ReportWire

Tag: f.b.i. (federal bureau of investigation)

  • The Disappearance of Nancy Guthrie

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    Guthrie lives on nearly an acre, in a brown-brick, ranch-style house with an attached garage, a short gravel driveway, and desert landscaping. She has been there since the mid-seventies. (Her husband died in 1988.) Her neighbors live within easy walking distance but their homes are barely visible, one to the next, because of folds in the hills and the density of trees and cacti. A sheriff’s cruiser was stationed in Guthrie’s driveway, its lights flashing. At the foot of the driveway, someone had erected a large sign, covered in protective plastic, that read “Dear Guthrie Family, your neighbors stand with you.” A painted stone read “Please pray.” Visitors were leaving potted plants and grocery-store flowers, many of them yellow, symbolizing hope for a safe return. Whenever someone new arrived at the tribute point, reporters pounced on them for comment.

    By then, investigators had checked Guthrie’s flat, whitewashed roof and probed her septic tank with a long pole. They had towed away her car. They had searched Annie’s home, and re-searched Nancy’s. Two drones buzzed overhead, and a chopper was up. The public had been fed aerial views of the property: a tidy back-yard parabola of green grass that led to a gated swimming pool and aqua chaise longues; blue planters; an orange tree; a patio with string lights.

    John Voorhies, a Tucsonian of sixty-two years, was standing in front of Guthrie’s home, watching the activity. He’d come with a friend—a paralegal and a TikToker who had driven seven hours, from Huntington Beach, California, to see the crime scene and opine about it. Voorhies, wearing an earpiece in his right ear, was listening to this friend live-stream while strolling up and down the street. Eventually, the TikToker stopped and pointed his cellphone camera at Guthrie’s home. The sobering details of the case included the fact that her doorbell camera was disconnected at 1:47 A.M., and that at 2:12 A.M. software detected motion, though it was unclear which software, or what this meant. At 2:28 A.M., Guthrie’s pacemaker disconnected from the app that monitored it, providing an important clue to when she was taken.

    Leising described five reasons someone might commit a kidnapping: financial gain, ideology, domestic discord, exploitation (for example, sex trafficking), and “delusion,” or mental illness. One could not help wondering whether Savannah Guthrie’s prominence—at a time when President Donald Trump has spent the better part of a decade calling journalists “the enemy of the American people”—was a factor. Tucson is Savannah’s home town; she went to college and got her start in broadcasting here. In November, in a “Today” show feature, she included her sister and mother in a scene at El Charro, a historic restaurant, where she asked Guthrie what she likes about where she lives. Guthrie mentioned “the air, the quality of life—it’s laidback and gentle.” They toasted with prickly-pear margaritas.

    On Monday, Savannah had posted another video on social media. This time she appeared alone, speaking extemporaneously as her family entered “another week of this nightmare.” Her hair and makeup were done. She was composed. The media was reporting that there was a 5 P.M. deadline for delivering six million dollars’ worth of bitcoin referenced in one of the so-called ransom notes. Savannah again mentioned faith, telling viewers that their prayers are “lifting” their mother, “even in this moment, and in this darkest place.” The Guthries believed that Nancy was “still out there.” Savannah begged the public for help: “We are at an hour of desperation.”

    The images from the doorbell camera show the intruder approaching the alcoved entryway of Guthrie’s house with his head down, walking hunched over, as if trying to avoid his face being seen. In addition to the balaclava, gloves, and backpack, he’s got on a holster that is too big for what looks like a handgun inside it. He’s positioned the holster over his crotch—almost like you’d wear an athletic cup—which anyone with firearms training would recognize as amateurish. (“Tactically, it’s ridiculous,” Miller, the former F.B.I. official, said.) Reflector strips on his backpack catch a bit of ambient light, though the overhead porch light is off. He steps onto Guthrie’s doormat, reaches for the camera, and tries to cover it with his right hand. Then he turns and bends, looking for something on the ground, in the alcove, before stepping onto the front walkway and plucking stems and leaves from a withered plant in the landscaping. He walks back to the camera, with what appears to be a small flashlight between his lips, and tries to obscure the lens with that clump of dead greenery.

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    Paige Williams

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  • Dan Bongino’s Podcast Homecoming

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    In January, Bongino finally did leave the F.B.I. Trump had told reporters that he thought Bongino “wants to go back to his show”; Bongino soon announced that he would. Appearing, again, with Hannity, Bongino defended his prior contention that some jobs traffic in facts and others in opinions. “I don’t know why this was hard for, again, these full-diaper media morons to understand,” he said. Regardless, he seemed to agree when Hannity proclaimed that “the real Dan Bongino’s back.” This past Monday, Bongino returned, on Rumble, a YouTube competitor that is popular among right-wing content creators, and was palpably in his element—at least, until his stream cut out. “Rumble is under attack, this show is under attack,” he said, after the feed was restored. “This is what these scumbags do.”

    In reality, the gulf between Bongino the free-range opinionator and Bongino the fact-constrained lawman may not have been as wide as all that. His show always claimed to be rooted in reality—its tagline was “Get ready to hear the truth about America, on a show that’s not immune to the facts”—even if that claim itself was not; after Bongino suggested, on “Hannity,” that his opinions weren’t relevant to his F.B.I. work, he criticized members of the media for pushing the Russia “collusion hoax” and said that, if Trump weren’t President, “we may not have a Republic.” (This is without getting into the reports, from inside the Bureau, that Bongino was obsessed with posting on social media, at the expense of pressing operational matters. On his show this week, Bongino responded that social media is integral to the F.B.I.’s work in the digital age, adding that his detractors “can go fuck yourself.”) For all the talk of distinct roles, U-turns, and the “real Dan Bongino,” the most interesting question, to my mind, isn’t whether Bongino changed during his hiatus from right-wing podcasting. It’s whether right-wing podcasting has changed on him.

    As chance and Justice Department foot-dragging would have it, Epstein was very much in the news when Bongino made his comeback, on Monday. He addressed the case, and his role in it, a little over halfway into his show. “Leadership involves frequently being misunderstood, and having to make decisions that’s gonna piss someone off,” he said. “I wanted to see the files, folks. I said, ‘Don’t let it go.’ I meant it. We got elected. We looked at it. The file was not—what was in there was not what we thought would be in there.” Two of Bongino’s competitors got into the latest dump of Epstein files much more directly (depending on your definition of “direct”). Candace Owens—whose podcast was, by at least one metric, the fastest-growing right-wing offering as of late last year, and has recently been home to increasingly baroque theorizing about the assassination of Charlie Kirk—opened her show on Monday by derisively asking, “Are we still talking about the Epstein files?” She then proceeded to do so via an extended disquisition involving Sigmund Freud, his “B’nai B’rith Freemason boys,” and child-abuse rituals. Later, Nick Fuentes described Epstein as “first and foremost, a Jew,” then scoffed at Owens for getting distracted by the occult. He also called her a “Johnny-come-lately antisemite.”

    In recent months—amid the leadership vacuum left by Kirk’s killing, and particularly since the former Fox host Tucker Carlson made the inflammatory decision to record a podcast with Fuentes—much ink has been spilled on emerging schisms between the most important commentators on the right, some of them around issues such as U.S. support for Israel and the overt tolerance of antisemitism, some of them viciously personal, most of them both. This week, The Hollywood Reporter taxonomized who is fighting with whom, and drew them into the broad camps of “MAGA Moderates” (Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro) and “MAGA MANIACS” (Owens, Carlson, Megyn Kelly). Apparently, the “moderates” can now be said to include Alex Jones, the notorious Sandy Hook truther. Indeed, much of the spilled ink has attested to the rapid radicalization of the MAGA media firmament, especially the growing momentum of Fuentes among young people who once saw Kirk as their lodestar. (Kirk, it should be noted, reportedly loathed Fuentes.) Because MAGA is the sort of world in which a person can host a podcast one day and lead the F.B.I. the next, these ructions would seem to matter for the broader post-Trump direction of the right, at a moment when that question is itself starting to matter. Owens and Fuentes have both been critical of Trump; the latter, in particular, has cast Trump’s Administration as unserious, even a betrayal. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right congresswoman who stepped down in January, has decisively broken with him. Last week, she stated that MAGA was “all a lie.”

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    Jon Allsop

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  • Tom Homan and the Case of the Missing Fifty Thousand

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    The Vice-President, it must be noted, graduated from Yale Law School, where presumably he learned something about what it takes to “violate a crime”—and how behavior that does not rise to the level of criminality can nonetheless be suspicious and blameworthy. The incoming Trump Administration was reportedly alerted to the investigation. It must have realized that a story this odiferous had a high likelihood of being leaked, yet it gave Homan a prominent role. It is hard to imagine another Administration in the post-Watergate era making that judgment—even if officials didn’t find Homan’s actions morally repugnant, they would avoid him out of self-preservation. But for the Trump team, with its high tolerance for embarrassment and supreme confidence in its impunity, there isn’t much that is off the table. So the Administration can brazen its way through self-serving deals that would have made its predecessors blanch: the gift of a luxury jet from Qatar; the various ventures into cryptocurrency, including a gala dinner for the biggest investors in the $TRUMP meme coin. A bag of cash pales by comparison.

    The Stephanopoulos-Vance encounter was not the Administration’s first effort to shut down the Homan story. Shortly after MSNBC broke the news of the cash transfer, in late September, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told a reporter, “Well, Mr. Homan never took the fifty thousand dollars that you’re referring to, so you should get your facts straight.” The investigation, Leavitt asserted, had represented “another example of the weaponization of the Biden Department of Justice against one of President Trump’s strongest and most vocal supporters in the midst of a Presidential campaign. You had F.B.I. agents going undercover to try and entrap one of the President’s top allies and supporters, someone who they knew very well would be taking a government position months later.” Homan, she said, “did absolutely nothing wrong.”

    On October 7th, at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s oversight hearing for Attorney General Pam Bondi, four Democratic senators—Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island; Mazie Hirono, of Hawaii; Alex Padilla, of California; and Peter Welch, of Vermont—also raised the matter of the missing fifty thousand. Bondi’s response was characteristically bristling and evasive; Whitehouse asked about the money seven times, to no avail. “You’re very concerned about money and people taking money and you rail against dark money yet you work with dark-money groups all the time,” Bondi told him. When Whitehouse asked Bondi if investigators had examined whether Homan reported the fifty thousand as taxable income, Bondi retorted, “Senator, I would be more concerned, if I were you when you talk about corruption and money, that . . . you pushed for legislation that would subsidize your wife’s company.” (Sandra Whitehouse, a marine biologist, has worked for an ocean-conservation group that receives federal funds for which her husband voted. The Senate Ethics Committee has dismissed two complaints on this subject.) The investigation into Homan “was resolved prior to my confirmation as Attorney General,” Bondi told Welch. “It’s not resolved. There’s fifty thousand dollars,” Welch responded. “Homan has it, or somebody has it. Do you have no interest in knowing where it is?” Bondi replied, “You’re not going to sit here and slander Tom Homan.”

    Homan, for his part, has tried a couple of different defenses. “Look, I did nothing criminal. I did nothing illegal,” he told Laura Ingraham, of Fox News, in September. Ingraham didn’t press Homan about whether he’d taken the money, and he didn’t deny it. Appearing Wednesday evening on NewsNation, Homan was more definitive. “I didn’t take fifty thousand dollars from anybody,” he declared, and added a helping of self-pity. “There’s been hit pieces on me since I came back to this Administration,” he said. “What people don’t talk about is I took a significant, huge pay cut to come back and serve my nation, and I’m not enriching myself doing this job.”

    The beauty of the Homan story is that its elements are so easily grasped: the undercover agents, the alleged dangling of contracts, the Cava bag, the missing cash. You don’t have to plow through the intricacies of international law or the economics of meme coins to understand that there is every indication that something very wrong happened, whether or not it amounted to a crime. To ask about this, again and again, is not slander, it is an obligation—of reporters, lawmakers, and the public. Because to let this episode slide—to allow it to be overtaken by the next outrage and the one to follow—would be to accept that no accountability is ever imposed on anyone in Trump’s orbit. Where’s the fifty thousand? ♦

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    Ruth Marcus

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  • The Retribution Phase of Trump’s Presidency Has Begun

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    It’s not like he was hiding the plan. When Donald Trump campaigned for a return to the White House in 2024, he openly embraced a platform of revenge and retribution against his political enemies. Even when allies practically begged him to swear off the idea of using the Presidency as a tool of personal vengeance, Trump was explicit about his intentions. I have often thought back to an interview he did in June of last year, in the Mar-a-Lago ballroom, with the TV shrink Phil McGraw, known as Dr. Phil, a Trump fan and supporter. “You have so much to do,” McGraw said to him. “You don’t have time to get even. You only have time to get right.” Trump’s response was to smirk. “Well, revenge does take time. I will say that,” he said. “And sometimes revenge can be justified. Phil, I have to be honest. You know, sometimes it can.”

    On Friday morning, the revenge vibes were strong when the news broke of an F.B.I. search at the Maryland home and D.C. office of John Bolton, Trump’s third first-term national-security adviser, who has since become one of his most frequent and acerbic public critics. Details about the raid were sparse, but initial reports suggested that officials were looking for evidence that Bolton had disclosed classified information to reporters and in his 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.” (Trump’s first-term Justice Department tried unsuccessfully to stop publication of the book—a best-selling account of the discord and dysfunction that marked Trump’s foreign policy during his initial White House stint.) Bolton could hardly have been surprised that the attack on him was renewed. In a new edition of the book that came out in January of 2024, he had warned, “Trump really only cares about retribution for himself, and it will consume much of a second term.”

    So let’s stipulate that whatever comes of the F.B.I. raid on Bolton, legally speaking, there is a certain awful predictability to it. In his first months back in office, Trump has made clear that his vengeful threats were not simply campaign-season bluster. He has stripped security clearances (including Bolton’s) and fired career civil servants for having ties to his opponents; he has demanded Justice Department investigations of them. Earlier in August, Trump’s D.O.J. launched probes of two of his most outspoken legal adversaries—the California Democrat Adam Schiff, who led the House’s first impeachment inquiry of Trump, in 2019, and the New York attorney general Letitia James, whose office successfully prosecuted Trump in a civil-fraud case. We don’t know yet where this will all end up—it’s far from certain that these investigations will lead to prosecutions, let alone a prison wing full of Trumpian “enemies of the people.” But we can already say for sure that he wasn’t just bluffing with his campaign-season threats; how is it possible that, so many years into this Trump era, there is not a more precise vocabulary for describing how it is that we are constantly being surprised when Trump and his advisers do exactly what we have expected them to do?

    A worrisome indicator for how this will all turn out is how unabashedly Team Trump now pursues its vengeance agenda—they are no longer really even trying to hide it. Back in January, when Kash Patel still needed the votes of a few not-fully-Trumpified Republican senators to win confirmation as F.B.I. director, he insisted that he had no intention of allowing America’s chief law-enforcement agency to be drawn into the messy work of carrying out Trump’s vendettas. “There will be no retributive actions taken by any F.B.I. should I be confirmed as F.B.I. director,” Patel said—under oath, I would point out—at his confirmation hearing. When asked about an appendix to his 2023 book, “Government Gangsters”—which named sixty people who were part of a supposed “Executive Branch deep state” arrayed against Trump, with Bolton, and many others who’ve already drawn Trump’s second-term fire, included—Patel said, “It’s not an enemies list. It’s a total mischaracterization.” Yet there he was on Friday morning, tweeting even before the news of the Bolton raid was public: “NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission.” Will we hear from any Republicans other than the two who voted against him that Patel has made a mockery of his sworn Senate testimony? Don’t count on it.

    Asked about the raid, Trump himself denied any specific foreknowledge. Sort of. “He’s not a smart guy, but he could be a very unpatriotic guy, we’re going to find out,” he told reporters on Friday morning. “I know nothing about it; I just saw it this morning. They did a raid.”

    Just a week earlier, on August 13th, Trump had been quite explicit about his anger toward Bolton, complaining on Truth Social that his onetime national-security adviser remains one of the media’s favorite “fired losers and really dumb people” to quote with attacks on him. It is certainly true that Bolton has continued to speak out against Trump at a time when many other former Trump Administration officials have fallen silent, despite having previously called him everything from a “threat to democracy” to a textbook “fascist” who “prefers the dictator approach to government.”

    The timing is notable: Trump’s Truth Social post about Bolton had nothing to do with classified information and everything to do with the fact that Bolton was one of the loudest reality checks on television about the President’s embarrassing summit a day earlier with Vladimir Putin, in Alaska. “Trump did not lose, but Putin clearly won,” Bolton said on CNN right after the two leaders abruptly ended their meeting with no deal to announce. This was precisely the statement that triggered Trump’s post: “What’s that all about?” the President complained. “We are winning on EVERYTHING.” Bolton has continued to offer sharp-edged assessments of Trump’s so-far-unsuccessful efforts to bring about an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine; he appeared on CNN Thursday night—hours before the F.B.I. raid, in fact—giving an interview in which he attributed the “confusion” about Trump’s negotiations with Putin to the Administration’s failure to say clearly what has been discussed, and called out “the White House’s concern that Trump didn’t stand up to Putin in Alaska.”

    I don’t know whether getting Bolton to shut up in public is a goal of this F.B.I. raid or merely a possible ancillary benefit for Trump. Either way, it represents a direct attack on one of the President’s most informed and unrelenting critics, a lifelong conservative whose direct-from-the-Situation-Room account of Trump’s ignorance, perfidy, and willingness to betray the national interest in service of his own self-interest provides an important counterpoint to the daily stream of pro-Trump propaganda now embraced by most of the American right.

    As I was digesting the news of Friday morning’s raid, a historian friend sent along a quote from Huey Long, the populist Louisiana politician who showed the political potential of an American-style demagogue, winning his state’s governorship and a seat in the Senate at a time when right-wing fascism was ascending in Europe, in the late nineteen-twenties and early thirties. Long had observed that the imposition of American-style fascism would not require a military takeover but “would only have to get the right President and Cabinet” to emerge as “a hundred-per-cent American movement.” What’s more, he had added, “it would be quite unnecessary to suppress the press. A couple of powerful newspaper chains and two or three papers with practical monopolies of certain fields would go out to smear, calumniate, and blackmail opponents into silence, and ruthlessly to eliminate competitors.”

    Long’s uncomfortably relevant assessment is a reminder that Trump’s actions do not exist outside history. The tools that worked so effectively to silence critics in the brutal dictatorships of the twentieth century—or in Putin’s Russia, for that matter—work just as well when they are deployed by America’s vengeful President. ♦

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    Susan B. Glasser

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