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Susan Crabtree

@susancrabtree

Nov 5

🚨🚨🚨 Important 🧵Both the @StateDept and the @FBI spent several weeks in late August and early September refusing to answer my questions on whether there was a member of the Diplomatic Security Service, @StateDeptDSS the agency that protects our dignitaries abroad, including Secretary of State Antony Bilnken, who was being investigated for spying -- wittingly or unwittingly -- for Iran.

Now we know, thanks to John Schindler, in the substack piece below, that my inquiries were spot on -- and the FBI and the State Department were refusing to confirm my reporting. The man in question, as Schindler revealed yesterday, is Lawrence Casselle.

Casselle served as the DSS regional director for the Near East (2023-24), but I'm told is now on an administrative or work-from-home leave pending the FBI investigation.

He served as chief of staff to the current Diplomatic Services director from from 2021 to 2023 and even as Donald Trump's White National Security Council director for counterterrorism from 2019-2020. He is being accused of having a romantic affair with an Iranian spy. I was told in late August by sources in the DSS community that it was likely an Iranian "honey pot" investigation.

But my question is a very relevant one today, Election Day. Why did the Biden-Harris administration work so hard to block my reporting on the DSS Iranian spying incident -- to flat-out refuse to answer my repeated questions about it during the height of the election campaign and right after Kamala Harris received her nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago? For months, the administration had been facing Iranian spying allegations against senior officials, including Robert Malley, Biden's Iran envoy.

My questions were incredibly pressing at the time because we were learning more about the Iranian assassination attempts against former President Trump - and the Diplomatic Security Services works with the Secret Service often when foreign dignitaries are in the U.S. In fact, the two agencies were working quite closely at the time to prepare for the United Nations General Assembly in New York, an annual event in which the city is flooded by thousands of foreign leaders. This year those dignitaries included Iranian Vice President Javad Zarif. You'll remember that Trump complained that the Secret Service made him scale down an outdoor rally in Wisconsin in late Sept. and move it inside because so many Secret Service were being diverted to help with security for the U.N. General Assembly, including for protection for Zariff and his team.

"We were in Wisconsin yesterday, and except for the fact that the administration would not let us have—we had 50,000, maybe more people, and we were going to do an outdoor rally, and we ended up having to do it inside, in front of about a thousand people," Trump said.

"But they didn't want me to be outside. They said they couldn't get us enough people because they were guarding the United Nations and Iran."

At the time of those remarks, Sen. Chuck Grassley was reporting in granular detail about an FBI investigation into an Iranian plot to kill Trump. In fact, on July 12 -- one day before the assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., the FBI arrested Asif Merchant, a Pakistani national who had recently spent time in Iran plotting Trump's assassination in a safe house. I was on several television and radio shows and podcasts speaking about this Iranian plot against Trump during those late summer weeks.

I will post screenshots about my inquiries and responses from the FBI and the State Department in the links below.

Questions to the FBI and non-response from Aug. 26.

My inquiry to the State Dept on Aug. 29.

Read 9 tweets

Susan Crabtree

@susancrabtree

Sep 5

🚨🚨🚨 BREAKING NEWS on IRANIAN THREATS against Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Nikki Haley and other politicians and top U.S. officials.

@ChuckGrassley releases new information on the Iran-backed assassination plot against Donald Trump -- and says the Iranian threat against the country is far larger than just targeting Trump.

Unclassified records Grassley has obtained reveal that Iran-backed plotters discussed potentially targeting American "politicians, military people or bureaucrats" including Trump, President Joe Biden, and former presidential candidate Nikki Haley.

Asif Merchant, a Pakistani native with Iranian ties who the Justice Department has charged for his involvement in the scheme, provided the evidence in an FBI proffer agreement.

Grassley has provided the FBI proffer agreement here:

“Bad actors are determined to wreak havoc on our country, and American political leaders across both parties are sitting squarely in the crosshairs. In this extraordinarily heightened threat environment, federal agencies ought to be laser-focused on building up public trust and reassuring the American people of their efforts to carry out their protective missions,” Grassley said in a statement. “I won’t stop pressing for answers until Congress and the American people are afforded the transparency they deserve.”

👉👉Just last week I wrote about this Iranian threat and how some U.S. protective agencies have been penetrated by Iranian assets-- I will provide the URL for that story in a link to this post.

Full Grassley press release below:grassley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/…

Here's the story I wrote on 8/26/24:

Is Iranian Spying Hurting Efforts to Protect Trump, Harris, Biden?

realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/…

🚨FBI DOC RELEASED BY @ChuckGrassley REVEALS DETAILS OF IRANIAN PLOT TO ASSASSINATE TRUMP:

This FBI proffer (write-up of an interrogation) with Asif Merchant, the Pakistani man with Iranian ties whom the FBI arrested on July 12th (one day before the Butler rally) includes a detailed plot to target Trump at a rally with Merchant and another individual at a Iranian "safe house" discussing the pros and cons of trying to shoot Trump at an indoor vs. an outdoor rally and detailed descriptions of the security - i.e. the Secret Service protection at each type of event.

Here's the full proffer.
grassley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/…

Read 5 tweets

Susan Crabtree

@susancrabtree

Aug 14

🚨🚨BREAKING: Secret Service Dir. Rowe is addressing the whole agency right now in a conference call and is pressing for a complete "paradigm" overhaul and is advocating for major budget increases.

Says the idea/mindset that we're going to ask you to do more for less is over. "We can no longer operate with that mindset."

"We can no longer wear our people down."

"We have to win the day every day.... We have to be in state of readiness to be able to meet environment."

"I look at Butler as an opportunity also to examine our own paradigm, to examine our own methodologies, to challenge our assumptions, to look at the new dynamic threat environment in which we're operating in, to look at the demands in which we're placing on our people.

"We're rising to this moment. And so I see this as also not only a challenge, but an opportunity for us to make improvements to learn from this so that it never happens again."

(cont.) Rowe says people are now getting the message that we can't "max-out" our people and not compensate them for it.

Says USSS special agents and employees "who have great love for their country and great love for what they do, candidly, the way we work people it's just not sustainable."

"And people are hearing that now. They are grasping it, and we are making that case now."

He's also outlining new technology and new interoperable and sophisticated communications plans.

I'll outline those in this email.

‼️‼️ Rowe, in powerful, humble and earnest remarks, is now "telling employees to build each other up, not tear each other down."

"Look at your brothers and your sisters and the people who left and right of you. you're in this situation with you right now -- build them up -- be better teammates."

"President Lincoln said a house divided will fail -- We have to have unity and singular focus as an organization right now."

👉👉Just before those comments he asked everyone to do some introspection:

"One thing that want to talk to you about is this: Imagine if you had a family member, maybe your father, your mother or sibling or spouse, and they've dedicated their lives to being a core professional. They...become a special agent or uniformed division officer.

"They've made contributions, but somehow, one day, they show up to work, and somehow their co-workers now viw them differently. They view them as inferior. They view them as not being significant contributors to what we're trying to do."

"If that was somebody special to you, I'm pretty confident you would be upset by that."

"I have been saddened by some of the comments that have been directed at our agency, some by people who actually carried the same commission...that I did, or that you do. But we cannot allow that toxicity to creep into our culture."

Ends his remarks by saying: "God bless you, and thank you for your time."

Read 7 tweets

Susan Crabtree

@susancrabtree

Aug 12

🚨🚨 EXCLUSIVE: A Secret Service special agent partially responsible for developing the plan to secure the rally where former President Trump was nearly assassinated is under internal agency investigation for POSTING VIDEOS AND PHOTOS FROM HER PROTECTIVE ASSIGNMENTS TO SOCIAL MEDIA, according to several sources within the Secret Service community.

The female agent served as the official site agent for the July 13 event in Butler, Pennsylvania, that ended in an assassination attempt that nearly killed Trump and the murder of rallygoer Corey Comperatore in front of his family. RealClearPolitics is not naming the agent out of concern for her personal safety,

👉👉Dissension, ‘Toxicity’ Plagued Trump’s Secret Service Detail Before Assassination Attempt realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/…

👉👉An RCP analysis of the Butler rally site agent’s Facebook account found a photo that appears to be taken from Mar-a-Lago looking across the intercoastal waterway.

“A sunset to be grateful for …” the post states, including a heart and sunset emojis and the hashtags “#nofilter #southflorida #thankful #workmode …”

Sources familiar with the videos said most appeared on the agent’s Instagram account, which is marked private.

‼️ Rancor, recriminations, and serious formal misconduct complaints have plagued all levels of the Secret Service detail assigned to protect former President Donald Trump over the last year, distracting the team from its core mission of securing Trump from physical harm and preventing an assassination.

Trump’s regular detail team, a force of 60 employees – special agents and support staff – has been beset by internal division, long workdays and weeks, and constant stress.

👉Last year, the team lost one of its members to suicide.

Read 6 tweets

Susan Crabtree

@susancrabtree

Aug 11

🚨🚨Re-Upping this story of mine from 2017 that somehow got lost in the reporter frenzy over “Russiagate” — Obama Admin Did Not Publicly Disclose Iran Cyber-Attack During 'Side-Deal' Nuclear Negotiations freebeacon.com/issues/obama-a…

Same “spear-phishing tactic” as the one reportedly used against the Trump campaign.

👉👉State Department officials in the Office of Iranian Affairs on Sept. 24, 2015 sent an email to dozens of outside contractors. The email alerted the contractors that a cyber-attack had occurred and urged them not to open any email from a group of five State Department officials that did not come directly from their official accounts.
"We have received evidence that social media and email accounts are being compromised or subject to phishing messages," the email, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, states. "Please be advised that you should not open any link, download or open an attachment from any e-mail message that uses our names but is not directly from one of our official accounts."
"We appreciate learning of any attempts to use our names or affiliations in this way," stated the email. Shervin Hadjilou, the public diplomacy officer in the Office of Iranian Affairs, sent the email and cc'd four other State Department officials who deal with Iran issues, including one cyber-security expert.state.gov
state.gov

While doing initial reporting on the story at the @dcexaminer the year before - in 2016 - I too was hacked by s bizarrely fierce spear-phishing operation. I felt stupid at the time, but it was an extremely deceptive tactic. The Washington Examiner had to give the entire workforce a mandatory tutorial on cyber security afterward. Remember @susanferrechio @DavidDrucker — @alweaver22 were you there yet?

Read 5 tweets

Susan Crabtree

@susancrabtree

Jul 29

🚨 WHY did the Secret Service COMMAND CENTER not tell its agents to prevent Trump from going on stage?
After reviewing the local Butler-area law enforcement's After-Action Report, (critical timeline attached to this post), it's still unclear to me if they were communicating with the Secret Service command center or a local command center at 5:45 p.m. when they were sending photos of Crooks to a Beaver County ESU group chat, then recommends they alert "command."

If local law enforcement sent the photos to the Secret Service Command Center, there's no way they should have let Trump out on that stage.

‼️One possible reason for letting Trump go on stage, I'm told from a source within the Secret Service community, is that the USSS Command Center is constantly getting flags of suspicious people --even though pics of Crooks were sent to the Secret Service Command Center at around 5:45 p.m., no one had seen a weapon yet -- so Crooks was flagged as a problem but not a "threat."

From a source within the Secret Service community: “A ‘suspicious person’ on the far outer perimeter where 8 cops are looking for him does NOT make me or 99% of agents keep a former or current President off the stage.

If the suspicious person was already on the roof?
“Yes, we hold [Trump].”

Has a gun? “Yes, we hold.”

Is running from police? -
“Maybe a hold.”

Read 4 tweets

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