I worked in a district attorney’s office in Massachusetts. We did several electronic intercept investigations along with other investigations each year. Obviously secrecy is essential during most of these. The files relating to them were under the control of the lead attorney. Those who knew of them and had access to them were only people who had a need to know about them. I’m sure after reading that you think well that is obvious.
Unfortunately, the FBI does not think it is obvious that crucial information be made available only to people with a right to know about it. As best as I can tell access to whatever is being done by some agents is available to all other agents and perhaps, for all I know given this sloppy procedure to all the FBI staff. After all, we knew that clerks in the FBI office in Boston knew that Whitey Bulger was John Connolly’s informant.
I am at a loss to understand how the FBI is able to control any investigation when knowledge of them is widespread throughout the Bureau. Knowing this one can only despair about any important information that is in the FBI’s possession and it is not hard to assume that those who have nefarious plans on America likewise have access to this information.
The recent charges against suspended FBI Agent Kendra Kingsbury shows the FBI’s total inability to protect our nation’s secrets. Kendra was an FBI agent out of Kansas City for 12 years until she was suspended in December 2017 for reasons not disclosed. It is alleged by the Justice Department that from 2004 to December 2017 she was taking highly sensitive information from the FBI, bringing it to her home and storing it there. She had no need to have or to know anything about this information but she was able to purloin it by copying it and removing it to her home during her twelve years with the FBI.
We are left in the dark as to why she was doing this. We have to wonder what type of security the FBI has that she could do this over so many years. We have no knowledge when the FBI first knew about it. Was it back in 2017 when she was suspended?. Is this another one of those cases where the FBI did nothing because it did not want to embarrass the FBI as I wrote about in my book Don’t Embarrass the Family?
An agent from the FBI’s counterintelligence unit said: “The breadth and depth of classified national security information retained by the defendant for more than a decade is simply astonishing.”
What to me is astonishing is that she could do this. The Justice Departent prosecutor said: “Our community’s safety and our nation’s security were jeopardized by this criminal behavior.” What exactly did she have?
“The first count of the federal indictment accuses Kingsbury of stealing secret information about government efforts to defend the nation against counterterrorism, counterintelligence and cyberthreats, and included details about open investigations.” Theses were said to include “sensitive information about national security investigations, intelligence gaps regarding hostile foreign intelligence services and terrorist organizations, and the FBI operations to defend the country against counterintelligence and counterterrorism targets.”
The second count “accuses Kingsbury of stealing secret documents containing details about intelligence sources and methods used by the government to collect information on terrorists and terrorist groups, including al-Qaida and suspected associates of Osama bin Laden, and information about emerging al-Qaida groups in Africa.”
It seems to me that having had this happen heads should roll but we hear nothing about that so nothing will change. I would think that this would be national news with editorials demanding a full accounting of how this happened and can happen. Where is the Fourth Estate – @nytimecramer, @washingtonpost, @maddow, @foxnews? Unfortunately, we cannot say we are in good hands if this is how the FBI is still operating.
I don’t think it was FBI agents. I think it goes a little higher up the chain of command than that. As Matt pointed out, “it was the FBI (Agents Morris and Fitzpatrick) who told the Globe that Whitey was an informant in 1988.” But this was not a Bureau supported move, and the FBI put pressure on the Boston Globe and the reporters, not to publish that.
“The agent told me that, ‘It’s not true, and that if you report something that’s not true Whitey will not live with that.’ He said, ‘He would think nothing of clipping you, Kevin [Cullen], and you know — you lived there.’ ”
https://www.npr.org/2013/02/25/172012353/whitey-bulger-bio-profiles-bostons-most-notorious-gangster
The Globe published the story anyway, but Bulger survived it with his gangster cred in tact. People were not persuaded until his trial in 2013. They introduced his informant case file as evidence. Evidence of what? And they had people giving sworn testimony as to whether or not he was an informant.
If someone has a different explanation for putting Bulger on trial for being an informant, other than to put a target on his back, I would like to hear it.
So the question is: Why? Maybe Bulger knew things that could cause problems for them. Of course if he was killed in prison right away then people would remember that he had been outed, and quite robustly, as an informant at his trial. But after five years people forget, and the newspapers are certainly not going to remind them.
Did anyone raise objection at the time? If Bulger’s lawyers objected, it would look like an admission of guilt. So did the Boston Globe write an editorial taking the prosecution to task for endangering defendant, Whitey Bulger? No, but then eight years later they want to get to the bottom of it, with some safely far away Bureau of Prisons, and without mentioning how it was that Bulger was found guilty of being an informant in the first place, right in Boston.
Did Bulger know anything about the Gardner heist? His lawyer says he did and was willing to divulge it in exchange for better treatment, and he was slain a few weeks later.
But I would like to see some kind of proof on that to be convinced. Thirty years of the Feds being completely squirrely about the Gardner heist case means it is a sensitive topic area, one that they are not going to want to get into in open court in a civil case.
On the other hand, one of the things that the government has been squirrely about, when it comes to the Gardner heist case, is Whitey Bulger himself.
In 2011 Stephen Kurkjian reported in the Globe: “Former FBI agent John Connolly, who handled Bulger as an FBI informant, has written in letters to a reporter that after leaving the agency’s Boston office in 1990, his former bosses asked him to approach Bulger about the Gardner crime.
“Bulger didn’t just leave the Boston office, he left the FBI entirely. He retired. And he retired in December of 1990, nine months after the Gardner heist. At the time of the Gardner heist, Connolly was still attached to the Boston office, and still Whitey Bulger’s handler for nine months.
An Agent who worked the case, Thomas McShane, wrote in his book, “Loot”
“Another Boston agent was in tight with Bulger, who was actually a long-time FBI informant dating back to when he was a street punk. That extremely rare inside connection nonetheless failed to produce any worthwhile information.”
Book excerpt:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/heist-century-444219.html
Why was the FBI dispatching retirees to interview a gang leader and former informant? One possible explanation is that there was local pressure to question Bulger and something other kind of non-local pressure to not question Bulger.
In 2013, Mike Nikitas asked SAIC DeLauriers about questioning Bulger regarding the Gardner Heist.
Mike Nikitas: Whitey Bulger got arrested a year and a half ago, have you ever talked to him about this, asked him whether he knows anything about it [the Gardner heist]?
SAIC DeLauriers: No.
Nikitas You haven’t?
SAIC DeLauriers: No.
And you think it wouldn’t be worth doing that?
SAIC DeLauriers: No. There’s no connection to the Bulger investigation.
Nikitas:Does he, maybe he knew of the theft?
SAIC DeLauriers: There’s no connection to the Bulger investigation. Time: 4:03
https://www.necn.com/news/politics/_necn__broadside__gardner_museum_heist_necn/1957743/
Strange. Maybe Bulger was always a potential problem and five years after his trial, (for being an informant) he had reached his expiration date. Maybe it was Gardner heist related, or something else he was offering (threatening) to talk about.
As far as the media, goes I think it was more of a carrot than a stick approach, at least that is what is plain for me to see. When you consider what Flemmi and Bulger gained from being high echelon informants, and how much misiformation and spin is out there, it sure seems like there are tangible benefits to being a high echelon disinformant.
My concern is our media landscape, not Rembrandt’s only seascape. There are other cases where the Boston Globe’s coverage concerns me. The Varsity Blues case, the Probabtion Department case, the State Senator Brian Joyce case (no known relation) and the Boston Calling case.
Example:
‘After aides’ trial ends in guilty verdict, what’s next for Marty Walsh?’
Boston Globe August 7, 2019
“The swift verdict cast a chill across City Hall Wednesday, an inescapable scarlet letter for a mayor who takes pride in his union background and has hoped his current perch could carry him into higher office. ” Was there “a chill” or were people steamed? Eighteen months later, the Boston Calling case was not mentioned one time through Walsh’s nomination and appointment as Secretary of Labor in the Globe.
All news media is adulterated with some disinformation. But unless there is a clear ideological agenda behind it, journalists do not hold each other into account. If you can keep disinformation to a minimum, people are more likely to know it when they see it. You can’t have people exercise critical thinking only when it is convenient, when the facts are on your side.
Kerry
Angela Clemente is now going after the FBI
Files on their informant Jeffrey Epstein
See
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2157491/Angela-Clemente-reveals-FBI-informants-committed-mafia-murders-working-witnesses.html
FBI informants collected hundreds of thousands of dollars as government witnesses ‘while continuing to commit murder for the mafia’
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
PUBLISHED: 00:50 EDT, 11 June 2012 | UPDATED: 01:50 EDT, 11 June 2012
In other news
Yes, remember Morris deliberately leased Bulger’s et alia TEI names hoping the gangsters would kill them, so they could not testify that Morris was accepting bribes from bad guys . . .So Morris, the attempted murderer, was given an obscene lenient deal from Fred The Fed Wyshak as a bribe from Fred the Fed to persuade Morris to testify the way Wyshak wanted him to testify . . .remember prior to John Connolly’s first trial, Morris was still withholding relevant info, but Wyshak and his cohorts, Durham, Spencer, you know who I mean, knew Morris was not telling the whole truth, and yet they still put him on as a witness in that first trial in Boston . . .corrupt Prosecutors and Investigators in the DOJ and the Top GUYS in the FED DOJ knew these things because they were publicly reported, too
True, too much non-disclosure from the DOJ and FBI . . .not only litle transparency, but apparently deliberate cover ups . ..
We need more oversight of DOJ, FBI, heads, top prosecutors et cetera . . .
Seems the FEDs have lost sight of the notion that they are public servants . . . .
Matt
Let’s pretend to agree to disagree as you always remind me
All reality is relative to Ground Zero.
Having hung out with speakers who were FBI agents,
( from our conferences dealing with crimes committed by
FBI agents)
I found these men and women to be extremely intelligent and caring.
Did I mention physically imposing?
Just google their names with the word FBI and you will see what
I mean.
Dr Frederick Whitehurst, Tyrone Powers,Suzzane Doucette William Turner,
Wesley Swearingen, John Ryan.
I also found these people to have a huge set of Balls. No explanation needed.
Going into battle I would have no problems having them cover my back.
My active barometer in judging the skill set of the organizational model
of the FBI is their long history of accomplishments.
These include wacking President Kennedy,Martin Luther King and Robert
Kennedy(probably John Kennedy Jr ,and knee capping Ted Kennedy did
I mention Congressman Allard Lowenstein ?) ; I would also include
the destruction of American Unions; the creation and coverup of the
1993 1st World Trade Center bombing, the Oklahoma City bombing,
TWA Flight 800 downing, 911 as well as the Anthrax attack.
This is a very partial short list that is dated.
So whaddya say we agree to disagree, eh?
In other news…
https://au.news.yahoo.com/two-coworkers-charged-with-child-sex-abuse-after-cops-dying-declaration-032228558.html
Two cop coworkers charged with child sex abuse after cop’s ‘dying declaration’
Brooke Rolfe·News Reporter
Sat, 22 May 2021, 11:22 pm
https://wjactv.com/news/local/cookies-with-cops-law-enforcement-forms-bond-with-bedford-county-children
“Cookies with Cops:” law enforcement forms bond with Bedford County children
by Nicole FuschinoSunday, May 23rd 2021
MSFREEH: I reject some of those extreme obscene Conspiracy Wacko theories you’ve just posted.
Here is where we agree:
96 percent of FBI agents and Federal prosecutors are hard working, honest, good public servants.
At the FBI, it is the guys on top, the Comey-type, Muellar-type who squelch info, and come up with false narratives, like phony Roge Agentt Theory.
Another major problem at DOJ and FBI is leaking and leaking false, out of context, slanted inside info.
I’d estimated about 90% of FED Prosecutors and FED jurists are honest, hard working, public servants, but 10% are politicized or power-obsessed, and so about 10% are corrupt to the core. Any public official who abuses his power in office is doubly corrupt, committing a crime and violating the trust placed in him or her by we the people.
It’ is fair to say that about 10 percent of FED Prosecutors and FED judges often or frequently violate due process and fair, equal administration, or violate constitutional safeguards endowed by or granted to WE the People by God or by our Constitution and duly enacted Statutes, Fed and state. To repeal, among the ten percent are bad to varying degrees and those are primarily motivated by politics, power aggrandizement, and thirdly and perhaps overriding is a knee jerk acting to please the Boston Globe, NYT, or WAPO, or leftists in MSNBC, CNN, CBA, et cetera, to please the Media, Academia, to get praise of benefits for kowtowing to the press, media or academia, or just to boost their egos.
Corruption in the FBI is first falsely framing innocent people and persecuting and harassing innocents and then extending harassment to others associated with a prime suspect and overly persecuting, tracing, threatening the family and friends and associates of innocent men and innocent women. It is pervasive guilty by association.
The second thing is arm twisting, intimidating, coercing.
The DOJ also sigs the FBI on innocents, and the trio of corrupt jurists (mostly liberal, leftists) corrupt Prosecutors/Investigators, and corrupt FBI et alia who act like Police State Gestapo, trampliing on human rights and America’s constitutional rights . . .
Many scholars, Mark Levin, Leo Terrell, Ben Carson, Pat Buchanan, Tucker-Carlson as smart as any reporter, columnists at NYT, WAPO, B. Globe, and luminaries you’ll read on The Federalist, Washington Times, Washington Examiner, and purview the columns of Thomas Sowell and others on Power Abuse, BBC, FOX News, local Fox 25 Boston about abuses committed by FEDs and States and Academia and Media, which abuses are fully addressed by Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz and other scholars. Of course, we disagree on some issues and tactics, but by and large a hard core of men and women like those I have mentioned, understand the dangers presented by Governmental Abuses of Fundamental Rights . .
the FEDs and Staties sometimes forget WE the People rule, not Public Employees.
Bill
https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-inside-militarys-secret-undercover-army-1591881
Inside the Military’s Secret Undercover Army
BY WILLIAM M. ARKIN ON 5/17/21 AT 5:30 AM EDT
MSFREEH, this is a great article, everyone should read and reflect upon . . .up to 60,000 DOD employees, contractors, working “undercover” stealthily, de facto spying on U.S. Citizens and planting tracking devices and camoflouging
(sp?) undercover operatives/operations . . . .doing what . . .who oversees . . .clearly Newsweek documents abuses of this power
Yes, two things: First we all agree it is appropriate that DOD personell be assigned to Federal Agencies working domestically . . .when I was at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Lt/ I worked with a guy the same age, Hal, a young psychiatrist, also an Lt, or something, and on our same set of offices were a couple of colonels from the DOD working on Drug Abuse impacting both local army, navy, bases, etc, and international operations.
But here’s the problem> THE DOD putting undercover or contracted employees or “retired” employees in public agencies and in private corporations, . . .reporting what? to whom? how is that data used? Who is in charge of these sixtythousand signature, signal, signing, singing, setting up agents?
One time, there was power outage on my street at two thirty in the A.M., I was awake . .the next morning on both of my laptop computers, all of my WORD documents had been deleted . . .no back up on the CLOUD because just previously a month or so, my charge card had expired, and so no backupon the Cloud existed.
When I contacted an MIT type expert in California, it cost be about three hundred dollars, he cleared my computers, get them back up working, and he told me that the destruction of all my Word documents was due to “a sophisticated, targetting of my computers>” Nothing else was damaged, only my several years of writings were destroyed.
Now, one friend’s theory is some teenage malicious hi tech guy sitting in Iran or Turkey or Chicago or NYC or LA just got access and got a mean kick out of destroying an anonymous guys’ writings.
The second theory, is someone did not like my writings, my ideas, and hired someone to destroy my computers’ years worth of writings.
Makes us wonder when sixty thousand are working undercover . . .the DOD says they are not undercover, the are just working in disguise or in the basement of Raytheon . . .and What the Hell are they doing . . .let Congress get all their records and make them public . . .or better still. Prosecute men like Comey, Brennan, et alia who deny collecting data on average American citizens . . .THE DOD, CIA, DIA, NSA, et cetera, are working with BIG CORPS and BIG Hi TECH COs tracking all of us . . .and no doubt some are abusing power, misusing collected data, and acting UnAmerican . . .
So, ask Newsweek, how do we corral these psych-op agents working, at times, undermining out Constitutional rights.
So, MSFREEH, good reference, all should read and ponder . . . .
Has this news story, about Kendra Kingsbury, been reported anywhere in the Boston area? It is troubling how the goings on at the Department of Justice are sometimes reported and not reported in the Boston media.
In a story this week the Globe reported that Whitey Bulger “had been publicly identified as a longtime FBI informant.” Identified by whom?
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/23/metro/three-inmates-implicated-slaying-whitey-bulger-face-inhumane-conditions-during-31-months-solitary-confinement-relatives-say/
As some of us may remember, it was by federal prosecutors in court:
CNN reported during Bulger’s trial that: “The prosecution previously introduced a 700-page document that suggests Bulger was an informant.”
https://www.cnn.com/2013/07/29/justice/massachusetts-bulger-trial
The prosecution went to a great deal of trouble to establish that Bulger was an informant, without ever linking that to the crimes he was on trial for. It is not a crime to be an FBI informant, though quite dangerous, if you are heading to federal prison.
Bulger’s “attorneys have said he was ready to negotiate giving up some information about the [stolen Gardner Museum] paintings in exchange for safer prison digs just weeks before he was murdered.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/did-whitey-bulger-pull-off-the-isabella-stewart-gardner-museum-art-heist-for-the-ira
But was Bulger offering, or threatening, to share information about the Gardner heist? Because the government certainly did nothing to offer Bulger anything in the way of extra protection, In fact they provided him with the exact opposite.
An unsigned opinion piece the next day deployed the same passive voice verbiage, that Bulger “had been publicly identified.” Again they ducked the key issue of the Bulger slaying, (who outed him) while at the same time observing that a need for “getting to the bottom of the killing, and the incomprehensible decisions by federal officials that led up to it, does not seem to be a high priority for the bureau [of prisons].”
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/24/opinion/murderer-who-was-murdered-still-deserves-justice/
But by putting this solely on the Bureau of Prisons, and not acknowledging how a target was put on Bulger’s back, when they outed him as an informant, in Boston, back in 2013, demonstrates that the Boston Globe also does not place a high priority on getting to the bottom of this.
The Globe’s actions on this are not incomprehensible, Just as first establishing in court in a highly publicized trial that Bulger was an informant, and then putting him in harm’s way was not incomprehensible. But it is very concerning.
Edging closer to incomprehensible, though, is how Sean McKinnon, the cellmate of Fotios “Freddy” Geas, the prime suspect in the Bulger, murder, but not himself a suspect has had to endure the torture of solitary confinement for over 2/1/2 years, because he has not cooperated with the Bulger slaying “investigation.”
McKinnon is faced with the choice of either being tortured and irreparably harmed by the federal government by way of solitary confinement, or informing on a Mafia hitman accused of murdering an informant.
Meanwhile the people who set the table for the hit on Whitey Bulger in Boston in 2013 and in the Bureau of Prisons in 2018 are drawing a federal paycheck. And the Boston Globe is too timid to even remind readers, —inform — about who it was, that outed Bulger in the first place, the very institutions that hired him.
Kerry:
A lot of good points. It was the FBI (Agents Morris and Fitzpatrick) who told the Globe that Whitey was an informant. It was the Globe that based on their actions published in 1988 that he had a special relationship with the FBI. Other things give fodder for thought. Whether Bulger was an informant or not – he always denied it – did not matter. It was the perception held by others that mattered. When the Globe in 1988 wrote about this Whitey felt safe believing no one would believe it. As you remind us by the end of his trial there were solid grounds for believing it because of the 700 page informant file that the prosecutors relied on to show it. The treatment of Whitey after that as I recall was placing him in general population where he remained in Florida, other than the times when he was being punished for his attitude and action toward guards. The transfer of him from there to Hazleton is the most sinister aspect of the matter – who told the killers he was coming so that he could be murdered in his first morning. Obviously his cell mat McKinnon knows who did the murder but as you note he is not talking and to ensure that he remains silent he is now in the same cell with the person who may have done it, one with Mafia connections doing life forever for other murders. As usual the Bureau of Prison believes it is accountable to no one.
Thanks for the comment.
Yes, remember Morris deliberately leased Bulger’s et alia TEI names hoping the gangsters would kill them, so they could not testify that Morris was accepting bribes from bad guys . . .So Morris, the attempted murderer, was given an obscene lenient deal from Fred The Fed Wyshak as a bribe from Fred the Fed to persuade Morris to testify the way Wyshak wanted him to testify . . .remember prior to John Connolly’s first trial, Morris was still withholding relevant info, but Wyshak and his cohorts, Durham, Spencer, you know who I mean, knew Morris was not telling the whole truth, and yet they still put him on as a witness in that first trial in Boston . . .corrupt Prosecutors and Investigators in the DOJ and the Top GUYS in the FED DOJ knew these things because they were publicly reported, too
Thanks for posting Joyce.
I would like to hear your analyses on why
FBI agents(please name them) felt Whitey
had to be wacked.
Answer the question of ‘what secrets did Whitey hold
about FBI agents’ ?
How FBI agents control the media by controlling
media’s corporate sponsors or by blackmail or by
physical threats or by…….
Think FBI asset/informant Jeffrey Epstein leading all those
sexcursions for pedophile politicians,industry leaders….
UGH!
https://www.amazon.com/Most-Feared-Man-America/dp/1643982591
The Most Feared Man In America Paperback – April 16, 2019
by Ph D Dr Dirk C Duran-Gibson (Author)