FBI whistleblower: Agencies spying on intelligence oversight

Date : February 8, 2024 By Crystal Gonzalez

Cybersecurity subject matter expert and federal contractor Dennis “Nate” Cain walked out of the FBI with hundreds of classified documents intending to unmask public corruption, money laundering, terrorism financing, and securities and exchange fraud. Cain was ready to talk about the shocking deep hole of secret surveillance on whistleblowers and the congressional intelligence committees — the same people supposed to oversee the government’s use of surveillance authorities — now that he is protected by the statute of limitations.

Although Cain’s access to these documents implicates prominent political and government figures, he raises an alarming bipartisan issue as America faces a digital crossroads of the information age — the weaponization of highly sophisticated secret surveillance and intelligence capabilities against Americans to kill the oversight of surveillance operations.

Cain said this story reflects a gross disregard for the law and the U.S. Constitution by government bureaucrats who abuse the intended use of intelligence information for political weaponization and intimidation of anyone who stands in their way.

Deprivation of Rights

After years of Cain’s weathering unprecedented investigational abuses — despite legal protection from the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act — and his not seeing any developments arising from the information he brought to the proper authorities’ attention, Cain publicly announced his bid for the U.S. House of Representatives in West Virginia’s 2nd congressional district. Cain said in his choice to run that he would stand up for Americans, the equal application of the law, and rein in the lawlessness that critical sections of the government have embraced.

Cain characterized the traumatic events he and his family endured as a systemic deprivation of rights under the color of law, which he notes happens daily. His experience, like many others, reveals the sprawling abuse of the intelligence bureaucracy to intimidate domestic whistleblower targets, weakening the ability of the congressional intelligence committees to perform intelligence oversight.

A Clandestine Meeting

After Cain saw the FBI stonewalling the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) during multiple congressional oversight hearings and hearing whispers of treason “so big it could take down the government,” he said he went looking for answers on FBINet, the FBI’s internal system.

Rumors at the Bureau

Cain said his search discovered a trove of evidence to substantiate the rumors he heard in the Bureau.

“The original rumor that I had heard from my supervisor was that they were ignoring crimes committed by Hillary Clinton and that they were basically just going to cover it up,” Cain said.

What Cain uncovered implicated several in the highest levels of the FBI’s chain of command. Cain then contacted a YouTuber named Bill Still, who had previously interviewed an NSA whistleblower named William Binney. Cain said Bill Still helped arrange a clandestine meeting for Cain with a senior staffer working for Devin Nunes, then Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, on October 31, 2017.

Safety Concerns

Cain said the staffer declined to see Cain’s badge, citing safety concerns, and that the staffer later revealed the problem of surveillance over House Intelligence Committee members to root out whistleblowers of the various agencies they are appointed to oversee.

“Think about that for a minute. The congressional committee responsible for oversight over the intelligence community was rightfully fearful that they were being surveilled by the very government agencies they had oversight over,” Cain said.

After being briefed, Cain said the staffer requested information to facilitate their ongoing Uranium One investigation since the FBI had stonewalled the committee. Cain said he then discovered a new trove of documents to fulfill the request.

Following Procedure

He said he was able to transfer the files onto a non-serialized thumb drive without getting flagged after he had been moved to a new desk with a machine previously used for penetration testing. Cain said he copied the files and then sealed and marked the envelope in accordance with classification handling procedures. Cain said his courier card allowed him to carry classified documents outside the FBI’s secure areas.

The staffer had asked him to install Wickr Me as a secure communication method, but the line went cold after Cain acquired the additional classified documents and walked out to make the hand-off, Cain said.

The Explosive Complaint

Unable to reach the staffer, Cain said he retained legal counsel and pursued filing for protection under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act with the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz to get the documents into the hands of both congressional intel committees.

‘Exchange of Prisoners’

Cain said arrangements were made through Cain’s lawyer, Michael Socarras, Esq. in June 2018 with the I.G.’s office for an “exchange of prisoners” to hand over the documents to Horowitz’s deputy, Mr. Josh Mahan, at Saint John’s Episcopal Church, across from the White House. Cain said he was authorized to maintain his anonymity by using the codename MCPOTA and took precautions to hide his identity by wearing a hoody and sunglasses during the exchange.

Cain said the House intelligence committee initially required Cain to deliver the files in person and agree to testify but eventually agreed to accept the information through Horowitz’s top aide. However, the Senate intelligence committee never received them — the documents wound up getting stuck in a drawer, Cain said.

Cain said the FBI could never arrest him because he followed proper procedures for handling classified information. He says he maintained his clearance and even recently received a call from the same contracting firm for another job at the FBI. The reason why Cain’s communications with the House Intelligence Committee were severed has never been clarified.

‘Secret Spying Capabilities’

Despite following the law and prescribed procedures, sixteen FBI agents reportedly raided Cain’s Union Bridge, Maryland, home on November 19, 2018. Eleven days later, then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley sought information from Horowitz and FBI Director Christopher Wray about the raid, given Cain’s protected whistleblower status. However, Cain said that Grassley later reported his request went unfulfilled.

U.S. Attorney Robert Hur cited a need to keep the full scope of the case under wraps in his boiler-plate motion to deny a request by The Daily Caller to unseal search warrant materials, adding that it was impracticable to do line-by-line redactions due to the saturation of sensitive investigation methods.

In an extraordinary feat of layered secrecy, Clinton appointee and U.S. District Court of Maryland’s Chief Magistrate Judge Beth P. Gesner also sealed her justification for keeping the warrant materials sealed in a December 2018 order.

FISA Abuse

Hur’s argument in this opposition mirrored the heavy redactions made to the FISA surveillance-warrant applications on Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. In a July 2018 interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox’s Sunday Futures, Nunes said that worse than using “Clinton-paid-for dirt […] to get a warrant to spy on an American citizen” was how the government was — “using our secret counterintelligence capabilities in this country.”

This assessment was not idle criticism. Of the twenty-nine FISA applications Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s team initially reviewed, errors or noncompliance with or missing factual accuracy review procedures marred every single one, according to a press release by Horowitz’s office on September 30, 2021.

Big Tech

Cain’s personal experience is consistent. He indicated that algorithmic delivery of Twitter suggestions following the raid on his home reflected conversations outside the presence of his phone, indicating cross-device voice recognition for targeted content. Cain declined to comment on the government’s relationship with intelligence gathered from social media, citing a nondisclosure agreement.

The recently publicized “Twitter Files” have revealed FBI-Twitter collusion in a full-fledged digital campaign that curated Twitter feeds and used the phony “Russia Gate” excuse to purge unrelated accounts. The files also revealed that those entities have also collaborated on controlling the narrative on COVID-19, silencing a doctor who said vaccinating children or those with a prior infection was unnecessary, a peer-reviewed study published in Nature linking mRNA vaccines to cardiac arrest in young people, and a response countering the false claim that COVID-19 was the leading death of children.

Former General Counsel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation James Baker was exited from his role as deputy general counsel of Twitter due to concerns about alleged suppression of “information important to the public dialogue,” Elon Musk said on December 6, 2022. Substack journalist Matt Taibbi also revealed that Baker’s secret vetting of the internal documents was hindering the second installment of the two-part expose of the Twitter Files. The first installment disclosed that Baker advised colleagues “caution is warranted,” suggesting Twitter censor the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 election.

Five Eyes Alliance

Cain said another principal avenue for intelligence agencies to spy on Americans involves partnerships with foreign countries in what is referred to as the “Five Eyes Alliance,” an intelligence-sharing alliance that acquired considerably expanded collection capabilities following the “war on terror,” amplified by the substantial leaps in developing technology.

History of Intrusion

Apparently, more than terrorists are being targeted by these efforts. Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico — two democrats serving on the Senate Intelligence Committee — wrote in a statement that the CIA’s lack of transparency on Prism-esque programs of bulk data repositories containing information on American persons “undermine democratic oversight and pose risks to the long-term credibility of the Intelligence Community.”

Reportedly, tapes released by Federal Judge G. Murray Snow reveal that a rogue intelligence operation hacked the Presiding Judge of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Reggie Walton, and Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, according to real estate billionaire Timothy Blixseth.

“[O]ne startling conclusion is clear: The FBI and its parent agency, the Justice Department, have become political institutions,” said the Republican Staff Report Committee on the Judiciary U.S. House of Representatives in a November 2022 report titled “FBI Whistleblowers: What Their Disclosures Indicate About the Politicization of the FBI and Justice Department.”

The Cover-Up

At first, Cain felt reassured by what he found as he discovered case numbers indicating multiple active investigations by various field offices. But, Cain said he had no choice but to act after hearing a series of lies and omissions in congressional testimony in addition to FBI Director James Comey’s “impromptu” July 2016 press conference where he concluded: “No ‘reasonable prosecutor’ would bring charges against Hillary Clinton over her private email server.” That conclusion hit Cain square between the eyes as untrue.

Special Access Program

During that press conference, Comey stated that the FBI had found seven Top Secret/Special Access Program (SAP) email chains on Hillary’s email server. This admission indicated willful mishandling of highly classified information as SAPs can only be accessed inside a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) and would require multiple hoops for someone to go through to access, remove, and transfer them to her personal email server, according to Cain. Those facts reflected a critical factor in establishing the intent of whoever took the information and put it on the server. Even so, establishing intent would be unnecessary in any such prosecution.

For Cain, the linchpin question has never been answered: How did Clinton gain access to the highest-level classified SAPs restricted on a closed system that were transferred to her home server, and for what purpose?

Trove of Classified Documents

Cain’s whistleblower disclosure involved over 450 pages of classified documents that he provided to the DOJ IG and both congressional Intelligence committees, including Treasury Suspicious Activity Reports assessed by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, indicating a high likelihood of criminal activity.

Cain said most of the files he found involved money laundering funds from prohibited jurisdictions. He said he also handed over intelligence documents that proved what the FBI knew and when regarding Uranium One, along with a few ancillary documents on other national security issues of “Urgent Concern.” Cain is unaware of a single indictment or prosecution that resulted from those documents.

Cain said that the actions of the FBI to dismiss Hillary’s email server and the lack of an indictment for the other criminal matters in the documents he had seen made it clear to him that the rumors of a planned cover-up were true.

Terrorism Financing

Cain said he discovered one case of terrorism financing that involved regular exchanges from the Clinton Foundation through multiple accounts to Gehad El-Haddad, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading spokesman and political party advisor, in monthly payments of $9,000.

In the lead-up to the 2012 Benghazi attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in the gruesome deaths of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, U.S. Navy Seal and CIA security contractor Glen Doherty, U.S. Navy Seal and CIA security contractor Tyrone Woods, and U.S. Air Force Staff Sergeant and State Department Officer Sean Smith, President Obama reportedly had approved a covert gun-running operation that Clinton championed to arm the Libyan opposition, emails show, who then used the arms against the United States.

This operation was just one reported instance related to the arming of these terrorists. In 2016, the Obama Department of Justice dropped the charges against arms dealer Marc Turi for allegedly supplying arms to Libyan extremists. Dropping the case avoided any review of Clinton’s emails and the reported attempts by the CIA to arm the rebels, according to Turi’s associate.

“They don’t want this stuff to come out because it will look really bad for Obama and Clinton just before the election,” said the associate, as reported by Politico.

Uranium One

Cain said he also found President Obama’s daily presidential briefings indicated foreknowledge of Russian plans, through its front organization Rosatom, to infiltrate the uranium supply chain of the United States before the Obama-era sale of Uranium One to Rosatom.

In October 2020, Mark Lambert, former co-president and part-owner of Transportation Logistics International Inc., received a four-year sentence “for his role in a scheme to bribe an official at a subsidiary of Russia’s State Atomic Energy agency,” according to a press release by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland.

“It now appears that despite pledges to the contrary, U.S. uranium made its way overseas as a part of the Uranium One deal,” Grassley said in a statement.

Cain said the sale of control of a good part of the world’s supply of uranium to Russia was problematic in and of itself but coupled with associated Russian payments and “contributions” and foreknowledge of the intent behind obtaining control, Cain felt obliged to make sure the facts saw the light of day.

Political Targeting

Cain also found documents showing that the FBI was party to a paid contract with a far-left organization called the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The SPLC targets Christian organizations over volunteer counseling programs while it fails to adequately characterize real threats like Antifa’s rampant political violence against the U.S. Courthouse in Portland, Oregon; physical attacks against Trump supporters; and the mass violence and destruction during the Black Lives Matter protests, which led to the deployment of thousands of National Guardsmen but surprisingly few arrests and fewer convictions.

This relaxed approach to addressing developing threats was apparent in how the FBI received a document containing an internal FBI assessment on American election security. It assessed U.S. voting systems as “safe” from foreign hacking due to their relative isolation from the Internet, despite periphery modes of access, including WiFi, modems, and Bluetooth. However, based on the FBI’s own internal assessment, foreign interference in U.S. elections was, in fact, unlikely.

This assessment contradicted the public daily streaming broadcasts on Russian interference and meddling in the 2016 election and the FBI’s hatching the baseless Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which targeted Trump campaign affiliates and General Michael Flynn over election interference, which according to Cain, it had already assessed as “safe.”

Chain of Command

Cain indicated that his whistleblower complaint named those in his regular chain of command — then Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, Michael Atkinson, who served as the former head of the U.S. Attorney’s office’s Fraud and Public Corruption section at the time that the Uranium One sale was ignored, along with former FBI Director Robert Mueller, and former Deputy Director James Comey.

Cain said he would also have named then United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod Rosenstein for his role in the case against Mikerin, the director of the Pan American Department of JSC Techsnabexport (TENEX), a subsidiary of Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation. However, since Rosenstein was the Acting Attorney General, Cain was concerned that his complaint would never make it out of his office.

Cain said Attorney General Jeff Sessions — who had promised at his confirmation hearing to recuse himself from any Clinton-related investigations — declined to even look at or issue Cain’s complaint a credibility rating, something he was obligated under the law to do and a decision that Horowitz admitted he had never encountered before. Ultimately, IG Horowitz assessed and determined the complaint to be credible himself and authorized Cain to deliver them to both committees as a matter of “Urgent Concern.”

Whistleblower Traps

Cain and his wife said their family endured gross investigational abuses, including suggestive interviewing, character assassination, and unconstitutional surveillance. These interrogation tactics affected their children — including parents of his children’s school bandmates and former in-laws. Cain said the FBI also sabotaged Cain’s livelihood, “warning” the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs about some form of vague liability over his return to work. Cain said he incurred legal fees of over $190,000 in defending against baseless, illegal, and unethical government attacks on his credibility.

Chemical Poisoning

Cain said he also suffered the sudden onset of a mysterious illness that presented with stroke-like symptoms after coming into contact with an unknown substance under his car’s door handle. A leading neurologist in Washington D.C. with over 50 years in practice ran multiple tests and concluded that Cain had not suffered a stroke, and stated that he had only seen a similar case once before in an instance of skin contact with a highly absorbent chemical by a worker at an industrial chemical plant, Cain said.

Cain said he confirmed with a Colorado poison testing center technician that several known chemicals met Cain’s description and could cause those symptoms upon skin contact. Developing chemicals to incapacitate and subdue adversaries is a familiar Cold War-era joint project of the U.S. Military and CIA. It is still in use by many adversaries of the United States.

Spying on Congress

In November 2018, Senator Grassley was finally able to share two declassified Congressional Notifications revealing that the CIA’s counterintelligence program was gathering congressional communications containing excerpts involving pending and developing whistleblower complaints, confirming Cain’s disclosures.

In a press release, Grassley stated there was no risk of disclosing sources and methods preventing the declassification of the two Congressional Notifications.

“I have been asking the same question for years: what sources or methods would be jeopardized by the declassification of these notifications? After four and a half years of bureaucratic foot-dragging, led by Directors Brennan and Clapper, we finally have the answer: none,” Grassley said in a press release, having first requested declassification in April 2014.

Grassley also noted Atkinson’s considerable interest and attention “on something that appeared intractable if small.”

Election Integrity

Cain assisted Trump’s White House after the 2020 election with election integrity investigations and worked around the clock to complete his work before the certification of the electors, Cain said. Cain said he also testified as an expert witness in multiple federal lawsuits where he encountered more corruption — this time within the court system’s denial of evidentiary hearings where multiple felony violations across several cases were apparent.

Cain said his company, Cain and Associates, was also hired by the Los Angeles District Attorney Bureau of Investigations to assist with a cyberforensic capture in a case regarding the alleged illegal handling and exposure of several states’ poll worker data to suspected Chinese foreign nationals in mainland China through documented login exchanges. Cain said the Chinese company was identified as Wuhan Yiqing Technology Co. Ltd., a parent company with close ties to Konnech Inc. and links to the Chinese Communist Party.

The allegations in that case involve transmitting American poll worker data to server locations in Beijing, China, and a back door vulnerability in an application programming interface with root access to statewide American voter registration rolls.

Illegal Ballot Harvesting

Cain said that although the FBI confirmed American votes were “safe” from foreign hacking, this case reflects a grave threat to election integrity that remains unaddressed and, for the first time, evidence of American poll data resident in China exposed to the Chinese Communist Party. Cain added that foreign program access to American voter rolls would be clearly illegal and could aid in illegal ballot harvesting, opening the door to widespread abuse of mass mail-in ballots and the potential for fraudulent manipulation.

On the heels of Trump’s recent indictment in New York, which Trump said in a statement was “political persecution and election interference at the highest level in history,” the public may finally have an opportunity to glean some answers to troubling questions on two politically polarized investigations through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Declassification

“I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!” Trump posted on Twitter on October 6, 2020, indicating the door would seem to be open to discovery.

Cain said, “Our founders would be rolling in their graves if they could see what’s going on in America today. If we don’t take a stand for the basic principles upon which America was founded — and in which the majority still believes in — then when we lose this country, it will be our fault. So, I’m not going down without a fight, I will not be intimidated into silence, and I will continue to labor for the restoration of a free America that respects and honors the God-given rights of all its citizens.”