... Bongino ran for a U.S. Senate seat in Maryland in 2012 and for congressional seats in 2014 and 2016 in Maryland and Florida, after moving in 2015. He lost the three races. ...
The new Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Kash Patel has reportedly told the agency's staff to ignore Elon Musk's request to justify their work or lose their jobs.
"For now, please pause any responses," reads a message sent by Patel on Saturday to all FBI personnel, calling for employees to wait for a coordinated response from the bureau. ...
Kennedy’s credit card balances range between $610,000 to $1.2 million in accounts that carry interest rates of 23.24% to 23.49%, the filing shows.
Financial experts interviewed by CNBC said balances that high are unusual.
“That’s a truly massive amount of credit card debt,” said Ted Rossman, senior industry analyst at Bankrate.
Maybe he can borrow some fashion money at lower rates from Kash Ap Patel at the FBI, if they ever confirm him.
Trump Media gifts DJT shares to FBI pick Kash Patel, Linda McMahon and president’s son
Trump Media this week gifted thousands of shares of company stock to President Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, to Trump’s eldest son and to four other board members, new regulatory filings show.
The company awarded 25,946 stock shares each to Patel, Donald Trump Jr., and the president’s pick for Education secretary, Linda McMahon, who all serve as Trump Media directors, the filings Thursday reveal.
Three other directors — former U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer, Eric Swider and Kyle Green — received the same number of DJT shares at no cost, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
The filings said the awards were granted Tuesday. Trump Media that day closed trading at $30.04 per share.
At
that price, the shares have a paper value of more than $779,400. But
most of the stock awarded has restrictions on when it can be sold. ...
A gross dereliction of duty on the part of the Republican-controlled Senate and the Trump-directed FBI. That is a harsh but unavoidable assessment of the confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth to serve as Donald Trump’s defense secretary. ...
Only [Senators] Wicker and Reed were permitted to review an FBI report that Reed described as “insufficient.” The FBI failed to question Hegseth’s second wife, despite her expressed interest in being interviewed. It didn’t speak to the woman who accused Hegseth of sexually assaulting her — and was paid by him in exchange for executing a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t obtain the forensic audit of a veteran’s organization Hegseth ran that found “evidence of gross financial mismanagement.”
Mayer reported that “the F.B.I.’s background investigation also failed to interview Fox News personnel who had described Hegseth to NBC News as smelling of alcohol on the job as recently as last fall. Instead, sources say that the Bureau settled for an interview with a public-relations official at Fox.”
The FBI’s role here is troubling, because the bureau is supposed to serve as the Senate’s chief source of reported and reliable information about the individuals whose nominations it is considering. ...
The bureau has argued that the scope of its inquiries is limited by the directions it is given, in this case by the Trump transition team. But the Trump team’s goal is to win confirmation, not to get to the truth of the matter — which makes a Trump-directed FBI investigation worse than meaningless; it makes it effectively a coverup.
More.
Thank you, Chuck.
Kash Patel incoming?
Before you get your hopes up about Kash Patel's capacity to do a good job, remember Wray was also a Trump appointee to replace the fired James Comey, and he turned out arguably worse than Comey.
Robert Mueller III was appointed by George W. Bush and assumed office exactly one week before 9/11/01. Neither of them kept us safe. And then they pursued the wrong guy in the anthrax attacks.
We have more than two decades of ugly feeling about the FBI to overcome.
FBI Director Christopher Wray to resign before Trump takes office
CNN data guru reports that Americans' trust in the FBI is at its lowest point 'this century'
The rats prepare to jump ship.
According to most of the sources, no one in the FBI at a GS-14 level or higher is safe from losing their job after Mr. Trump is sworn in, and they fully expect the president-elect to “smash the place to pieces when he gets in,” and that it will be a “bloodbath.”
Former FBI whistleblower George Hill told The Washington Times that people in the agency say the current state of the FBI is “frazzled.”
“I have friends still at the Bureau telling me that no less than 50 Senior Executives (SES) are scrambling to retire ASAP,” he said.
More.
As many police departments are still in the process of complying with the FBI’s new reporting requirements, experts predict that the national crime data is likely to be incomplete for years to come, and will leave more room to politicize crime statistics without concrete evidence. These issues are likely to become more urgent as the country moves closer to another election cycle where crime is certain to be a potent issue: In 2024, the FBI is likely to release its national crime data just before the election.
More.
And . . . right on cue:
Like who believes the FBI anymore?
How do we know it wasn't the FBI hacking the info and sending it to Dems?
While the number of reported crypto-related crimes accounts for around 10% of financial fraud complaints received by the FBI last year, the losses from those crimes accounts for nearly 50% of the total amount Americans lost to financial schemes.
More.
See also the Internet Crime Complaint Center report here.
My organization has been highlighting this dangerous double-standard, warning Americans that the Justice Department and FBI are exploiting the FACE Act to target and harass individuals like Eva who stand in the way of their extremist agendas.
Just this month, a man named Elliot Bennet set fire to a Catholic Church in New Jersey. This was the third time Bennet had committed acts of violence or vandalism against the church since 2018, the 21st attack on a Catholic Church in 2024, the 274th attack since May 2022 and the 412th attack since May 2020.
Yet the same Justice Department that is fighting to throw Eva in jail failed to prosecute Bennet for these multiple and obvious FACE Act violations. It has also failed to federally prosecute a single one of the more than 400 egregious FACE Act violations against Catholic Churches since May 2020, or to meaningfully address the 90 attacks on pregnancy resource centers across the nation since May 2022.
These attacks don’t involve prayer and hymns. They’ve involved fire-bombings and arson, vandalism of pregnancy clinics and churches, spray painted threats on clinic and church walls, decapitated statues, smashed glass, disrupted masses, blocking of church entrances and even physical attacks on priests and parishioners. They have cost at least $25 million in damages to Catholic Churches, while intimidating hundreds of peaceful Catholic and pro-life communities.
More.
Arkansas airport executive shot during attempted search warrant, police say
Totally normal.
DailyMail.com has discovered that then-private-citizen Biden, who had spent virtually all his adult life in public service, bought the home for slightly under $2.75million – in cash. And making the transaction even stranger it was within weeks of a highly questionable text that Hunter had sent to Runlong 'Raymond' Zhao, an associate at Chinese oil giant CEFC asking to seal a deal worth $10 million a year. ...
Property records show Joe's six-bedroom second property was purchased on June 8, 2017 for $2,744,001 – just seven weeks before his son's shakedown messages. ...
An analysis published last year by DailyMail.com shows a $5.2 million discrepancy between his IRS filings and his Office of Government Ethics disclosures for the same period. ...
The figure is surprisingly similar to the $5 million Joe was allegedly bribed by Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner Ukrainian gas firm Burisma, according to information received by a trusted FBI informant.
The whole thing is here.
The story, here, never mentions Rogers' strong opposition to what Edward Snowden did to reveal illegal US government surveillance of US citizens.
Fourth Amendment libertarians are certain at least to take note.
Rogers is ex-FBI.
