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Townhall.com @townhallcom SENATOR KENNEDY: "Why didn't the FBI just say, hey, the laptop's real?!" FBI DIRECTOR WRAY: "We have to be very careful about what we can say, especially in the middle of an election season..."

The FBI offered ex-British intelligence agent Christopher Steele $1 million to corroborate salacious allegations made in his dossier against Donald Trump and members of his 2016 campaign, but he was unable to do so, an FBI official testified Tuesday.

A person close to the Trump family suggested the FBI may have planted “listening devices” during a raid targeting former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence earlier this week. Lawyers for the former president previously said that FBI agents would not allow Trump’s team to observe or supervise their search of Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. One lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, told Fox News on Thursday that agents are believed to have searched Trump’s bedroom, office, and a storage room. Because the FBI allegedly “didn’t allow anybody to supervise what they were doing, and they specifically requested to turn off the security cameras,”...

Federal authorities are in the preliminary stages of investigating the handling of classified material found at former President Donald J. Trump’s Florida home after he left office, people familiar with the matter said on Thursday. The effort, led by the F.B.I., stems from the discovery of classified information in 15 boxes that contained documents, mementos, gifts and letters that had been taken from the White House at the end of Mr. Trump’s term in apparent violation of the requirements for turning over all presidential records to the National Archives. The development was reported earlier by The Washington Post.

In ignoring the latest John Durham indictment, most of the media and official Washington are ignoring the elephant between its lines: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mr. Durham, the special counsel appointed to investigate the government’s handling of the Russia collusion mess, levels a single criminal charge against Michael Sussmann, then a lawyer for the Democrat-linked firm Perkins Coie. In delivering to the FBI fanciful evidence of Trump-Russia collusion a few weeks before the 2016 election, Mr. Sussmann is alleged to have lied to the FBI’s chief lawyer, James Baker, claiming he was acting on his own behalf and not...

@RepMattGaetz BREAKING: Congressman Matt Gaetz calls on FBI Director Christopher Wray to fully disclose the role and involvement of FBI operatives during the January 6th Capitol riot. More details coming. Letter...

Joseph Bolanos was a pillar of his community. President of his Upper West Side block association for the past 23 years, he looked out for his neighbors during the pandemic. He dropped off masks and kept extra heaters in his rent-controlled apartment for seniors. He raised morale with a weekly street dance to show his support for essential workers. A Red Cross volunteer after the 9/11 attacks, the 69-year-old security consultant once received a police commendation for heroism after saving a woman from being mugged. Unmarried, and caring for his 94-year-old mother, he was a well-loved character in the quiet...

This is the story of how the FBI framed four innocent men for murder, destroyed families, and tried to cover it up. It’s also the story of the convergence of John Durham and Robert Mueller: how Durham uncovered the FBI’s crimes and how Robert Mueller’s FBI disputed the innocence of the men the FBI framed. The FBI knocked and Mike Albano opened the door. It was 1983. As a member of the Massachusetts State Parole Board, Albano thought he had been doing his job when he looked into voting to commute the sentence of Peter Limone, who along with Joseph...

Victims of the FBI's constitutionally dubious raid say they've been told to come forward and identify themselves if they want their stuff back. Dagny discovered that the FBI had seized the contents of her safe deposit box—about $100,000 in gold and silver coins, some family heirlooms like a diamond necklace inherited from her late grandmother, and an engagement ring she'd promised to pass down to her daughter—almost by accident. She'd been asked by a friend to recommend a convenient and secure location for keeping some valuables. Dagny searched Yelp to find the phone number for U.S. Private Vaults, a Beverly...

The FBI continued abusing the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act program, including searching for information on people who had gone to the bureau to report they were victims of a crime, a newly declassified document shows. The Epoch Times One FBI information specialist between April 11, 2019, and July 8, 2019, conducted approximately 124 queries of information obtained through secretive methods under the act, or FISA, which permits warrantless surveillance of foreigners outside of the United States. The surveillance can and has been used to ultimately obtain information on Americans. The searches included looking at information for people who had...

Rep. Devin Nunes released a groundbreaking document in early 2018 that shook up Washington and proved to be the beginning of the end of the Trump-Russia conspiracy industry. His memo, released while he chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, contained two stunning disclosures that are now back in the news.First, it confirmed that the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign funded a Kremlin-sourced dossier in 2016 that accused Donald Trump and his allies of various election conspiracy crimes.Second, the Democratic-financed dossier was used by the FBI to justify four wiretaps lasting one year on Trump campaign volunteer...

It’s now confirmed that the FBI used a known drug addict in an effort to set up and bring down the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, and anyone connected to him. This is today’s FBI – set up innocent individuals with crimes while ignoring real obvious crimes like those involved in the 2020 election. In late February documents were released surrounding one of the FBI’s spies hired to set up and discredit members of the Trump team in 2016. The Conservative Treehouse noted: The FBI documents outline how Stefan Halper was enlisted by the FBI for their...

On Tuesday, March 2nd, Sen. Chuck Grassley asked FBI Director Wray if there had been a determination as to the cause of Sicknick’s death.Wray didn’t just shockingly obfuscate, but actually refused to say if they even have a determination of the cause of death yet.

For the past year, defenders of the FBI have consistently downplayed the significance of an FBI staff lawyer falsifying evidence in the government’s investigation into Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia. They argue Kevin Clinesmith’s crime of altering a CIA document to obscure the fact that former Trump campaign aide Carter Page worked for U.S., not Russian, intelligence was a rare lapse in judgment by an overworked bureaucrat. It was not, his apologists say, part of any broader conspiracy to conceal exculpatory information from surveillance court judges, who never learned of Page’s history with the CIA before approving FBI warrants to...

In secretly recorded talks with informer Stefan Halper, Carter Page dispelled key Russia collusion allegations before FISA warrant was even approved. Four days before the FBI secured a surveillance warrant against him in fall 2016, Trump campaign adviser Carter Page repeatedly knocked down the key allegations at the heart of the Russia collusion investigation while talking to a government informant who was wearing a wire. Page's unwitting statements of innocence to informer Stefan Halper were never shared with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before it approved four warrants authorizing a full year of surveillance of Page's communications. Page's exculpatory statements...

The FBI not only gave ex-British Intelligence officer Christopher Steele classified information, they paid him to show up to accept the information, according to the Inspector General report released late last year. The information about Steele received little media attention, but Eric Felten at RealClearInvestigations (my former employer) has now brought that information into the light. Remember, Steele is the one who compiled the infamous Steele Dossier filled with salacious information about President Donald Trump. He was paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee. “The report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz details how a team of FBI...

FBI Director Christopher Wray told the federal surveillance court in a letter Friday that he “deeply regrets” the bureau’s many errors in the process to obtain surveillance warrants on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. “The FBI has the utmost respect for this Court, and deeply regrets the errors and omissions identified by the OIG,” Wray wrote in a letter to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). A judge on the FISC ordered the FBI on Dec. 17 to respond by Friday with a roadmap on how the bureau plans to address the problems identified in a Justice Department inspector...

In 2018, the U.S. government filed 1,117 final applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for authority for the FBI to conduct electronic surveillance and physical searches. One application was withdrawn. One other was denied. The remaining 1,115 were granted.Hours before the FISA court issued a December 17 order openly declaring that it could no longer trust any of the sworn statements the FBI had submitted to justify spying on Americans, The New York Times published an opinion article by William Webster, a former director of both the FBI and the CIA. Webster wrote, “Today, the integrity of...

HUGE! FBI Employees Conducted 3.1 Million Questionable and Illicit Searches, Including Searches on US Citizens in 2017-2018 According to a new declassified ruling FBI employees abused NSA mass surveillance data in 2017 and 2018. In 2017 FBI employees conducted over 3.1 million searches from the NSA database including searching activities of US citizens.Under current FBI rules surveillance data can only be searched if there is reasonable suspicion of crimes having taken place or clear risks to national security. But FBI employees and even contractors were searching the database to see what information they could find on U.S. citizens.The bureau is...

"""How Convenient. FBI ‘lost Notes’ From August 2015 Meeting with IC Inspector General Regarding Hillary Clinton’s Private Server"""" The FBI ‘lost notes’ from an August 2015 meeting with the Intelligence Community Inspector General about Hillary Clinton’s private server, according to new FBI docs released Friday. According to the newly released FBI docs related to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private server, Special Agents (SAs) have been gathering and copying materials in response to FOIA and stumbled across some ‘missing notes.’ How convenient.