FBI says Trump was indeed struck by bullet during assassination attempt
Updated: 4:15 PM PDT Jul 26, 2024
Good morning, Chairman Jordan, ranking member Nadler members of the committee. Uh I want to begin by offering my condolences on the passing representative Jackson Lee who served the people of Texas in this body and on this committee for so long, thank you all for your support of our efforts to protect the American people and uphold the constitution. I am proud to be here today representing the 38,000 special agents, intelligence analysts and professional staff who make up the FBI men and women who every day work relentlessly to counter the most complex threat environment I’ve seen in my tenure as FBI director maybe in my entire career in law enforcement before I go any further. I also want to acknowledge and offer my deepest condolences to the victims of the horrific assassination attempt in Butler County, to the friends and family of Coy comparator who by all accounts lost his life, protecting others from danger to the other victims, two of whom were critically wounded and of course, of course to President Trump, former President Trump and his family, as I’ve said from the beginning, the attempted assassination of the former president was an attack on our democracy and our democratic process. And we will not, and do not tolerate political violence of any kind, especially *** despicable account of this magnitude. And I want to assure you and the American people that the men and women of the FBI will continue to work tirelessly to get to the bottom of what happened. We are bringing all the resources of the FBI to bear both criminal and national security. Now, there’s *** whole lot of work underway and still *** lot of work to do and our understanding of what happened and why will continue to evolve. But we’re going to leave no stone unturned. The shooter may be deceased but the FB I’s investigation is very much ongoing to that point. I also want to acknowledge that I recognize both the congressional and the public interest in this case and the importance of this investigation to the American people. And I understand there are *** lot of open questions. So while the investigation is very much ongoing and our assessments of the shooter and his actions continue to evolve. My hope here today is to do my best to provide you with all the information I can given where we are at this point. I have been saying for some time now that we are living in an elevated threat environment and tragically, the Butler County assassination attempt is another example, *** particularly heinous and very public. One of what I’ve been talking about but it also reinforces our need at the FBI and our ongoing commitment to stay focused on the threats on the mission and on the people we do the work with and the people we do the work for every day all across this country. And indeed around the world, the men and women of the FBI are doing just that working around the clock to counter the threats we face just in the last year. For example, in California, the FBI and our partners targeted an organized crime syndicate responsible for trafficking fentaNYL meth and cocaine all across North America. We charged the Mexican based suppliers who brought the drugs into the United States. *** network of Canada based truck drivers who delivered the drugs and the distributors in the United States who spread the poison into our communities. Staying on threats emanating from the border. I have warned for some time now about the threat that foreign terrorists may seek to exploit our Southwest border or some other port of entry to advance *** plot against Americans. Just last month. For instance, the Bureau and our joint terrorism task forces worked with IC in multiple cities across the country. As several individuals with suspected international terrorist ties were arrested using ISIS immigration authorities leading up to those arrests, hundreds of FBI employees dedicated countless hours to understand the threat and identify additional individuals of concern. Now, the physical security of the border is of course not in the fbi’s Lane. But as the threat has escalated, we’re working with our partners in law enforcement and the intelligence community to find and stop foreign terrorists who would harm Americans and our interests.
FBI says Trump was indeed struck by bullet during assassination attempt
Updated: 4:15 PM PDT Jul 26, 2024
The FBI said former President Donald Trump was struck in the ear by a bullet during an assassination attempt on July 13, as the agency moved Friday to clarify what happened after nearly two weeks of confusion and conflicting accounts.Related video above: FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies to House committee on Trump assassination attemptIn a statement issued Friday evening, the FBI said: “What struck former President Trump in the ear was a bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces, fired from the deceased subject’s rifle.”The statement came two days after FBI Director Christopher Wray said during congressional testimony that it was not clear whether Trump’s injuries were caused by a bullet or shrapnel.
The FBI said former President Donald Trump was struck in the ear by a bullet during an assassination attempt on July 13, as the agency moved Friday to clarify what happened after nearly two weeks of confusion and conflicting accounts.
Related video above: FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies to House committee on Trump assassination attempt
In a statement issued Friday evening, the FBI said: “What struck former President Trump in the ear was a bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces, fired from the deceased subject’s rifle.”
As Jefferson Morley, who’s published several books about the CIA and written extensively about the JFK assassination, notes, if people believe that the government is capable of concealing facts about an attempt on the life of a US president, that’s probably because it’s demonstrably done so and is actively doing so. Similarly, if people believe that the CIA is capable of creating brainwashed assassins, that’s in part because of its very real history of interest in exactly this. The notorious MKUltra wasn’t just the inspiration for everything from the Bourne movies to Stranger Things, but an actual program of research into mind control—especially replacing true memories with false ones—about which historians and researchers still have many unanswered questions, largely because files related to the program were destroyed in the early 1970s.
“You can’t unring the MKUltra bell,” says Morley. “People know about it. A lot of people know about it. So to say, ‘Oh, that’s irrational conspiracy,’ which is the attitude that we get from the mainstream press—’Oh, you know, how dare anybody question the CIA’s account of that?’— I mean, it just doesn’t ring true to most people, because most people know it’s not true.”
The social memory of the political murders of the 1960s, and of the government in some cases at the least withholding information about them, certainly informs the public’s understanding of events today. It thus informs collective sensemaking, to use the term employed by researchers at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
Two days after the July 13 attempt on Trump’s life, the researchers published an analysis outlining the process by which groups were making sense of the crisis in real time by gathering evidence and interpreting it through a frame, and how this was playing and had already played out. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, they identified three politically coded frames: one suggesting that the shooting was staged, one focused on the Secret Service’s failures, and one suggesting the shooting was an inside job. The first seems to have fallen apart due to the evident reality of the shooting, including the death of Corey Comperatore and the serious injuries suffered by two other Trump rally attendees; the second, given the manifest failures that led to the resignation of the Secret Service’s director, seems broadly sound. The third seems likely to linger.
“Every time there’s a school shooting, my book sales go up,” says Tom O’Neill, the author of Chaos, which among other things draws intriguing though ultimately inconclusive connections between Charles Manson and MKUltra. O’Neill happened to be watching the rally at which Crooks tried to shoot Trump, and his first thought, he says, was, “Well, there go my book sales again. They’re going to skyrocket, because people really want to believe that there’s no such thing as a lone assassin.”
O’Neill says he’s often asked whether he believes the MKUltra program still exists, and that he can only say that while he wouldn’t be surprised, he has no idea, because nearly all the relevant records were destroyed and because, in his view, transparency is almost beside the point. “They’re not going to release any of their secrets. That’s why they’re the CIA,” he says. “And if they release something, you should be suspicious of what they release.”
Investigators are searching the home of the Trump rally gunman who the FBI identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. Anna Schecter Zigler, senior coordinating producer for CBS News and Stations’ Crime and Public Safety Unit, joins CBS News 24/7 to discuss the ongoing investigation.
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AT&T on Friday disclosed that hackers had accessed records of calls and texts of “nearly all” its cellular customers for a six-month period between May 1, 2022, and Oct. 31, 2022. Jo Ling Kent reports.
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For more than a decade, Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov—a Ukrainian who used the online hacker name “Tank”—managed to evade cops. When FBI and Ukrainian officials raided his Donetsk apartment in 2010, the place was deserted and Penchukov had vanished. But the criminal spree came to a juddering halt at the end of 2022, when he traveled to Switzerland, was arrested, then was extradited to the United States.
Today, at a US federal court in Lincoln, Nebraska, a judge sentenced Penchukov to two concurrent nine-year sentences, after he pleaded guilty to two charges of conspiracy to participate in racketeering and a conspiracy to commit wire fraud. United States District Judge John M. Gerrard also ordered Penchukov to pay more than $73 million, according to court records. The court also ordered three years of supervised release for each count and said they should run concurrently.
Both charges carried a maximum sentence of up to 20 years each. According to court documents, however, the US government and Penchukov’s lawyers both requested a less severe sentence following him signing a plea agreement in February. It is unclear what the terms of the plea deal include. At the time, documents show, Penchukov could also face having to repay up to $70 million—less than the combined amount he’s ordered to pay in restitution and forfeited funds. “I understand this, but I don’t have such amounts of money,” he said in court earlier this year.
The US prosecution of Penchukov—who has been on the FBI’s “most wanted” cyber list for more than a decade—is a rare blow against one of the most well-connected leaders of a prolific 2010s cybercrime gang. It also highlights the ongoing challenges Western law enforcement officials face when taking action against Eastern European cybercriminals—particularly those based in Russia or Ukraine, which do not have extradition agreements with the US.
Ahead of the sentencing, the Department of Justice refused to comment on the case, and the FBI and Penchukov’s lawyers did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.
When the Ukrainian pleaded guilty in February—a number of charges were dropped following him signing the plea agreement—he admitted to being one of the leaders of the Jabber Zeus hacking group, starting in 2009, that used the Zeus malware to infect computers and steal people’s bank account information. The group used the details to log in to accounts, withdraw money, and then send it to various money mules—stealing tens of millions from small US and European businesses.
“The defendant played a crucial role, a leadership role, in this scheme by directing and coordinating the exchange of stolen banking credentials and money mules,” prosecutors said in court earlier this year. They would steal thousands from victim companies, often draining their accounts.
Penchukov, who was also a well-known DJ in Ukraine, also admitted to a key role organizing the IcedID (also known Bokbot) malware, which collected the victim’s financial details and allowed ransomware to be deployed on systems. He was involved from November 2018 to at least February 2021, officials say. Investigators found he kept a spreadsheet detailing the $19.9 million income IcedID made in 2021.
This is an updated version of a story first published on March 31, 2024. The original video can be viewed here.
This report is the result of a joint investigation by 60 Minutes, The Insider, and Der Spiegel
Tonight we have important developments in our five-year investigation of mysterious brain injuries reported by U.S. national security officials. The injured include White House staff, CIA officers, FBI agents, military officers and their families. Many believe that they were wounded by a secret weapon that fires a high-energy beam of microwaves or ultrasound. This is our fourth story and as we reported in March, we now have evidence of who might be responsible. Most of the injured have fought for America, often in secret. And they’re frustrated that the U.S. government publicly doubts that an adversary is targeting Americans.
One of them is Carrie. We’re disguising her and not using her last name because she’s still an FBI agent working in counterintelligence. She says, in 2021, she was home in Florida when she was hit by a crippling force.
Carrie: And bam, inside my right ear, it was like a dentist drilling on steroids. That feeling when it gets too close to your eardrum? It’s like that, you know, times ten. It was like a high pitched, metallic drilling noise, and it knocked me forward at, like, a 45 degree angle this way.
She says she was by a window in her laundry room.
Carrie: My right ear was line-of-sight to that window while this thing was happening in my ear. And when I leaned forward it kind a—it didn’t knock me over, but it knocked me forward. I immediately felt pressure, and pressure and pain started coursing from inside my right ear, down my jaw, down my neck and into my chest.
At the same time, FBI agent Carrie told us, the battery in her phone began to swell until it broke the case. Finally she passed out on a couch. Because of chest pain, she was checked by a cardiologist and then returned to duty.
Carrie: And I remember complaining to my colleagues for months after that I felt like I had early Alzheimer’s. Short term memory, long term memory, confusing memories, uh, multitasking. My baseline changed. I was not the same person.
60 Minutes has agreed to withhold the last name of “Carrie,” a Havana Syndrome victim who is still an FBI agent working in counterintelligence.
60 Minutes
Carrie’s story matches those we’ve uncovered over the years.
Olivia Troye: It was like this piercing feeling on the side of my head. It was like, I remember it was on the right side of my head and I, I got like vertigo.
Olivia Troye was Homeland Security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence. In our 2022 report, she told us she was hit outside the White House.
Anonymous: And then severe ear pain started. So I liken it to if you put a Q-tip too far and you bounce it off your eardrum. Well, imagine takin’ a sharp pencil and just kinda pokin’ that.
And this man told us he was among the first publicly known cases in 2016 from our embassy in Cuba. That’s how the incidents became known as “Havana Syndrome.” He’s medically retired from an agency we can’t name– blind in one eye and struggling for balance.
A major medical study for the government was led by Dr. David Relman of Stanford University. In our 2022 report he told us…
Dr. David Relman: What we found was we thought clear evidence of an injury to the auditory and vestibular system of the brain. Everything starting with the inner ear where humans perceive sound and sense balance, and then translate those perceptions into brain electrical signals.
His study found, “directed pulsed (radio frequency) energy…appears to be the most plausible mechanism…” For example, a focused beam of microwaves or acoustic ultrasound. More than 100 officials or family members have unexplained, persistent, symptoms.
Carrie: If I turn too fast, my gyroscope is off, essentially. It’s like a step behind where I’m supposed to be. So I’ll turn too fast, and I will literally walk right into the wall or the door frame.
Now, for the first time, the case of FBI agent Carrie suggests which adversary might be responsible. She spoke with the FBI’s permission but wasn’t allowed to discuss the cases she was on when she was hit. We have learned from other sources one of those cases involve this Mustang going 110 miles an hour.
Deputy (on bodycam video from 2020): Pull over, Pull over!
In 2020, near Key West, Florida, deputies tried to stop the Mustang for speeding. It ran 15 miles until it hit spike strips laid in its path.
Deputy (on bodycam video from 2020): Get out! Put it down! Get on the ground now.
A search of the car found notes of bank accounts.
Deputy (on bodycam video from 2020): Citibank…Discover Savings $75,000…
And this device, that looks like a walkie-talkie, can erase the car’s computer data including its GPS record. There was also a Russian passport.
Deputy (on bodycam video from 2020): What’s your first name?
Vitalii Kovalev (on bodycam video from 2020): Vitalii. V-I-T-A-L-I-I.
Vitalii Kovalev was the driver, from St. Petersburg—Russia not Florida.
Deputy (on bodycam video from 2020): Why did you run? Be honest with me.
Vitalii Kovalev (on bodycam video from 2020): I don’t know.
Deputy (on bodycam video from 2020): You know why you ran.
Vitalii Kovalev (on bodycam video from 2020): I don’t know.
And we don’t know why he ran. But what we learned suggests he was a Russian spy.
Christo Grozev: What we see here is Vitalii Kovalev fitting exactly this formula.
Christo Grozev is a journalist, legendary for unmasking Russian plots. In 2020, he uncovered the names of the Russian secret agents who poisoned Vladimir Putin’s rival Alexey Navalny. Grozev is lead investigator for our collaborator on this story, The Insider, a magazine by Russian exiles. We asked him to trace Vitalii Kovalev.
Christo Grozev is a journalist for The Insider, an investigative magazine by Russian exiles.
60 Minutes
Christo Grozev: He studied in a military institute. He studied radio electronics with a particular focus on use within the military of micro-electronics. He had all the technology know-how that would be required for somebody to be assisting an operation that requires high technology. But then all of a sudden, after working for two years in a military institute he up and decides to become a chef.
Kovalev immigrated to the U.S. and worked as a chef in New York and Washington D.C., even appearing at far left, in a TV cooking segment.
But Kovalev was actually a Russian military electrical engineer with a top secret security clearance.
Scott Pelley: Can someone like Kovalev simply decide to drop all of that and become a chef?
Christo Grozev: It is not an easy job to just leave that behind. Once you’re in the military, and you’ve been trained, and the Ministry of Defense has invested in you, you remain at their beck and call for the rest of your life.
We don’t know what Kovalev was up to but our sources say, over months, he spent 80 hours being interviewed by FBI agent Carrie, who had investigated multiple Russian spies. Kovalev pled guilty to evading police and reckless driving. He was sentenced to 30 months. While he was in jail, Carrie says she was hit in Florida and, a year later, when she awoke to the same symptoms in the middle of the night in California.
Carrie: It felt like I was stuck in this state of, like, disorientation, not able to function. Like, what is happening? And my whole body was pulsing,
Mark Zaid is Carrie’s attorney. He has a security clearance and for decades, has represented Americans working in national security. Zaid has more than two dozen clients suffering symptoms of Havana Syndrome, which the government now calls “anomalous health incidents.”
Mark Zaid: I have CIA and State Department clients as well, who believe they’ve been impacted domestically. There are dozens of CIA cases that have happened domestically that is at least believed. And, and we’re not even just talking about physical manifestation. We’re talking about evidence of computer issues in the midst of the incident where computer screens just literally stop working or go flicker on and off.
Scott Pelley: Do you know whether there are other FBI agents who have also suffered from these anomalous health incidents?
Mark Zaid: There are other FBI agents and personnel, not just agents, analysts. I represent one other FBI person who was impacted in Miami. And I also know of FBI personnel who believe they were hit overseas in the last decade.
Scott Pelley: Were any of these members of the FBI counterintelligence people in addition to Carrie?
Mark Zaid: The one thread that I know of with the FBI personnel that is common among most if not all of my clients other than the family members connected to the employee, was they were all doing something relating to Russia.
Attorney Mark Zaid
60 Minutes
Vitalii Kovalev served his time and in 2022, went back to Russia—ignoring American warnings that he was in danger because he’d spent so much time with the FBI. Christo Grozev found this death certificate from last year, which says Kovalev was killed at the front in Ukraine.
Scott Pelley: Do you think Kovalev was sent to Ukraine as a punishment?
Christo Grozev: One theory is that he was sent there in order for him to be disposed of.
Scott Pelley: Is Kovalev really dead, or is this another cover story?
Christo Grozev: That is a very good question. And we actually worked on both hypotheses for a while. I do believe at this point that he was dead.
Carrie: We’re dealing with energy weapons. It’s not going anywhere. Look how effective it’s been. It’s next generation weaponry. And, unfortunately, it’s been refined on some of us, and we’re the test subjects.
U.S. intelligence says, publicly, there is no credible evidence that an adversary is inflicting brain injuries on national security officials. And yet, more than 100 Americans have symptoms that scientists say could be caused by a beam of microwaves or, acoustic ultrasound. The Pentagon launched an investigation run by a recently retired Army lieutenant colonel. In March, Greg Edgreen spoke publicly for the first time.
Scott Pelley: Are we being attacked?
Greg Edgreen: My personal opinion, yes.
Scott Pelley: By whom?
Greg Edgreen: Russia.
Greg Edgreen ran the investigation for the Defense Intelligence Agency. He would not discuss classified information but he described his team’s work from 2021 to 2023.
Greg Edgreen: We were collecting a large body of data, ranging from signals intelligence, human intelligence, open-source reporting. Anything regarding the internet, travel records, financial records, you name it. Unfortunately I can’t get into specifics, based on the classification. But I can tell you at a very early stage, I started to focus on Moscow.
Scott Pelley: Can you tell me about the patterns you began to see?
Greg Edgreen: One of the things I started to notice was the caliber of our officer that was being impacted. This wasn’t happening to our worst or our middle-range officers. This was happening to our top 5%, 10% performing officers across the Defense Intelligence Agency. And consistently there was a Russia nexus. There was some angle where they had worked against Russia, focused on Russia, and done extremely well.
Scott Pelley: What has been the impact on American national security?
Greg Edgreen: The impact has been that the intelligence officers and our diplomats working abroad are being removed from their posts with traumatic brain injuries. They’re being neutralized.
Greg Edgreen and Scott Pelley
60 Minutes
We have learned of an incident at last year’s NATO summit in Lithuania—a meeting that focused largely on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and was attended by President Biden. Multiple sources tell us that a senior official of the Department of Defense was struck by the symptoms and sought medical treatment. We told Greg Edgreen what we had learned.
Greg Edgreen: It tells me that there are no barriers on what Moscow will do, on who they will attack, and that if we don’t face this head on, the problem is going to get worse.
The problem first appeared in public in 2016. U.S. officials reported being hurt in Cuba and the incidents became known as Havana Syndrome. But we have learned it started two years earlier when at least four Americans reported symptoms in Frankfurt, Germany. There is also evidence of what could be revenge attacks. For example, in 2014, three CIA officers were stationed in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s obsession. 2014 was the year that a popular revolt overthrew Putin’s preferred leader. Later, those CIA officers went on to other assignments and reported being hit, one in Uzbekistan, one in Vietnam, and the third officer’s family was hit in London.
If it is Russia, investigative reporter Christo Grozev believes he knows who’s involved. In 2018, Grozev was the first to discover the existence of a top secret Russian intelligence unit which goes by a number, 29155.
Christo Grozev: These are people who are trained to be versatile assassins and sabotage operators. They are trained in countersurveillance, they are trained in explosives, they’re trained to be using poison, and technology equipment to actually inflict pain or damage to the targets.
Grozev works with our collaborators on this report, a magazine called The Insider and Germany’s Der Spiegel. he has a long track record uncovering Russian documents. And Grozev says he found one that may link 29155 to a directed energy weapon.
Christo Grozev: And when I saw it, I literally had tears in my eyes, because it was spelling out what they had been doing.
It’s a piece of accounting. An officer of 29155 received a bonus for work on quote, “potential capabilities of non-lethal acoustic weapons…”
Christo Grozev: Which told us that this particular unit had been engaged with somewhere, somehow, empirical tests of a directed energy unit.
Scott Pelley: There it is, written down in black and white.
Christo Grozev: It’s the closest to a receipt you can have for this.
Christo Grozev
60 Minutes
We’ve also found that Russia’s 29155 may have been present in Tbilisi, Georgia when Americans reported incidents there.
Scott Pelley: Do you believe that you were attacked?
Anonymous: Absolutely.
She asked us to withhold her name for her safety. She’s the wife of a Justice Department official who was with the embassy in Tbilisi. She’s a nurse with a Ph.D. in anesthesiology. On Oct. 7, 2021, she says that she was in her laundry room when she was blindsided by a sound.
Anonymous: As I’m reaching into the dryer– I am completely consumed by a piercing sound that I can only describe as when you listen to a movie and the main character is also consumed by the sound after a bomb goes off. That is similar to the sound that I heard. And it just pierced my ears, came in my left side, felt like it came through the window, into my left ear. I immediately felt fullness in my head, and just a piercing headache. And when I realized that I needed to get out of the laundry room, I left the room, and went into our bedroom next door, and projectile vomited in our bathroom
We have learned that hers was the second incident that week. Sources tell us, earlier, in the neighborhood, a U.S. official, their spouse and child were hit. We have also learned of a phone call that was intercepted nearby. A man says in Russian, “Is it supposed to have blinking green lights?” and “Should I leave it on all night.” We have no idea what he was talking about but, the next day, the incidents began.
Sources tell us that an investigation centered on this Russian, Albert Averyanov. His name, on travel manifests and phone records, appears alongside known members of Unit 29155. He is also the son of the commander.
Christo Grozev: He was groomed to become a member of the unit since he was 16. His number is in the phone books of all members of the unit. Clearly, he’s more than just the son of the boss. He’s a colleague of these people.
Grozev found Albert Averyanov’s phone was turned off during the Tbilisi incidents but our sources say there’s evidence someone in Tbilisi logged into Averyanov’s personal email during this time. Most likely, Grozev believes, Averyanov himself—placing him in the city.
Christo Grozev: We believe members of Unit 29155 were there in order to facilitate, supervise, or maybe even personally implement attacks on American diplomats, on American government officials, using an acoustic weapon.
Scott Pelley: After you were able to get out of the laundry room, call your husband, what did you do then?
Anonymous: I went downstairs. I first looked on our security camera, which is right beside our front door, to see if anyone was outside. There was a vehicle right outside of our gate. I took a photo of that vehicle and noticed that it was not a vehicle that I recognized. And I went outside.
Scott Pelley: Did you see anyone around the vehicle?
Anonymous: I did.
Scott Pelley: We sent you a photograph of Albert Averyanov. And this is the picture that we sent you.
Anonymous: You did.
Scott Pelley: And I wonder if that looks anything like the man you saw outside your home.
Anonymous: It absolutely does. And when I received this photo, I had a visceral reaction. It made me feel sick. I cannot absolutely say for certainty that it is this man, but I can tell you that even to this day, looking at him makes me feel that same visceral reaction. And I can absolutely say that this looks like the man that I saw in the street.
This 40-year-old wife and mother is among the most severely injured people we have met.
Anonymous: My headaches and brain fog continued. Later on into that weekend, I started having trouble walking down the stairs, specifically at night. I had trouble finding the steps to get down the stairs. So my coordination and vestibular system started just really falling apart.
She was medically evacuated. And now doctors say she has holes in her inner ear canals—the vestibular system that creates the sense of balance. Two surgeries put metal plates in her skull. Another surgery is likely.
Despite experiences like hers, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said last year it’s “very unlikely a foreign adversary is responsible.” But the DNI also acknowledged some intelligence agencies had only “low” or “moderate” confidence in that assessment. Recently, the National Institutes of Health reported results of brain scans on some patients. NIH said there’s no evidence of physical damage. but the medical science of so-called anomalous health incidents remains vigorously debated. For its part, the Director of National Intelligence says the symptoms probably result from “… preexisting conditions, conventional illnesses, and environmental factors.” Attorney Mark Zaid represents more than two dozen ahi clients.
Scott Pelley: What do you make of the intelligence community assessment?
Mark Zaid: So I’ve had access to classified information relating to AHI. I can’t reveal it. I wouldn’t reveal it. I will tell you that I don’t believe it to be the entire story, and I know of information that undermines or contradicts what they are saying publicly.
Scott Pelley: Are you saying that the government wants to cover this up?
Mark Zaid: There is, in my view, without a doubt, evidence of a cover up. Now, some of that cover up is not necessarily that, oh, we found a weapon and we don’t want anybody to know about it. What I’ve seen more so is we see lines of inquiry that would take us potentially to answers we don’t want to have to deal with, so we’re not going to explore any of those avenues.
Greg Edgreen
60 Minutes
Greg Edgreen: “You know, if my mother had seen what I saw, she would say, ‘It’s the Russians, stupid.’”
Greg Edgreen who ran the military investigation told us he had the Pentagon’s support but, in the Trump, and Biden administrations, he says, the bar for proof was set impossibly high.
Greg Edgreen: I think it was set so high because we did not, as a country, and a government, want to face some very hard truths.
Scott Pelley: And what are those?
Greg Edgreen: Can we secure America? Are these massive counterintelligence failures? Can we protect American soil and our people on American soil? Are we being attacked? And if we’re being attacked, is that an act of war?
After what he learned in his classified investigation, Greg Edgreen retired from the Army to start a company to help the victims. He hopes to channel government contracts into treatment programs.
As with all spy stories, much is classified and what remains is circumstantial. None of the witnesses tonight wanted to speak. Some fear for their families. But all felt compelled to shine a light on what they see as a war of shadows –a war America may not be winning.
Christo Grozev: If this is what we’ve seen with the hundreds of cases of Anomalous Health Incidents, I can assure that this has become probably Putin’s biggest victory. In his own mind this has been Russia’s biggest victory against the West.
Scott Pelley: In terms of the long-term, would you consider this to be life-altering?
Anonymous: Absolutely life-altering. For our whole family.
“Targeting Americans” statements
Prior to 60 Minutes’ March 31, 2024, broadcast which featured correspondent Scott Pelley’s report on Havana Syndrome, we reached out to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the White House, and the FBI for comments on our story, “Targeting Americans.”
They responded to 60 Minutes with the following statements:
Office of the Director of National Intelligence:
“We continue to closely examine anomalous health incidents (AHIs), particularly in areas we have identified as requiring additional research and analysis. Most IC agencies have concluded that it is very unlikely a foreign adversary is responsible for the reported AHIs. IC agencies have varying confidence levels because we still have gaps given the challenges collecting on foreign adversaries—as we do on many issues involving them. As part of its review, the IC identified critical assumptions surrounding the initial AHIs reported in Cuba from 2016 to 2018, which framed the IC’s understanding of this phenomenon, but were not borne out by subsequent medical and technical analysis. In light of this and the evidence that points away from a foreign adversary, causal mechanism, or unique syndromes linked to AHIs, IC agencies assess those symptoms reported by U.S. personnel probably were the result of factors that did not involve a foreign adversary. These findings do not call into question the very real experiences and symptoms that our colleagues and their family members have reported. We continue to prioritize our work on such incidents, allocating resources and expertise across the government, pursuing multiple lines of inquiry and seeking information to fill the gaps we have identified.”
White House:
“At the start of the Biden-Harris Administration and again following the 2023 Intelligence Community assessment, the White House has directed departments and agencies across the federal government to prioritize investigations into the cause of AHIs and to examine reports thoroughly; to ensure that U.S. Government personnel and their families who report AHIs receive the support and timely access to medical care that they need; and to take reports of AHIs seriously and treat personnel with respect and compassion. The Biden-Harris administration continues to emphasize the importance of prioritizing efforts to comprehensively examine the effects and potential causes of AHIs.”
FBI:
“The issue of Anomalous Health Incidents is a top priority for the FBI, as the protection, health and well-being of our employees and colleagues across the federal government is paramount. We will continue to work alongside our partners in the intelligence community as part of the interagency effort to determine how we can best protect our personnel. The FBI takes all U.S. government personnel who report symptoms seriously. In keeping with this practice, the FBI has messaged its workforce on how to respond if they experience an AHI, how to report an incident, and where they can receive medical evaluations for symptoms or persistent effects.
Produced by Oriana Zill de Granados and Michael Rey. Associate producers: Emily Gordon, Kit Ramgopal and Jamie Woods. Broadcast Associate: Michelle Karim. Edited by Michael Mongulla and Joe Schanzer.
Scott Pelley, one of the most experienced and awarded journalists today, has been reporting stories for 60 Minutes since 2004. The 2023-24 season is his 20th on the broadcast. Scott has won half of all major awards earned by 60 Minutes during his tenure at the venerable CBS newsmagazine.
Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao on Wednesday dismissed the claims of her partner’s role in her administration as “rumors and innuendo” when CBS News Bay Area interviewed her for the first time since the FBI raid on her home June 20.
During the seven-minute interview with CBS News Bay Area anchor and reporter Ryan Yamamoto, Thao largely reiterated what she has said in previous public comments since the raid, declaring her innocence and referring any questions about the investigation to federal authorities.
When asked if the FBI has told her she is not under investigation, Thao replied, “First and foremost, I cannot comment on matters related to an ongoing investigation, but what I can share is that I am not the subject of investigation and I have done nothing wrong. And I expect that there will be an opportunity for us to say more, but not at this time.”
The mayor also reiterated that she is “fully cooperating with the investigation” and added, “If you have other questions about the investigation, I implore you to ask the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office.”
When Yamamoto asked about Thao’s partner Andre Jones and his involvement in the investigation, the mayor replied, “Look, Andre’s my partner and has been for ten years. We love and support one another as many couples do. The question you’re asking relates to what’s being reported and is connected to the investigation, so I can’t comment on that and, again, if you’d like to know more about what is going on in the investigation, you would have to ask the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office.”
Yamamoto continued by asking the mayor if she had spoken with Andre and how he was doing, Thao laughed and said, “Again…you know, that is a personal question, and I will not answer a personal question.”
Yamamoto then shifted his line of questioning to whether Jones has a role in her administration and if he was on the payroll as an advisor, Thao was adamant in her response.
“I think that’s a really funny question. I think I heard that question for the first time yesterday, and absolutely not. I’ve been on the city council. He’s never been on any payroll,” she said. “That’s really easy to confirm. He’s hardly even been in my office. There’s no truth to that at all. It’s just rumors.”
When Yamamoto pressed Thao on the issue, saying that people CBS News Bay Area had spoken with said Jones was a regular presence at city hall and even sat in on some safety meeting, When he asked if that was appropriate, she replied with a laugh.
“Again, I’m not going to address innuendos and rumors,” said Thao. “And that’s exactly what it is: rumors, gossip, innuendos.”
When he said he would like to give Thao and opportunity to respond to those serious allegations, she replied, “They are very serious allegations. Again, not responding to rumors, innuendo, all of that. This is a person telling you a story. So, again, not addressing rumors.”
When asked about her relationship to the Duong family, who also had a home and a business location searched in connection with the FBI raid, Thao said, “Well, as mayor, I meet with a lot of community members and business owners. I take pictures with them and I explore ways they can help the city. That’s what mayors do. Elected officials, we all do that.”
She then referred any specific questions about the FBI raid on the Duong family home and business to federal authorities. When asked if, in light of the investigation, she would consider returning any of the campaign money donated by the Duong family, Thao replied, “You know, at the end of the day, what I’ve been reading in the papers is that they donated to many, many people. What I can tell you is I follow the campaign’s rules, and the campaign rule states that we cannot accept money from people that we are in contract with. And I can tell you, in my campaign in this office, we follow the rule to a T.”
The mayor went on to say that she would “absolutely not” consider resigning in light of the controversy surrounding the raid and the ongoing efforts to recall her, noting that organizers have refused to comply with a subpoena demanding that the recall campaign be transparent about their top donors.
In closing, when she was asked who was paying her legal fees after the changeover in her representation last week, Thao said she that she planned to open a legal defense fund, but also said she was like “anybody else who has to pay for their attorney.”
I was born in Oakland, grew up in the East Bay and went to college in San Francisco where I graduated with a degree in Broadcasting at San Francisco State University (Go Gators!).
Washington — Newly revealed photographs taken by the FBI during its August 2022 search of former President Donald Trump’s South Florida resort shed further light on how the former president kept keepsakes from his time in office alongside documents bearing classification markings.
The photos, some of which had not been publicly released, were included as exhibits accompanying a Monday court filing from special counsel Jack Smith in the ongoing federal case against Trump in South Florida. Prosecutors have accused the former president of mishandling records containing the nation’s secrets after leaving the White House in January 2021 and obstructing the Justice Department’s investigation.
Trump was charged with 40 counts, including the unlawful retention of national defense information, and has pleaded not guilty. His presidential campaign did not immediately return a request for comment on Smith’s latest filing.
The filing from Smith’s office is in response to an effort by Trump to toss out the indictment and suppress all evidence seized during the court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago. More than 100 documents bearing classified markings were recovered by the FBI in August 2022, and 21 of the records underlie counts of willful retention of national defense information that Trump is charged with. In all, federal investigators collected over 300 sensitive government records during their investigation into the former president.
Trump has argued that the FBI agents who executed the search warrant failed to maintain the order of the documents as they were found and did not take photos to show the sequence of records in each box containing them.
The special counsel acknowledged in a May 3 filing that there were some boxes where the documents were not in the same order as they were at the time of the FBI’s search. But prosecutors have contended the alterations were inconsequential to the underlying conduct Trump and his two codefendants are accused of and wrote “where precisely within a box a classified document was stored at Mar-a-Lago does not bear in any way” on the defendants’ ability to properly examine evidence.
Trump’s legal team has claimed that the failure to keep the documents intact and the order maintained violated his due process rights. They accused prosecutors of withholding information about the records’ sequence because it would undercut their claim that Trump knew classified documents were stored in the boxes alongside other personal items and willfully retained them after his presidency.
Smith’s team, though, argued in his latest filing that there is no basis for throwing out the charges against Trump because of a disruption of the precise order of documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.
“Trump personally chose to keep documents containing some of the nation’s most highly guarded secrets in cardboard boxes along with a collection of other personally chosen keepsakes of various sizes and shapes from his presidency,” prosecutors on the special counsel’s team said.
They accused the former president of maintaining the boxes containing sensitive material in a “haphazard manner” and said the FBI agents who conducted the search “did so professionally, thoroughly, and carefully under challenging circumstances.” Smith is separately seeking to bar Trump from making public statements that endanger law enforcement officers involved in the case. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over proceedings, did not seem receptive to prosecutors’ arguments to modify the conditions of his release during a hearing on the matter Monday.
See the photographs taken by the FBI during its search of Mar-a-Lago and included in Smith’s filing:
A photo taken by Walt Nauta, an aide to Trump, included in a motion filed by special counsel Jack Smith on June 24, 2024, showing the contents of fallen boxes stored at Mar-a-Lago spilled on the floor.
Justice Department
A photo taken by Walt Nauta, an aide to Trump, included in a motion filed by special counsel Jack Smith on June 24, 2024, showing the contents of fallen boxes stored at Mar-a-Lago spilled on the floor.
Justice Department
The photos taken by Walt Nauta, an aide to Trump, in late December 2021 show boxes in a storage room at Mar-a-Lago that had fallen over, their contents spilled onto the floor. Nauta was also charged by Smith in the documents case and has pleaded not guilty.
A photo taken by the FBI included in a motion filed by special counsel Jack Smith on June 24, 2024, showing stacks of boxes in the storage room at Mar-a-Lago.
Justice Department
Prosecutors said that one of those fallen boxes, identified in court filings as A-35, contained a classified record that the FBI recovered during its August 2022 search. A photo taken by the FBI during the search shows stacks of boxes, including A-35, in the storage room at Mar-a-Lago, roughly eight months after Nauta sent a text message that included the images of the fallen boxes.
Smith said in his filing that the classified record in box A-35 underlies Count 8 of the indictment, which describes the document as dated Oct. 4, 2019, and concerns “military capabilities of a foreign country.” The record has a “SECRET//REL TO USA, FVEY” classification marking, according to the indictment. FVEY is the Five Eyes intelligence alliance comprised of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
A photo taken by the FBI included in a motion filed by special counsel Jack Smith on June 24, 2024, showing cover sheets added by agents that replaced sensitive documents next to the boxes the records were found in.
Justice Department
A photo taken by the FBI included in a motion filed by special counsel Jack Smith on June 24, 2024, showing cover sheets added by agents that replaced sensitive documents next to the boxes the records were found in.
Justice Department
During the search of Mar-a-Lago, a group of agents and members of the so-called Evidence Response Team reviewed the boxes from the storage room to look for any documents bearing classification markings that were subject to seizure, according to Smith’s team. If such a record was found, the team member removed it, separated it, recorded the box where it was located and replaced the sensitive document with a placeholder sheet, prosecutors explained in their filing.
That placeholder sheet was a preprinted classified cover sheet, but after agents ran out of those cover sheets, they used blank pieces of paper with “handwritten annotations to identify the document,” according to Smith’s filing.
As part of the process, the Evidence Response Team took photos of the documents, with the cover sheets added by FBI agents, next to the box they were found in, prosecutors wrote.
A photo taken by the FBI included in a motion filed by special counsel Jack Smith on June 24, 2024, showing a blue box located in the “45 Office,” which prosecutors said contained documents marked classified.
Justice Department
A photo taken by the FBI included in a motion filed by special counsel Jack Smith on June 24, 2024, showing a blue box located in the “45 Office,” which prosecutors said contained documents marked classified.
Justice Department
A photo taken by the FBI included in a motion filed by special counsel Jack Smith on June 24, 2024, showing a blue box located in the “45 Office,” which prosecutors said contained documents marked classified.
Justice Department
In addition to searching the storage room, the FBI also went through the “45 Office,” which consisted of an anteroom where staff had desks, the former president’s office, a closet attached to Trump’s office, and two bathrooms.
Agents with a filter team, which first looked for any material that might be deemed privileged, found in the closet a “blue, covered, leatherbound box full of various papers, including numerous newspapers, newspaper clippings, magazines, note cards of various sizes, presidential correspondence, empty folders, and loose cover sheets for classified information, as well as documents marked classified,” according to the special counsel’s filing.
The filter team member then alerted the case team, whose agents were investigating the case, that documents marked classified had been discovered in the box, and two agents went through it, the filing states. They found “numerous” documents with classified markings, some of which had classification cover sheets attached, as well as loose cover sheets, the special counsel’s team said.
A photo taken by the FBI included in a motion filed by special counsel Jack Smith on June 24, 2024, showing the contents of boxes at Mar-a-Lago and classified cover sheets positioned alongside the boxes
Justice Department
A photo taken by the FBI included in a motion filed by special counsel Jack Smith on June 24, 2024, showing the contents of boxes at Mar-a-Lago and classified cover sheets positioned alongside the boxes
Justice Department
A photo taken by the FBI included in a motion filed by special counsel Jack Smith on June 24, 2024, showing the contents of boxes at Mar-a-Lago and classified cover sheets positioned alongside the boxes.
Justice Department
Smith and his team argued in his filing that the contents of the boxes belonged to Trump and no one else, and said agents going through them during the Mar-a-Lago search found keepsakes “valuable only to Trump.”
Prosecutors wrote that the boxes “had no apparent organization whatsoever” and contained an array of items: clothing, picture frames, magazines, shoes, newspapers, newspaper clippings, greeting cards, binders, Christmas ornaments and correspondence. Photos taken by the FBI show the boxes and some of their contents to “provide a sense of the variety of items” in them, with classified cover sheets positioned alongside the boxes, according to Smith’s filing.
Melissa Quinn is a politics reporter for CBSNews.com. She has written for outlets including the Washington Examiner, Daily Signal and Alexandria Times. Melissa covers U.S. politics, with a focus on the Supreme Court and federal courts.
FBI agents raided the home of Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao on Thursday, according to a report from The San Francisco Chronicle, a Hearst affiliate.An FBI spokesperson told the Chronicle that they could not provide more information outside of the agency “conducting court authorized law enforcement activity on Maiden Lane.”The Chronicle reports that property records link the home on 80 Maiden Lane to Thao.Video from affiliate KTVU shows no marked vehicles outside the home as of 9:35 a.m. Earlier, agents came and went from a white van with tinted windows.Thao has not returned calls for comment that the Chronicle made earlier. Oakland’s website describes 38-year-old Thao, the city’s 51st mayor, as the first Hmong-American mayor of a major city in the country. She was elected in 2022 and is from Stockton.This is a developing story. Stay with KCRA 3 as we work to gather details.See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app.
An FBI spokesperson told the Chronicle that they could not provide more information outside of the agency “conducting court authorized law enforcement activity on Maiden Lane.”
The Chronicle reports that property records link the home on 80 Maiden Lane to Thao.
Video from affiliate KTVU shows no marked vehicles outside the home as of 9:35 a.m. Earlier, agents came and went from a white van with tinted windows.
Thao has not returned calls for comment that the Chronicle made earlier.
Oakland’s website describes 38-year-old Thao, the city’s 51st mayor, as the first Hmong-American mayor of a major city in the country. She was elected in 2022 and is from Stockton.
This is a developing story. Stay with KCRA 3 as we work to gather details.
CHICAGO — A former DuPage County prosecutor accused of making threats against state lawmakers and the Illinois Attorney General over social media has been charged.
30-year-old Samuel Cundari, who was an Assistant State’s Attorney in DuPage County, has been charged with transmitting in interstate commerce a threat to injure another person, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Central District of Illinois.
Prosecutors say authorities were initially contacted by two Illinois State Representatives on March 17, after they were allegedly tagged in a threatening post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
The post allegedly stated “Our patience grows short with you. The day we put your kids’ feet first into a woodchipper so we can enjoy their last few screams is coming.”
Five other people or groups were also allegedly tagged in the post, including the Illinois Attorney General, and as a result, the FBI began an investigation.
Prosecutors say a couple of days prior, on May 15, a tip came into the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center regarding another post on X that appeared to be in response to an advertisement about the Springfield PrideFest, which took place on May 18.
Prosecutors say the post allegedly stated “I sure hope NOBODY leaves a pressure cooker filled with bail bearings, glass, and nails, filled with diesel fuel and fertilizer, with the over pressure safety valve disabled, near a natural gas line line [sic]. That would be VERY sad and VERY unfortunate.”
According to prosecutors, authorities were able to trace back the two social media posts to Cundari.
Cundari was subsequently arrested and charged.
If convicted, Cundari could face up to five years in prison, three years of supervised release and a possible fine of up to $250,000.
Sex, drugs, and … Eventbrite? A WIRED investigation published this week uncovered a network of spammers and scammers pushing the illegal sale of controlled substances like Xanax and oxycodone, escort services, social media accounts, and personal information on the event management platform. Making matters worse, Eventbrite’s recommendation algorithm promoted posts for opioids alongside addiction recovery events. The good news is, the company appears to have removed most of the more than 7,400 illicit posts WIRED uncovered.
If you drive a Tesla Model 3, make sure to enable your PIN-to-drive feature or your car could be easily stolen within seconds. While the company has added new ultra-wideband radio tech to its keyless system, which can prevent “relay attacks,” researchers at Beijing-based security firm GoGoByte found that Model 3s (as well as other unnamed makes and models of vehicles) are still vulnerable. Relay attacks use inexpensive radios to transmit the signal from someone’s key fob or phone app that can then be used to unlock and start an impacted vehicle. Tesla says its adoption of ultra-wideband radio was not meant to stop relay attacks (even though it technically could), but it’s possible the automaker will add that protection in the future.
Police busting people for running illicit online markets is nearly as old a tale as the dark web itself. But this week’s takedown offered a new twist. The FBI recently arrested Lin Rui-siang, a 23-year-old accused of operating Incognito Market, which authorities claim facilitated $100 million in sales of narcotics on the dark web. US prosecutors claim Lin then extorted Incognito’s users by threatening to expose them unless they paid up. Curiously, Lin’s professional experience includes teaching police how to catch cybercriminals by tracing cryptocurrency on blockchains. If the US Justice Department is correct about his alleged involvement in Incognito Market, that would make him one of the most unusual cybercriminals we’ve ever encountered.
Leaks don’t just impact people on the wrong side of the law, of course. An unsecured database recently exposed biometric data of police officers in India, including face scans, fingerprints, and more. The incident reveals the dangers of collecting sensitive biometrics in the first place.
Finally, the saga of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange inched forward again this week, with a British court ruling that he can appeal his extradition to the US, where he faces 18 charges under the Espionage Act for WikiLeaks’ publication of classified US military information. The judges said that Assange can appeal US prosecutors’ assurances about how his trial would be conducted and on First Amendment grounds. The appeals process will inevitably push back any final decision about his potential extradition for months.
But that’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
Following the trend of tech companies in the AI race throwing privacy and caution to the wind, Microsoft unveiled plans this week to launch a tool on its forthcoming Copilot+ PCs called Recall that takes screenshots of its customers’ computers every few seconds. Microsoft says the tool is meant to give people the ability to “find the content you have viewed on your device.” The company also claims to have a range of protections in place and says the images are only stored locally in an encrypted drive, but the response has been roundly negative nonetheless, with some watchdogs reportedly calling it a possible “privacy nightmare.” The company notes that an intruder would need a password and physical access to the device to view any of the screenshots, which should rule out the possibility of anyone with legal concerns ever adopting the system. Ironically, Recall’s description sounds eerily reminiscent of computer monitoring software the FBI has used in the past. Microsoft even acknowledges that the system takes no steps to redact passwords or financial information.
Federal authorities are reportedly working quietly to establish ties between antiwar demonstrators on US campuses and any foreign groups or individuals overseas, according to journalist Ken Klippenstein, formerly of the Intercept, who says the National Counterterrorism Center is at the center of the effort. Evidence of overseas ties would lend further ammunition to politicians, university officials, and police, who’ve widely claimed “outside agitators” are to blame for the demonstrations—an allegation that’s routinely lobbed at protesters in the United States, often meant to imply that the protesters themselves are dupes. Incidentally, authorities may also overcome constitutional hurdles to surveillance by establishing a foreign target to spy on; someone unprotected by the country’s Fourth Amendment. Republicans in Congress—representatives Mark Green and August Pfluger—have, meanwhile, asked the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to supply congressional committees with records about the government’s surveillance of the protesters, including any efforts to infiltrate them using “online covert employees or confidential human sources.”
The FBI has nabbed a 42-year-old Wisconsin man for using Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image generative AI software, to manufacture child sexual abuse material. The man was reportedly caught with “thousands of realistic images” of children, some featuring them nude or partially clothed with men. Court records indicate the evidence includes more than 13,000 gen-AI images as well as the prompts he used to create the images. “Using AI to produce sexually explicit depictions of children is illegal, and the Justice Department will not hesitate to hold accountable those who possess, produce, or distribute AI-generated child sexual abuse material,” Nicole Argentieri, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, says in a statement. The arrest is part of Project Safe Childhood, a collaboration between the government and corporations reportedly targeting online offenders.
Security researchers this week disclosed to TechCrunch that they’d discovered consumer-grade spyware—often known as “stalkerware”—on the computers of “at least three” Wyndham hotels in the United States, potentially exposing travelers’ personal details. The stalkerware, called pcTattletale, can be installed on Android and Windows devices, giving whoever has control of the sneaky app the ability to access data on the targeted machine and monitor users’ activity. The presence of pcTattletale was discovered thanks to a security flaw in the spyware that exposed screenshots of infected machines to the open internet, according to the researchers. Although the researchers found pcTattletale on Wyndham computers, the hotel company says each of its locations are franchises, suggesting that the spyware infection could be limited to just a few locations.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation may launch a criminal probe into possible fraud allegedly surrounding a now-blocked foreclosure sale of Elvis Presley’s famed Graceland mansion, according to TMZ and Radar.
The outlets reported Wednesday that the FBI had contacted actor Riley Keough‘s team and Graceland officials on Tuesday, allegedly expressing interest in Naussany Investments & Private Lending LLC, the company seeking to auction off the building.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation told The Times via email that it had not received a request to “investigate from the district attorney general in Shelby County, which would be the mechanism for our potential involvement.”
Representatives for Keough did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for confirmation and comment.
Keough filed a lawsuit against Naussany Investments last week, alleging that the company had presented fraudulent documents stating that her late mother, Lisa Marie Presley, had borrowed $3.8 million from the company and “gave a deed of trust encumbering Graceland as security.”
The “Daisy Jones & the Six” star stated in her lawsuit — which asked a judge to block the auction of Graceland and to declare that the documents were fraudulent — that “Lisa Marie Presley never borrowed money from Naussany Investments and never gave a deed of trust to Naussany Investments.”
A Tennessee judge awarded Keough a temporary injunction against the sale on Wednesday. The court also said it would move forward with the fraud case, citing a lack of appearance by Naussany Investments representatives at Wednesday’s hearing and the need for additional evidence from Keough’s lawyers.
After the ruling, a person purporting to be a Naussany Investments representative submitted a statement that said the company would drop its claims on Graceland, the Associated Press reported.
Elvis Presley Enterprises, which manages the Presley estate, told The Times in a statement Wednesday that business would continue as usual.
“As the court has now made clear, there was no validity to the claims,” the statement read. “There will be no foreclosure. Graceland will continue to operate as it has for the past 42 years, ensuring that Elvis fans from around the world can continue to have a best in class experience when visiting his iconic home.”
Keough’s lawsuit, which was reviewed by The Times, said Naussany Investments presented a deed of trust for Graceland and a standard promissory note to the estate via the Los Angeles County Superior Court in September.
The deed of trust contained the signature of Florida notary Kimberly Philbrick, who submitted an affidavit May 8 saying she had no involvement with the documents.
“I have never met Lisa Marie Presley, nor have I ever notarized a document signed by Lisa Marie Presley,” Philbrick’s affidavit read. “I do not know why my signature appears on this document.”
Keough was formally named the sole trustee of her mother’s estate — and, by extension, of Elvis’ estate — in November after settling a legal dispute with grandmother Priscilla Presley, Elvis’ widow.
The message explained that Incognito was now essentially blackmailing its former users: It had stored their messages and transaction records, it said, and added that it would be creating a “whitelist portal” where users could pay a fee—which for some dealers would later be set as high as $20,000—to remove their data before all the incriminating information was leaked online at the end of this month. “YES THIS IS AN EXTORTION!!!” the message added.
In retrospect, Ormsby says that the site’s apparent user-friendliness and its security features were perhaps a multiyear con laying the groundwork for its endgame, a kind of user extortion never seen before in dark-web drug markets. “Maybe the whole thing was set up to create a false sense of security,” Ormsby says. “The extorting thing is completely new to me. But if you’ve lulled people into a sense of security, I guess it’s easier to extort them.”
In total, Incognito Market promised to leak more than half a million drug transaction records if buyers and sellers didn’t pay to remove them from the data dump. It’s still not clear whether the market’s administrator—Lin, according to prosecutors, whom they accuse of personally carrying out the extortion campaign—planned to follow through on the threat: He appears to have been arrested before the deadline set for the victims of the Incognito blackmail.
An Expert in ‘Anti Anti-Money Laundering’
At the same time the FBI says Lin was laying the groundwork for this double-cross, he also appears to have briefly tried engineering an entirely different scheme. In the summer of 2021, during Incognito Market’s relatively quiet first year, Lin’s alleged alter ego, Pharoah, launched a service called Antinalysis, a website designed to analyze blockchains and let users check—for a fee—whether their cryptocurrency could be connected to criminal transactions.
In a post to the dark-web market forum Dread, Pharoah made clear that Antinalysis was designed not to help anti-money-laundering investigators, but rather those who sought to evade them—presumably including his own dark-web market’s users. “Our goals do not lie in aiding the surveillance autocracy of state-sponsored agencies,” Pharoah’s post read. “This service is dedicated to individuals that have the need to possess complete privacy on the blockchain, offering a perspective from the opponent’s point of view in order for the user to comprehend the possibility of his/her funds getting flagged down under autocratic illegal charges.”
After independent cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs wrote about the Antinalysis service in August 2021, describing it as an “anti anti-money laundering service for crooks,” Pharoah posted another message complaining that Antinalysis had lost access to its blockchain data source, which Krebs had identified as the anti-money-laundering tool AMLBot, and that it would be going offline. “Stay posted and fuck LE,” Pharoah wrote, using the abbreviation LE to mean “law enforcement.” Antinalysis eventually returned, however, and pivoted last year to acting instead as a service for swapping bitcoin for monero and vice versa.
Meanwhile, Lin appears to have maintained his obsession with cryptocurrency tracing and blockchain analysis: His final LinkedIn post last week before his arrest in New York announced that he had become a certified user of Reactor, the crypto tracing tool sold by blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis. “I’m excited to share that I’ve completed Chainalysis’s new qualification: Chainalysis Reactor Certification (CRC)!” Lin wrote in Mandarin. His last X post shows a Chainalysis diagram of money flows between dark-web markets and cryptocurrency exchanges.
A day after jurors held the one-kilogram gold bars seized from Sen. Bob Menendez’s home in their own hands, they’ll hear more from the FBI agent who led the search of the New Jersey Democrat’s home in June 2022.
Lawyers for Menendez will continue questioning FBI agent Aristotelis Kougemitros on Friday.
Kougemitros told prosecutors Thursday that his team mostly eschewed the “flashy” FBI trappings when they arrived at the split-level Englewood Cliffs home Menendez shares with his wife, Nadine, to execute a search warrant.
“We came with unmarked vehicles, which we normally have, but we had less of them,” he said. “We didn’t have a large group, which we normally have for a search. We wore subdued markings that identify us. We were sensitive that we were searching the home and executing a search warrant of a United States senator.”
No one was home at the time of the search, so the group of agents typed in the code to the garage, where a black Mercedes-Benz convertible was parked, and entered the house, he said. The FBI agent noted they had to call a locksmith to open several doors in the house, including those to the primary bedroom and its closets.
Kougemitros said the FBI was authorized to look for various items of value and seized 52 items from the home, including cellphones, gold, cash and jewelry.
On the floor of one of the closets, they found a one-kilogram gold bar inside a Ziploc bag that had been wrapped in a paper towel, he testified. In the same closet they discovered a safe containing loose cash, envelopes of cash, seven one-ounce gold bars and another one-kilogram gold bar, according to Kougemitros. Cash was also found elsewhere in the house, he said, recalling finding $100,000 in a duffel bag and tens of thousands more inside boots and jacket pockets.
“The amount of cash that we began to discover was so voluminous that I directed the team that we would no longer be photographing any of the cash; we would be seizing the cash, because I believed it was evidence potentially of a crime,” he said.
There was so much cash, the FBI agent said, that he called in reinforcements. Two FBI agents from Manhattan “brought two cash-counting machines,” Kougemitros said.
In total, the FBI seized 11 one-ounce gold bars, two one-kilogram gold bars and $486,461 in cash, he said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Lara Pomerantz repeatedly called attention to the cash and gold bars that were found in the couple’s home in her opening statement on Wednesday, alleging they were given to the senator by New Jersey businessmen as bribes in exchange for political favors.
On Thursday, while questioning Kougemitros, she showed the jury a photo taken during the search of an envelope that contained $7,400 cash. The envelope was embossed with Fred A. Daibes and an Edgewater, New Jersey, address.
Menendez is being tried alongside Daibes, a New Jersey real estate developer, and Wael Hana, owner of the halal meat company IS EG Halal, who are both accused of bribing the senator. All three have pleaded not guilty.
A third businessman who was indicted, Jose Uribe, pleaded guilty in March and confessed to buying Menendez’s wife a $60,000 Mercedes convertible to influence the senator. Uribe will testify during the trial.
On Thursday, Adam Fee, a lawyer for Menendez, sought to sow doubt about whether the senator had access to the primary bedroom closet where the safe and gold bars were found, questioning the FBI agent about the location of a blue blazer that prosecutors are connecting to Menendez.
On Wednesday, another attorney for Menendez, Avi Weitzman, said Menendez did not have a key to the closet.
Caitlin Yilek is a politics reporter at cbsnews.com and is based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked for the Washington Examiner and The Hill, and was a member of the 2022 Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship with the National Press Foundation.
The FBI-MPD Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force arrested a Silver Spring, Maryland, man in D.C. on Friday who’s accused of sharing child pornography on social media.
The FBI-MPD Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force arrested a Silver Spring, Maryland, man in D.C. on Friday who’s accused of sharing child pornography on social media.
In an indictment, unsealed Friday, Joseph Ruben Baer, 20, was charged with one count of distribution of child pornography.
The task force says they were monitoring a social media app because they believed pedophiles were using it.
According to the Department of Justice, an undercover agent monitoring the app began messaging with Baer on April 18. Baer “expressed an interest in the sexual exploitation of prepubescent boys” and later sent the agent two video files on the app that showed him “masturbating while watching child pornography on a laptop computer.”
Days later, on April 25, a federal grand jury returned an indictment charging Baer.
The task force executed a search warrant on Friday at two residences connected to Baer in Silver Spring, but he was picked up in the District.
Baer first appeared in court later that day. He is being held without bond.
The case remains under investigation. It’s being pursued under Project Safe Childhood, launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. Project Safe Childhood is a national strategy to combat child sexual exploitation.
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They included a Caressa & Francais, dated 1913 and valued at $40,000. A $60,000 Gand & Bernardel, dated 1870. And a 200-year-old Lorenzo Ventapane violin, worth $175,000.
For more than two years, federal prosecutors allege, Mark Meng stole high-end violins across the country — ingratiating himself to vendors by posing as a collector who merely wanted to borrow and try them out, then ghosting those vendors and reselling them to an unknowing violin dealer in Los Angeles.
The 57-year-old Irvine man — who also is accused of robbing a bank with a pithy thank-you note and fleeing in a white minivan — now faces charges of wire fraud and bank robbery, according to a federal complaint filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
A man robs the U.S. Bank on Barranca Parkway in Irvine on April 2, demanding $18,000 from the teller.
(Irvine Police Instagram)
The violin scheme, prosecutors allege, ran from August 2020 through April 2023.
During that time, Meng reached out to violin shops, saying he wanted to take the instruments on loan for a trial period to figure out if he wanted to buy them.
He “gained the trust of these stores by representing himself as a collector, and in some cases, he purchased violin bows before asking for violin trial periods,” the complaint reads.
In each encounter, he allegedly kept the instrument beyond the trial-basis period, “provided excuses” for the delay, and negotiated a price for the violin. He then would send the violin shop a check that would bounce — after which he would send a new hot check, pretend he mailed the instrument back and the mailer carrier lost it, or simply stop communicating.
Meng allegedly stole at least four violins, including a 1903 Guilio Degani worth $55,000, as well as a bow by esteemed bow maker François Lotte valued at $7,500.
In October 2023, Meng was questioned by agents from the FBI regarding the stolen violins.
So, prosecutors say, Meng was aware he was under federal investigation when, on April 2, he allegedly robbed a U.S. Bank branch on Barranca Parkway in Irvine.
According to the federal complaint, Meng was wearing latex gloves, a baseball cap, dark sunglasses, a blue bandanna covering the lower half of his face, and a “USA” T-shirt. Prosecutors say he slid a note to the bank teller that read: “$18,000. — Withdraw. Please. Stay Cool! No harm. Thx.”
The teller told prosecutors that he “appeared to be shaking and nervous,” according to the complaint.
When the teller said she did not have access to that much money, he allegedly said: “Give me whatever you have!”
She opened the cash register and gave him $446, the complaint says.
Meng then allegedly fled in a white Toyota Sienna minivan.
A bank employee returning from lunch captured cellphone video footage of Meng entering the vehicle, the complaint says. Footage also was obtained from surveillance cameras.
The U.S. attorney’s office said in a statement that the FBI’s Art Crime Team investigated Meng with assistance from the Irvine and Glendale police departments.
Meng was arrested April 11 by Irvine police. He told a detective that on the day of the robbery, he went to a casino, Starbucks and Costco.
As detectives searched his home, where they found the “USA” T-shirt, a tenant who lived there told police that Meng liked to gamble.
If convicted, Meng would face a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner and ranking member Jim Himes blasted out invitations announcing a “bipartisan celebration” of the 702 program’s continuation last week. The event, which the lawmakers have dubbed FISA Fest, is being held in a reception room in the US Capitol building Wednesday night.
A House Intelligence Committee spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Turner and Himes were instrumental in preserving the FBI’s warrantless access to 702 data. In countless “briefings” since October, the pair urged members of their respective parties to avoid reining in the FBI’s authority too greatly. Instead, the new procedures designed by the bureau itself were touted by both lawmakers as a sufficient bulwark against further abuse.
Narrowly winning that battle last month, Himes and Turner worked to kill an amendment that would have forced FBI employees to get search warrants before reviewing the communications of Americans swept up by the program. (The amendment, opposed by the Biden White House, failed in a tie vote, 212-212.) Instead, the FBI’s procedures, now part of the 702 statute, require employees to affirmatively “opt in” before accessing the wiretaps. They must also seek permission from an FBI attorney before conducting “batch queries” of the database. And queries for communications of elected officials, reporters, academics, and religious figures are now all deemed “sensitive” and require approval from higher up the chain of command.
Congress established Section 702 in 2008 to legitimize an existing surveillance program run by the National Security Agency (NSA) without congressional oversight or approval. The program, more narrowly defined at the time, intercepted communications that were at least partly domestic but included a target the government believed was a known terrorist. While bringing the surveillance under its authority, Congress has helped to steadily expand the scope of the surveillance to encompass a new slate of threats, from cybercrime and drug trafficking to arms proliferation.
While advocates for 702 surveillance often imply that Americans who are wiretapped are communicating with terrorists—a concoction that Turner himself repeatedly lent credence to this year—the allegation is dubious. Officially, it is the US government’s position that it is impossible to know which US citizens are being surveilled or even how many of them there are. The chief aim of the 702 program is to acquire “foreign intelligence information,” a term that encompasses not only terrorism and acts of sabotage but information necessary for the government to conduct its own “foreign affairs.”
Surveillance critics worry that the array of possible targets extends far beyond what is being characterized in unclassified settings. It is uncontroversial to suggest that the US government—like all governments with the power to spy—finds reasons to spy on foreign allies, businesses, even news publications. So long as the target is foreign, they have no privacy rights.
The limits of the 702 program remain murky, even to congressional members insisting that it should not be curbed further. The Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Mark Warner, acknowledged to reporters this week that language in Section 702 needs to be “fixed,” even though he voted last month to make the current language law.
FISA experts had warned for months that new language introduced by the House Intelligence Committee is far too vague in the way it describes the categories of businesses the US government can compel, fearing that the government would obtain the power to force anyone with access to a target’s online communications into snooping on the NSA’s behalf—IT workers and data center staff among them.
A trade group representing Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft, among some of the world’s other largest technology companies, concurred last month, arguing that the new version of the surveillance program threatens to “dramatically expand the scope of entities and individuals” subject to Section 702 orders.
“We are working on it,” Warner told The Record on Monday. “I am absolutely committed to getting that fixed,” he said, suggesting the best time to do so would be “in the next intelligence bill.”
It is shaping up to be perhaps the biggest case in the history of the UCLA Police Department: how to identify dozens of people who attacked a pro-Palestinian camp at the center of campus last week.
UCLA detectives are now scanning hundreds of images in an attempt to identify the attackers. They intend to use technology that captures facial images and compares them to other photos on the internet and social media to put names to faces, according to law enforcement sources.
The same technology has allowed police to identify suspects in smash-and-grab retail burglaries. It also was the heart of the Jan. 6 investigation, in which videos of those storming the U.S. Capitol helped the FBI identify many of the assailants and led federal prosecutors to charge more than 1,300 people. In those cases, investigators often were able to find social media images of the assailant wearing the same clothing as during the attack.
“Technology has made the entire community into the eyes of law enforcement,” said retired Los Angeles police Capt. Paul Vernon, who led an effort after a mini-riot following the Lakers’ NBA championship victory in 2010 that resulted in dozens of arrests based on videos, social media posts and security footage. “Photo recognition has gotten a lot easier.”
Vernon said an investigator also could gather cellphone data from the immediate area to prove an individual was there at the time of the incident. In some cases, assailants may have posted to their social media accounts, essentially bragging about their actions. Officers wearing body cameras may have also captured some of the behavior, he said.
The attackers likely came in vehicles, so UCLA police will be examining data from license plate readers for movements near campus on May 1. Security cameras on streets neighboring the campus where they likely parked could yield more clues.
On Monday night, Block outlined actions the school is taking in the aftermath of last week’s violence. University police will work with the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office to identify and prosecute the assailants “to the fullest extent of the law,” he said. The university “also connected with the FBI about possible assistance,” Block said in a statement.
Despite the technology, the probe faces hurdles. Some of the attackers wore masks, making it harder to identify them. In those instances, detectives will look for a moment before or after the attack when the perpetrators’ faces were revealed, an official who was not authorized to discuss the investigation told The Times.
There is also deep anger among some protesters in the camp because it took so long for police to stop the attack. That distrust could take a toll. Many of the students who were injured, some of whom were hospitalized with their wounds, have gone to groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations for Southern California but haven’t spoken with campus police.
UCLA is a small police department, so it is reaching out to other agencies and private entities to access the technology needed in the investigation, law enforcement sources said. But so far, UCLA hasn’t made a public appeal seeking information on specific suspects.
In the wake of the Jan. 6 attack, the FBI made arrests based on information from relatives, work colleagues, teammates, former friends and ex-significant others after the FBI released photos of suspects. An army of web sleuths and politically knowledgeable social media watchers known as “sedition hunters” also dedicated themselves to identifying the mob and turning their names over to the FBI.
Images from the UCLA attack are springing up on Instagram. In one case, a man can be seen using a plank to hit a pro-Palestinian protester and then punching and kicking others. Dressed in a black sweatshirt, white sweatpants and a black cap, his bearded face is not hidden. Police can use that image to track him down or ask for help identifying him.
“Holding the instigators of this attack accountable and enhancing our campus safety operations are both critical,” Block said. “Our community members can only learn, work and thrive in an environment where they feel secure.”
The ability of the United States to intercept and store Americans’ text messages, calls, and emails in pursuit of foreign intelligence was not only extended but enhanced over the weekend in ways likely to remain enigmatic to the public for years to come.
On Saturday, US president Joe Biden signed a controversial bill extending the life of a warrantless US surveillance program for two years, bringing an end to a months-long fight in Congress over an authority that US intelligence agencies acknowledge has been widely abused in the past.
At the urging of the agencies and with the help of powerful bipartisan allies on Capitol Hill, the program has also been extended to cover a wide range of new businesses, including US data centers, according to recent analysis by legal experts and civil liberties organizations that were vocally opposed to its passage.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, allows the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), among other agencies, to eavesdrop on calls, texts, and emails traveling through US networks, so long as one side of the communication is foreign.
Americans caught up in the program face diminished privacy rights.
While the government requires a foreign target to commence a wiretap, Americans are often party to those intercepted conversations. And although US attorney general Merrick Garland insisted in a statement on Saturday that the updates to the 702 program “ensure the protection of Americans’ privacy and civil liberties,” and that the government never intentionally targets Americans, the government nevertheless reserves the right to store their communications and access them later without probable cause.
“Section 702 is supposed to be used only for spying on foreigners abroad,” says Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Instead, sadly, it has enabled warrantless access to vast databases of Americans’ private phone calls, text messages, and emails.”
Under the law, the government can retain communications captured by the 702 program for half a decade or more—indefinitely, so long as the government makes no effort to decrypt them.
A trade organization representing some of the world’s largest tech companies came out against plans to expand Section 702 in the final hours of the debate, claiming that a new provision authored by House Intelligence Committee members would damage the competitiveness of US technologies, “arguably imperiling the continued global free flow of data between the US and its allies.”
US intelligence obtains its vast surveillance power through yearly certifications doled out by a secret court. The certifications permit the NSA in particular to force businesses in the US—categorized as “electronic communications service providers,” or ECSPs—to cooperate with the program, collecting data and installing wiretaps on the agency’s behalf.
Years ago, the government sought to unilaterally expand the definition of ECSP under the law, seeking to compel the cooperation of whole new categories of businesses. That effort was beaten back by the FISA court in 2022, in a ruling that stated only Congress has the “competence and constitutional authority” to rewrite the law.
Privacy protocol Railgun denies claims of North Korean hackers or sanctioned individuals using the platform, despite earlier claims from the FBI.
The assertions were initially fueled by a January 2023 statement from the FBI, which implicated North Korea’s Lazarus group in laundering over $60 million in Ethereum through Railgun. The funds were reportedly stolen in a June 2022 cyber attack.
Following the U.S. sanctions on popular crypto mixer Tornado Cash, there were speculations that Railgun was becoming a preferred alternative for such operations.
In a recent statement, Railgun clarified that there is no concrete evidence to support claims of the platform’s misuse by sanctioned individuals or groups, including North Korea.
RAILGUN protocol: “Any suggestion that sanctioned individuals, governments, or entities such as North Korea have used RAILGUN have no evidence & are based only on speculation.” From 2023, all RAILGUN transactions go through a Private Proofs of Innocence check which verifies that…
Railgun is recognized for implementing advanced Zero-Knowledge Privacy protocols that safeguard user transactions on dApps, thereby enhancing the privacy of defi transactions. The platform drew additional attention following a transaction by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who recently transferred 100 ETH, valued at about $325,000, to Railgun.
Arkham data shows Buterin has regularly interacted with the Railgun using small amounts of ETH over the past six months. He highlighted on social media that wanting privacy is normal, noting that measures used by Railgun significantly reduce the risk of malicious parties infiltrating privacy pools.
The ongoing debate over privacy in the crypto space has also seen contributions from prominent figures like Coinbase CLO Paul Grewal, who has been vocal about the necessity for the legal protection of privacy rights. Grewal has argued against sanctions on platforms like Tornado Cash, advocating for the support of open-source privacy software under clear legislative frameworks.
