At the FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. , words uttered by the agency’s late longtime leader J. Edgar Hoover are carved symbolically into a courtyard wall: “The most effective weapon against crime is cooperation…The efforts of all law enforcement agencies with the support ...
At the FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., words uttered by the agency’s late longtime leader J. Edgar Hoover are carved symbolically into a courtyard wall: “The most effective weapon against crime is cooperation…The efforts of all law enforcement agencies with the support and understanding of the American people.”
But less than a mile away, the consequences of a breakdown in this crucial component of crimefighting became apparent when violent political extremists took over the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. Newly unsealed FBI documents obtained and analyzed by Knewz.com show intelligence officials were caught off guard by the scope of the attack — an outcome that several government watchdog groups have since said may have been avoided if federal agencies followed their own policies, and worked more cooperatively with one another.
With the same key players back in the political arena ahead of the 2024 Presidential Election, uncertainty looms over whether the country could see the resurgence of domestic violence by political extremists.
On Wednesday, February 7, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI released nearly 150 pages of email correspondence between members of the department’s Washington Field Office (WFO) from the days leading up to January 6, 2021.
The documents — while heavily redacted — demonstrate that high-ranking WFO members were underprepared for the events to come, largely due to how they were assessing and sharing information.
For example, an email sent within the office on January 3, 2021 read, “FBI WFO does not have any information to suggest [January 6] will involve anything other than First Amendment protected activity.”
By that time, law enforcement officials across the country were well-aware of about a dozen planned “Stop the Steal” protests related to the counting of electoral votes that would clinch incoming President Joe Biden’s victory over the outgoing officeholder, Donald Trump.
Trump had been mobilizing his supporters via social media with tweets like, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” as well as “Don’t be weak fools!”
An array of Congressionally ordered probes into the actions of law enforcement officials leading up to the insurrection have found that a litany of information pointed to the fact that rioters had plans for violence, but many threats were not deemed credible, nor passed along to partners properly.
A report called “Planned in Plain Sight, A Review of the Intelligence Failures in Advance of January 6th, 2021” released last June by a Senate committee concluded that “multiple federal agencies failed to effectively coordinate in the lead-up to January 6th, contributing to the failures that allowed the Capitol to be breached that day.”
The committee said federal agencies like the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “received numerous tips and were aware of significant online posts threatening violence at the Capitol, yet they failed to accurately assess this intelligence and share the information with law enforcement partners.”
As early as December of 2020, for instance, the FBI had intel about the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group with a history of violence, planning to be in D.C., the committee said.
The agency had gotten a tip saying “‘[t]heir plan is to literally kill people. Please please take this tip seriously and investigate further,'” according to the report.
“‘Yet while FBI was receiving these and other increasingly concerning reports, internal emails…demonstrate that the Bureau continued to downplay the overall threat,” the investigators said.
The WFO’s email on January 3, 2021 went on to say it was possible the planned events “could incite a violent reaction,” but suggested any such violence would likely be between protesters, “based on known intelligence” and “historical observations.”
Ultimately, however, the Congressional hearing was disrupted when more than 2,000 rioters stormed the grounds in a violent siege that resulted in at least seven deaths, assaults on nearly 175 police officers, and about $2.7 billion in estimated damages, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It was the bloodiest attack on the Capitol since 1812.
“When you see the amount of intelligence they had in advance…there was a failure to include specific intelligence that would have been critical for my men and women to be better prepared that day,” Capitol Hill Police Chief Steven Sund — who has since retired — told a House oversight subcommittee panel in September of 2023, when asked about the information shared with his department by FBI.
Senate Committee Chairman Gary Peters said “it is clear that this violent coordinated attack was the result of a massive and historic intelligence failure.”
The newly released emails present a first-hand look into the WFO’s actions leading up to the insurrection, revealing where there were crucial blind spots and raising the question: have officials made changes to prevent history from repeating itself?
In response to this query, the FBI sent a statement to Knewz.com reading, in part: “We are constantly trying to learn and evaluate what we can do better or differently, and this is especially true of the attack on the U.S. Capitol.”
A domestic terrorism expert from the Council on Foreign Relations spoke to The Associated Press for a November 2023 article about anticipations ahead of the 2024 presidential election and noted that American election years are often marked by violence. Therefore, he told the outlet, “we should absolutely expect such incidents in 2024.”
Jacob Ware also said political violence in the U.S. was being driven by conspiracy theories spread through social media like “Stop the Steal,” “QAnon” and “Pizzagate.”
“No longer are these conspiracy theories and very divisive and vicious ideologies separated at the fringes,” he said. “They’re now infiltrating American society on a massive scale.”
In February of 2023, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released the results of its Congressionally ordered investigation into federal agencies’ actions leading up to January 6. Among the findings in the report was that “FBI personnel did not follow policies for processing some tips, resulting in them not being developed into reports that could have been shared with partners.”
The GAO found that between October 1, 2020 and January 5, 2021, the FBI learned about 73 tips related to potential domestic terrorism in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021.
One of these tips came from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service on December 22, 2020 and informed the agency about a post on Parler — a popular social media platform among Trump supporters — urging “fellow patriots and oath keepers” to “take up your arms…and hang every traitor.”
However, the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division “did not develop related reports on information from Parler as required,” the GAO said.
The newly unsealed documents illustrate that at the eleventh hour, top intelligence officials at the WFO warned law enforcement partners that they could be certain of little more than the fact that the planned events might cause traffic delays.
On January 4, 2021, a “situational awareness report” was sent out to dozens of agencies warning about street closures and parking restrictions that “may delay your commute” in Washington, D.C. over the following days “due to First Amendment-protected activities.”
The GAO report noted an email sent that afternoon among WFO staff said the office had “no information indicating a specific and credible threat,” going on to say that “[m]ost of what WFO is seeing are random chatter with no specificity.”
Per FBI policy, if a threat is deemed credible, an official written “situational information report” (SIR) must be sent to law enforcement partners.
Prior to the insurrection, the FBI produced just two SIRs specific to January 6; both were issued the night before the attack, and neither came from the WFO.
Jennifer Moore, the FBI administrator who oversaw intelligence at the WFO in the lead-up to the attack, was questioned by a House of Representatives committee in July of 2022.
When the panel asked why her branch put out no such report, she replied, “At that time, we did not have specific actual intelligence that we felt needed…to be disseminated in that manner.”
Moore went on to explain that the agency is legally barred from investigating a person based solely on the expression of their First Amendment rights, and therefore, “we are very limited in what we can do.”
While the WFO was seeing plenty of “rhetoric” online discussing a takeover of the Capitol, Moore said, the office didn’t see “specific threats or actionable intelligence.”
The agency echoed this position in its statement to Knewz.com, saying “We are committed to upholding the constitutional rights of all Americans and do not conduct investigations based solely on First Amendment protected activity.”
But GAO said in its report that “[Moore] conflated the Bureau’s standards for taking more intrusive investigative action on a tip versus merely reporting it to partner agencies, which was one reason FBI did not share more intelligence it was seeing,” and that “FBI employees wrongly concluded that they could not process certain online tips because they determined they were not credible.”
The Senate committee, similarly, wrote, “Despite claims by some agency officials,” the FBI “[has] authority to monitor and report open-source intelligence, including social media — and agency guidelines require them to report certain online threats,” adding that intelligence officials “failed to follow agency guidelines on the use of [this] intelligence.”
One of the two SIRs issued by the FBI in relation to January 6 was produced by the agency’s field office in Norfolk, Virginia.
The report detailed information from a thread on the pro-Trump online forum “thedonald.win” discussing “specific calls for violence.” One user posted, “Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood…being spilled. Get violent…stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”
Also included in the brief were images of maps that point to access tunnels and “rally points,” calling for a “perimeter” around the Capitol.
Capitol Hill Police Chief Sund told the House panel last September that he wasn’t made aware of the information in this report until after the insurrection.
Sund also said he missed important intel in another 15-page brief because it had been buried on the last page behind a long list of street closure notifications.
However, Moore told the House committee the Norfolk SIR “was absolutely shared with Capitol police” prior to the sixth, adding that this was “one of our takeaways.”
“Obviously the intel that we were sharing wasn’t getting where it needed to be,” she said, adding that the department would, as a result, brief officials in the future from the “bottom up and from the top down, to ensure that decision-makers are equipped with the best, most recent information.”
The redacted emails released in February suggest there was some confusion among federal officials during this time.
On the morning of January 2, 2021, Assistant Director in Charge of the WFO Steven D’Antuono wrote an email describing the threat picture for January 6 as it had been relayed to him by FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich.
“What I could gather from the Deputy is that the focus is no one knows what is going to happen and that scares them,” D’Antuono’s message to fellow WFO agents read, “so they want to know what the intel is and plan accordingly but that is tough because there really is no centralized role in this for the Defense or the Federal government components.”
He went on to say, “I’m trying to tamp this down with the Deputy like I have the last couple protests but this one may be different.”
Moore told the House committee, when questioned about this assessment, that D’Antuono “may have overstepped his lane on his brief,” because “that’s not how this was.”
This committee’s final report, released in December of 2022, also noted that officials “disagreed as to which agency was taking the lead role,” saying Department of Defense officials pointed to the Department of Justice as the lead, “but DOJ and FBI officials stated that no agency had been designated the lead.”
Other agencies, the investigators added, “also reported confusion about who was in charge.”
When asked about what went wrong on January 6, the report added that “officials across agencies passed blame, largely pointing to failures at other agencies for what happened.”
Despite these contributions to the chaos that ensued at the Capitol in 2021 by federal agencies, the House Select Committee to Investigate January 6 concluded in its final report that “the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed. None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him.”
The insurrection led to Trump’s second impeachment, and eventually his indictment on four criminal charges related to his role in the events that unfolded that day.
During an impeachment hearing, former New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney said Trump “sent an angry, violent mob to the Capitol” with the goal of stopping Congress from certifying the 2020 election.
“In other words, Donald Trump was attempting to instigate a coup,” Maloney said, going on to say that “he gave literal marching orders that morning” when he told a crowd of supporters to “walk down to the Capitol to fight like hell,” and to “stop the steal.”
His defense lawyers, however, have noted that the former president also told his supporters to protest “peacefully and patriotically,” arguing that his words were not calls for actual violence or criminal activity.
At the committee’s recommendation, the former president was charged with three counts of conspiracy and one count of corruptly obstructing and impeding an official proceeding — charges to which he has pleaded not guilty. Trump recently asked the Supreme Court to postpone his case until after this year’s election.
As the political landscape of the 2024 presidential election takes shape, it remains likely the country will see Biden and Trump go head-to-head for a second time. The Republican nominee will be determined at the Republican National Convention this July, but Trump has taken the lead by a long-shot.
As of February 9, 2024, Ballotpedia projected Trump had 63% of the Republican electoral delegates, and Biden had 91% of the Democratic vote.
The GAO’s report urged the FBI to asses “the extent to which, and why, personnel did not process threats shared by social media platforms as required by policy,” adding that this would clarify whether these discrepancies “are indicative of a larger problem, if existing internal control policies need improvement, or if additional controls are needed.”
In its statement to Knewz.com, the agency said it had “increased our focus on swift information sharing with all our state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement partners throughout the United States.”
The GAO also called for the FBI director to devise a plan to ensure personnel follow policies for processing information. In July of 2023, the watchdog group designated this recommendation “closed” after the FBI implemented new procedures within its National Threat Operations Center, which now “centralizes information for tracking and analysis” to make sure information is put into reports.
The move was part of the National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, a “government-wide effort to prevent, disrupt and deter unlawful domestic terrorist violence and confront the long-term contributors to domestic terrorism” enacted by the Biden Administration.
In January of this year, the agency also announced that its ongoing efforts to identify those involved in the insurrection had led to 1,240 arrests.
In an interview with CBS News in 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that in response to January 6, the agency was “taking a hard look at how we can be even more preemptive, even more aggressive, even more responsive to make sure that we prevent something like that from ever happening again.”
“Americans can be sure,” Wray said, “the FBI is fiercely determined to do our part with the other agencies to make sure that that never happens again.”
The FBI’s full statement to Knewz.com:
“The FBI’s goal is to disrupt and stay ahead of any threats. We are constantly trying to learn and evaluate what we can do better or differently, and this is especially true of the attack on the U.S. Capitol. The FBI worked closely with our law enforcement partners – including the U.S. Capitol Police – in advance of January 6 and on that day to share information in real time. We also set up command posts and had tactical assets ready to deploy should our partners request such assistance. Following events at the Capitol, the FBI increased our focus on swift information sharing with all our state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement partners throughout the United States. We also made improvements to assist investigators and analysts in all of our field offices throughout the investigative process, including centralizing the flow of information to ensure timely notifications so they can take appropriate action on potential threats. Additionally, the FBI investigates violence, threats of violence, and violations of federal law. We are committed to upholding the constitutional rights of all Americans and do not conduct investigations based solely on First Amendment protected activity.”
The biggest aviation mystery in history will be solved this year when underwater search specialists uncover the wreckage of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 . This is the prediction of one of the key researchers in the case, whose work has helped pinpoint the most accurate probable crash ...
The biggest aviation mystery in history will be solved this year when underwater search specialists uncover the wreckage of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
This is the prediction of one of the key researchers in the case, whose work has helped pinpoint the most accurate probable crash site to date, Knewz.com has learned.
Private contractors are tantalizingly close to announcing details of a new search for the wreckage in the remote southern Indian Ocean. The search is likely to begin toward the end of 2024.
Once underway, it could only take weeks to find the plane using the most up-to-date location study, coupled with new underwater search technology.
Richard Godfrey, a physicist and avionics expert who, along with researchers Dr. Hannes Coetzee and Professor Simon Maskell, used a novel scientifically proven technique to pinpoint where the plane crashed, reveals that several private underwater search operators are finalizing plans to renew the search. He is confident that one of them will commit ships to water by the end of year and that when they do, they will be able to locate the wreckage on the ocean floor.
Godfrey is a key member of the Independent Group, a collection of experts who have been investigating the disappearance for a decade.
Godfrey tells Knewz.com: “My hopes are that of the several organizations currently interested in going and searching, one of them will start this year. I am very confident that this will be the year the search resumes. These organizations are all in the final stages of testing and integration of new technology and it’s all looking positive.
“If there is a new search, I can confidently predict the wreckage will be found because I am privy to details about the new capabilities that these parties have to offer.”
MH370 departed from Kuala Lumpur International Airport on March 8, 2014, heading toward Beijing Capital International Airport, where it was due to arrive at 6:30 a.m. local time after five hours and 34 minutes in the air. There were 239 people on board.
Just before the plane left Malaysian airspace en route to Vietnam, the captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, said goodbye to Malaysia air traffic control. Seconds later the plane’s transponder was switched off and MH370 went “dark.” Radar shows that it then tracked back over the Malaysian Peninsula and out into the Malacca Strait, where radars lost it.
However, equipment on the plane continued to receive and transmit hourly pings, or “handshakes,” with a satellite system, and analysis of this data showed the plane flew south into the Indian Ocean until the signal disappeared.
In the days after the disappearance, oceanographers such as Prof. Pattiaratchi, from the University of Western Australia, were able to identify a region of the southern Indian Ocean where the aircraft was likely to have crashed.
A flaperon from the plane wing washed up on Réunion Island in July 2015, confirming the analysis and adding weight to the theory that the aircraft had crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.
The subsequent search for the plane was unprecedented, covering a huge area and previously unmapped underwater terrain and extreme depths. Initially co-ordinated by Australian authorities, the first international search was wound up in January 2017 without any trace being found of the plane.
In 2018, private operator Ocean Infinity embarked on a three-month “no find, no fee” search covering another 112,000 square kilometers. This also proved fruitless, but the company vowed to return if it could reach a new contract with the Malaysian government, which owned the carrier and had agreed to pay Ocean Infinity if the plane was found.
Most recently, Richard Godfrey and his colleagues used an archive of records of radio waves transmitted by ham (amateur) operators to identify and track MH370’s flight path. In a groundbreaking technique they used data recorded by what is known as the Weak Signal Propagation Reporter Network, or WSPRnet, better known as “Whispernet.”
The idea of using amateur radio signals as a passive radar system to detect and track aircraft was first proposed in a NATO paper written by the Finnish Air Defense Academy in 2016. Their projections pinpoint a much more defined crash zone, part of which has already been searched.
In September 2023, Godfrey and his co-authors published a report on the most recent WSPR data. At the time, Godfrey told Knewz.com: “It represents the most accurate and detailed record of the path the plane took and hence the most accurate estimate of the crash site at the end of the flight path after fuel exhaustion. Broadly we can identify a probable crash site area of ocean 70 nautical miles by 42 nautical miles within which there are hotspots where the likelihood that the aircraft will be increased. One third of the area has already been searched. The high probability area we have defined is 10 square kilometers.”
With new technology, Godfrey explained, a search operation could cover the area “in just a couple of weeks.”
“It’s not going to take them a long time to find MH370 when they go out,” Godfrey said.
And a private company willing to fully fund the cost of a search would not need permission from the Malaysian authorities to look for the plane or to record it and film it if they found it. They would only need permission if they were to salvage it, by which point it would be a potential crime scene, as the reason for the plane’s disappearance remains unknown.
Godfrey continues: “The question is, how will the Malaysian authorities react when it is found? To get the black box or other items that prove how it crashed, or who was in the cockpit when it did, a search team would have to have the permission of the Malaysian government, but if you have shown pictures of the wreckage to the world the Malaysian government will be in a difficult position to say no to requests for permission to salvage.”
There has been speculation that the Malaysian authorities may be reluctant to continue searching for the plane if the wreckage reveals that the airline or its employees were liable. One of the strongest theories about MH370’s disappearance is that the pilot purposely crashed the plane in an act of murder-suicide. If this is proved, the resulting lawsuits from families of survivors would be significant and would cost the Malaysian government dearly.
In November 2023, a liability lawsuit was filed by relatives of passengers in a Chinese court. The Malaysian flag carrier has been named a defendant along with aircraft manufacturer Boeing, its engine provider Rolls-Royce and German insurer Allianz Insurance. The case was filed by multiple families at Beijing’s Chaoyang District People’s Court.
“Denial of salvage of evidence will not look good in front of a judge in a court of law,” explains Godfrey.
A successful search operation would also be a huge PR coup for an underwater search operator, providing commercial kudos in a competitive industry where increasingly energy and mining companies are looking to identify and exploit resources from under the seabed.
Adventurer and MH370 debris hunter Blaine Gibson is also confident there will be a new search this year, but warns that nothing is definite.
Gibson has been on a multi-year mission to find and recover debris from Flight MH370 after consulting with oceanographers at the University of Western Australia. To date he has recovered 22 pieces of debris, 18 of which are recorded in the official accident investigation as being “likely or almost certainly” from the airplane.
Gibson reveals that the latest pieces to be found have not been claimed by the Malaysian authorities and are “gathering dust” in a storage room at the Madagascar Civil Aviation Authority. One piece has damage on it that could have been caused by blades from a jet turbine, and so could provide vital clues as to how the aircraft broke up when it hit the water.
“There are about 10 pieces from six different countries that have never been delivered and investigated,” says Gibson. “The last three pieces delivered to Malaysia and identified from photos as being from the plane by experts have never been officially analyzed or studied. No reports have been made, so it seems Malaysia has stopped investigating the debris. The real answers lie underwater in the debris field however.”
One of the unforeseen challenges the group and search experts now face is disinformation and conspiracy, fueled in part by a three-part Netflix documentary series released in 2023 called MH370: The Plane That Disappeared.
The consensus view among many experts is that pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah was clinically depressed and crashed on purpose. Some of his friends say in the months before the flight he was isolated and lonely. It was also discovered that he had plotted a similar flight path into the middle of the southern Indian Ocean on his home PC flight simulator.
Other scenarios include some kind of malfunction which incapacitated the crew and passengers, a hijack, or an explosion, although available data tends to negate these.
The Netflix show included the murder-suicide theory, but also gave airtime to two of the more outlandish theories that have surfaced over the years. In one, the plane was hijacked by Russian terrorists who commandeered it remotely from an electronics compartment under the floor of the first-class cabin and flew it to Kazakhstan. Satellite data was then doctored, and fake debris was planted.
In the other theory, U.S. military planes jammed MH370’s communication systems then shot it down to prevent sensitive electronics equipment onboard reaching China. Both scenarios are sketchy and supported by flimsy supposition.
Blaine Gibson contributed to the docuseries but says he was not told it would be concentrating on the conspiracy theories.
“People who watched Netflix came away with the impression that there isn’t any evidence at all as to where the aircraft is, not even which ocean it is in or if it’s in an ocean at all,” he says. “They were presented with three explanations, one was theory, two were fantasy. The problem is, How much influence does that have on the public, and does the public then influence the politicians who decide whether to agree a contract with a new search operator? It’s really sad because Netflix did a tremendous disservice to the efforts of the families and the scientists who have worked on this.”
Gibson, who has faced threats and personal attack because of his work, says finding the plane will be vindication.
Richard Godfrey, who has been working on the project for a decade, modestly says that it will be satisfying if his analysis locates the crash site. And then he’ll move on to his next project.
“My next plan is to try and find Amelia Earhart,” he reveals.
Aviator Earhart disappeared in 1937 during an attempt at becoming the first woman to complete a circumnavigational flight of the globe. Her plane disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island during one of the final legs of the flight.
Richard Godfrey concludes: “It is much more difficult because it is a long time ago and the records are hazy. It was another world back then, but there is still quite a lot of data to be analyzed. But let’s find MH370 first.”
Click here for more ongoing coverage of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
Prosecutors are gearing up for a retrial in the Ghislaine Maxwell sex-trafficking case. In a sign the Department of Justice expects it will be forced to go head-to-head with Maxwell in a courtroom for a second time, they have asked a New York judge ...
Prosecutors are gearing up for a retrial in the Ghislaine Maxwell sex-trafficking case.
In a sign the Department of Justice expects it will be forced to go head-to-head with Maxwell in a courtroom for a second time, they have asked a New York judge to agree to the “categorical withholding” of the FBI’s top-secret files on her sex predator pal, Jeffrey Epstein, Knewz.com has exclusively learned.
The website RadarOnline.com sued the FBI in 2017 and demanded they reveal their entire case against Epstein, the former friend of Presidents Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and other famous identities, who died in his Manhattan jail cell on Aug. 10 that year.
Ever since, the FBI and the Department of Justice have been relentlessly fighting to keep the majority of the documents from RadarOnline.com and out of the public.
In their latest filing in the near six-year lawsuit, Maurene Comey, the lead prosecutor against Maxwell, admitted the FBI is sitting on unreleased information that could impact a jury appeal in any appeal from Maxwell.
Comey — the daughter of former FBI director James Comey — admitted the Epstein files include exhibits that were not publicly filed at the first trial, specific information about witnesses who may testify at a new trial, as well as “information and documents” authored by potential trial witnesses.
The files include topics and witness statements that “go far beyond the issues covered during the first trial,” Comey said in a July 11 declaration to the United States District Court Southern District of New York.
“The first trial focused primarily on the abuse of six victims, and many exhibits were received under seal to protect the privacy of those victims and other third parties,” she added.
“The withheld records include statements from and evidence regarding many more victims of Epstein and numerous witnesses who were not called or referenced during the first trial, including some who the Government may elect to call and/or reference if this case were to be retried.”
“Accordingly, premature release of the records would risk unduly influencing potential jurors for a retrial.”
Maxwell, 61, appealed her conviction after a jury found she joined and enabled the sexual abuse that Epstein committed on scores of teenagers and young women for more than a decade.
She has claimed she was prosecuted as a “proxy” for Epstein to “satisfy public outrage” over the case in the aftermath of his death in a Manhattan jail.
The former British socialite is serving a 20-year jail term at a federal facility in Tallahassee.
RadarOnline.com, represented by noted first amendment lawyer Dan Novack, filed suit in 2017 and alleged the FBI stonewalled its Freedom of Information Act request.
The website demanded the production of the bureau’s records concerning “the agency’s investigation and prosecution of Jeffrey Edward Epstein for sexually trafficking underage women. Defendant FBI has withheld these records despite a properly filed FOIA request.”
“Jeffrey Epstein is a billionaire financier, philanthropist, and sex offender. In 2005, Epstein became the subject of an undercover sex trafficking investigation by Palm Beach, Florida police and the FBI. Dozens of underage women were trafficked by Epstein to perform sexual acts on him as well as his friends,” the website said in its initial filing.
Despite that, the suit said, Epstein was allowed to plead guilty to a single count of soliciting prostitution from a minor under Florida state law and serve only 13 months in prison.
He would later die in the midst of the RadarOnline-FBI battle while in his Manhattan holding cell in 2019, where he was awaiting trial for several sex-trafficking charges.
RadarOnline.com has been attempting to get its hands on the contents of the FBI files ever since.
In a 2019 search of Epstein’s Manhattan mansion, FBI agents seized a shelf full of black binders which included CDs filled with photos, a passport from a foreign country with a picture of Epstein under another name, and other documents. They also sawed open a safe and found diamonds, jewelry, CDs, and hard drives inside.
In a similar raid, FBI and NYPD officers ransacked the Caribbean home of Epstein in the U.S. Virgin Island and were seen on video carting away evidence including a number of computers.
Much of that evidence has never been released nor has details about Epstein’s role as an FBI informant, as was first detailed in this exclusive Knewz.com report.
But in her declaration, Comey, who also helped lead the case against Epstein, argued “premature public disclosure could reasonably be expected to influence potential jurors’ perceptions of the witnesses and the evidence to be presented at trial.”
Previously, Comey told the judge the “release of the FBI’s records relating to the investigation and prosecution of Epstein would provide Maxwell with greater access to the agency’s investigatory files than she would otherwise have through the criminal discovery process; contravene the Protective Order entered by Judge Nathan in the criminal case against Maxwell; risk influence by the media upon witnesses and the jury; potentially influence witnesses’ trial testimony by providing the opportunity for them to shape their testimony by conforming it with other evidence gathered during the investigation; and be reasonably expected to impair the ability to seat a fair and impartial jury.”
While the trial of Maxwell has since concluded and sunk into a life behind bars, the FBI, via the Justice Department, said the release of its Epstein case file could “likely interfere with the prosecution of Maxwell.”
“Regarding the remaining records, releasing the entirety of the FBI’s records relating to its investigation of Epstein in this FOIA litigation would interfere with any new trial of Maxwell in several ways,” Comey said.
“First, it would allow Maxwell to have earlier and greater access to the investigatory files than she would otherwise have through the criminal discovery process… She did not have access to all of the FBI’s files relating to the investigation and prosecution of Epstein. If there were a new trial, the Court would presumably set a deadline for release of any additional records relating to the new trial. Release of all FBI records pertaining to the FBI’s investigation and prosecution of Epstein therefore would provide Maxwell with earlier and greater access to records than she would otherwise have at any new trial.”
Comey also claimed if there were a new trial, there would likely be significant coverage by the media which would adversely impact a jury.
“Media coverage of a new trial may impact potential witnesses and jurors,” she said.
“As such, the parties in the Maxwell matter remain subject to a protective order prohibiting the defense from disseminating Government productions to the public or the press.”
Comey added, “Premature release of the withheld records, particularly if the records are released in part or without full context, may influence the perception of jurors who have been exposed to media coverage containing speculation and theories relating to Maxwell.”
On July 7, 2022, Maxwell appealed the criminal judgment to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Maxwell’s appeal is said to focus on five points raising issues pertaining to statute of limitations; a non-prosecutions agreement; juror misconduct and a post-verdict hearing; and sentence.
“The Government breached a non-prosecution agreement that immunized Ms. Maxwell for these offenses,” said Arthur Aidala, Maxwell’s latest attorney.”
“That agreement was entered into by the Government and Epstein in 2007, and, by its terms, unambiguously barred this prosecution, in the first instance.”
For more on Epstein, Maxwell and their connections to British royal Prince Andrew, read the Knewz.com investigative special report Lust, Lies, & Spies: How The Enormous Power of the British Police Force Provided a ‘Protection Racket’ for Prince Andrew and Covered-Up Epstein & Maxwell’s Criminal Enterprise in Britain
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential ambitions received a major cash injection when the Democratic presidential candidate testified before Congress on July 20, Knewz.com has exclusively learned. The political action committee, American Values 2024, pocketed a staggering $5 million as a result of the divisive ...
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential ambitions received a major cash injection when the Democratic presidential candidate testified before Congress on July 20, Knewz.com has exclusively learned.
The political action committee, American Values 2024, pocketed a staggering $5 million as a result of the divisive hearing on federal government “censorship” of Americans’ free speech on social media, the organization said.
“American Values 2024 raised over $16,250,000 since it was founded in late 2022,” Tony Lyons, Kennedy’s book publisher and the super PAC’s co-chair told Knewz.com.
“The key point is that $5,000,000 of that came in during Robert F Kennedy Jr’s congressional testimony.”
He added: “The censorship, vilification, and targeted propaganda playbook that the DNC used so effectively against Bernie Sanders won’t work against Robert F Kennedy Jr.”
The New York Times previously reported American Values 2024 had raised $10.25 million, including two “very large” donations that each exceed $1 million.
The contributions were said to have come from a “right down the middle” mix of Republicans and Democrats.
The successful fundraising also came after Kennedy controversially suggested Covid-19 was engineered to “ethnically” target certain ethnic groups while sparing Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people — a claim he has since tried to distance himself from.
The former attorney and nephew of John F Kennedy were caught on tape suggesting the virus was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people”.
“Covid-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said at a dinner in New York City. The remarks were videotaped and first published by the New York Post.
“Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” he continued, adding, “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.”
Kennedy, a former environmental attorney, continues to surprise in his presidential campaign as a long-shot challenger to President Joe Biden.
According to a Quinnipiac University poll conducted in June, Kennedy was said to be viewed favorably by 40% of Republicans, compared to only 25% of Democrats.
At the July 20 hearing investigating the politicization of the federal government, Republicans largely defend Kennedy and decried Democrats’ protests over his presence before the committee as “censorship,” reported Politico.
The political site reported:
Democrats, in turn, argued that Republicans were “co-signing” Kennedy’s views on vaccines and medical science by providing Kennedy with a “megaphone.”
Democrats largely did not engage with Kennedy and used their time to protest Kennedy’s invitation or ask questions of their witness, civil rights lawyer Maya Wiley, about the impact of Kennedy’s statements on race and ethnicity, and the broader problem of disinformation on social media platforms.
American Values 2024 comments linking Kennedy to Sanders suggest the Kennedy campaign is gearing up for a repeat of what happened in 2016 when the Vermont Senator was effectively muzzled as delegates voted 54% to 46% in support of former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the party’s nominee.