So many ex-FBI agents worked for Twitter that they had an internal Slack channel dedicated to onboarding new former FBI staffers to the social media platform staff. So many FBI requests came in that Twitter committed people to handling them, and, as Elon Musk has confirmed, the FBI paid millions of dollars to the company. What did this hand-in-glove, hand-in-taxpayer-pocket, relationship get the Department of Justice?
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24 replies on “FBI Paid Millions to Twitter, Hired ex-FBI Agents: What Did Your Taxpayer Money Buy from Twitter?”
One word: TREASON.
My mantra for all of the departments that exist without Constitutional authority. Once again is Defund, Defang, Dismantle.
Particularly with these enforcement agencies. Any crime that takes place in America happens on a state’s soil. The local and state police should handle it. We don’t need another layer.
CIA needs the triple D treatment as well. And so does…Epa, NEA, etc.
We are at war. And it is (still) a fight worth having.
Ex-FBI agents? It seems almost certain that any number of those “Twitter employees” were/are in reality “Moles” still working for the FBI in a covert capacity!!!
Scott, could you please send me a shipment of your optimistic Pixie dust, as this American is filled with despair over all the corruption that I’m seeing happen in real time, and the pure futility of the honest attempts to correct it!!!
Yeah … No I’m pretty sure Scott Ott is not the possessor of any sort of Pixie dust, optimistic or otherwise. What you’re seeing is the result of Faith manifesting itself. Faith allows Scott to choose not to submit to despair. Because Scott already knows how the story ends, he’s seen the spoiler. It’s a “by their fruits you shall know them” sort of thing.
Sometimes, not often but it’s known to happen from time to time, I disagree with Scott. However, he’s no Pollyanna, he looks at reality with all the perception of as Bill often says “a steely eyed missile man”. He’s not being optimistic, optimists are fools and Scott is no fool.
He just makes a conscious decision not to let it get him in a funk. I’m grateful for that. Grateful because it’s contagious if you let it be.
Remember, all media is biased and things are seldom as dire as we are being told. Very few people make a living telling people how good things are and even fewer can support themselves telling people how bad things are not.
If you can’t do anything about something it’s a lot better policy to focus on the things you can do something about because worry and anger are not going to change anything anyway. Nothing but you that is, they’ll make you miserable. Do what you can with what you’ve got then kick back and have a cigar, a drink, or whatever it is you do when you want to relax. If you don’t have something that relaxes you, find something and just don’t overdo it.
Don’t forget to be grateful for the good things in your life, nothing drives out despair like gratitude. Even when things seem terrible (and they often do) you’re still living a better life than people a hundred or more years ago, with a lot more resources than you have, could hope for. Perspective is important and there is no realistic perspective that doesn’t indicate gratitude is merited.
Be of good cheer and Merry Christmas!
Despair can, and too often does, end up in tragedy. It is okay to despise what is wrong. And we must work to right the wrong. In the meantime we must be grateful for the good that we have. We the people must be righteous.
This is a tragic state of affairs but it is largely brought about by people using our freedoms and our trust against us. This is what the Left does, this is what Terrorists do, this is what foreign powers do. Our freedoms make us strong in one way but they also make us uniquely vulnerable in another.
In a long past life I interfaced and interacted with the FBI on various occasions. Unless there’s someone else in here that can truthfully say that, or someone who actually served with the FBI, that means I probably know more about that agency than most of you. What most people know about the FBI, or any other government agency for that matter, is gleaned from biased (in either direction) news articles and fictional television shows.
That’s just not reality, I’m sorry to have to make that point and I know it’s going to offend people who think they ‘know things’ but it is true nonetheless.
I see people in here calling for disbanding the FBI completely and that’s just admirably cute ignorance. You’re hearing about all these terrible things some people in the FBI have done (and are going to keep doing unless we stop them, more on that in a bit) and you’re getting all that from media designed to mold your opinion one way or another.
Even this video released by people I greatly admire, and it most definitely is Truth with a capital “T”, is still designed to get your dander up over an outrage. Which it should, it’s a real outrage. The difference between Conservative media and Leftist media is that while both are intended to get you to think about something in a certain way, any Conservative media worth the name is going to do that with Truth and the Leftist media is going to do that with lies.
The problem with Conservative media is that there are not enough hours in a day to cover the WHOLE Truth. There’s always a LOT more to the ‘story’ than a half hour to hour long video can cover.
We need the FBI, what we don’t need is the terrible people who have wormed their way into it. I find that wormage appalling and it absolutely has to be dealt with.
There are agents right now doing righteous things you never, ever hear about in the media. If you do hear about something like that it’s usually because they failed to detect and/or prevent something really, really bad. Like the Oklahoma City bombing by McVeigh and Nichols kind of bad.
If those people are successful there may be prosecutions which are public record but it’s generally not even then made a big deal of for more than a brief blip on the public media.
My experience with those sorts of people is that they are good men and true. They are men of unimpeachable integrity and for most of you unimaginable valor. You just don’t know what they’re doing or you’d think the same of them.
Then we have the other sort that’s making all this trouble and it is very, very serious trouble. In fact, it’s the kind of trouble the FBI is supposed to prevent or prosecute.
A couple decades ago that’s exactly what the FBI would have done with these mutts, FBI agents or not. True, they might not have actually hauled fellow agents into court but they would be dismissed and banned from any sort of position of real power in any agency for the rest of their lives. This sort of venal cur exists and has always existed, it’s how we deal with them that is the problem.
You can’t have the mutts running the show or the situation will always deteriorate to the point we’re seeing now. ALWAYS. It can get much, much worse. Prosecuted or simply banned and shamed the instant this sort of behavior was detected the agency should have acted decisively and yes, “The Good of the Service” is a legitimate attitude when “The Service” relies so heavily on the trust and confidence of those being served.
Disbanding the FBI will not accomplish anything good and it absolutely will accomplish the advancement of even greater evil. The problem is not the FBI, it’s the worms who have wriggled into and eaten the apple. If allowed to keep eating and laying eggs those worms will eventually kill the apple tree. If you cut off that apple the worms simply crawl away to contaminate more apples. It doesn’t kill the worms, it forces them to be more clever and to spread wider.
You end up with worms protecting worms everywhere, in every agency.
In the human realm those worms will just find sustenance elsewhere. Worms are very good at corruption and corrupting. It is their very nature.
Whatever agency, system or device you come up with to replace the vital functions of the FBI after you disband the FBI becomes the worm’s most preferable environment. They will gravitate to the same environment you just kicked them out of. They will corrupt the next agency, other political offices and because they have real power they will grow and spread until they run up against something more powerful to stop them. Disbanding the FBI won’t stop them …
The solution, the insecticide to destroy that wormy corruption of our vital institutions is severe punishment by example. We have at least a two tier and more like a multiple tier justice system where the more important the worm is the less it has to fear from real justice.
This encourages the worms to be wormy. If they know they can get away with whatever they’re doing then there’s nothing to stop the spread of worms with worms protecting worms protecting more worms.
That’s the problem and that’s gotta stop. Those worms, no matter how high they might be, need to be forcibly pulled from the apple and squashed publicly and severely. THAT is what keeps any other worm-minded mutt from acting on his vermiform nature no matter how lofty his desk might be.
The way to accomplish this cleaning lies on a path through the United States Department of Justice. If the Justice Department won’t prosecute the worms the worms will always spread no matter what agency or position of power they can corrupt.
The Dept. of Justice is a statutory not Constitutional entity. Meaning it was created by codified law not by Constitutional Authority. It belongs to the Executive Branch of our government.
(Unlike say, the Judicial Branch, which is a Constitutional entity not subject to alteration by statutory means. This is why the President and Congress can ‘pack the court’, this is allowed by a Constitutional lack of foresight. The Founders simply never dreamed that a partisan political party would corrupt their own Judicial branch. The Founding Fathers were great men, they were not infallible men and could not foresee nor forestall all possible corruptions to the system they were creating.)
So the U.S. Department of Justice is subject to law created by Congress and signed by the President of the United States of America just like anything else not directly enumerated in the U.S. Constitution.
Therein lies the means to fix this problem. Laws must be created and stringently enforced to halt and reverse the damage of these worms.
To do that, we have to get political supremacy and elect leaders with the guts to address this issue directly and vigorously with strong measures to drive out the worms and punish the ones that are found. All of them, whenever and wherever they are discovered.
You can complain about the FBI all you like. You can make demands that it be dissolved to your heart’s content. If we don’t get political power it doesn’t matter. If we don’t win this sort of tragedy will not only continue but it will grow until we are a Republic in name only.
ACTS, I stand corrected by your post. I agree that my opinion is formed from what I am seeing with my own eyes, and what others are telling me they are seeing.
However, I have no direct experiences with the FBI (thankfully), as you say you have. So I will indeed defer to your judgement as to what I assume is the very large percentage of good, decent and hardworking FBI agents as compared to the much smaller percentage of “Worms” in the force. I will also agree that the good work that they FBI currently does usually goes unnoticed as it probably should be.
I also agree that the anger is real toward the “worms” at the FBI (and no doubt infecting other agencies).
Finally, I agree with you that nothing but complaining can be done without “political supremacy”.
Thank you for saying all of that, I do have a problem with blaming unsung heroes for the acts of a despicable few. I tried to be ‘nice’ in how I put my objections to doing that and the people who do it. Most Americans are acting out of a dearth of understanding and that’s not really the fault of The People when something secretive requiring immense trust is at stake.
People have no way of knowing the things they don’t know especially when that knowledge is perforce withheld from them out of gravest necessity. It’s a forgivable thing. It still sticks in my craw a little bit even so.
I know people who have saved a lot of American lives and no one here probably will ever know the name of even a single one of them. That doesn’t just apply to the FBI either, there are a lot of good Americans living in marginal conditions away from their families this Christmas and are the men and sometimes women that Winston Churchill referred to when he said —
““We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.””
My thoughts and prayers most certainly during the Christmas Season always turns to those people. Because I know they’re there far from the people they love and who love them, standing guard over the rest of us. A lot of people either don’t know that, or choose in bile and rage to ignore such genuine heroes.
I can’t do that and wouldn’t if I could. Those people are not the problem.
It’s not the ‘American Way’ to punish the many for the heinous acts of the few. Neither is it rightly American to forget and worse damn those righteous ‘rough men’ along with those who are truly doing the bidding of Evil.
It’s exactly the same thing as the Left does blaming all peaceful, lawful, law abiding gun owners for the acts of criminals with guns. Then using that pretext in trying to take guns away from the good which will do nothing to stop the bad.
I don’t want to be like the Left. This is why I often take exception when people say we need to resort to their tactics. There are tactics like this I simply will not consider no matter how bad things get.
This is the last day before my family ramps up its Christmas festivities and we have some bad weather forecast here so if I don’t see you again before then …
A very Merry Christmas to you and your people, and I wish you a Joyous and Prosperous New Year. I hope like me you are home to spend this best time of the year with your family and friends. I’m grateful as hell for that and wish everyone else could appreciate it half as much as I do.
Well said and the same to you and yours. Hunker down and keep warm.
The DOJ has its own website and Twitter presence. If the DOJ honestly and truly believed it was within it’s writ to police “disinformation” in the public square (and like Scott, I doubt it is), the appropriate way to do so would be to call out, specifically, the alleged disinformation and its source on the DOJ’s own website, Twitter account, or other portal. Twitter (or any other publisher) would be free to take the stuff down or leave it up, but at least then who wanted it taken down and the motivation for taking it down would be transparent–not the result of some covert FBI-Twitter censorship operation.
Great segment Steve. “Tell em to stuff it!”.
There are a lot of FBI people who are not willing to defend the constitution, but have a paying job they want to keep until their retirement, so they go along to get along, to get that pension, regardless of what they’re asked to do.
Sorry if that offends one of you,
but to look away at the Clinton Initiative Foundation, to look away at Epstein, too look away, no, to participate in, Spygate and Russion collusion, to look away at cities burning across the country in riots, to look away, no , to participate in a plot to kidnap a state governor, to look so deeply into activities of people on January 6th, to not disclose the identity and cell phone geo tracking of the January 6th DNC/RNC Pipe Bomber, and to willfully block the truth of the Hunter Biden laptop even though they possessed the laptop…..
We must disband the FBI, send agents to DHS or ATC or CBP, and only agents willing to recommit to their oath to the constitution (by lie detector if necessary).
Seems like many folks like to jump on Scott’s back and beat him like the pony that he is…
I’m not here to do that. I’m actually supporting Scott in an ass-backward sort of way. But I do want to make a distinction between a word Scott said in this episode. Petty? No. I believe it’s important. Important but yet totally understandable – contemporaneous speaking year in, year out, not to humans in front of you but to a camera lens and the voices in your ears, that kind of speaking is darned difficult to get right and smooth and correct 100% of the time. Kudos to Scott and the ‘other two’ for pulling this off for more than 14 years now? 2008? Wow.
Scott said, “Leaked” in referring to the internal communications of Twitter.
Eric Snowden leaked. Edward Manning leaked. (Chelsea didn’t leak, she came later…. 😉 )
Leaking is something you stole and released to the world.
Elon Musk spent 42 billion of his and his friends dollars, and one of the actions he took was to provide transparency of what was going on in Twitter BEFORE HE BOUGHT THE COMPANY. It’s HIS company now, so it’s not a leak, it’s a disclosure. It’s the transparency he suggested would happen. As I said above, the difference is important.
On the flip side of this, what news organizations gladly and 24 hours a day promoted the false story of Trump-Russia collusion – as if it were an incontrovertable fact?
Treason at Twitter: Guys…how many news organizations failed to report about the laptop, or reported the laptop to be Russian Disinformation? Only those who did their homework and reported the true facts should be illuminated from the treason charges. The New York Post did their job…the New York Times committed treason, CNN committed treason…Fox News got it right…and the list goes on and on and on.
These massive departments of the federal government have aligned themselves with the Left because they fear for their survival. (If the Republicans were a real party, this threat would be real. MAGA could make the fear real, but Big Media and pearl clutchers have successfully emasculated this possibility.) Calvin Coolidge was able to trim the government by 20%. The Feds have PTSD from all the way back then. Where is he when we need him?
Scott — count me as one of those who has lost faith in the government, their so-called “limitations”, the unbelievable shoddy performance of Congress, and the wanton incompetence of the President. I will continue to vote; I will continue to berate my so-called elected “officials” when they screw the pooch (happens frequently, btw); and I will continue to stay informed.
But I’m not convinced that the FBI or the DOJ are worth salvaging. When it’s this bad (corruption, incompetence, flat-out lying to the American people), it’s time to dismantle the apparatus and start over again. Defund, defund, defund — but Congress can’t even do that. Omnibus budgets, anyone?
It’s flat-out disgusting.
I’m a-feared that people’s BS meters are not well tuned.
Please explain Biden’s presence in the White House. Even without the laptop, he barely ran a campaign with rallys attended by tens of people.
Too many low info voters, or people who refuse to accept that the Democratic Party is now at best an organized crime outfit and at worst the greatest threat to America our country has ever faced. I’m not sure how any sane human being votes for a party that makes child mutilation its flagship issue, and yet here we are
There was a legitimate Red Wave in 2020, as evidenced in the down-ballot results. We are currently in Stage-4 of Yuri Besmenov’s formula: 1) Demoralize, 2) Destabilize, 3) Crisis, 4) Normalization. The Left are gradually normalizing the cheats at the national level; e.g. “You Republicans need to embrace mail-in voting season and get better at it.” BS-Flag on the play!
IMHO, this problem is best addressed by establishing a standing elections oversight body/committee in –every- state legislature to keep the respective processes transparent to the voters. This problem is not going away and flagging it two weeks prior to an election is not good enough.
Fix bayonets!
The key was discussed here. People need to go to jail for a very, very long time or worse (I favor worse). Not budget cuts, not just some actions to provide more “oversight” and audits. People need to go down. That’s the only justice here and the only way to turn the tide of this kind of activity. Needless to say this is not a one off. This is just one instance where they got caught.
Congress can not put people in jail. Only the Justice Department can do that. Think we are going to see an indictment with this DOJ?
No, I’m certain that THIS DOJ will not indict. That’s the problem. To get the DOJ we need to deal with this we have to win and therein lies the rub.
If we don’t win political supremacy then we are powerless to stop this sort of thing. If we do win political supremacy but the people we elect do not have the will to confront this and do something actionable about it the result is the same.