LOW IQ Amrikkkan clowns DON'T UNDERSTAND that Amrikkan GOVT is a PURE
EVIL GESTAPO TYRANNY, which BRAINWASHES the public 24x7 about DEMOCRACY
and DEMONIZES Russia, China, Non-Christians, POC, Non-Americans while
SELLING themselves as ANGELIC DEMOCRACY, when in REALITY amrikkka is a
PURE EVIL FASCIST TYRANNY which should be and must be COMPLETELY
DESTROYED to SAVE human species.
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https://news.yahoo.com/operation-whistle-pig-inside-the-secret-cbp-unit-with-no-rules-that-investigates-americans-100000147.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=tw&tsrc=twtr
Yahoo News
Operation Whistle Pig: Inside the secret CBP unit with no rules that
investigates Americans
It was almost 10 p.m. on a Thursday night, and Ali Watkins was walking
around the capital following instructions texted by a stranger. One
message instructed her to walk through an abandoned parking lot near
Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle, and then wait at a laundromat. Then
came a final cryptic instruction: She was to enter an unmarked door on
Connecticut Avenue leading to a hidden bar.
The Sheppard, an upscale speakeasy, was so dimly lit it was sometimes
hard to see the menu, let alone a stranger at the bar. But amid the red
velvet upholstery, Watkins, then a reporter at Politico, almost
immediately spotted the man she was supposed to meet: He was wearing a
corduroy blazer and jeans and had a distinctive gap between his teeth.
“I won’t tell you my name, but I work for the U.S. government,” he said,
according to her account later provided to government investigators.
It was June 1, 2017, and Watkins was a rising star in the world of
national security journalism, breaking big stories about the
investigation into President Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. She had
hopped from the Huffington Post to BuzzFeed and then Politico, when a
man writing under the pseudonym Jack Bentley had reached out, wanting to
meet with her. She agreed, as journalists often do, thinking he might be
a potential source.
Once at the bar, however, she found that the man seemed more interested
in gathering information about her than in providing her with
information. And he appeared to know a lot about her, including details
of her travels and her relationship with James Wolfe, an older man who
worked on Capitol Hill.
The meeting, which lasted almost four hours, would change both of their
lives. Late the following year, Wolfe, the onetime boyfriend of Watkins,
was sentenced to two months in prison for lying to the FBI about his
relationship with reporters. And Watkins, by then at the New York Times,
faced ethical questions about her relationship with Wolfe, even though
she denied he had been a source for her stories while they were involved.
The true mystery of the saga was the role of the man at the bar. He was
portrayed in subsequent articles as something of a rogue actor who had
taken it upon himself to conduct a Trump-era leak investigation, and he
subsequently faced an internal investigation at the Department of
Homeland Security, where he worked.
Yet documents obtained by Yahoo News, including an inspector general
report that spans more than 500 pages — and includes transcripts of
interviews that investigators conducted with those involved, emails and
other records — reveal a far more disturbing story than the targeting of
a single journalist. The man, whose real name is Jeffrey Rambo, worked
at a secretive Customs and Border Protection division. The division,
which still operates today, had few rules and routinely used the
country’s most sensitive databases to obtain the travel records and
financial and personal information of journalists, government officials,
congressional members and their staff, NGO workers and others.
As many as 20 journalists were investigated as part of the division’s
work, which eventually led to referrals for criminal prosecution against
Rambo, his boss and a co-worker. None were charged, however.
Rambo, who believes he was unfairly vilified for seeking out Watkins,
said in a wide-ranging exclusive interview with Yahoo News that he acted
legally and appropriately. He agreed to speak amid what he describes as
escalating threats against him in San Diego, where he now lives, and
after Yahoo News obtained a copy of the inspector general investigation
into Rambo and his colleagues.
“I’m being accused of blackmailing a journalist and trying to sign her
up as an FBI informant, which is what’s being plastered all around San
Diego at the moment because of misinformation reported by the news
media,” he said in the interview.
The story Rambo tells is even stranger than the one already in the
public view, which is strange enough. His meeting with Watkins, he says,
was the result of a Trump-era White House assignment to Customs and
Border Protection to combat forced labor. Rambo, the lead on the
project, was authorized to reach out to anyone who he thought might be
useful, including journalists and other people inside and outside the
government.
As part of that process, he and others he worked with vetted those
potential contacts, pulling email addresses, phone numbers and photos
from passport applications and checking that information through
numerous sensitive government databases, including the terrorism watchlist.
“There is no specific guidance on how to vet someone,” Rambo later told
investigators. “In terms of policy and procedure, to be 100 percent
frank there, there's no policy and procedure on vetting.”
Those swept up in the division’s vetting included journalists from
national news organizations, ranging from the Associated Press to the
New York Times. Even Arianna Huffington, the founder of the Huffington
Post, was flagged in those searches.
“When a name comes across your desk you run it through every system you
have access to, that's just status quo, that's what everyone does,”
Rambo told investigators.
But the idea of government officials trawling through government
databases, looking at the private lives — and even romantic
relationships — of U.S. citizens not suspected of any crime, is
precisely what civil liberties experts have warned about for years.
“For two decades, we’ve seen how the collect-it-all, share-it-all
philosophy underlying post-9/11 law enforcement floods agencies with
sensitive personal information on millions of Americans,” Hugh
Handeyside, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties
National Security Project, told Yahoo News. “When agencies give their
employees access to this ocean of information, especially without
training or rigorous oversight, the potential for abuse goes through the
roof.”
Rambo, however, doesn’t see his story as one of abuse. He was doing
precisely what his higher-ups authorized him to do.
“I’m called a rogue Border Patrol agent, I’m called a right-hand man of
the Trump administration, I accessed data improperly, I violated her
constitutional rights — all of these things are untrue,” Rambo told
Yahoo News. “All these things are standard practices that — let me
rephrase that. All of the things that led up to my interest in Ali
Watkins were standard practice of what we do and what we did and
probably what’s still done to this day.”
CBP’s National Targeting Center was created in the wake of the 9/11
terrorist attacks to help identify potential threats crossing the
borders of the United States, whether people, drugs or weapons. When
Rambo was detailed to the center in 2017, he was assigned to the newly
launched Counter Network Division, a unit designed as a bridge between
law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community that prided
itself on taking “out of the box” approaches.
Freed from the constraints of bureaucracy, those inside were supposed to
think creatively about how to solve problems. According to testimony in
the inspector general report, Rambo’s supervisor, Dan White, fostered a
freewheeling atmosphere at the division, calling his team “WOLF,” short
for “way out in left field.” White even had a water bottle with a WOLF
sticker. He himself would later tell investigators: “We are pushing the
limits and so there is no norm, there is no guidelines, we are the ones
making the guidelines.”
The division’s assignments were high-level and came directly from the
CBP commissioner, the secretary of Homeland Security or the White House,
which in May 2017 asked the division to look at the Democratic Republic
of the Congo, where the U.S. believed companies were using cobalt mined
by forced labor to produce consumer goods in China. Rambo, one of few
Border Patrol agents assigned to the division, where he worked alongside
representatives from across law enforcement and intelligence agencies,
was asked to lead the project. “My orders were to tackle a problem set
that we were given from the White House,” he told Yahoo News.
Rambo, according to documents included in the inspector general report,
was told to gather the evidence needed to hit companies with sanctions
under the rarely used Tariff Act of 1930. He proposed using information
from experts in academia, NGOs, humanitarian groups, officials at other
government agencies and journalists specializing in forced labor
reporting. The plan was greenlighted by his boss, he later told
investigators, with one caveat. "Make sure you vet whoever you contact,”
Rambo said White told him.
In late May 2017, Rambo and one of his co-workers began reaching out to
people, including Martha Mendoza, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated
Press reporter who covered forced labor. On May 31, Rambo, using his
government email, wrote to Mendoza explaining that CBP was trying to
identify companies that were importing goods possibly linked to forced
labor. “We are hoping to connect with subject matter experts outside of
the traditional government circles as your ‘rules of engagement’ are a
bit different than ours,” he wrote Mendoza, “and can perhaps help in
pointing us in the right direction to U.S. companies that meet such
criteria or are suspected of such.”