Free Republic

An FBI agent appealed for patience Friday after a black man was found hanging from a tree in Mississippi, saying 30 federal, state and local agents were working intensively to determine whether he was killed or committed suicide. "Everybody wants answers and wants them quickly. We understand that," FBI Special Agent Don Alway told a crowd outside the Claiborne County Courthouse. "We are going to hold off on coming to any conclusions until the facts take us to a definitive answer." The county coroner confirmed that the man found hanging from a white sheet Thursday was Otis Byrd, an ex-convict...

Fueled by an addiction to prescription painkillers, an FBI agent abused heroin from his own drug investigations and in the process botched dozens of cases involving suspected drug traffickers in multiple states, according to details that emerged Friday. Matthew Lowry, formerly a special agent with the agency's Washington field office, tampered with hundreds of grams of heroin seized during drug investigations in 2013 and 2014, keeping it in his car for weeks or months, and periodically using it, according to charging documents filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., on Friday.

African American students at UC Berkeley are demanding that their college name one of its buildings after one of the FBI's most wanted terrorists. In 2013, Assata Shakur was named as one of the FBI's most wanted terrorists. In 1977, Shakur murdered a New Jersey police officer and was convicted; she escaped from prison in 1979 and has been on the run ever since. Currently, she is staying in Cuba and New Jersey is offering a $2,000,000 award for her capture. The Black Student Union at Berkeley, however, does not see Shakur as a felon, but as a hero. So...

A judicial advisory panel Monday quietly approved a rule change that will broaden the FBI's hacking authority despite fears raised by Google that the amended language represents a "monumental" constitutional concern. The Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules voted 11-1 to modify an arcane federal rule to allow judges more flexibility in how they approve search warrants for electronic data, according to a Justice Department spokesman. Known as Rule 41, the existing provision generally allows judges to approve search warrants only for material within the geographic bounds of their judicial district. But the rule change, as requested by the...

A reputed Genovese capo who was once pals with Rev. Al Sharpton pleaded guilty Thursday to federal racketeering charges involving illegal gambling and extortion. Pagano has been reportedly linked to an unsuccessful mob attempt in the early 1980s to recruit Sharpton to distribute illegal drugs. The two were also once acquaintances. Sharpton, according to reports, was also once a mole with the FBI’s Mafia unit when they were investigating Pagano’s father.

Full Title: Revealed: Hillary Clinton's State Department refused over and over to brand Al Qaeda group that kidnapped 300 girls in Nigeria as 'terrorists' Under then-Secretary Hillary Clinton, the U.S. State Department repeatedly refused to add the Nigerian al-Qaeda affiliate group Boko Haram – the organization responsible for the recent kidnapping of more than 300 young girls – to its official list of terrorist organizations. In November 2013, current Secretary John Kerry did what Clinton wouldn't. Boko Haram is the group that has claimed responsibility for kidnapping hundreds of girls in Nigeria, promising to sell them into slavery. The Daily...

Apple released iPhone 6 with new, powerful encryption setting that should make it much harder for law enforcement and surveillance groups like the FBI and the NSA from accessing users’ emails, photos and contacts. After Edward Snowden revelations last year, privacy-minded users may be happy about the new feature, but law enforcement is decidedly not. At a news conference Thursday, FBI Director James Comey criticized Apple’s encryption, which scrambles information on the new iPhone 6 using a code that could take “more than five-and-a-half years to try all combinations of a six-character alphanumeric passcode with lowercase letters and numbers,” Comey...

FORT MEADE, Md. (AP) — A person believed responsible for shootings along highways over the last two weeks in the Baltimore-Washington area, including shots that damaged a National Security Agency building, is in custody, the FBI said early Wednesday. The FBI believes the person in custody is responsible for shootings along Maryland highways, including one near the Fort Meade Army installation, which is home to the NSA, FBI spokeswoman Amy Thoreson said in a statement. She said no other information was available early Wednesday.

Last April House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) released a report implicating Democrat Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) in colluding with the IRS and Lois Lerner against the nonpartisan voters rights group “True the Vote.” Catherine Engelbrecht, the founder of “True the Vote,” testified before Congress in February. She was targeted by FBI, IRS, ATF, and OSHA after she filed for tax exempt status for her voters rights group. Engelbrecht said this during her testimony before Congress and Cummings, “Frankly, to sit before my accuser and be silent in the face of what he did was unconscionable.” ... This week the...

The Obama administration’s Operation Choke Point program targets gun and ammunition dealers and tries to make life “miserable” for businesses that it doesn’t like, a payment processor told a Choke Point victim in jarring new audio. Operation Choke Point is a program by which the Department of Justice works with other administration agencies, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to force banks to shut down accounts of businesses that it objects to. The program purports to fight fraudulent businesses, but has instead targeted many gun and ammunition dealers and other lawful businesses.

A German rapper-turned ISIS extremist who starred in the group's grisly beheading videos was being spied on for the FBI by a woman he thought was his wife. Denis Cuspert, 39, who now calls himself Abu Talha al-Amani, embraced radical Islam and travelled to Syria to fight with militants before becoming the group's main propagandist. The spy transmitted critical information about the rapper and his ISIS colleagues before escaping to Turkey - where she was arrested and then turned over to the US, according to the German newspaper Bild. The paper said German and American intelligence sources confirmed the existence...

The unveiling of a new statue built to memorialize the murdered U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry on Saturday at the Homeland Security Department's Brian Terry Border Patrol Station in Bisbee, Arizona, received minimal news coverage by the nation's media except for the Fox News Channel, a news agency maligned and denigrated by President Barack Obama and his administration. In fact, no official from the Obama government attended the event and the sycophants in the legacy media made certain not to cover the story. In the battle at the Mexican-U.S. border, Obama and his minions seem to have chosen the...

After a recent terror threat on an American mall, an official has revealed that the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation has been staging mock attacks in U.S. shopping centers for nearly two years to test their readiness. The secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson recently warned shoppers at Minnesota's Mall of America to remain vigilant after a new terrorist video from Al-Shabaab -- An Al-Qaeda-linked militant group out of Somalia -- threatened an attack on the iconic mall. But, an official told CNN that the FBI has been preparing for such an attack for nearly two years, since the...

Yesterday’s news became big news on the Fox News Channel last week when former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani brought up the name of President Barack Obama’s childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis. It was almost seven years to the day when we published our seminal piece about Davis, “Obama’s Communist Mentor.” Davis was a member of the Communist Party and a suspected Soviet espionage agent. He was included in the FBI’s security index, meaning that Davis could be arrested or detained in the event of a national emergency. The FBI file on Davis documents his anti-white and pro-Soviet views,...

Amid Al-Shabaab terror threats officials reveal the FBI has been staging mock attacks in US malls for nearly two years to test readiness After a recent terror threat on an American mall, an official has revealed that the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation has been staging mock attacks in U.S. shopping centers for nearly two years to test their readiness. The secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson recently warned shoppers at Minnesota's Mall of America to remain vigilant after a new terrorist video from Al-Shabaab -- An Al-Qaeda-linked militant group out of Somalia -- threatened an attack on the...

OTAY MESA — An FBI agent's handgun discharged into his leg Thursday morning during training at a firearms training center in Otay Mesa, a federal official said. The shooting happened at the San Diego Regional Firearms Training Center on Alta Road about 10 a.m., FBI Special Agent Darrell Foxworth said. Investigators are trying to determine if the agent accidentally shot himself or if the gun malfunctioned.

Former CIA director says Obama is 'scared' to call ISIS terrorists 'Islamic' after FBI director wasn't invited to extremist summit – but Russia's secret police chief was! Former CIA director James Woolsey said Thursday that President Obama 'looks scared' to called members of Middle Eastern terrorist groups 'Islamic,' just hours after the conclusion of a White House 'Countering VIolent Extremism' summit that studiously avoided pinning terrorism on Islamists. Sitting FBI director James Comey was not invited to the event, but his counterpart from Russia – Aleksandr Bortnikov, the director of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) – attended. The FSB...

The White House did not invite the most senior American official charged with preventing terrorist attacks — the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey — to the three-day conference this week on countering violent extremism in the United States and abroad because the administration did not want the event too focused on law enforcement issues, according to senior American officials. But Mr. Comey’s Russian counterpart — Aleksandr V. Bortnikov, the director of the Russian Federal Security Service, the post-Soviet K.G.B. — was at the meeting, even though international human rights groups have repeatedly accused the Russian security service of unjustly detaining...

Top U.S. counterterrorism officials say they worry a potential terrorist could be hiding among refugees who are looking to come to the United States after escaping the brutal war in Syria. "It's clearly a population of concern,” the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Nicholas Rasmussen, told the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday. Committee Chairman Mike McCaul, R-Texas, went further, saying it would be a “huge mistake” to bring refugees from the conflict to the U.S. – even as an estimated 4 million children, women and men have been forced to flee Syria and another 7 million have been...

In a report to be published on Monday, and provided in advance to The New York Times, Kaspersky Lab says that the scope of this attack on more than 100 banks and other financial institutions in 30 nations could make it one of the largest bank thefts ever — and one conducted without the usual signs of robbery. The Moscow-based firm says that because of nondisclosure agreements with the banks that were hit, it cannot name them. Officials at the White House and the F.B.I. have been briefed on the findings, but say that it will take time to confirm...