Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

You can paste full URL like: https://x.com/threadreaderapp/status/1644127596119195649
or just the ID like: 1644127596119195649

How to get URL link on X (Twitter) App

  1. On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
  2. Click again on or Share Via icon
  3. Click on Copy Link to Tweet
  4. Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
  5. More info at Twitter Help
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
@shellenberger
Feb 8, 2023 • 57 tweets • 21 min read • Read on X
TWITTER FILES: CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS

Twitter executives, including fmr FBI lawyer Jim Baker, who served as Twitter Deputy Counsel, are about to testify in front of the House Oversight Committee about their handling of the Hunter Biden laptop

Let's go

BACKGROUND

Rep. Jamie Raskin calls Twitter files “authentically trivial” and "silly," but doesn't address the coordinated effort by the intelligence community to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop, which was in FBI possession since Dec 2019, *before* its contents became public in Oct 2020. Image
Witnesses: Jim Baker, Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth, Anika Collier Navaroli Image
Baker claims he urged caution around the Hunter Biden laptop when in reality he led the charge within Twitter to reverse the finding by Twitter Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth that the NY Post story had *not* violated Twitter policies

Baker repeatedly and forcefully urged Roth and other Twitter executives to censor and thus discredit the NY Post story. After he did so, Roth reversed his decision, and censored the story. Image
Vijaye Gadde, the former general counsel of Twitter, claims that its censorship of the NY Post article was done in line with its policy against hacked materials, but she does not mention that Roth & his team found they were *not* from hacking.

There was extremely strong evidence the Hunter Biden emails were authentic and *not* the result of hacking. The @nypost included a picture of the receipt signed by Hunter Biden and an FBI subpoena proving it had taken possession of the laptop.

It would have taken a few minutes for Jim Baker, Yoel Roth, Vijaye Gadde to confirm whether the FBI subpoena was real or fake. None of them did so.
Yoel Roth, like Vijaye, opens his statement describing content moderation decisions that are not particularly controversial, such as against hate speech. This has been a strategy from many Twitter execs & defenders, including regime media.

The real issue here is disinformation.
"Twitter made a mistake," says Roth, about Twitter's censorship of the NY Post story about the laptop. "I've been clear that in my judgment at the time, Twitter should not have taken action to block the NY Post's reporting." Image
Roth says that Twitter's mistake was due to his memory of Russia's hack & leak of DNC emails in 2016.

He fails to mention that he himself said FBI repeatedly primed him in 2020 to dismiss reports of the laptop as another Russian disinfo operation.

The Democrats put forward a former Twitter exec. as a witness who says, "I was not involved in the decision around Hunter Biden's laptop," which is the main topic of this hearing. She then changes the topic to January 6. Image
.@RepAndyBiggsAZ asks Roth, "Were there experts... you consulted between 9 am and 10:15 am," when Roth reversed his decision.

Roth says, "We were following this discussion as it unfolded on Twitter... and that informed Twitter's judgement"

No mention of Baker.
The witness Anika Collier Navaroli talks about how alarmed she was when Trump called his tweets "little missiles" and argues that Twitter didn't censor enough in advance of January 6.
Roth says he regrets his tweet saying there were "ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE" and that he doesn't think all conservatives are Nazis Image
Gadde says that Hunter Biden never told Twitter that he was a victim of a hack

Gadde says she did not contact Biden's lawyer to ask if the laptop was authentic Image
Baker says that he did not talk to his FBI contacts about the Hunter Biden laptop on October 14, the day the NY Post published its article.

We know that at 3:38 pm that day, Baker arranged a phone call with the General Counsel of the FBI.

Roth says that he has been harassed since leaving Twitter, which is something that I and every other journalist who covered the Twitter Files have condemned publicly and repeatedly.

Nobody should be subjected to the harassment that Yoel Roth was subjected to.
Roth confirms that he was warned in meetings with intelligence agencies and other social media companies that there could be a hack and leak operation involving Hunter Biden, but adds that the Hunter Biden info may have come from another social media firm

Roth does not say which firm that was, but it is notable that when Joe Rogan asked Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg about the Hunter Biden laptop, Zuckerberg said his staff was warned by FBI of a coming Russian hack and dump operation

Roth says FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan said publicly that the documents Chan sent to Roth on the evening of Oct 13 did not relate to the Hunter Biden laptop.

Roth says, "The company made a decision that it did violate company policy. It wasn't my personal judgment at the time that it did. But the decision was communicated to me by my direct supervisor, and ultimately I didn't disagree with it enough to object to it." Image
Roth has confirmed for the first time that he was overruled by his boss, Del Harvey, in censoring the laptop.
Rep. @AOC calls the Hunter Biden laptop "disinformation," which is bizarre. No serious person today denies that the Hunter Biden laptop is real. Multiple news media companies have confirmed that it is real and wasn't tampered with.

cbsnews.com/news/hunter-bi…
Rep. Fry asks Roth about FBI constantly emailing Twitter about foreign interference.

Roth calls the FBI reports "a bit of mixed bag"

Roth says he wouldn't describe FBI as pressuring Twitter, but on Jan 2, 2020 a Twitter exec complained of "sustained (If uncoordinated) effort by the IC [intelligence community] to push us to share more info & change our API policies."

And that same month, Roth resisted FBI efforts to get Twitter to share data outside of the normal search warrant process.

Rep. Dan Goldman claims the first paragraph in the Oct 14 NY Post was "completely false" bc the Ukrainian prosecutor was corrupt, but the NY Post didn't claim he wasn't corrupt, only that Biden pressured the government to fire him.

Not clear what Goldman's talking about Image
Gadde says, "I ultimately approved that decision" to censor the laptop.
.@Jim_Jordan asks Baker if talked to any of the 51 former CIA Directors and other intelligence community officials who claimed the Hunter Biden laptop appeared to be Russian disinformation
Baker says, "I've talked to those people in the course of my career."
Baker: "I don't recall discussing that publication that they did about the Hunter Biden laptop with any of those people."
Rep. @AOC says the "information coming out of the NY Post" was "disinformation," which is bizarre. She seems to be saying that the laptop is not authentic, which is not something any mainstream journalist or policymaker believes anymore.
A committee member asks Gadde, "How is visibility filtering any different from shadow banning?"

Gadde: "I believe there are different definitions of shadowbanning... At that time I specifically defined shadow banning to mean something different than visibility filtering."
But, as @bariweiss reported last December, "What many people call 'shadow banning,' Twitter executives and employees call 'Visibility Filtering' or 'VF.' Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning."

Gadde misrepresented what Twitter was doing.

Roth confirms to Rep. @RepTimBurchett that Twitter neither de-platformed Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei nor removed his Tweet calling Israel "a malignant cancerous tumor... that has to be removed and eradicated"

Image
As background, @bariweiss documented widespread "incitement to violence" and hate speech by major political figures that Twitter did nothing about, even as it moved to de-platform a sitting president.

A committee member asks Roth if the Russian trolls were more on Trump's or Biden's side and Roth says, "We saw Russian operatives playing both sides and often playing them against each other... manufacturing drama."
.@RepBeccaB stresses that the Biden campaign did not demand Twitter censor the Hunter Biden laptop, but that's never been the issue.

The issue is that FBI & intel community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.

The implication of Rep. Balint is that all of this is a conspiracy theory, but when we asked former top CIA media analyst, "So you think the FBI could have been 'pre-bunking' the laptop?" he said, "I don’t think there’s any other possibility."

public.substack.com/p/former-top-c… Image
Rep. Gary Palmer asks how the former Twitter executives justified removing Trump while leaving on Twitter Iran's Ayatollah, who called for the destruction of Israel.

"You understand how hypocritical this is, right?" says Palmer.

None offer a defense of that decision.
In Twitter Files Part 4, I documented how, on January 7, senior Twitter execs created justifications to ban Trump and sought to change policy for Trump alone, distinct from other political leaders

In Twitter Files Part 5, @bariweiss reported that Twitter staff unanimously concluded that Trump had *not* violated Twitter’s policies.

“I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement."

“Don’t see the incitement angle here.”

Anika Navaroli, who is also testifying, agreed, saying, "I also am not seeing clear or coded incitement in the DJT tweet... Safety has assessed the DJT Tweet above and determined that there is no violation of our policies at this time.”

"Navaroli... testified... that the ban came only after Twitter execs had for months rebuffed her calls for stronger action against Trump’s account" — @drewharwell @washingtonpost

washingtonpost.com/technology/202…
But Navaroli, as a Twitter executive, expressed precisely the opposite, stressing that Trump had not, in fact, violated Twitter policies

.@RepArmstrongND notes that, after intense FBI warnings of Russian disinformation, Twitter execs. did not seek to find out if the Hunter Biden laptop the result of hacking.

Instead, they reversed their own evaluation.

Worth watching:
.@RepPatFallon notes that Joe Biden repeatedly denied, while campaigning for president, ever talking to his son, Hunter, about his business dealings and that the Oct 14 NY Post article about the Hunter Biden laptop disproved that.

nypost.com/2020/10/14/ema…
.@RepDanGoldman stresses that people couldn't confirm the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop right away, but a) they could have and b) Roth & his team had already determined there was no evidence it was from hacking before they were overruled by Baker, Gadde, and Harvey
.@Jim_Jordan responds to Goldman:

"You know who knew the laptop was real? The FBI! Maybe they had it for a year and just said, 'You know what? We're gonna put it on the shelf and we're not going to look at it. But if anyone knew it was real, it's them."
Back to shadow-banning

Roth: "It would not surprise me to know that visibility filtering labels had been applied to the accounts of elected officials."

Jordan: "But the user doesn't know?"

Roth: "It was not Twitter's practice to notify users."
Rep @laurenboebert notes that Twitter applied "an aggressive visibility filter" on January 9, 2021, for 90 days, after she tweeted what she says was a joke: "Hillary must be pissed it took the DNC until 2020 to successfully rig an election." Image
@RepLuna accuses Twitter executives of working with the intelligence community and NGOs through the Jira cloud server system to censor tweets and thus violate the First Amendment.
Rep. @ChuckEdwards4NC asks Roth about his participation in an Aspen Institute zoom meeting in June 2020 with reporters and other social media execs. to plan how *not* to cover a potential Russian "hack & leak" relating to Hunter Biden

Rep. Edwards: "Why was Hunter Biden chosen as the subject of this scenario? Just weeks before the October 14th, 2020 publication of the first Hunter Biden story?"

Roth: "I don't know."
.@RepScottPerry : "Do you find it highly coincidental that it actually happened and it was Hunter Biden at all?"

Roth: "My statement does not suggest the FBI told me it would involve Hunter Biden... I think there is a coincidence there and I really can't speak as to how"

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Michael Shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Oct 17
First Brazil and now the EU say they will seize the assets of @ElonMusk's companies. A President Harris would do the same. They know it's illegal. They know it looks bad. They don't care. They know they can't rule the world without mass censorship and total information control. Image
They've been preparing us mentally for weeks, months, and years. Recently it was Gates, Clinton, and Kerry. Before that, it was Obama, Biden, and Harris. Before that it was Aspen, Harvard, Stanford, the UN, the WEF, the EU, and IC intermediaries.

Around the world, legacy media are urging mass censorship. They want the government to transfer wealth from social media companies to them. Their journalist-employees are petty authoritarians filled with status anxiety & envy who are desperate to censor what we can say online.
Read 13 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Oct 16
You might think the war on free speech in other nations has nothing to do with you, but it does. Global elites, including Biden and Harris, are trying to censor the whole Internet. And now the Biden administration is implicated in the persecution of Brazil's free speech leader. Image
Biden Administration Implicated In Brazilian Court’s Attack On Congressman Fighting Censorship And Corruption

Federal Police investigation of libertarian Marcel Van Hattem marks new stage in Lula government’s authoritarian turn
President Joe Biden (left); Congressman Marcel Van Hattem (center); Brazilian President Lula (right)

In March, Public published the “Twitter Files - Brazil,” which revealed demands made by Brazil’s Supreme Court that independent journalists and policymakers, including a 38-year-old libertarian congressman named Marcel Van Hattem, be banned not just from Twitter, today X, but all social media platforms.

Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the same justice who temporarily banned X and froze Starlink’s assets, had accused Van Hattem of spreading election misinformation. And yet the video in question had nothing to do with the election, and had been posted on Instagram but not X.

Since then, no member of Brazil’s Congress has done more to expose censorship by that nation’s Supreme Court and denounce corruption in President Lula’s government than Van Hattem.

Van Hattem’s censorship and his denuciations of corruption have made him famous nationwide. He has become a prominent and popular face of Brazil’s free speech movement. At a recent demonstration against censorship in São Paulo, hundreds of people asked to take selifes with him. On Instagram and on X, Van Hattem has 1.5 million and 1 million followers, respectively.

Now, amid a broad crackdown on free speech, the Lula government appears to be retaliating against Van Hattem. Brazil’s Federal Police are investigating alleged insults made by Van Hattem against one of its officers. They are doing so despite explicit constitutional protection of Congress members' speech.

“This is the first time in history a Brazilian judge has ever ordered the investigation of a member of Congress for something he said in the Chamber,” Van Hattem told Public.
Congressman Van Hattem taking selfies with fans in São Paulo at a free speech demonstration on September 7, 2024 (author photo)

If the Supreme Court finds that Van Hattem knowingly made false claims about Shor, he could face prosecution for defamation or slander.

That would be considered a radical step in Brazil because its courts have respected the separation of powers for decades and have treated Congress’ parliamentary immunity as sacrosanct.

“The Supreme Court has gone after politicians before,” said Van Hattem, “but it hadn’t until now violated the sacred and constitutionally protected right of the people’s elected representatives to speak.”

The Federal Police report says Van Hattem’s speech displayed “a possible purpose…. To embarrass, humiliate, and offend DPF Fábio Shor, all this because he apparently disagreed with his professional investigative performance….”

But Van Hattem’s concern wasn’t merely “performance.” In his August 14 speech, Van Hattem accused Federal Police officer Fábio Alvarez Shor of having produced “several absolutely fraudulent reports against innocent people,” which, if true, are violations of the law.

Legal scholars expressed alarm at the Supreme Court’s violation of parliamentary immunity. “The investigation of @MarcelVanHattem is abusive and unconstitutional,” wrote constitutional law expert Andre Marsiglia on X yesterday. “Article 53 of the Federal Constitution states: ‘any words spoken by congressmen are inviolable.’”

The exact language of Article 53 is “Deputies and Senators enjoy civil and criminal inviolability [immunity] on account of any of their opinions, words and votes.”

That broad protection, Marsiglia says, includes alleged insults of the police.

As such, the Lula government and Supreme Court risk fueling the anti-corruption and pro-free speech movements and undermining their own legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Why is that? And given that Van Hattem has been denouncing the Lula government and Supreme Court for years, why did they decide to go after him now?Image
Image
Please subscribe now to support our defense of free speech and to read the rest of the article!

Image
Read 5 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Oct 15
The media say we must give the government more power to fight misinformation online. We must not. The only way to fight misinformation is through free speech. What the media really want is the power to censor us. And it's easy to see why: very few Americans trust them. Image
For years, governments and mainstream media corporations worked hand-in-glove to censor social media platforms. After @elonmusk bought Twitter, that changed. Ever since, they've been on the warpath, demanding the power to censor X and demonizing the First Amendment. Image
Brazil, Canada, and Australia show where this is all headed. They are working to shake down social media platforms to pay off mainstream media they control. It's censorship in service of propaganda. Their goal is total control over the information environmentImage
Image
Image
Image
Read 12 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Oct 12
California regulators have blocked @SpaceX launches because they disagree with @elonmusk's politics. This is a blatant violation of the First Amendment and a gross abuse of power, even in increasingly totalitarian California. Image
The California Coastal Commission rejected SpaceX's proposal to increase rocket launches for political not environmental reasons. Just look at what they said

— “We’re dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race,” said CCC Chair Caryl Hart.

— “This company is owned by the richest person in the world with direct control of what could be the most expansive communications system in the planet,” said another commissioner.

— “Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] while claiming his desire to help hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” said another one.
All California regulators take their cues from California Gov. @GavinNewsom.

As such, this could be payback by Newsom, who has been at war with @elonmusk ever since Newsom signed legislation that makes it easier for teachers to brainwash children into believing they are the opposite gender and can change their sex through drugs and surgery.

x.com/shellenberger/…
Read 5 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Oct 10
The media says CBS didn't do anything wrong in editing what Kamala Harris said on "60 Minutes." But it did. It made her sound articulate. By contrast, in 2020, CBS "60 Minutes" made Trump look ridiculous by *falsely claiming* Hunter Biden's laptop couldn't be verified. Image
AP basically admits that "60 Minutes" made Harris sound more articulate but then insists it was done with the best of intentions. But the 2020 interview and the misinformation "60 Minutes" spread shows that CBS was completely biased.Image
Image
Here is the false claim by Stahl that the laptop couldn't be verified.

Read 14 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Oct 8
The US government says it is not hiding a secret UAP (UFO) program. But dozens of whistleblowers say it is. And now, a new whistleblower has come forward to reveal what the government is hiding, including the name of the secret program, which is revealed here for the first time. Image
Pentagon Is Illegally Hiding Secret UFO Program From Congress, Whistleblowers Allege

New government whistleblower reveals, for the first time, the name of the Unacknowledged Special Access Program (USAP) for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs)
General Lloyd Austin testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing to be the next Secretary of Defense on January 19, 2021. (Photo by GREG NASH/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
_________________________________________

One of Congress’ most important responsibilities is oversight of the executive branch in general and the military and Intelligence Community (IC) in particular. The first article of the United States Constitution specifies this responsibility. This role ensures that powerful governmental entities operate within the bounds of the law, uphold democratic principles, and remain accountable to the American people.

This responsibility extends to classified programs like Special Access Programs (SAPs). By law, the Department of Defense (DOD) must notify the “Gang of Eight” (the chairpersons and ranking members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, and the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate) and/or the relevant congressional committees about their existence.

The National Security Act of 1947 requires that covert operations and Compartmentalized Access Programs (CAPs) by intelligence agencies, including the military intelligence community, be reported to Congress. Specifically, the President must provide a written finding that justifies covert action and submit it to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

While the military and IC may limit the amount of detail shared with Congress, the Constitutional and legal responsibility remains. Sunshine remains the best disinfectant. Readers are, of course, welcome to disbelieve the whistleblowers and the evidence they provide of UAPs. I do not claim to know what they are.

There is, however, a growing body of evidence that the government is not being transparent about what it knows about UAPs and that elements within the military and IC are in violation of their Constitutional duty to notify Congress of their operations.

Over the last four days, a Pentagon spokesperson repeatedly promised to respond to Public’s questions but did not do so. We will update this article with their response should they decide to provide one.

— Michael

_________________________________________

There is no evidence that any non-human or extra-terrestrial intelligence has visited Earth, according to a May 2024 report by the office the Pentagon created in 2022 to study unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), formerly called UFOs.

The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office AARO “assesses that the inaccurate claim that the USG is reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology and is hiding it from Congress is, in large part,” the report concluded, “the result of circular reporting from a group of individuals who believe this to be the case, despite the lack of any evidence.”

The former Director of AARO has since resigned his position and has repeatedly dismissed and ridiculed the topic, claiming that talk of the phenomenon is due mainly to a small group of individuals in the grip of a rumor-based religion.

But critics say that AARO’s 63-page history of the US government’s investigation into UAPs since the end of World War II was riddled with factual errors and poor referencing, including to Wikipedia. And the document was missing historical information that appeared in the 117-page “UAP Timeline” document created by a former or existing US government intelligence officer that Public published last year.

Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under President George H. W. Bush, wrote a lengthy rebuttal, concluding, “this is the most error-ridden and unsatisfactory government report I can recall reading during or after decades of government service.”

And major political figures, including Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, have vouched for the credibility of UAP witnesses and whistleblowers.

“I’ve interviewed solid people,” said former president Donald Trump in September, “great pilots for the US Air Force, et cetera, they’ve seen things that they cannot explain.”

Former President Donald Trump being interviewed by his son, Don Trump, Jr., about UAPs

Trump has said repeatedly that the government has information about UAPs that it has not released. In 2020, during a podcast with his son, Donald Trump, Jr., Trump said, “I won’t talk to you about what I know about it, but it’s very interesting.”

In June of this year, Trump said that the government has information about UAPs that it has not released. "I have access,” he said, “and I speak to people about it. I've had actually meetings on it. And they will tell you there's something going on.”

In 2021, former CIA Director John Brennan said, “I think some of the phenomena we may be seeing continue to be unexplained and might be some type of phenomenon that results from something that we don’t yet understand and could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”

The same year, the current Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, said UAPs could constitute human intelligence (NHI).

In 2023, a high-ranking former intelligence officer named David Grusch testified to Congress that the US government had retrieved spacecraft of nonhuman origin and bodies, which US government insiders told Public was accurate.

In July 2022, the Intelligence Community Inspector General concluded that Grusch’s complaint that “elements” of the IC had withheld or hidden UAP-related information from Congress “to purposely and intentionally thwart legitimate Congressional oversight of the UAP Program” was both “credible” and “urgent.”

At the time, Charles McCullough III, the first Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, who the US Senate had confirmed for his job in 2011, represented Grusch.

That does not mean that extraterrestrial beings occupy or are operating the UAPs, nor that the US government and military contractors are hiding crashed alien spacecraft or bodies, as some former astronauts, former IC officers, and former military leaders claim.

There are other explanations for UAPs. Current dominant alternative theories, including those put forward by AARO, are that UAPs are some kind of natural phenomenon we don’t yet understand, like ball lighting or plasma. They could also be part of some new US or foreign government weapons program, such as drones, aircraft, balloons, CGI hoaxes, or birds.

Other UAP skeptics say that some combination of government disinformation and social contagion, like the Satanic panic of the 1980s or the Salem witch trials, among UAP believers in the US military are driving the phenomenon.

Is it possible that the Pentagon and CIA are still playing disinformation games with the American people to cover up unacknowledged programs? Or that intelligence and security agencies, as well as politicians, are creating a UAP hoax to frighten the public? And is it possible that whistleblowers are fabricating parts or all of their testimony?

The US Air Force allegedly used disinformation against a UFO buff in the past to cover up a weapons program. Something similar could be happening today.

However, no available evidence supports that theory. And so, while this possibility should not be ignored, for it to be true, it would require a complicated conspiracy with unclear motivations.

As Senator Rubio noted last year, “Most of [the UAP whistleblowers] have held very high clearances and high positions within our government. So, you do ask yourself: What incentive would so many people with that kind of qualification – these are serious people – have to come forward and make something up?”

Rubio also said that individuals in “high clearances and high positions within our government” with “firsthand knowledge” of UAPs were “fearful of harm coming to them.”

Grusch and other UAP whistleblowers say the government retaliated against them and tried to stop them from going public.

Last year, Senator Gillibrand said, “There's a lot of fear and so I don't know if we'll ever get to the bottom of it. I don't know if we'll ever get the information about Special Access Programs that are ‘need to know,’ only that Congress has not [been] read in on. I'm trying to get to the bottom of it.”

The training and experience of many UAP witnesses and whistleblowers, including in the US IC and military, undermine facile dismissals of all these individuals as cranks and grifters.

In 2021, John Ratcliffe, the Director of National Intelligence under former President Trump, said that UAP demonstrated “technologies that we don’t have and, frankly, that we are not capable of defending against.” And, Ratcliffe said, U.S. intelligence analysts had “high confidence” that foreign adversaries were not behind the famous “Tic Tac” UAP that four Navy Pilots encountered over the water.

Last October, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the DOD published their 2023 Annual Report on UAPs. It said that “many reports from military witnesses do present potential safety of flight concerns, and there are some cases where reported UAP have potentially exhibited one or more concerning performance characteristics such as high-speed travel or unusual maneuverability.”

Finally, many videos and photographs cannot be easily dismissed, and people have reported similar UAPs before drones, aircraft, and CGI existed or were widespread.

And now, existing and former US government officials have told members of Congress that AARO and the Pentagon have broken the law by not revealing a significant body of information about UAPs, including military intelligence databases that have evidence of their existence as physical craft.

One of these individuals is a current or former US government official acting as a UAP whistleblower. The person has written a report that says “the Executive Branch has been managing UAP/NHI issues without Congressional knowledge, oversight, or authorization for some time, quite possibly decades.”

Furthermore, these individuals have revealed the name of an active and highly secretive DOD “Unacknowledged Special Access Program,” or USAP. The source of the document told Public that the USAP is a “strategic intelligence program” that is part of the US military’s family of long-standing, highly-sensitive programs dealing with various aspects of the UAP ‘problem.’”

Public is revealing its name here for the first time.

Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative journalism and to read the rest of the article!

x.com/shellenberger/…Image
Image
Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative journalism and to read the rest of the article at the link below!

Read 13 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

Send Email!

:(