Former ICE chief: Biden-Harris created greatest national security threat since 9/11

Former Border Patrol agent asks 23 years after 9/11: What does ‘safe’ mean?

Twenty-three years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Americans are not any safer than they were before because of a border crisis facilitated by the Biden-Harris administration, national security experts argue.

One U.S. Army veteran who later served as a Border Patrol agent for 10 years but left citing Biden-Harris policies told The Center Square that Americans’ safety and security means something different depending on the administration in charge.

Since fiscal 2021, more than 12.5 million foreign nationals have illegally entered the country under Vice President Kamala Harris, designated the “border czar” by President Joe Biden. That’s by far the greatest number of any administration in U.S. history.

The illegal entries include two million who evaded capture, known as gotaways, alarming those in law enforcement because they say they don’t know who or where they are or how many are connected to countries of foreign concern or state sponsors of terrorism. Several hundred with connections to the Islamic terrorist organization, ISIS, have illegally entered the country, authorities confirmed this year.

Those who’ve been apprehended by U.S. authorities attempting to enter the U.S. include a record number of known or suspected terrorists – more than 1,700 since fiscal 2021. This is the greatest number in U.S. history, and equivalent to nearly two U.S. Army battalions.

The majority of those on the terrorist watch list apprehended by Americans came from Canada, nearly 1,100. They total the equivalent of one U.S. Army battalion.

The administration has “unsecured the border on purpose” and “created the greatest national security threat since 9/11,” Tom Homan, former director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told The Center Square.

The total number of illegal border crossers under Biden-Harris total more than the individual populations of 45 U.S. states, The Center Square reported.

The record number parallels Biden’s stated goal at a North American Summit in Washington, D.C., in 2021 to facilitate more foreign nationals coming to the U.S., The Center Square reported. He also formalized a Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection in 2022 with roughly two dozen countries to facilitate the “safe, orderly migration” of foreign nationals into the U.S. and in other countries.

The terminology has been repeatedly used by Harris and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. It’s also been embraced by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, whose agents have been ordered to release illegal foreign nationals into the country through new parole programs and a CBP One app. The programs and app are illegal, multiple states who sued to stop them, argue. Mayorkas was also impeached over them.

Despite Biden, Harris and Mayorkas claims that the border is secure and those being released into the country are being vetted, DHS Office of Inspector General audits prove otherwise. Federal agents can’t find foreign nationals released into U.S. as terrorism threats are heightened, The Center Square reported.

Despite this, Canadian officials have told The Center Square, “The Canada-U.S. border is the best-managed and most secure border in the world.” Mexico’s outgoing president said Mexico doesn’t have a cartel problem, the U.S. “drug problem” isn’t Mexico’s problem and “we are not going to act as any policemen for any foreign government.”

“The record number of people on the terrorist watchlist coming across the northern border” disproves the “most secure border in the world” claim, Homan said. “What they won’t tell you are the unknown gotaways coming through the northern border.”

Former Border Patrol chief Mark Morgan agrees, adding, “To say that our borders are secure is simply not a factual statement,” he said. “It’s just not. What level of threat is coming across is unknown.”

Morgan, also a retired FBI chief, was among several officials who warned Congress that the volume of single military age men illegally entering the U.S. equates to a “soft invasion” and a terrorist attack is likely imminent but preventable if security measures were put in place.

Ammon Blair, former Border Patrol agent and U.S. Army officer and senior fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said if the border were secure, the number of illegal border crossers would be zero.

He also pushed back on Biden-Harris administration claims about “safe, orderly migration,” saying, “Who would it be safe for? According to Mayorkas, safety means the safe, orderly, humane migration for illegal aliens into the country.”

“What does safe mean, and who are safe?” he asks. “Where are the protection protocols to protect Americans? There aren’t any. The only agency that has a protective order to secure a border is the U.S. military.”

Multiple officials have said there aren’t enough agents to patrol the northern or southwest borders, not to mention other ports of entry along the U.S. coast.

“We don’t have the resources to patrol the border, the technology or manpower,” Blair said. “The capacity to have 100% awareness of the border is astronomical and doesn’t happen with the current system under Department of Homeland Security.”

During Tuesday’s presidential debate, Harris deflected from answering questions about her role as border czar and didn’t say how she’d protect Americans from terrorist threats.

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How the federal government weaponized the bank secrecy act to spy on Americans

Published on December 13, 2024

Todayville

By Martin Armstrong

A Congressional investigation committee released an extremely concerning report this week entitled: “FINANCIAL SURVEILLANCE IN THE UNITED STATES: HOW THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WEAPONIZED THE BANK SECRECY ACT TO SPY ON AMERICANS” that details how the US government has been monitoring American citizens through bank transactions, with an emphasis on citizens who have expressed conservative viewpoints.

“Financial data can tell a person’s story, including one’s “religion, ideology, opinions, and interests” as well as one’s “political leanings, locations, and more,”’ the report begins. This investigation began after a whistleblower who happens to be a retired FBI agent alerted Congress that the Bank of America (BoA) voluntarily provided the Biden Administration information on customers who used a credit or debit card in Washington, D.C., around the January 6 protests. The new report has revealed that federal agencies have been working “hand-in-glove with financial institutions, obtaining virtually unchecked access to private financial data and testing out new methods and new technology to continue the financial surveillance of American citizens.”

As I’ve said countless times, “money laundering” is ALWAYS the excuse for why the government must track and monitor our financial transactions. The Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) E-Filing System is a system for financial institutions to file reports required by the BSA electronically. By law, the BSA requires businesses to keep records and file reports to help prevent and detect money laundering. This is how the Biden Administration is attempting to disregard privacy and weaponize financial institutions.

US intelligence agencies searched through records for terms like “Trump” and “MAGA” to target Americans who they believed may hold “extremist” views. The agencies searched for Americans who purchased religious texts, such as the Bible, and also labeled them extremists. Anyone expressing disdain for the COVID lockdowns, vaccines, open borders, or the deep state were placed on a watchlist. Again, the BSA was used as a premise to pull transactions placed by the individuals on this list.

As explained by the investigative committee:

“With narrow exception, federal law does not permit law enforcement to inquire into financial institutions’ customer information without some form of legal process.9  The FBI circumvents this process by tipping off financial institutions to “suspicious” individuals and encouraging these institutions to file a SAR—which does not require any legal process—and thereby provide federal law enforcement with access to confidential and highly sensitive information.10 In doing so, the FBI gets around the requirements of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), which, per the Treasury Department, specifies that “it is . . . a bank’s responsibility” to “file a SAR whenever it identifies ‘a suspicious transaction relevant to a possible violation of law or regulation’”11 While at least one financial institution requested legal process from the FBI for information it was seeking,12 all too often the FBI appeared to receive no pushback. In sum, by providing financial institutions with lists of people that it views as generally “suspicious” on the front end, the FBI has turned this framework on its head and contravened the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of particularity and probable cause.”

Under this premise, anyone who held a viewpoint that opposed the Biden Administration was considered a “suspicious” individual who required monitoring. The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network created a database to carefully watch potential dissenters. Over 14,000 government employees accessed the FinCEN database last year and conducted over 3 million searches without a warrant. In fact, over 15% of FBI investigations during 2023 has some link to this database. It is estimated that 4.6 million SARs and 20.8 million Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs) were filed in the last year.

The committee noted that the government is incorporating AI to quickly search the web for “suspicious” Americans:

“As the Committee and Select Subcommittee have discussed in other reports, the growth and expansion of AI present major risks to Americans’ civil liberties.211 For example, the Committee and Select Subcommittee uncovered AI being used to censor “alleged misinformation regarding COVID-19 and the 2020 election . . . .”212 Those concerns are not hypothetical. Some AI systems developed by Big Tech companies have been programmed with biases; for example, Google’s Gemini AI program praised liberal views while refusing to do the same for conservative views, despite claiming to be “objective” and “neutral.” With financial institutions seemingly adopting AI solutions to monitor Americans’ transactions, a similarly biased AI program could result in the systematic flagging or censoring of transactions that the AI is trained to view as “suspicious.”

This is extremely troubling and goes beyond government overreach and violated numerous Constitutional protections. The government effectively transformed banking institutions into spy agencies, and anyone who could potentially hold a view that did not fit the Biden-Harris agenda has been treated as potential terrorist. It is completely insane that someone could be seen as an extremist for purchasing a religious text or purchasing a firearm. This is discriminatory, predatory behavior that puts millions of lives at risk. Think of governments in the past who have rounded up names of dissenters based on religion or ideology. They claim they are merely observing us, but the goal is to silence us.

The committee said their investigation has just begun as they will not allow the government’s abuse of financial data to go unchecked. Furthermore, they are concerned that these warrantless searches can lead to widespread debanking practices where the government can easily block any dissenter from participating in society by crippling them financially. This is yet another reason why governments want to push banks to create CBDC so that they can punish citizens with a simple click of a button.

espionage

Three Steps to Fixing the FBI: Interview with Whistleblower Colleen Rowley

Published on December 5, 2024

Todayville

From Matt Taibbi of Racket News

Depoliticization, decentralization, and transparency are all achievable goals

On August 13, 2001, 33-year-old French citizen Zacarias Moussaoui paid $6,800 in $100 bills to train on a 747 simulator at the Pan-Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, Minnesota. A retired Northwest Airlines pilot named Clarence “Clancy” Prevost thought Moussaoui’s behavior was odd for someone with no pilot’s license and told his bosses as much. When they said Moussaoui had paid and they didn’t care, Prevost said, “We’ll care when there’s a hijacking and the lawsuits come in.”

The company went to the FBI and on August 16, in what should have been one of the biggest arrests in the history of federal law enforcement, Moussaoui was picked up on an immigration violation. Agents on the case wanted permission to search Moussaoui’s belongings, with one asking superiors as many as 70 times for help in obtaining a warrant. The situation grew more urgent when the French Intelligence Service sent information that Moussaoui was connected to Islamic radicals with ties both to Osama bin Laden and the Chechen warlord Khattab, and that even within this crowd, Moussaoui was nicknamed “the dangerous one.”

Coleen Rowley, the Chief Division Counsel for the Minneapolis Field Office, absorbed agents’ concerns quickly and was aggressive in asking superiors to seek a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to investigate further. One of the goals was a look at Moussaoui’s computer, as agents believed he’d signaled he had “something to hide” in there. But unlike the former Northwest pilot Prevost, whose superiors trusted his judgment and escalated his concerns, Rowley and the Minneapolis field office were denied by senior lawyers at FBI Headquarters. The Bureau was sitting on the means to stop 9/11 when the planes hit the towers.

This story is actually worse than described, as Rowley made clear in what became a famous letter she wrote to then-Director Robert Mueller the following May. “Even after the attacks had begun,” she wrote, “the [Supervisory Special Agent] in question was still attempting to block the search of Moussaoui’s computer, characterizing the World Trade Center attacks as a mere coincidence with Misseapolis’ prior suspicions about Moussaoui.”

While the Bureau blamed 9/11 on a lack of investigatory authority, the actions of the Minnesota office showed otherwise. Rowley’s decision to confront Mueller with a laundry list of unnecessary bureaucratic failures made her perhaps the FBI’s most famous whistleblower. Her letter excoriated the Bureau’s Washington officeholders for failing to appreciate agents in the field, and for implicitly immunizing themselves against culpability.

“It’s true we all make mistakes and I’m not suggesting that HQ personnel in question ought to be burned at the stake, but, we all need to be held accountable for serious mistakes,” she wrote, adding: “I’m relatively certain that if it appeared that a lowly field office agent had committed such errors of judgment, the FBI’s [Office of Professional Responsibility] would have been notified to investigate and the agent would have, at the least, been quickly reassigned.”

The relentless and uncompromising style of Rowley’s letter made it a model for whistleblower complaints. As the administration of George W. Bush hurtled toward war in Iraq, Rowley was made a cultural and media icon, occupying the center spot on Time magazine’s “Persons of the Year” cover in January, 2003.

For these reasons and more I was pleased to see after running articles earlier this week about the FBI and the reported choice of Kash Patel as Director that Coleen commented under the second one. I’d reached out to her previously after four whistleblowers came forward about questionable post-J6 investigations, and with the choice of Patel and rumors of a major housecleaning of the Bureau’s Washington office, similar issues seemed in play.

“A large majority of FBI agents always held Headquarters in contempt, knowing that it only attracted the losers, brown-nosing careerist political hacks who wanted to climb the ladder to go thru the ‘revolving door’ at age 50 to make their corporate millions,” she wrote. “The best, most competent agents typically refused to sacrifice their integrity and their families to climb the ladder in that Washington, DC cesspool.”

Part of my personal frustration with the FBI story is that the audiences that cared about its Bush-era offenses have largely turned a blind eye to its issues since Donald Trump’s rise to power, even though many problems are similar. Coleen, who manages the tough trick of maintaining the respect of both liberal and conservative audiences, is the perfect person to help bridge that gap. I reached out to her earlier this week and we talked about Patel, the long-term challenges facing the Bureau, and possible fixes.

MT: Kash Patel made public comments about closing the Washington headquarters and turning it into a “museum of the deep state.” He added he’d then “take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals.” Does that make any sense?

Coleen Rowley: I hate to go to bat for Kash Patel because I’ve been disappointed by all of these people in Washington. It’s such a cesspool. I really don’t think anybody can keep their head above it. So I hate to really laud him, but I do think he is completely correct on three or four things, and they’re major things. And he’s getting smeared for the thing that he’s most correct about. FBI headquarters: the FBI itself wants to take that down.

MT: How?

Coleen Rowley: Agents hate the J. Edgar Hoover building on Philadelphia Avenue. They’ve been talking about moving forever, all the agents. It was considered a matter of pride to not stoop to go to headquarters. This goes way back. Everyone knew that the ones who were going to headquarters were the ones trying to climb the ladder. They didn’t care about cases. They would always do what’s politically correct. And so they were all made fun of. In fact, Jules Bonavolonta wrote a book about how bad headquarters was.

MT: Is it The Good Guys?

Coleen Rowley: That sounds right. Everyone in the FBI knew that the people in that building were corrupted, because they’d decided to sacrifice themselves to go to headquarters in order to become somebody, by managing. And then especially in later years, the real incentive was to go through that revolving door to make a lot of money. And that’s the Strzoks and McCabes, and all those people.

MT: You’ve talked in the past about a dichotomy between agents in the field and the politically-minded managers at headquarters. Why is that divide harmful?

Coleen Rowley: Because the real work is done in the field. Headquarters was just there to help you do your work. Well, the 9/11 story is a perfect example. I wrote another op-ed in the Los Angeles Times called WikiLeaks and 9/11: What If? It was about this whole idea that’s very counterintuitive to what people are brainwashed to think, but sharing information is the key. The 9/11 Commission even said that if they had just shared information between agencies and then with the public, 9/11 would not have happened.

MT: They said there was a “failure to connect the dots,” I think.

Coleen Rowley: I was asked this when I testified to the Senate Judiciary about siloing and how the information, when it goes up the pipeline, gets convoluted and bottlenecked at headquarters because they want to keep power for themselves there. They really don’t want to let the field and the agents do the job. They want to have so-called oversight. I mean, that’s the good term for it, oversight, but it’s worse than that. They just want to keep the power there.

MT: You wrote that one of the things you liked was the possibility that Patel might decentralize the Bureau. What might that entail?

Coleen Rowley: They could delegate down FISA, and I’m not the first person to have this idea. Legal scholars say one of the best ideas to avoid this bottlenecking of information that occurs at headquarters is for the FISA judges not to have to travel to one particular SCIF [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility] in Washington. Keep the judges actually out in the field.

MT: I didn’t realize that.

Coleen Rowley: Yeah. They have SCIFs all over the country. So it’s not a problem. And it could be easily delegated down. Why does every request have to go through headquarters and the DOJ, except for control reasons? In all other matters, like criminal Title IIIs, you go straight to a judge. Some judges, they’re going to have differing opinions on things. And maybe a judge, every once in a while, would say no to a Title III.

MT: But that happens anyway, doesn’t it?

Coleen Rowley: Yeah. Very seldom with FISA, but yes. With a FISA application, they’re usually a hundred pages long and there’s tons of probable cause, and every Title III I ever read was beyond reasonable doubt by the time a judge saw it, to be honest. But this travesty that occurred with FISA is because it’s all bottlenecked up there for control in Washington DC, and with a handful of people who don’t want to share this information. I mean, I’ve got so many stories. They won’t even share the Moussaoui story with other offices even after 9/11.

MT: What?

Coleen Rowley: Yeah, because they’re trying to cover it up… It’s a long story but the desire for control at headquarters is a huge thing.

MT: The last time we talked, you might’ve mentioned the suggestion of having more of the Bureau’s top officials gain experience in the field. Wouldn’t that give them more grounding in what’s actually going on in the world? It seems like that’s a problem.

Coleen Rowley: These supervisors at headquarters learn bad habits. You try to “punch your ticket.” That’s the terminology. You try to go there for your year and a half. You hate it, but you do it. You have to bend over and please the bosses to get through that year and a half in order to “punch your ticket” and climb the ladder. The risk aversion is incredible. As a whole, the most competent and best investigators, and this goes to Kash Patel, he gets kudos for actually having investigated something. He was a public defender for seven years, so he has seen things from the other side of an investigation. Meanwhile, by contrast, Comey came out of Lockheed, and I forget where Wray came from [eds. note: Wray worked at King and Spaulding, earning $14 million advising clients like Chevron, Wells Fargo, and Johnson & Johnson], but they came out with millions in their pockets. What is their background? Did they ever actually investigate? Did they ever actually even work in criminal justice? No. So they are political creatures. Not case-makers. Kash at least has some experience.

MT: Seemed like he did a good job with the Nunes memo…

Coleen Rowley: Yes. Whoever did the investigation – I doubt it was solely him – but yeah, they did a great job on that because controlling the press and everything. It’s sad though that it hasn’t reached a lot of the public after all this time. I think it’s important because between the call for transparency… The funny thing is Patel will be all for the whistleblowers of the FBI that you called me about before, the ones that were chagrined about all the stuff they had to do after January 6th. But now he’s going to be against anybody being a whistleblower if he abuses power? It’s always that way. But that call for transparency is key. That’s a test. Then the debunking of Russiagate, and how the FBI got so politicized. And then thirdly, the decentralization of the FBI, so that you take that power out of Washington, DC, where it’s so close to corruption and revolving doors.

MT: There’s one more thing that I wanted to ask about, because you mentioned it in a piece you sent to the New York Times about Comey before he was named Director. You talked about the tactic of trying to “incapacitate” suspects who can’t be prosecuted. This goes along with that issue of “disruption” or “discrediting.” Does the Bureau need to get back to making cases as opposed to these extrajudicial techniques? Can Patel do that?

Coleen Rowley: All that goes back to COINTELPRO.

MT: Right.

Coleen Rowley: One of the things I would hope for, which I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere, is that he could do something to reduce the entrapment-type cases that just burgeoned with Mueller. Talk about hypocrisy. He went to the ACLU and gave a speech about civil liberties. The whole ACLU stands up and applauds him, all while he is starting those entrapment cases. I was still in the FBI. I retired a year later, took my pension and left. I was like, oh, this is so wrong. They hired these con artist informants to infiltrate Muslim groups. There are books written about this now. [On a recent radio show] I said it’s possible that yes, maybe some of these tactics actually did prevent some nut from going further. You can’t say that isn’t true. On the other hand, the numbers here of cases that were based on the FBI telling vulnerable people, “Look, we can get you a bomb. We can get you this.” And then all of a sudden, when the guy looks like he’s going to press the button on it, that’s when they have the take-down.

It’s such a formula and you’re not accomplishing anything if you’re creating crime. We have so much crime in this country now. If I was Kash Patel, that’s what I would be saying. When they asked me those questions, I’d say, “We’ve got so much crime. It’s all over the country. Why can’t we have more agents out in the field working cases and trying to reduce the violence and the crime and the drug dealing, et cetera?” I think that would be a real winner politically for him to say.

MT: It sounds like you think it’s possible for him to fix some things. But we shouldn’t set ourselves up for disappointment.

Coleen Rowley: I’ve just gotten so cynical. I don’t put hope in anything or anybody anymore. Obama… even going way back, I don’t put hope out with anybody… But if he gets support on some of these things, the call for transparency, depoliticization and decentralization, there’s a chance.

MT: Let’s hope. Thank you!

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