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The Take Down of Sheriff Clarke: FBI Used Search Warrant to Gain Access to His Gmail

By Katie Leach. The FBI obtained a search warrant to access former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke’s personal email in March, according to a federal court filing made public this week.

An affidavit dated March 7 explained the FBI wanted access to Clarke’s personal Gmail account for an investigation into an incident between Clarke and fellow airline passenger, Dan Black, in January.

Black sued, claiming he was unlawfully detained by six uniformed deputies and two K-9 dogs after a squabble with Clarke aboard an American Airlines flight in January.

Special Agent Jennifer Walkowski requested the search warrant for the FBI after being pointed towards the emails by Milwaukee County auditors.

Walkowski presented the court with a photocopy of an email from Clarke – at the address [email protected] – referencing Black’s formal complaint which read: “Sheriff has taken this asshole’s compliant under advisement and summarily determined that he can go to hell. The next time he or anyone else pulls this stunt they may get knocked out. Sheriff does not have to wait for some goof to assault him.” (Read more from “The Take Down of Sheriff Clarke: FBI Used Search Warrant to Gain Access to His Gmail” HERE)

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FBI Executed Search Warrant on Ex-Sheriff David Clarke’s Email

By Alberto Luperon. A recently discovered search warrant dated March 21 showed that the FBI searched Google for “information associated” with the email account of former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke. They wanted info on communications from or after January 15 regarding the detention of Dan Black.

Yes, that Dan Black, the guy who sued Clarke in February for allegedly having him detained and interrogated by deputies after a flight to Milwaukee. Black claimed that it was Clarke who started the confrontation, asking him during the flight if he “had a problem.” He also said that the sheriff’s office later posted a threatening statement, “Next time he or anyone else pulls this stunt on a plane they may get knocked out. The Sheriff said he does not have to wait for some goof to assault him. He reserved the reasonable right to pre-empt a possible assault.” His office declined to comment on the lawsuit in February.

The Feds were investigating Clarke for allegedly misusing his authority as sheriff.

(Read more from “FBI Executed Search Warrant on Ex-Sheriff David Clarke’s Email” HERE)

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Did FBI Conspire to Stop Trump?

The original question the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign was to answer was a simple one: Did he do it?

Did Trump, or officials with his knowledge, collude with Vladimir Putin’s Russia to hack the emails of John Podesta and the DNC, and leak the contents to damage Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump?

A year-and-a-half into the investigation, and, still, no “collusion” has been found. Yet the investigation goes on, at the demand of the never-Trump media and Beltway establishment . . .

That, from the outset, Director James Comey and an FBI camarilla were determined to stop Trump and elect Hillary Clinton. Having failed, they conspired to break Trump’s presidency, overturn his mandate and bring him down.

Essential to any such project was first to block any indictment of Hillary for transmitting national security secrets over her private email server. That first objective was achieved 18 months ago. (Read more from “Did FBI Conspire to Stop Trump?” HERE)

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FBI Says Las Vegas Shooter’s Motive May Take Nearly a Year to Release

It may be a long time until the public knows exactly what led to the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.

The FBI have revealed it will not release its report on Stephen Paddock’s shooting onto a crowd of Las Vegas concert goers any time soon.

During an interview, the chief of the FBI’s Las Vegas office revealed that the agency probably would not brief the public until the report is released sometime in October — a full year year after Paddock gunned down 58 people.

“Now that’s a long time for some people, but speaking for the FBI, that’s light speed, all right?” Special Agent in Charge Aaron Rouse said, according to Fox News.

On the night of Oct. 1, Paddock opened fire from his Mandalay Bay hotel room onto a crowd of around 22,000 people attending a country music concert in Las Vegas.

Moments before shooting at the crowd outside, Paddock had fired at a security guard through the door of his hotel room. The security guard had incidentally been on the 31st floor to check on an alarm when he was shot.

Paddock ultimately killed 58 people and injured 527 others during his brief, but devastating rampage, according to Axios.

A SWAT team finally charged into Paddock’s room and found him dead from a self-inflicted gun shot wound.

Over two months have passed since the massacre and there is still no clear motive for his actions.

“As I sit here today, I believe that we are learning as much as we possibly can about why the subject did what they did,” Rouse stated.

Other agencies investigating the event will be releasing their reports at different times. However, Rouse says the FBI’s report is “focusing a large part on the why” which is “what everybody wants to know.”

Rouse said that evidence suggests Paddock acted alone in the attack and he has not been linked to any radical organizations or ideologies.

He added that FBI investigators have about 250,000 photos and 22,000 hours of surveillance and cellphone footage to examine — a colossal amount of data that may shed more light on what happened.

“We didn’t leave anything uncovered,” Rouse said in an interview. “And again, the casinos, with their support, let us track down a lot of information of who may have had contact with that person. And it was very helpful to us.”

The Islamic State group originally claimed responsibility for the massacre, suggesting Paddock had acted on their orders to attack Western countries, but these claims were quickly ruled out by the FBI.

Paddock’s girlfriend, Marilou Danley, informed investigators that he would lie in bed screaming, an indication that he may have been in “physical or mental anguish.”

Over the years, Paddock made a substantial money from video gambling, and investigators have suggested that his recent gambling losses may have played a role.

Several times, Paddock had gambled over $10,000 in a single day, and in some instances more than than $20,000 and $30,000 in one day, at casinos in Las Vegas, according to NBC News. (For more from the author of “FBI Says Las Vegas Shooter’s Motive May Take Nearly a Year to Release” please click HERE)

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Prosecutors Ask FBI Agents for Info on Uranium One Deal

On the orders of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Justice Department prosecutors have begun asking FBI agents to explain the evidence they found in a now dormant criminal investigation into a controversial uranium deal that critics have linked to Bill and Hillary Clinton, multiple law enforcement officials told NBC News.

The interviews with FBI agents are part of the Justice Department’s effort to fulfill a promise an assistant attorney general made to Congress last month to examine whether a special counsel was warranted to look into what has become known as the Uranium One deal, a senior Justice Department official said.

At issue is a 2010 transaction in which the Obama Administration allowed the sale of U.S. uranium mining facilities to Russia’s state atomic energy company. Hillary Clinton was secretary of state at the time, and the State Department was one of nine agencies that agreed to approve the deal after finding no threat to U.S. national security.

A senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the initial FBI investigation told NBC News there were allegations of corruption surrounding the process under which the U.S. government approved the sale. But no charges were filed.

As the New York Times reported in April 2015, some of the people associated with the deal contributed millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. And Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 for a Moscow speech by a Russian investment bank with links to the transaction. (Read more from “Prosecutors Ask FBI Agents for Info on Uranium One Deal” HERE)

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As Trump-Russia Goes Cold, Clinton-Comey Turns up Smoking Gun

Text messages released by the Department of Justice Tuesday revealed an extreme anti-Trump bias by Peter Strzok, a former senior member of special counsel Robert Mueller’s election probe team. The texts also hint at the possibility that the James Comey-led FBI may have had a plan to illegally thwart Trump’s presidential ambitions.

Following an internal Justice Department investigation, agent Strzok was quietly reassigned from his senior post at the FBI to a human resources position in the Bureau. It’s unclear at this time whether his text messages had anything to do with his reassignment. He was exchanging messages with Lisa Page, a fellow FBI official at the time, during the 2016 election campaign, according to reports.

Some have argued that Strzok did no wrong, because he had every right to criticize and use explicit language to target then-candidate Trump in his private exchanges. Strzok and Page frequently called the president “an idiot,” or “awful,” which is 100 percent their right to do as observers of politics.

However, some of the texts hint at the possibility that Strzok may have stepped over that line, and that he moved beyond simply expressing his discontent with the Republican presidential nominee.

One particular text may be interpreted as strategizing to interfere in the electoral process — what could be understood as discussing a plan to work with FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to stop Trump from becoming president.

“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s (McCabe) office — that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40,” Strzok texted Page in 2016.

Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, remarks that the text “clearly indicates” that Strzok was “infected by political viewpoints,” describing the text as “disqualifying.”

The text’s possible reference to Andrew McCabe raises another giant red flag about Comey’s deputy.

Although McCabe’s wife was running for office with the help of Clinton allies, the FBI deputy director refused to recuse himself from the Clinton email investigation until one week before the presidential election. Judicial Watch later found out that he was using his work email account to spread the word about his wife’s political ambitions.

It’s worth recalling that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for the research into the infamous “Trump-Russia” dossier. The FBI (under James Comey and McCabe) then reportedly paid for this information and used the mostly debunked dossier to wiretap Trump advisers.

The ongoing investigation into the 2016 election was far from a smooth-running ship prior to these latest revelations. Peter Strzok is far from the only extreme partisan on Mueller’s investigation team. (For more from the author of “As Trump-Russia Goes Cold, Clinton-Comey Turns up Smoking Gun” please click HERE)

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FBI Lacks ‘Technical Ability’ to Crack Most Smartphone Encryption

The FBI is struggling to decode private messages on phones and other mobile devices that could contain key criminal evidence, and the agency failed to access data more than half of the times it tried during the last fiscal year, FBI Director Christopher Wray told House lawmakers.

Wray will testify at the House Judiciary Committee Thursday morning on the wide range of issues the FBI faces. One of the issues hurting the FBI, he said, is the ability of criminals to “go dark,” or hide evidence electronically from authorities.

“The rapid pace of advances in mobile and other communication technologies continues to present a significant challenge to conducting lawful court-ordered access to digital information or evidence,” he said in his prepared remarks to the committee. “Unfortunately, there is a real and growing gap between law enforcement’s legal authority to access digital information and its technical ability to do so.”

Wray said criminals and terrorists are increasingly using these technologies. He added that the Islamic State is reaching potential recruits through encrypted messaging, which are difficult for the FBI to crack . . .

He noted that in the last fiscal year, the FBI was unable to access data on about 7,800 mobile devices, even though they had the legal authority to try. He said that was a little more than half of the mobile devices the FBI tried to access in fiscal year 2017. (Read more from “FBI Lacks ‘Technical Ability’ to Crack Most Smartphone Encryption” HERE)

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Black Friday Posts New Single Day Record for Gun Checks at More Than 200,000

The FBI was flooded Friday with more than 200,000 background check requests for gun purchases, setting a new single day record, the bureau reported Saturday.

In all, the FBI fielded 203,086 requests on Black Friday, up from the previous single-day highs of 185,713 last year and 185,345 in 2015. The two previous records also were recorded on Black Friday.

Gun checks, required for purchases at federally licensed firearm dealers, are not a measure of actual gun sales. The number of firearms sold Friday is likely higher because multiple firearms can be included in one transaction by a single buyer.

The surging numbers received by the bureau’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), comes just days after Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered a sweeping review of the system, which allowed a court-martialed Air Force veteran to purchase the rifle used earlier this month to kill 25 people inside a Sutherland Springs, Texas, church . . .

The breakdown in the Kelley case highlighted longstanding problems within the system, which for more than 20 years has served as the centerpiece of the government’s effort to block criminals from obtaining firearms. Yet it has largely struggled to keep pace with the volume of firearm transactions and still properly maintain the databases of criminal and mental health records necessary to determine whether buyers are eligible to purchase guns. (Read more from “Black Friday Posts New Single Day Record for Gun Checks at More Than 200,000” HERE)

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FBI Interviewed NYC Terrorist About His Ties to Terrorism Before the Attack

A critical piece of information has emerged in the case of a terrorist attack that killed eight people in New York City on Tuesday—the suspected attacker was reportedly interviewed by federal agents under the suspicion that he had linked to terrorists in 2015.

Federal law enforcement officials told ABC News that the suspect, Sayfullo Saipov, “was interviewed in 2015 by federal agents in the Department of Homeland Security Investigations Unit about possible ties to suspected terrorists.”

In spite of having enough information to initiate contact with Saipov and interview him, DHS did not pursue the case, citing that “the agents did not have enough evidence to open a case on him.”

The officials claimed that Saipov’s “name and address was listed as a ‘point of contact’ for two different men whose names were entered into the Counterterrorism and Criminal Exploitation Unit’s list after they came to the United States from ‘threat countries.’” At least one of those two men has reportedly vanished and is “being actively sought by federal agents as a ‘suspected terrorist.’”

The initial information released on Saipov, a 29-year-old immigrant from Uzbekistan, painted the picture of a friendly Uber driver who slipped under the government’s radar after he came to the U.S. on a Diversity Visa from a country off of the government’s terrorist map.

The truck attack that Saipov is suspected of carrying out is being painted as a “lone-wolf attack,” in which he began yelling “Allahu Akbar” after he exited the vehicle, waving a paintball gun. He also reportedly left a note at the scene claiming that he carried out the attack for the Islamic State—although no proof of that note has been released.

John Miller, NYPD deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, claimed that Saipov had been planning the attack “for a number of weeks,” and he carried it out “in the name of ISIS.”

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that the suspect was “radicalized domestically” after he came to the U.S. legally in 2010. “The evidence shows—and again, it’s only several hours, and the investigation is ongoing—but that after he came to the United States is when he started to become informed about ISIS and radical Islamic tactics,” he said on Wednesday morning.

It has been less than 24 hours since the attack, and the report from ABC News claimed:

“Investigators searching Saipov’s online activities have found social media links to people who are or were subjects of terror investigations,” and he appears to be much more involved than just “someone who found ISIS propaganda online with no sense that he was part of a cell or in any way directed to do this.”

While the attack is being hailed as the “Deadliest Terrorist Attack in New York since 9/11” that shows the threat of ISIS attacks on U.S. soil, it is also the textbook example of the failed War on Terror.

As we’ve learned from subsequent FBI investigations, one even announced last month in which a man was supported by the FBI, given a fake bomb and told to blow up a mall in Florida, the bureau has an extensive network of informants and patsies ready to do their bidding in carrying out staged terror attacks.

Once these fake attacks are carried out, the FBI then takes credit for preventing a terrorist attack, thereby validating their anti-terrorist budget and activities. Some critics of the FBI call those actions nothing less than entrapment. And without the help of the FBI, those individuals would arguably be going about their everyday activities, unconcerned with carrying out acts of terrorism. The FBI’s anti-terrorism activities, some have said, actually create terrorists out of regular citizens.

After Sayfullo Saipov was interviewed by federal agents in 2015 about suspected connections to terrorists, he arguably would have stayed in their system for the next several years, and if he did , in fact, spend “a number of weeks” plotting a deadly attack, then the government agencies who receive billions in taxpayer dollars to combat terrorism, should have had enough time to prevent it. (For more from the author of “FBI Interviewed NYC Terrorist About His Ties to Terrorism Before the Attack” please click HERE)

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FBI Warns: More Violence From ‘Black Identity Extremist’

The FBI Counterterrorism Division warned about the potential violence that could come from members of “Black Identity Extremists” (BIE), according to a document obtained by Foreign Policy.

The Aug. 3 document warns of the potential violence that members of the BIE movement could possibly perform against American law enforcement officers, Foreign Policy reported Friday.

“The FBI assesses it is very likely Black Identity Extremist (BIE) perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as justification for such violence,” the document read. Foreign Policy notes that the document was marked for official use. (Read more from “FBI Warns: More Violence From ‘Black Identity Extremist'” HERE)

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FBI Agent Comes Forward: ‘Multiple Leads’ in US. And ‘All Across World’ in Vegas Shooting

On Thursday, FBI special agent Aaron Rouse, held a press conference to provide further details about Sunday’s shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas that left 59 dead, and over 500 wounded.

Rouse, who is in the special agent in charge of the Las Vegas division, also asked for the public’s patience in regards to the investigation.

“Additionally, we have multiple leads across the United States and all across the world for our legal industries determining the whereabouts of the panel of the people involved in this investigation, and that leads grows,” Rouse said.

“A lot of these leads will go nowhere but we have to follow them, and that’s going to take some time,” Rouse said.

Las Vegas Sheriff Joseph Lombardo suggested at a separate press conference that there is a possibility the shooter had assistance in amassing the massive repertoire of weaponry he used during the attack.

“Do you think this was all accomplished on his own?” Lombardo asked. “You’ve got to make the assumption he had to have some help at some point.”

Previously, officials had spoken to the shooter’s girlfriend, Marilou Danley in an attempt to gain more information. Yet, Rouse would not reveal whether Danley was still a person of interest.

Lambardo also suggested that he had seen evidence which could suggest the shooter intended to survive his attack.

Rouse did not comment on that speculation.

“There’s going to be questions, I’m sure you’re going to have questions about people we’ve been talking to, maybe people outside of the United States,” Rouse said.

He also offered an explanation for why he could not answer previously stated questions.

“The fundamental trust of the American people and the FBI is based upon our discretion — and how good would that discretion be if we were to provide information that they provided to us in confidence?

“This is about informing on an investigation, this is about resolving an investigation, so specifics regarding any individual contact cannot be answered.”

Rouse reiterated the importance of public trust during the course of the investigation.

“You need us, you trust us, and the way we have that trust is by using good discretion about what we share,” Rouse said.

Rouse has held his position at the Las Vegas division since September 2016.

Previously, Rouse held a section chief position at FBI headquarters, as well as leadership positions at the Tampa and San Antonio offices. In total, he has been with the FBI for more than 20 years. (For more from the author of “FBI Agent Comes Forward: ‘Multiple Leads’ in US. And ‘All Across World’ in Vegas Shooting” please click HERE)

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