Intelligence Agency Corruption News Articles

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Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on dozens of engaging topics. And read excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

The FBI and the Defense Department were actively involved in research and development of facial recognition software that they hoped could be used to identify people from video footage captured by street cameras and flying drones, according to thousands of pages of internal documents that provide new details about the government's ambitions to build out a powerful tool for advanced surveillance. The documents, revealed in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union filed against the FBI, show how closely FBI and Defense officials worked with academic researchers to refine artificial-intelligence techniques that could help in the identification or tracking of Americans without their awareness or consent. Many of the records relate to the Janus program, a project funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, or IARPA. The improved facial recognition system was ultimately folded into a search tool, called Horus, and made available to the Pentagon's Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office, which helps provide military technologies to civilian police forces. No federal laws regulate how facial recognition systems can be used. The tool's use in domestic mass surveillance would be a "nightmare scenario," said Nathan Wessler, a deputy director at the ACLU. "It could give the government the ability to pervasively track as many people as they want for as long as they want. There's no good outcome for that in a democratic society."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

A war between China and Taiwan will be extremely good for business at America's Frontier Fund ... according to audio from a February 1 event. The remarks occurred at a tech finance symposium hosted at the Manhattan offices of Silicon Valley Bank. "If the China-Taiwan situation happens, some of our investments will 10x, like overnight," [a] person who identified as "Tom" said. "So I don't want to share the name, but the one example I gave was a critical component that ... the total market value is $200 million, but it is a critical component to a $50 billion market cap. That's like a choke point, right. And so if it's only produced in China, for example, and there's a kinetic event in the Pacific, that would 10x overnight, like no question about it. There's a couple of different things like that." AFF is surely not the only venture fund that would see stratospheric returns throughout their portfolio in the case of a destabilizing global crisis, like a "kinetic event in the Pacific" – that is to say, war. Gilman Louie, AFF's co-founder and current CEO, serves as chair of the National Intelligence University, advises Biden through his Intelligence Advisory Board, and was tapped for the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board. Louie previously ran In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm. In other words, AFF stands to massively profit from a geopolitical crisis while its CEO advises the Biden administration on geopolitical crises. AFF was founded last year with support from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Note: While the detection of a Chinese spy balloon drums up significant fear and outrage over hostile foreign "threats," an incisive article reveals how US surveillance of foreign countries is quite common, including their recent expansion of military bases in Southeast Asia to monitor and surveil China. Furthermore, many independent journalists are questioning the war-fueling narrative that China is a threat to national security. Watch an insightful analysis uncovering the deeper story of what's behind the growing tensions between the US and China.

Under a post-9/11 surveillance program known as "Upstream", the NSA is systematically searching Americans' internet communications as they enter and leave the United States. The agency sifts through these streams of data looking for "identifiers" associated with its many thousands of foreign targets – identifiers like email addresses and phone numbers. The NSA does all of this without warrants, without any individual judicial approval, and without showing that any of the people it is surveilling – including countless Americans – have done anything wrong. This surveillance raises serious constitutional concerns, but no court has ever considered a legal challenge to it because the government has claimed that allowing a suit against Upstream surveillance to go forward would implicate "state secrets". In 2007, for example, an appeals court dismissed a lawsuit filed by Khaled El-Masri claiming that, in a case of mistaken identity, he had been kidnapped and tortured by the CIA. The court acknowledged the public evidence of El-Masri's mistreatment but held that state secrets were too central to the case to allow it to go forward. And in 2010, a different appeals court dismissed a lawsuit filed by five individuals who claimed that one of Boeing's subsidiary companies had flown the planes carrying them to the black sites where they were tortured by the CIA. This use of the state secrets privilege – to dismiss cases – departs from the supreme court's narrow framing of the privilege.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on court system corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

Allegations by FBI Special Agent Steve Friend contained in a whistleblower complaint filed late Wednesday with the Department of Justice inspector general reveal a politicized Washington, DC, FBI field office cooking the books to exaggerate the threat of domestic terrorism, and ­using an "overzealous" January 6 investigation to harass conservative Americans and violate their constitutional rights. Friend, 37, a respected 12-year veteran of the FBI and a SWAT team member, was suspended Monday, stripped of his gun and badge, and escorted out of the FBI field office in Daytona Beach, Fla., after complaining to his supervisors about the violations. He was declared absent without leave last month for refusing to participate in SWAT raids that he believed violated FBI policy and were a use of excessive force against Jan. 6 subjects accused of misdemeanor offenses. "I have an oath to uphold the Constitution," he told supervisors when he asserted his conscientious objection to joining an Aug. 24 raid on a J6 subject. "I have a moral objection and want to be considered a conscientious objector." In his whistleblower complaint to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz ... Friend lays out multiple violations of FBI policy involving J6 investigations in which he was involved. He says he was removed from active investigations into child sexual exploitation and human trafficking to work on J6 cases sent from DC. As a result, he believes his child exploitation investigations were harmed.

Note: Read how Facebook is silencing activity related to this whistleblower. Read also Matt Taibbi's reporting on this important case. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.

The Central Intelligence Agency has for years been collecting in bulk, without a warrant, some kind of data that can affect Americans' privacy. At the same time, [the C.I.A.] declared that a report about the same topic, which had prompted the letter, must remain fully classified. That report, called "Deep Dive II," was part of a set of studies by a watchdog board scrutinizing intelligence community operations under Executive Order 12333. In March 2021, the Senate Intelligence Committee received a copy of the report. Two Democrats on the panel, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, urged Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, and William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, to declassify the activity. The senators suggested that its hidden existence cut against Americans' understanding that various pieces of legislation enacted in recent years "limit and, in some cases, prohibit the warrantless collection of Americans' records." In 2015, Congress banned bulk collection of telecommunications metadata under the Patriot Act and limited other types of bulk collection by the F.B.I. under laws governing domestic activities like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. Yet "the C.I.A. has secretly conducted its own bulk program" under Executive Order 12333, the senators wrote. "It has done so entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

Right up until his death in 2018, Ferik Duka dreamed of seeing his three eldest sons, Shain, Dritan, and Eljvir, freed from prison. In 2009, the three brothers were sentenced to life for their role in an alleged plot to attack the Fort Dix military base in New Jersey. The convictions followed a terrorism sting ... that ran for over a year and involved multiple government informants. The investigation into the "Fort Dix Five," as the case became known, was marred by outrageous law enforcement and legal abuses, documented in a 2015 investigation and documentary by The Intercept. Their case was just one of many in which zealous FBI officials and prosecutors, operating in the heated atmosphere of post-9/11 America, branded individuals who posed no appreciable threat to the country as enemies of the state. Many of them, like the Duka brothers, were given long prison sentences or otherwise had their lives ruined after being convicted on material support for terrorism charges. "There hasn't been any reckoning with the legacy of this era," said Ramzi Kassem, a ... Law professor. Kassem said, "It is alarming when you look across these cases and see an overrepresentation of suspects who were mentally deficient, marginalized, or otherwise vulnerable. Informants proposed so-called terrorism plots, funded them, provided means of execution, coaching, and even coaxed the targets of stings over prolonged periods of time in order to enable prosecutors to paint their conduct as criminally punishable."

Note: Read more about terrorism plots hatched by the FBI. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and terrorism from reliable major media sources.

Less than six months into the Biden administration, more than 15 consultants from the firm WestExec Advisors have fanned out across the White House, its foreign policy apparatus, and its law enforcement institutions. Five, some of whom already have jobs with the administration, have been nominated for high-ranking posts, and four others served on the Biden-Harris transition team. Even by Washington standards, it's a remarkable march through the revolving door, especially for a firm that only launched in 2017. The pipeline has produced a dominance of WestExec alums throughout the administration, installed in senior roles as influential as director of national intelligence and secretary of state. WestExec clients, meanwhile, have controversial interests in tech and defense that intersect with the policies their former consultants are now in a position to set and execute. The creeping monopolization of foreign policymaking by a single boutique consulting firm has gone largely unnoticed. The firm describes one of its chief selling points as its "unparalleled geopolitical risk analysis," now confirmed by the saturation of its employees in positions of power. WestExec has also succeeded in getting tech startups into defense contracts. Deputy Director of the CIA David S. Cohen was an early member of WestExec's "core team." But it's impossible to know who his clients were, because an exemption for the spy agencies' officials means that his disclosure is not publicly available.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.

A former Gestapo general who sent tens of thousands of Jews to their deaths was protected from prosecution by US and West German intelligence after the Second World War. SS-General Franz Josef Huber served as head of the Gestapo in Vienna and much of Austria following the Nazi takeover. He worked closely with Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, and personally ordered the deportation of Austrian Jews to concentration camps. Yet while Eichmann was captured by Israel and sentenced to death ... Huber was released by US forces following the war and spent the rest of his life as a free man in his native Munich, where he was a minor employee at a local business. That was a cover arranged for him by West German intelligence. It now appears Huber was protected by the US because it believed he could be a useful asset against the Soviet Union. "Although we are by no means unmindful of the dangers involved in playing around with a Gestapo general, we also believe, on the basis of the information now in our possession, that Huber might be profitably used by this organization," a CIA memo from 1953 obtained by the New York Times reads. Declassified files obtained by German ARD television's Munich Report show that US and West German intelligence conspired to hide Huber's past and protect him from prosecution. In the US, the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies recruited more than 1,000 ex-Nazis as agents in the years following the war.

Note: Read about the Nazi scientists secretly brought to the US to work after WWII. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.

As chief investigator for the Senate intelligence committee, Daniel Jones spent five years poring over internal CIA accounts of the agency’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” programme adopted in the “war on terror”, which Congress demanded to see after it emerged that agency officials had destroyed videotapes of the brutal questioning of terrorist suspects. The Amazon movie, The Report, tells the story of what Jones ... and his colleagues found out about the torture programme: the systematic use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and “stress positions”, and the extraordinary fact that the CIA itself had conducted a review that showed none of it was working. The programme did not provide useful intelligence – and yet the CIA hid that conclusion. None of the officials responsible for the torture or the cover-up had been held accountable. Gina Haspel, who ran one of the CIA’s black sites and who wrote a cable calling for the destruction of the torture videotapes, is now director of the CIA. When Obama was elected, he called an end to the torture, but stopped short of confronting the intelligence community. In a famously oddly worded admission in 2014, Obama said: “We tortured some folks.” The 44th president went on to say: “It’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. A lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots.” The line still infuriates Jones, who says the real patriots were the CIA whistleblowers.

Note: A former CIA counterterrorism officer who was imprisoned for blowing the whistle on the CIA torture referred to CIA director Gina Haspel's actions as "war crimes, crimes against humanity". For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.

A memo written by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, released among 2,800 declassified records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, has shown how in the days after Lee Harvey Oswald was shot, the FBI planned to convince the public that he was the real assassin as soon as possible. In the document, dictated shortly after Oswald was shot by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby, Hoover explains. “The thing I am concerned about, and so is [Attorney General Nicholas] Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin,” Hoover said in the 1963 memo. The former FBI director went on to explain that establishing which facts could and could not be made public was important because of the possible foreign policy implications. “There are several aspects which would complicate our foreign relations,” Hoover says in the memo. These were namely that the FBI was aware Oswald had contacted both the Cuban embassy in Mexico City and the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Hoover explained that having the interception of these messages - one of them to the “man in the Soviet Embassy in charge of assassinations and similar activities on the part of the Soviet government” - made public would have “muddied the waters internationally.” Roughly 300 documents of the tranche of what would have been 3,100 documents pertaining to the assassination of President Kennedy have been withheld [by] President Donald Trump.

Note: Why are documents related to the JFK assassination still classified over 50 years after that fact? Why did Trump backtrack on his campaign promise to release all of these files? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and assassinations.

More than six years after the FBI crime laboratory was rocked by controversy, the Justice Department has identified about 3,000 criminal cases that could have been affected by flawed science and skewed testimony. Government officials told The Associated Press they are aware of between 100 and 150 cases in which prosecutors have alerted defendants of problems they concluded were material to verdicts. None has resulted in overturned convictions, they said. The identification of cases and prosecutorial reviews are the final stages of a scandal that shook the FBI during the mid-1990s when a senior chemist at the famed crime lab went public with allegations of shoddy work, tainted evidence and skewed testimony. A Justice Department internal investigation concluded in 1997 that 13 lab technicians made scientific errors in cases or slanted testimony to help prosecutors. Several were reprimanded, but none was fired or prosecuted. Some criminal defense lawyers are concerned by the Justice Department's decision to let federal, state and local prosecutors decide whether to notify defendants of problems. "That's like asking the fox to guard the hen house," said former federal prosecutor Neal Sonnett. He is past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "If there is a possibility that evidence has been tainted, then the Department of Justice or prosecutors should not be the arbiter of whether it's material," Sonnett said.

Note: In 2015, the FBI admitted its scientists used flawed evidence for decades to help prosecutors wrongfully convict defendants. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.

The Justice Department inspector general's office has determined that the FBI crime laboratory made "scientifically unsound" conclusions in the Oklahoma City bombing case, finding that supervisors approved lab reports they "cannot support" and many analyses were "biased in favor of the prosecution." The still-secret draft report, obtained by The Times, also concludes that FBI lab officials may have erred about the size of the blast and the amount of explosives involved and may not know for certain that ammonium nitrate was used for the main charge that killed 168 people and injured more than 850 others. The draft report shows that FBI examiners could not identify the triggering device for the truck bomb or how it was detonated on April 19, 1995, and it warns that a poorly maintained lab environment could have led to contamination of critical pieces of evidence, such as debris found on the clothing of defendant Timothy J. McVeigh. If entered into evidence at McVeigh's trial ... the draft report could provide a measure of doubt about whether bomb residue evidence was properly handled and professionally examined by experts at the Washington lab. The Justice investigation began after complaints were made by Frederic Whitehurst, an FBI chemist and the principal whistle blower on problems at the lab. While confirming many accusations made by Whitehurst and others, the report also knocks down a number of Whitehurst's charges.

Note: Read more about major issues with the Oklahoma City bombing investigation. More recently, the FBI has admitted to problems in its forensics unit leading to decades of flawed testimony in criminal trials. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.

From the headlines, [Sidney] Gottlieb had emerged as a kind of Dr. Strangelove. He had overseen a vast network of psychological and medical experiments conducted in hospitals, universities, research labs, prisons and safe houses, many of them carried out on unsuspecting subjects – mental patients, prostitutes and their johns, drug addicts, and anyone else who stumbled into the CIA's web. Some had been subjected to electroshock therapy in an effort to alter their behavior. Some endured prolonged sensory deprivation. Some were doped and made to sleep for weeks in an attempt to induce an amnesia-like state. Others suffered a relentless loop of audiotape playing the same message hundreds of thousands of times. As the CIA's sorcerer, Gottlieb had also attempted to raise assassination to an art form. Out of his labs had come a poisoned handkerchief designed to do in a Libyan colonel, a bacteriological agent for a Congolese leader and debilitating potions intended for Cuba's Fidel Castro. The name Sidney Gottlieb is but an obscure footnote. Yet for a generation of Americans who came of age in the Cold War, his experiments came to define the CIA as a rogue agency. The most notorious project was MK-ULTRA, created in 1953. It was, in Gottlieb's words, intended to explore 'various techniques of behavior control in intelligence operations.' It funded an array of research, including electric-shock treatments, hypnosis and experiments designed to program or deprogram a subject's memory.

Note: Read more about the CIA's MK-ULTRA program. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on mind control from reliable major media sources.

The CIA experienced "as many failures as successes" in exploring the intelligence applications of LSD and other drugs, according to the October 1975 U.S. Senate testimony of the Agency's former top chemist, Sidney Gottlieb, the man most closely associated with the notorious MKULTRA behavior control research projects. The long-secret transcripts of Gottlieb's testimony to the staff of the United States Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities ("Church Committee") were published today by the National Security Archive, 50 years after the historic intelligence oversight hearings, along with a selection of declassified CIA memos and other records concerning MKULTRA. The Church Committee transcripts are among the highlights of the Digital National Security Archive collection, CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA. Gottlieb was a key bureaucratic player who signed off on hundreds of MKULTRA subprojects and who developed clandestine relationships with universities, prisons, hospitals, private laboratories, and private foundations that made it difficult to trace the programs back to the Agency. The Church Committee faced considerable obstacles in reconstructing the story, especially since Gottlieb and CIA director Richard Helms destroyed most of the original project records in 1973.

Note: According to Gottlieb's testimony, the CIA covertly dosed an unwitting individual with a massive amount of LSD to deliberately induce psychosis, causing him to experience violent paranoia and leading an unsuspecting psychiatrist to declare him mentally ill. This was done explicitly to discredit the man in the eyes of his colleagues–a tactic deemed as operationally useful for destroying a person's credibility without ever touching them. Learn more about the MKUltra Program in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.

Larry Sanger appeared on Tucker Carlson's podcast to claim Wikipedia had lost its way and began censoring accounts which held right-wing or conservative views. 'There is a whole army of administrators - hundreds of them - who are constantly blocking people that they have ideological disagreements with,' he said. Sometime between 2006 and 2007, he began asking questions about intelligence agencies interfering with the entries. 'Virgil Griffith did Master's research,' he revealed, speaking of the American programmer who served a five year prison sentence for North Korea with evading sanctions. 'He came up with a tool called Wiki Scanner that enabled people to look up the IP addresses of people who had done edits and like, who had edited which articles. And so they were able to find a whole bunch of edits coming from Langley.' Langley is often a term used to describe the CIA, the unincorporated community of Langley in Virginia, where the headquarters is based. 'A large part of the remit of intelligence today is to manipulate public opinion in various ways,' Sanger said. 'Wikipedia is like just a gold mine for the intelligence agencies of the world because it's like a one stop shop. You can just like type in the things that you want people to believe.' Carlson had claimed Wikipedia has become 'a weapon of ideological, theological war, used to destroy its enemies.' Sanger said he first recognized and began to describe Wikipedia as 'propoganda' in 2020.

Note: Read more about how the CIA, FBI, and the Pentagon secretly edited entries in Wikipedia, including removing references to CIA illegal rendition and torture, downplaying US involvement in Iraqi civilian deaths, and rewriting the definition of "terrorism" to expand its political use. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and intelligence agency corruption.

TrineDay Books announces the release of Blue Butterfly: Inside the Diary of an Epstein Survivor, a gripping memoir of Survivor Juliette Bryant that exposes Jeffrey Epstein's previously unreported medical crimes. Juliette's firsthand testimony ... unravels Epstein's deep ties to the shadowy intelligence community that controlled him. It explores how the two-time college dropout amassed a fortune of half a billion dollars while spending his days abusing young girls. Twenty-three years ago, on September 26, 2002, Jeffrey Epstein touched down in Cape Town with a high-profile entourage. That night, 20-year-old Juliette Bryant, a psychology student and aspiring model, was recruited and promised a future with the lingerie retailer Victoria's Secret. Instead, she found herself ensnared in a global network of abuse. Juliette was trafficked across continents and American states, taken to all of Epstein's luxury residences, and introduced to co-conspirators who enabled his operations to flourish in plain sight. The sexual abuse and psychological manipulation Juliette endured were pervasive as she made her final trip to Epstein's remote Zorro Ranch in New Mexico. There, in June 2004, Juliette awoke paralyzed in a laboratory, while a female doctor operated on her–without her knowledge or consent. While other books have documented his trafficking network, Blue Butterfly explores his obsession with elite eugenics, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, cryogenics, and cloning.

Note: Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on Jeffrey Epstein's criminal enterprise.

The United States is building up its military assets, sparking fears of another regime change attempt against Venezuela–and this one could be far more deadly than the others. Citing an influx of Venezuelan drugs into the U.S., the Trump administration is rapidly building up its military forces, encircling the South American nation. While this is officially a counter-narcotics operation, few in Washington bother to hide their true intentions. "Dear Foreign Terrorist Leader Maduro, Your days are seriously numbered," Former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn stated publicly. In a recent interview, President Maduro claimed that most of the profits from the trade stay in the U.S. "Eighty-five percent of the billions from international drug trafficking each year are in banks in the United States. That is where the cartel is," he said, adding: "There is $500 billion in the U.S. banking system, in reputable banks. It is from the United States that all drug trafficking is directed." In 2014, Juan Orlando Hernández came to power in Honduras following a U.S.-backed coup. Hernández quickly began using his position to enrich himself, allying with the infamous Sinaloa Cartel. Last year, he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for distributing more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. The U.S. government supported his administration. In 2008, Bolivia ... expelled the DEA from the country, leading to a significant drop in the production of cocaine.

Note: Our original investigation explores the dark truth of the war on drugs. During the 2008 financial crisis when banks were starved of cash, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime Antonio Maria Costa said he had evidence that proceeds from the drug trade were the only liquid capital keeping major banks afloat. According to Costa, the interbank loans the global financial system depended on were being funded by drug money. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and the war on drugs.

Speculation is growing that Ghislaine Maxwell could soon be freed. Despite campaigning on the promise to release the Epstein Files, there are increasing signs that the Trump administration is considering pardoning the world's most notorious convicted sex trafficker. For years, Maxwell aided her partner Jeffrey Epstein in trafficking and raping girls and young women. Epstein's associates included billionaires, scientists, celebrities, and politicians, including President Trump, whom he considered his "closest friend." While many of Ghislaine Maxwell's crimes have come to light, less well-known are her family's myriad connections to both the U.S. and Israeli national security states. Chief among these are those of her father, disgraced media baron and early tech entrepreneur, Robert Maxwell. Maxwell's biographers ... write that he was first recruited by Israeli intelligence in the 1960s and began buying up Israeli tech corporations. Israel used these companies and their software to carry out spying and other clandestine operations. Maxwell amassed a vast business empire of 350 companies, employing 16,000 people. He owned an array of newspapers, including The New York Daily News. Throughout the 1990s, Epstein's biographer Julie K. Brown noted, he openly boasted about working for both the CIA and Mossad. Epstein met with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns three times in 2014. Burns would later be named director of the CIA.

Note: Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Epstein's criminal enterprise and intelligence agency corruption.

An interview that I conducted in 2020 with Brad Edwards, a lawyer for Epstein's victims, has always haunted me. It's about a conversation Edwards had with Epstein's bodyguard of five years, Igor Zinoviev, who warned him to back off because of Epstein's shadowy connections to the U.S. government. "[Zinoviev said] ‘You don't know who you're messing with and you need to be really careful. You are on Jeffrey's radar and somebody that Jeffrey pays a lot of attention to, which is not good, you don't want to be on Jeffrey's radar,'" Edwards told me for Broken: Jeffrey Epstein, the podcast series I hosted and reported. "And I said, ‘Well, give me some examples. I mean, who am I messing with?'" Edwards recalled. "And that's when he looked across the table and whispered three letters, ‘C-I-A.'" One of Zinoviev's first assignments during Epstein's brief 2008 detention – just 13 months of overnights at the Palm Beach County jail with so-called work release – was to visit CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. There, he says, he attended classes for a week as the only private citizen in the room. At the end, the director or assistant director – Zinoviev couldn't remember – handed him a book with a handwritten note inside. He was told not to read it and to deliver it directly to Epstein in jail. Edwards later wrote about this encounter in his own book, Relentless Pursuit: My Fight for the Victims of Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein's usefulness to high-ranking officials might also explain why a Freedom of Information Act request of his calendar by The Wall Street Journal revealed multiple meetings with former CIA director Bill Burns when he was Deputy Secretary of State.

Note: This piece was published on Tara Palmeri's Substack. Palmeri is an investigative journalist and former ABC News White House correspondent. US attorney Alexander Acosta was once told Epstein "belonged to intelligence, and to leave it alone." Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations.

A long-suppressed oversight report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) concluded that the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which claimed Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump, had been manipulated under the direction of then-CIA Director John Brennan. The HPSCI report revealed that Brennan created a special Fusion Cell, excluded independent reviewers, and used a tightly controlled team of hand-picked CIA analysts to reverse what the underlying intelligence actually said. According to a CIA whistleblower who co-authored the ICA, Brennan put the team "under duress" to reach a conclusion that Putin supported Trump. The evidence did not show that the Russians favored Trump. According to someone close to the report, the raw intelligence showed that Russian officials saw Hillary Clinton as "more stable and more manageable" – and thus preferable to Trump. But Brennan's hand-picked team reversed that. Meanwhile, those responsible have faced no consequences. There was a time when if you abused your power in office, whether or not it rose to the level of a crime, you were exiled from D.C. Instead, Comey gets a teaching job in ethics, and Clapper and Brennan get TV contracts. The picture is less incomplete and, finally, clear. The Intelligence Community did not merely misread Russian intentions. It reversed its own analysts. It misled Congress.

Note: The security firm CrowdStrike was hired to investigate the alleged Russian hack of DNC servers in 2016 and found no proof that any emails from the system had been exfiltrated. All they found was inconclusive circumstantial evidence, which was presented as proof in media to the public. This deflected from the DNC and Clinton campaign's sabotage of Bernie Sanders and the damaging content of leaked DNC emails. In 2022, the DNC and Clinton campaign were fined by the FEC for obscuring their role in funding the debunked Steele dossier. Clinton also personally approved sharing another unverified claim with the press that alleged a secret Trump-Russia server connection, which helped trigger an FBI investigation later found to be baseless. Why are we not connecting the dots?

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