I wonder if it’s because so many of us lost faith in the federal government after its absurd overreactions, bad public health policies, and demonstrable lies respecting COVID, or is it just the passage of time and changes at the top making it harder to keep secrets, but this week both the FBI and CIA are in the line of fire.
The CIA
Sixty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the National Archives and Records Administration has finally released over 13,000 records in its possession relevant to that tragic event. Some 3% of the records are still being hidden from us. Why? So many years have passed and so many of the key figures have passed away it seems hard to imagine a benign explanation. The event was always the subject of theories critical of the official line. Truth to tell, one need not have been a conspiracist to question it. To take just a single example, the single-bullet explanation never stood up to analysis in my view. And that’s just one part of the story. After the record release, Tucker Carlson reported that someone with “direct knowledge” of the still-withheld records states the CIA is connected to the assassination. (The agency had at that point some expertise in political assassinations, having engaged in them in the Congo, Dominican Republic, South Vietnam, and Chile.) Adding fuel to the fire, Robert Kennedy, Jr., nephew of the assassinated president, indicated he suspects the agency had a hand in it, and asked, “What are they hiding?” He added, that this assassination was a “successful coup d’etat from which democracy has never recovered.”
Adding to the mystery, Mike Pompeo, former CIA Director, declined to appear on the show to discuss the withheld records and the charges against the agency. If the claim is true, it’s difficult to understand the motive, although President Kennedy was critical of the agency and publicly said he planned to dismantle it.
The FBI
As the records of Twitter are being released by the new owner, Elon Musk, the FBI seems to have run that platform, manipulating public discourse, undercutting then President Trump, and affecting the 2020 election outcomes, along with other things like the public health response to COVID. The most easy-to-read summary of the latest document releases is at Townhall where Matt Vespa puts the evidence in a very readable form.
Former New York Times op-ed writer Bari Weiss, former Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi, and others have posted lengthy threads on Twitter ironically detailing the discriminatory behavior that we have railed against for the better part of a decade. Spencer had the latest drop on this story yesterday.
The endless troves of documents have shredded the claims that the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice operate as impartial entities. That’s no longer the case -- these agencies are now geared toward influencing public opinion at the behest of their Democratic Party overlords. They’re the only ones who benefit from this system of state-sponsored censorship. Taibbi described the FBI-Twitter relationship perfectly as one of “master-canine” (via SubStack) [emphasis mine]: We’ve long known about those analytical processes, but the Twitter Files show something new. We now have clear evidence that agencies like the FBI and the DHS are in the business of mass-analyzing social media activity -- your tweets and mine, down to the smallest users with the least engagement -- and are, themselves, mass-marking posts to be labeled, “bounced,” deleted or “visibility filtered” by firms like Twitter. The technical and personnel infrastructure for this effort is growing. As noted in the thread, the FBI’s social media-focused task force now has at least 80 agents, and is in constant contact with Twitter for all sorts of reasons.
The FBI is not doing this as part of any effort to build criminal cases. They’ve taken on this new authority unilaterally, as part of an apparently massive new effort to control and influence public opinion.
Vespa reminds us that the FBI not only used Twitter to influence public opinion, but it lied about Russian Collusion, scotched any inquiry into Hunter Biden’s laptop, which evinces massive illegal activities by the Biden family, and raided Trump’s Florida home on “shoddy and spurious legal justification.”
How closely bound was the Twitter hierarchy with the FBI? So close that it’s easy to see how this hand-in-glove censorship operation was successful for so long. It was not just once-FBI and Twitter general counsel James Baker, whom Musk fired after finding that he was delaying the release of records showing the unconstitutional use of the platform to censor government critics. “Twitter’s top ranks were riddled with ex-FBI agents and executives stitching the company even closer to the federal agency now under fire for leaning on Twitter to meddle in the 2020 elections.”
To take a few examples: Dawn Burton, who “served as deputy chief to FBI boss James Comey,” was Twitter’s director of strategy, operations, and counsel organization.
As a Comey insider, Burton would have been close to the agency’s Hillary Clinton email investigation as well as its probe into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. She continues to serve in her role after Comey’s ouster in May 2017 and the appointment of special Counsel Robert Mueller.
And then there was Jeff Carlton, who had previously worked for both the FBI and CIA. He led “Twitter’s tragic Response Team of 50+ employees/agents in resolving the highest-profile Trust & Safety escalation.”
Who elected these agencies and people to govern us? How much more of this corruption will be uncovered? Who benefited from the assassination of JFK and the election of Joe Biden and presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson (whom, incidentally, the released records reveal had, indeed, been a member of the KKK)?
I have lots of questions heading into the new year, with little certainty of answers, but I have no reservations in wishing you Happy Hanukah, Merry Christmas, and a wonderful New Year. I’m doing it early because I will be away for most of it, and truth be told we all need some respite before what looks to be a very difficult and contentious 2023.