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An IT specialist employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was arrested today for attempting to transmit national defense information to an officer or agent of a foreign government. Nathan Vilas Laatsch, 28, of Alexandria, was arrested in northern Virginia and will make his initial court appearance tomorrow. According to court documents, Laatsch became a civilian employee of the DIA in 2019, where he works with the Insider Threat Division and holds a Top Secret security clearance. In March, the FBI commenced an operation after receiving a tip that an individual - now known to be Laatsch - offered to...

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has subpoenaed three key White House staffers who are allegedly shielding Joe Biden from media scrutiny and doing his job for him amid his cognitive difficulties. “I am issuing subpoenas today for White House staff Annie Tomasini, Anthony Bernal, and Ashley Williams to appear for depositions,” Comer announced on X on Wednesday. Williams is the Special Assistant to the President and Deputy director of Oval Office Operations, Bernal, the Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor to the First Lady, and Tomasini, the Deputy Chief of Staff. “The White House has shielded these...

We already know that the raid on Mar-a-Lago was completely unjustified and unnecessary for many reasons …***Now we're learning that due to a secret Obama-era program, the Presidential Information Technology Committee (PITC), there's a very good chance that the Biden Administration has had control of the originals of many, or all of the documents at issue this entire time.The PITC was created in March 2015 by Executive Order in response to an October 2014 incident in which Russian hackers breached Executive Office of the President computers. ...A 2015 Memorandum of Understanding between the members of the PITC set out the...

Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) claimed Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that Trump administration officials who were saying the content of a Signal group chat on military strikes against the Houthis was not classified information was insulting Americans. Host Martha Raddatz said, “There have been very strong denials from the administration that there was anything classified. So, quite simply, was this classified information or not?” Warner said, “Absolutely. It was such a nature when you are doing the actual battle plans and the timing, what type of aircraft were being sent out, if you had a traditional military officer or a...

An IDF brigadier general from the Southern Command lost classified and highly sensitive documents in a parking lot of an office tower in Ramat Gan, while on his way to a civilian meeting A civilian who passed by picked up the documents and handed them over to a security guard in the building, who reported the incident to the police and IDF. The IDF confirmed that the sensitive documents should not have been taken out the military base and the brigadier general is currently being investigated by the Information Security Department. Military sources stressed that he has not been suspended...

PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — President Donald Trump said Friday that he’s revoking former President Joe Biden’s access to government secrets and ending the daily intelligence briefings he’s receiving in payback for Biden doing the same to him in 2021. Trump announced his decision in a post on his social media platform shortly after he arrived at his Mar-a-Lago home and private club in Palm Beach for the weekend. “There is no need for Joe Biden to continue receiving access to classified information. Therefore, we are immediately revoking Joe Biden’s Security Clearances, and stopping his daily Intelligence Briefings,” Trump wrote....

How could anyone object to Trump’s declassification of the files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? Americans deserved to know the whole truth, whatever it was, at the time, and the fact that it has been hidden for over sixty years now has only led to a proliferation of conspiracy theories and ever-increasing suspicion of government narratives on any and every subject. Now, suspicion of the government is entirely warranted, as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would be the first to tell you, and Trump’s decision to release the files is a long-delayed act of transparency. But...

WASHINGTON – The last time Joe Biden packed up and left office, he took with him thousands of papers from his decades in public service — including some classified documents that should have gone to the National Archives for safekeeping. That move spawned a federal investigation into whether Biden had knowingly broken the law and a damaging Justice Department report that referred to Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” igniting public concerns over his mental acuity that eventually led Biden to drop out of the race. The discovery also watered down the significance of the criminal case...

Who were the agents who vetted Asif Rahman? Information about this federal worker who wanted to harm Israel can be found here: “US government worker charged with leaking classified documents on Israel’s plans to strike Iran,” by Eric Tucker, Associated Press, November 13, 2024:Now let me guess…A man who worked for the U.S. government has been charged with leaking classified information assessing Israel’s earlier plans to attack Iran, according to court papers filed Wednesday.The man, identified as Asif William Rahman, was arrested by the FBI this week in Cambodia and was due to make his first court appearance in Guam.He...

The leak of high-classified U.S. intelligence documents to the Iranian regime last week has triggered a much-needed counter-intelligence investigation to identify the source -- either a mole who has betrayed their country, or a cyber-hack. The documents, which bore Top Secret/NOFORN and compartmented intelligence headers, described U.S. satellite spying on Israeli airfields as the IDF conducted exercises believed to foreshadow a massive airstrike on Iran. The NOFORN designation means that the document cannot be shared with foreign nationals other than members of the "Five Eyes" intelligence-sharing arrangement the United States has crafted with the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and...

Files should be open to the public unless otherwise specified, not secret by default. We the people have a right to know what our government does in our name, and to know our own historyEarly in his third presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed to establish a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to “declassify and publish all documents on Deep State spying, censorship, and abuses of power.” The phrase “Truth and Reconciliation” recalls bodies established to investigate abuses by toppled Communist regimes such as East Germany’s, or the former apartheid government of South Africa. The framing suggests that Trump views the entire...

Special counsel Jack Smith asked a federal appellate court on Wednesday to halt his appeal in President-elect Donald Trump’s classified documents case, citing the results of the 2024 election. “As a result of the election held on November 5, 2024, one of the defendants in this case, Donald J. Trump, is expected to be certified as President-elect on January 6, 2025, and inaugurated on January 20, 2025,” Smith wrote to the Atlanta-based 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals. “The Government respectfully requests that the Court hold this appeal in abeyance — and stay the deadline for the Government’s reply brief,...

The federal government’s classified documents indictment was once considered a “slam dunk.” But this month, Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida dismissed the case, ruling that the attorney general improperly appointed Jack Smith, and therefore Smith could not legally prosecute Trump. Smith promptly notified Cannon that he intends to appeal her decision, but it’s not clear what his strategy will be. There is now a near-zero chance that Donald Trump will be tried over this case in front of a jury before November—but special counsel Jack Smith is forging ahead with an appeal that could go...

The Justice Department has agreed to pay a total of $2 million to settle legal claims brought by former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page over the DOJ’s release of text messages the pair exchanged. The agreement ends a lawsuit Page brought, but does not fully resolve Strzok’s separate suit, allowing him to continue to press his claims that he was fired in order to please then-President Donald Trump. On Friday, Strzok’s lawyers announced his $1.2 million agreement as attorneys for both sides notified a federal judge in Washington that the privacy-focused portion of that...

Julian Assange tried to contact Hillary Clinton and the White House when he realized that unredacted U.S. diplomatic cables given to WikiLeaks were about to be dumped on the internet, his lawyer told his London extradition hearing on Tuesday. Assange is being sought by the United States on 18 counts of hacking U.S. government computers and an espionage offense, having allegedly conspired with Chelsea Manning, then a U.S. soldier known as Bradley Manning, to leak hundreds of thousands of secret documents by WikiLeaks almost a decade ago. On Monday, the lawyer representing the United States told the hearing that Assange,...

Special counsel Jack Smith has formally appealed a federal judge’s dismissal of criminal charges against former President Trump over his alleged mishandling of classified information after finding the prosecutor was unlawfully appointed. Smith’s office filed a notice saying it would appeal Florida-based U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling tossing out the 40 charges Trump faced to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. The Trump-appointed judge on Monday ruled that Attorney General Merrick Garland did not have the authority to appoint a federal officer with the “kind of prosecutorial power wielded by Special Counsel Smith.” “The bottom line is this: The...

on Soundstage in 1975

WASHINGTON, DC: Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Mike Turner pressed the White House to clarify if Hunter Biden is aware of classified briefings. This comes after the first son made a surprise appearance at the Executive Mansion this week in an attempt to bolster his father's flagging reelection campaign, according to the New York Post. Turner wrote to White House chief of staff Jeff Zients, "White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has confirmed that Hunter Biden is attending official White House meetings involving the President and his staff." He added, "An immediate response is requested, please notify the Committee...

We knew Judge Aileen Cannon likely wouldn't rule right away on the multiple motions heard before her over the past week in the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump. The issues are complicated, and there are a lot of moving parts in the case. So when I first saw the headline: "Cannon rejects Trump claims FBI botched Mar-a-Lago search," I was a bit surprised at the swiftness of the ruling. And I figured Trump and his legal team were likely disappointed with the ruling. Then I took a closer look (always recommended). Here's how The Hill frames it:...

AT A MINUTE before 5 a.m. on April 27, ABC News’ James Gordon Meek fired off a tweet with a single word: “FACTS.” The network’s national-security investigative producer was responding to former CIA agent Marc Polymeropoulos’ take that the Ukrainian military — with assistance from the U.S. — was thriving against Russian forces. Polymeropoulos’ tweet — filled with acronyms indecipherable to the layperson, like “TTPs,” “UW,” and “EW” — was itself a reply to a missive from Washington Post Pentagon reporter Dan Lamothe, who noted the wealth of information the U.S. military had gathered about Russian ops by observing their...