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DENVER (AP) — A Colorado man who is a registered Democratic voter has been arrested on suspicion of tampering with voting equipment by allegedly inserting a USB thumb drive into a voting machine at a polling station during the primary election in June, authorities said. No elections data were accessed, and the June 28 incident didn’t cause any major disruption to voting, authorities said. Richard Patton, 31, of Pueblo was arrested on Thursday by members of the Pueblo Police Department High-Tech Crime Unit for investigation of tampering with voting equipment, a felony, and cybercrime-unauthorized access, a misdemeanor, the department said...

A former National Security Agency contractor jailed for leaking a document about Russian hacking in the 2016 election has spoken out about her experiences, insisting that she is "not a traitor." Reality Winner, now 30, was arrested in 2017 and admitted to taking classified intelligence documents that same year. She was accused of mailing top-secret NSA information to the media outlet The Intercept. The classified document detailed Russian government efforts to hack a Florida-based US voting software supplier. In 2018, Winner was sentenced to more than five years in prison. She was released in June 2021 for good behavior. Speaking...

Billie Winner-Davis doesn't get it, or maybe she does. How can Paul Manafort, chairman of President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, get compassionate release from prison — years before his slated release, after lying about his dealings with Russian intelligence assets — while someone who leaked a report about Moscow's efforts to interfere in elections, like her daughter, languish behind bars? And whatever happened to all of those people who used to champion the cause of persecuted whistle-blowers? "As each chapter of this unfolds, I see just how corrupt our system really is, and I see just how powerless the average...

When she was arrested in Afghanistan last month, Aafia Siddique allegedly had in her possession maps of New York, a list of potential targets that included the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, the subway system and the animal disease center on Plum Island, detailed chemical, biological and radiological weapon information that has been seen only in a handful of terrorist cases, as well as a thumb drive packed with emails, ABC News has learned.

Why is the FBI withholding information on the DHS whistleblower’s laptop and thumb drive? In Amador County, California, on February 21, Philip Haney, author of  See Something Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad, was found dead from a single gunshot wound. News reports suggested suicide but the local sheriff found “this is not the case.” The death of Haney, 66, was a homicide, the unlawful killing of one person by another. The Amador County sheriff had no suspects but did find some clues. Deputies recovered “numerous thumb drives and a laptop” from the crime...

Computer thumb drives used to program Philadelphia voting machines were stolen from a city warehouse along with the laptop of an employee from the machines’ manufacturer. The items were stolen from a warehouse in the city’s East Falls section, city election commission spokesman Nick Custodio said in a brief emailed statement, adding: “We are confident that this incident will not in any way compromise the integrity of the election.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, which first reported the theft in the majority Democratic city, said they were stolen this week. The laptop did not hold any “sensitive election-related data” and was not...

Police on the scene were pressured to stay silent. A flash drive that contained crucial absentee voter information in the 2020 presidential election was briefly lost during the early morning hours of Wednesday Nov. 4 as the world waited for Milwaukee to reveal its ballot counts. Sources within Milwaukee County law enforcement told Wisconsin Right Now exclusively that the executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, Claire Woodall-Vogg, realized she had lost the flash drive when she left, with police escort, the Central Count building where ballots were tallied. She was en route to the county courthouse to report “the...

Amid accusations of massive battleground state election fraud meant to swing the Presidential race for Democrat Joe Biden, outraged voters in the 7th District of Virginia are sounding the alarm after incumbent Democrat Abigail Spanberger was propelled to victory by the discovery of nearly 15,000 early absentee votes stored on a thumb drive in the Richmond suburb of Henrico County. In a chain of events similar to those that have played out around the country, with roughly 85% of votes reported as being tallied, Republican challenger Nick Freitas, as well as President Donald Trump, led their respective races in the...

A missing thumb drive for a ballot scanner forced the Lancaster County elections office to recount more than 21,000 in-person absentee ballots late Tuesday night, leaving the results of local races in question at presstime. The recounted ballots represent 42% of the county’s vote total in the election, so they could affect the results of almost every race. Rick Crimminger, chairman of the Lancaster County Election Commission, said no one is sure what happened to the thumb drive.

“I’m terrified, I’m terrified that she’s not going to be treated fairly,” the mother of accused leaker Reality Sara Winner told CBS News after her daughter’s arrest under the Espionage Act for stealing Top Secret documents and passing them along to a media outlet. Billie-Jean Davis says her daughter is afraid that law enforcement will “make her disappear,” but then at the same time claims that the US government wants to make an example of Winner. “That’s not fair,” she tells CBS:(VIDEO-AT-LINK) The mother and stepfather of 25-year-old Reality Leigh Winner, the NSA contractor accused of leaking government secrets, are...

Reality Leigh Winner, a 25-year-old National Security Agency contractor accused of leaking classified information about Russian hacking to the media, wrote that she wanted to "burn the White House down" in notes confiscated from her home during a raid, federal prosecutors said in court today. Winner pleaded not guilty to a charge of “willful retention and transmission of national defense information” this afternoon in federal court in Augusta, Georgia. She was arrested at her Georgia home on June 3 and charged with removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet. Winner was a contractor...

Now that Reality Winner's in legal jeopardy for abusing her paid position and illegally distributed classified documents to the media and issued a threat to the White House, maybe being a "pretty, white and cute" female is something that could be exploited because she is just so much smarter than everyone else.

British ex-spy Christopher Steele shared more fake conspiracy theories with the FBI than just his infamous Steele dossier (with the pee story in it). At least three Steele assertions went to the Crossfire Hurricane team. Every single one of them was untrue. Steele provided the FBI with the name of a Russian intelligence officer who was supposedly Carter Page's handler. If true, this would -- of course -- lend credence to another claim Steele made about bribes in return for relief from U.S. sanctions for Russia. However, the FBI admitted to Horowitz that "Steele's allegations about the Russian national were...

In the last few days, media talking heads have been saying the word "CrowdStrike" a lot, defining it as a wild conspiracy theory originating in Moscow. They were joined by Chris Wallace at Fox News, who informed us that president Trump and his ill-informed fans believe in a crazy idea that the DNC wasn't hacked by the Russians but by some Ukrainian group named CrowdStrike that stole the DNC server and brought it to Ukraine , and that it was Ukraine that meddled in our 2016 election and not Russia. A crazy idea indeed. Except that neither Trump nor his...

No wonder the Dems are nervous: The alleged Russian hacking of the DNC’s computers is proving to be a Hillary campaign and DNC scam that went unchallenged by Messrs. Comey and Mueller. In his telephone conversation with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, President Trump requested Ukraine’s help in getting “to the bottom of” the Russian collusion narrative and the role of CrowdStrike, a private computer security company, in propagating that story. Lost in the volcanic eruption of faux outrage and condemnation aimed at the president by the Democrats and their wholly owned media subsidiary, this reference to CrowdStrike indicates that the...

Nellie Ohr, the wife of Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, told her husband she was deleting emails sent from his government account. The revelation comes as both Ohrs remain under intense scrutiny for their ties to Fusion GPS and British ex-spy Christopher Steele, the author of the anti-Trump dossier that was used to obtain warrants to wiretap a member of President Trump's 2016 campaign. Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch obtained a series of April 2016 emails from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department that show a correspondence between the Ohrs, an aide to Bruce Ohr named...

A US Secret Service agent inserted a USB drive infected with "malicious malware" into his laptop after the hardware was confiscated from a Chinese woman who was arrested late last month after attempting to gain entry to President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort. Agent Samuel Ivanovich testified in court on Monday that he put the thumb drive into his own computer, and it began installing files in a "very out-of-the-ordinary" way. He quickly stopped his analysis of the drive, the Miami Herald reported.

A 32-year-old Chinese woman, who said she wanted to talk to President Trump’s family about economic relations between the United States and her home country, lied her way into Mar-a-Lago over the weekend before she was arrested, U.S. Secret Service agents said. Yujing Zhang, who said she was sent by a fellow Chinese national named Charles, was charged with making false statements to a federal officer and entering or remaining in a restricted building or grounds. She appeared in U.S. District Court on Monday and a public defender was appointed to represent her. She is to return to court next...

Who would have thought that, this deep into the Russia collusion probe, we'd be learning about yet another dossier connected to Hillary Clinton? And, as it turns out, it was sort of a family secret. By his own account, senior Department of Justice (DOJ) official Bruce Ohr played an essential — and unorthodox — role, carrying politically tainted allegations of Donald Trump-Russia collusion to the FBI during the 2016 election. First, it was unverified intelligence starting in July 2016 from Trump-hating former British spy Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous Russia dossier. Next, it was sketchy intelligence starting in...

After months of secret negotiations, a shadowy Russian bilked American spies out of $100,000 last year, promising to deliver stolen National Security Agency cyberweapons in a deal that he insisted would also include compromising material on President Trump, according to American and European intelligence officials. The cash, delivered in a suitcase to a Berlin hotel room in September, was intended as the first installment of a $1 million payout, according to American officials, the Russian and communications reviewed by The New York Times. The theft of the secret hacking tools had been devastating to the N.S.A., and the agency was...