🚨🚨🚨SCOOP: New whistleblower docs show Jane Roberts, who is married to SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts, made $10.3 million placing lawyers at elite firms —
NEW: Hunter Biden asked for a retainer of, um, $2 million per year, plus 'success fees', to help unfreeze money belonging to the Libyan govt. This was 2015, while his father was still VP. Read the emails here...
Click on the story to see the line-item spreadsheet of her commissions.
At least one of the firms that paid Jane Roberts — WilmerHale — later argued before SCOTUS. John Roberts did not recuse, and voted in favor of WH’s client.
NEW: I spoke with two ex-CIA officials who gave a blow-by-blow account of how the Bush administration misrepresented their intel and knowingly lied to the US public.
I went to Paul Manafort's apartment.
Ate my first ham sandwich.
Got him to admit for the first time that he passed Trump campaign data to a suspected Russian asset.
Here are 8,000 words about it, no paywall...
New CBO report: The poorest *half* of America -- ~150 million people -- hold only *2 percent* of the country's total wealth
Wealth of top 10 percent has grown markedly since 1989
That tiny little line at the bottom of this chart is half the country
🚨🚨🚨 SCOOP 🚨🚨🚨
Exclusive: A veteran FBI agent told Congress that investigations into Giuliani and other Trump allies were 'suppressed'
@thisisinsider
interviews new FBI whistleblower and obtained the leaked disclosure they made to Senate Judiciary
We've updated our Hunter Biden story with email hard copies, which are *not* from the laptop, and have been *independently confirmed*.
The emails show that
@JoeBiden
's son asked for $2 million to help unfreeze money belonging to the Libyan government.
NEW: Daniel Penny of West Islip, NY is the 24-year-old Marine veteran who killed Jordan Neely on the subway, a former law-enforcement source confirmed to Insider /
@thisisinsider
.
Thank you,
@_katya_long
@TheNewsHam
for letting me pitch in a bit.
My first Insider piece is live, on BILLIONAIRE PHILANTHROPY. If you pay taxes, you are subsidizing billionaires out of your own pocket to pursue their benevolent passions. And don't confuse philanthropy with charity. I'll explain the difference below...
NEW: An anonymous Twitter employee gave me a firsthand look at what it's like inside the company right now. There's fear, uncertainty, and a looming culture war...
Caveats: Deal didn't wind up happening. Emails aren't from the famous laptop -- I obtained them through another source during the course of reporting on something else.
Also, here are some sirens 🚨🚨🚨
🚨NEW: Today, Insider is publishing diagrams that show a doomsday tunnel complex underneath Putin's Black Sea palace.
Power and ventilation systems show how long he's been prepping for the worst — existential conflict with the West. w/
@carrierana22
🚨🚨🚨NEW —>
@NeriOxman
, spouse of the self-styled plagiarism cop
@BillAckman
, didn’t just plagiarize from other scholars. She also lifted passages from Wikipedia.
Yes, Wikipedia.
More scoopage from my colleagues
@ByKLong
@TheNewsHam
@narimesp
For a few hours yesterday, the consensus seemed to be that Russian missiles had likely struck a member of the NATO alliance.
That incendiary allegation hung on the word of a single, anonymous "senior intelligence official."
Amateur negotiator: I will buy it for $54
Master negotiator: I will buy it for $54 ... no wait, I need a few weeks to humiliate myself in public and through legal discovery ... make it stop yes I will buy it for $54
Last Saturday, on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the FBI declassified a document that could transform everything that we think we know about the Saudi govt's alleged links to the attacks.
For the full story, click below. Here's a brief 🧵.. /1
There's a lot about 9/11 that we still don't know. Consider Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national who got two of the hijackers situated in San Diego. Was he working for Saudi intelligence? Yes he was, according to newly declassified FBI docs... 🧵/1
NEW: My 4,000-word profile Charlie McGonigal.
McGonigal used to be the FBI's top NYC spy-hunter. He had top-level access to classified intel.
Now he's accused of illicitly taking Russian money, among other things... /1
The NYT has found the officials most responsible for failing to act and stop the exploitation of migrant children for cheap labor. There are two:
-- Susan Rice @ White House
-- Xavier Becerra @ HHS
Essential accountability reporting by
@hannahdreier
...
New US military training document calls socialists a "terrorist" ideology and lists them alongside "neo-nazis" amid Pentagon crackdown on domestic extremism, per counterterrorism training material leaked to me:
NEW: So, I texted Tucker Carlson. He texted back. He said he was running for president. I asked him for some backup. Then he says he was only kidding. But ... he won't rule out a run. Also, he's "fundamentally a dick" — his words.
How did FBI learn about the McGonigal/Russia problem?
After McG's girlfriend revealed a bag of cash and envelopes, some guessed that she tipped them off.
She says she emailed FBI in 2019.
But now we know that the FBI was onto McGonigal before that.. /1
There's a lot about 9/11 that we still don't know. Consider Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national who got two of the hijackers situated in San Diego. Was he working for Saudi intelligence? Yes he was, according to newly declassified FBI docs... 🧵/1
🚨🚨🚨SCOOP🚨🚨🚨
For
@thisisinsider
, I talked to former FBI agent Charles McGonigal's ex-lover about his cash-fueled double life. Here is what she told me...
I don't want to say that Andy flat-out lied to me during our initial 2017 phone calls about Cambridge Analytica. So hard to know if spokespeople are being mendacious, or are just out of the loop.
Regardless, nothing he says about a breaking crisis should be taken at face value.
Just pointing out the fact that
@FrancesHaugen
did not work on child safety or Instagram or research these issues and has no direct knowledge of the topic from her work at Facebook.
So, I am not thrilled by the Jan 6 report.
It fails to answer how the US govt did not see this coming. That makes me wonder whether we've gotten anywhere since 9/11. Can the US nimbly respond to an imminent threat?
Story here, I'll add notes below... /1
I was inside the DC foreign-policy "Blob" for 5 years. I wrote an essay about the experience, why the US keeps going to war, who really drives those decisions, and who benefits. Just for tonight, it's outside the paywall...
SCOOP: Nearly ONE BILLION dollars in cash and gold was smuggled out of Afghanistan through a single border crossing during the months before the govt's collapse. Documents show involvement of senior Afghan officials. With
@EdrisLutfi
..
Some late-night texts with
@TuckerCarlson
, wherein he says he is indeed running for president, then says he is just kidding about that, then says he is "fundamentally a dick." Story here...
🚨🚨SCOOP: In 2018, British authorities alerted FBI about a meeting between spy chief Charles McGonigal and a Russian who was under surveillance, in London.
Female soldier was allegedly sexually assaulted by *22* other troops at the Army training base in Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, Pentagon official tells me.
Video of the incidents has been circulating among servicemembers.
CIA's position — the one that Bush either ignored or failed to hear — was that Al Qaeda could strike anywhere and at any time, and that all US citizens were potential targets.
Warnings do not get clearer than the August 6 PDB entitled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike US" /3
Just to give you an idea of the scale of Trump's Chinese IP empire, I'm going to post the full list of his China trademarks here.
Here are 50+ Trump China trademarks, everything from hospitals to insurance to restaurants to hotels.
And that's just the first four pages.. /7
Stunning investigation by
@TheNewsHam
about what passes for normal inside NYPD — officers use city resources for their lucrative side hustle, running a private security company in Midtown North.
NYPD knew. So did
@NewYorkStateAG
. Nobody did a thing.
That document is just the tip of the iceberg.
Here's a list of other urgent warnings that the Bush White House received in the spring and summer of 2001, from
@philipshenon
's "The Commission" ... /4
Yesterday, Congressional Democrats urged Biden to change how the US kills people from the air. Here's my story about where thing stand👇
I also want to recap how much we've learned from
@nytimes
.
To be blunt, the Pentagon is out of control... 🧵 /1
The $10.3 million is absolutely news — click on the piece and you’ll see new documents that back it up.
Whether this is misconduct isn’t my call to make. I don’t make it.
The people deserve to know about the financial entanglements of SCOTUS, just like the rest of govt.
I've carefully reviewed this retread "scoop." The hit piece presents not a scintilla of evidence of misconduct by Chief Justice Roberts. The Chief Justice and Mrs. Roberts deserve an apology.
On a colleague's advice, I would like to add something to yesterday's Charlie McGonigal story. Here goes...
Guerriero recalls having dinner with McGonigal and Shestakov, and seeing S hand manila envelopes to McG both before *and* after McG retired from the FBI in fall 2018.
Earlier today,
@SenatorDurbin
requested that FBI Director Christopher Wray brief the Senate Judiciary Committee and answer some hard questions about Charles McGonigal...
Well, the story that Bush tells about the numerous pre-9/11 warnings that he received is both self-serving and flat-out wrong.
Here, Bush claims that CIA Director George Tenet said that the Al Qaeda threat was "overseas."
No. That's not at all what Tenet or the CIA said... /2
Bush's maneuvering to escape blame for 9/11 — winning a second term despite having presided over such a devastating failure — is one of the shrewdest tricks in presidential history.
Here👇is the story of how he did it. /13-end
NEW: A story about the Nord Stream mystery.
Much attn has been paid (and rightly so) to a sailing yacht, the Andromeda. German investigators think it was involved in the sabotage.
But there's a 2nd vessel you should know about — the Minerva Julie... 🧵/1
There's more background in the piece, below.
Also: This idea that Bush bears some direct responsibility for 9/11 after having ignored numerous warnings is not some fringe view.
At least it wasn't in 2004... /6
Let's talk about GAIN-OF-FUNCTION RESEARCH, which I wrote about 👇here👇.
*Some* GoF takes deadly pandemic-potential diseases and seeks to make them ... even deadlier.
You'd think the US govt would want to keep a tight leash on that. They don't... /1
When it comes to mass surveillance, we tend to focus on the threat of top-down totalitarianism and underestimate the threat of data-empowered loons conducting search-and-destroy missions as they root through our private lives.
@janawinter
has the goods...
Some news — I'm now chief national security correspondent
@thisisinsider
.
Please keep sending tips and story ideas.
And if you know something worth knowing, I'm always happy to get together in person — Philadelphia, NYC, DC, or elsewhere.
🚨NEW: So
@BillAckman
, that thrower of plagiarism stones, has been living in a glass house.
His spouse
@NeriOxman
's dissertation contains passages plagiarized from other scholars, without attribution.
Major scoop here from
@ByKLong
and
@TheNewsHam
...
Either Clarence Thomas's behavior deviates from current SCOTUS norms, which would be a scandal.
Or it doesn't deviate from current SCOTUS norms, which would be an even bigger scandal.
The risk of Russia initiating a nuclear conflict in Ukraine is very real—particularly when it comes to shorter-range, lower-yield "tactical" nukes. My latest...
Here👇is
@maureendowd
on Bush's deafness to the Al Qaeda threat in 2004.
Bush has said at times that the warnings lacked specificity. That's not an excuse for inaction. Dowd is entirely right — how much specificity do you need?
/7
Or, if Bush really wanted to know CIA's take on the possibility of an Al Qaeda attack on US soil, he could have consulted Tenet's public testimony.
Here is Tenet on the Hill in 1999... /5
@DavidCornDC
Yes. Great work, David.
And it gets even crazier. McGonigal's ex-girlfriend told me that he had a second phone for encrypted comms, and that he accepted manila envelopes from a former Soviet diplomat over dinner while he was still at FBI ....
For
@thisisinsider
, I got a firsthand account from inside a Mexican troll farm, operated by none other than Yevgeny Prigozhin, aka "Putin's chef," that targeted the 2020 US election
#WagnerLeaks
...
Next week, I'll be joining
@thisisinsider
as a senior correspondent, writing 🔥analytic features🔥 -- big arguments driven by data and reportage. Very psyched by this chance to zoom out and roam around. Your ideas/tips are always welcome. 🎉
Actually they're being charged with felonies for (allegedly) traveling to Russia, meeting with a cut-out acting on behalf of Russia's security services, and knowingly acting as agents of Russia after returning to the US.
Try reading the actual indictment next time
This is an absolutely remarkable - and chilling - indictment. Several American black leftist groups and activists are being charged with felonies for posting memes and other political content against the war in Ukraine, protesting racial injustice: allegedly on behalf of Russia:
If you wanted to make the argument that official misinformation is far more dangerous than misinformation propagated by rogue actors, this example would be a good place to start.
For Insider, I dug into the case of Imaad Zuberi, a political superdonor and VC who faces a 12-yr prison sentence. He also claims to be a CIA asset, according to docs. The CIA cxn isn't confirmed but I think it should be taken seriously. Here's why... /1