🚨 NEW EMPOWER OVERSIGHT RELEASE
FBI Director Christopher Wray is testifying before @JudiciaryGOP tomorrow. Members will rightly want to ask the countless questions about the FBI's investigation into the attempted assassination. But the FBI also needs to be held accountable for targeting @GOBactual for something they know he didn't do.
empowr.us/ahead-of-wray-… It started with this May 2022 video. In it, @JamesOKeefeIII interviews a masked FBI agent who disclosed facts showing DOJ misled the public in its court filings claiming it didn’t view @Project_Veritas
as a media organization.

Watch the @GOPoversight hearing right now here. oversight.house.gov/hearing/oversi… Comer: This tragedy was preventable…USSS has a zero-fail mission—but it failed.

🧭 Here’s the thing:

If Kim Cheatle’s goose wasn’t cooked the moment a would-be assassin came within centimeters of killing former President Trump…

Or once the Secret Service put out a statement like this was just a “crisis averted” instead of their biggest protective failure since 1981…

It most DEFINITELY was cooked as soon as she approved the Secret Service’s spokesman putting out a tweet like the one below.

Here’s why. 🧵 Anyone familiar with the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) would not be surprised AT ALL by the allegation that Trump’s security detail requested additional resources. Site agents often ask for more resources and are told to make do with what they have. (I’ll post more about that tomorrow in advance of the Cheatle hearing.)

So the USSS spokesman denying so strongly what was almost inevitably bound to have at least SOME truth to it—and to have multiple people who could attest to that truth—was a pretty big crisis communications strategic failure. 🧨

🧵 As the Kim Cheatle resignation countdown continues (not if, but when), here are some important things to keep in mind about the future of the Secret Service, which has one of the most important missions in the entire federal government. Every country requires the ability to protect its head of state from assassination—especially countries with democratic elections, where candidates vie to serve as head of state.

All countries have a security force to perform this function, and ours is the U.S. Secret Service (USSS). The one mission we cannot allow them to fail at is keeping the current, former, and future presidents safe.

8 years ago @MHowellTweets and I wrote a 200-page report for @GOPoversight that covered in detail several Secret Service security failures, such as how USSS allowed an armed guard on an elevator with President Obama who had a criminal history of three arrests with misdemeanors—including shooting at and hitting a fleeing vehicle with a 3-year-old in the backseat.

As bad as those and other details were, they were just symptoms of a much larger breakdown in the USSS. Clearly their leadership hasn’t learned its lessons, and a massive overhaul is still needed.

https://twitter.com/gopoversight/status/672279357365157889

🚨🚨 Today I sent this letter to Congress alerting them to a new FBI whistleblower @EMPOWR_us is representing—a registered Democrat who served as a supervisor in the FBI’s Security Division—who further substantiates the concerns we’ve had for two years: the FBI was using security clearance suspensions and revocations as a tool to push (usually conservative) employees out of the FBI, regardless of the facts. empowr.us/wp-content/upl… The new whistleblower, who is choosing to remain anonymous to the public (the FBI knows exactly who he is), confirms that SecD routinely asked employees about their coworkers’ personal political or medical beliefs, which @EMPOWR_us first revealed to the public three weeks ago.

https://twitter.com/empowr_us/status/1800351708687782156

"The crimes found by the jury were committed on October 12, 2018, and were fully known to law enforcement within less than two weeks when the gun was recovered after the defendant’s then-girlfriend — the wife of his late brother, whom he’d also gotten hooked on crack — took the Colt Cobra .38, which he’d illegally purchased while lying on the required federal form, and recklessly discarded it in a trash bin near a school, out of fear that in his drug-addled state he’d hurt himself or others. If the defendant’s name had been Robert Hunter Smith, any normal federal prosecutor would have prosecuted him for these crimes by early 2019, if not sooner — and there’d have been no concerns about the Secret Service mysteriously intervening to make the damning evidence disappear." "The defendant was named Robert Hunter Biden and the federal prosecutor was the abnormally political David Weiss, so the prosecution took six years — and if Weiss and the Biden Justice Department had had their way, it wouldn’t have happened at all."

🚨🚨 These records the FBI produced to @JudicialWatch showing the FBI's coordination with House Democrats to smear our clients are a HUGE deal: .

When Marcus Allen, @RealStevefriend, @GOBactual and I testified before @JudiciaryGOP's @Weaponization on May 18, 2023, we strongly suspected the FBI or DOJ had coordinated with Democrats on the Judiciary Committee.

That's why @EMPOWR_us filed this FOIA request with DOJ the day of that hearing for DOJ communications with one staffer for Ranking Member Nadler: .

It looks like the problem was worse than we thought.

Let's walk through the timeline of how this played out... 🧵judicialwatch.org/documents/jw-v…
empowr.us/wp-content/upl… Throughout February 2023, @JudiciaryGOP conducted bipartisan transcribed interviews of several FBI whistleblowers as part of @Weaponization’s investigation into the politicization of the FBI.

Rather than focusing on the substance of the whistleblowers’ disclosures, Judiciary Democrats spent most of those interviews talking about tweets, press interviews, or other First Amendment activity the whistleblowers had engaged in.

It seems doubtful that Democratic staff spent hundreds of hours poring over podcast interviews with @kyleseraphin to find the material, raising the question of where they obtained it.

“‘The defendant’s laptop is real (it will be introduced as a trial exhibit) and it contains significant evidence of the defendant’s guilt’… Hines underscored that the laptop data…is ‘self-authenticating’ and will be ‘introduced with corroborating evidence at trial.’”

https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1793389476523266196

This is a doozy of a filing. "[D]efense counsel demonstrates...despite claiming they do, they actually have no evidence to give them 'reasons to believe that data has been altered and compromised before investigators obtained the electronic material." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

“In 2021, AUSA Leslie Wolf told investigators they could not pursue Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris as a witness based on information she received from the CIA. Investigators were never provided the same information that AUSA Wolf received.” gop-waysandmeans.house.gov/chairman-smith… See SSA Gary Shapley’s affidavit about this here. gop-waysandmeans.house.gov/wp-content/upl…

🚨🚨 Today IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler have taken the extraordinary step of filing a motion to intervene in Hunter Biden's lawsuit against the IRS in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Read why below... 🧵 courtlistener.com/docket/6780378…
They filed it so they can do what the IRS has failed to: make clear that their protected disclosures were legal, pursuant to whistleblower protection laws, and critical to safeguarding the principle of equal treatment under the law regardless of party or familial relationship.

🚨🚨 BREAKING: This morning the legal team of IRS Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley referred to @JusticeOIG and DOJ OPR the conduct of Special Counsel David Weiss for attacking the IRS whistleblowers' reputation by leading the world to believe they were under investigation.🧵 Weiss's March 11 filing in the CA criminal case against Hunter Biden opened with an attack on the IRS whistleblowers, comparing their conduct with that of Hunter Biden's. (In a subsequent hearing, Weiss's office referred to the whistleblowers as "hyenas, baying at the moon.")

🚨 This morning @JusticeOIG released a memo citing concerns about DOJ's compliance with whistleblower protections for employees with a security clearance. The review was in part prompted by the whistleblower complaint of @EMPOWR_us's client, Marcus Allen. oig.justice.gov/news/doj-oig-r… @JusticeOIG @EMPOWR_us Mr. Allen is an employee of the @FBI. According to the DOJ OIG report, the FBI waits on average 17.5 months between suspending an employee's security clearance and making a final decision on whether to revoke it or reinstate it. (That doesn't count any time spent appealing.)

This is a big one to watch... @EMPOWR_us "is asking a federal court to unseal documents related to the Justice Department’s subpoenas of the personal phone and email records of members of Congress and during the Trump-Russia investigation." foxnews.com/politics/watch… @EMPOWR_us Those subpoenas included my partner, @EMPOWR_us's founder Jason Foster. At the time of the DOJ subpoenas, he was the chief investigative counsel to our former boss, @ChuckGrassley, leading oversight of the Trump-Russia investigation. So DOJ had *zero* business seeking his coms.

🧵: @EMPOWR_us has submitted a FOIA request to the FBI for more information about sexual misconduct and other inappropriate behavior by Michael Christman, head of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division. The FBI describes CJIS as a "high-tech hub in the hills of West Virginia," and it houses programs like the National Crime Information Center, National Instant Criminal Background Check System, Bioterrorism Risk Assessment Group, and more. fbi.gov/services/cjis

Congress should have a strong interest in defending the tax whistleblower provision *it created* at 26 USC 6103(f)(5) ("Disclosure by whistleblower"), which allows those with access to confidential taxpayer information to blow the whistle to @WaysandMeansGOP or @SenateFinance.

https://twitter.com/RepMattGaetz/status/1773017984547627506

@WaysandMeansGOP @SenateFinance The provision was added by the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998. Why was it introduced? "The [Senate Finance] Committee believes that it is appropriate to have the opportunity to receive tax return information directly from whistleblowers." congress.gov/105/crpt/srpt1…

Today at 1 pm PT there is a hearing on Hunter Biden's various pre-trial motions to dismiss.

His attorneys have thrown everything but the kitchen sink at the government in an effort to get the charges dropped. On February 20 they filed *8* motions to dismiss on various grounds.

(They also filed a "motion to strike surplusage" because they didn't like that the indictment referenced "Mr. Biden's 'extravagant lifestyle' and other gratuitous descriptors," as they put it.)

Special Counsel Weiss's office has done a good job knocking down most of Abbe Lowell's silly arguments. But there is one area where Weiss's interests are aligned with Hunter Biden's: not being happy about IRS Special Agents Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler blowing the whistle to Congress. So we'll be watching to see if that manifests itself in today's hearing.

It's already outrageous that after the IRS whistleblowers highlighted how Weiss and his office had allowed political pressures to infect their decisionmaking, Weiss was still appointed Special Counsel. There is no way he can impartially examine the misconduct OF HIMSELF AND HIS OWN OFFICE.

Now, Weiss and his team may be tempted to use today's hearing for CYA on that front, but it would be *entirely* inappropriate for Weiss's office to be opining to Hunter Biden's lawyers or Judge Scarsi on the propriety of the IRS agents blowing the whistle. Weiss has way too much personal skin in the game. Meanwhile, in another case dealing with some of the same issues...

https://x.com/tristanleavitt/status/1773030125090529422?s=20

🚨 Note the irony that the FBI says Marcus Allen’s family isn’t allowed to accept small-dollar charitable contributions because of government ethics rules…

Yet Joe Biden’s family can receive millions of dollars from corrupt foreign actors and everyone pretends that’s ok.

https://twitter.com/jsnfostr/status/1762517710380957786

When we noted to the FBI that the funds were raised to support Marcus’s family in a time of need, rather than tied to his FBI duties in any way, this is where they pointed us…

[Can’t indirectly accept a gift because of a family member’s relationship to a government official.]

"In contrast to the Russia-collusion hoax, which rested solely on the Steele dossier to paint Trump as a Putin patsy, evidence of Biden family corruption is comprehensive, diverse, and comes from their own mouths, texts, emails, and loyalists." thefederalist.com/2024/02/26/dem… "So it’s appalling to see the Biden corruption deniers’ manipulation of the Smirnov indictment to launch another Russia-collusion hoax, promising the American public that the entirety of the Biden corruption scandal and Hunter Biden’s legal problems is a Russian disinformation campaign designed to interfere in the 2024 presidential election."

🚨🚨🚨 @EMPOWR_us has learned through whistleblowers within ATF that at the direction of the White House, ATF has drafted a 1,300 page document to justify a rule effectively banning the private sale of firearms. 🧵 @EMPOWR_us The whistleblowers say the rule is being drafted by Senior Policy Counsel Eric Epstein, who worked as the Phoenix Field Office's Division Counsel during Operation Wide Received (a precursor of Operation Fast and Furious).

It's been two years since the FBI suspended Marcus Allen's Top Secret security clearance merely for questioning FBI Director Chris Wray's congressional testimony. This American patriot been in limbo without pay almost ever since as he's appealed. empowr.us/empower-oversi… On the eve of Marcus and me testifying before the @Weaponization Subcommittee in April 2023, the FBI leaked information about his clearance suspension to the @nytimes. It included new, demonstrably false allegations the FBI had literally never even asked Allen about before.