Government Corruption Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Government Corruption Media Articles in Major Media

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Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

A federal statement announcing Jeffrey Epstein's death has surfaced in newly released Justice Department files but it carries a date that appears to precede the moment he was officially found dead inside his New York prison cell. The document, issued by the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and dated Friday, August 9, 2019, states that Epstein had already been found unresponsive and pronounced dead. But prison records and official accounts show Epstein was not discovered unresponsive until the morning of August 10, 2019. According to official accounts, Epstein was discovered unresponsive in his cell shortly after 6.30am on August 10 by a corrections officer. Medical personnel attempted to revive him, but he was pronounced dead soon afterward. Epstein's death came amid a cascade of failures inside one of the federal government's most secure detention facilities. Prison records show that guards assigned to monitor Epstein did not conduct required checks during the overnight hours before his body was discovered. Scheduled rounds at 3am and 5am were missed, according to official findings. Furthermore, cameras positioned outside Epstein's cell were not functioning properly that night. Investigators later confirmed that at least two surveillance cameras had malfunctioned, leaving critical gaps in visual monitoring. Because of those failures, officials were unable to establish a definitive timeline of Epstein's final moments.

Note: Mark Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein's brother, believes that his death involved an official cover-up. An email thread between high-level federal investigators discusses what appears to be an unnamed individual attempting to extort Mark Epstein. The sender claims: "with the coordination of the director of prison regulations, the cameras were tampered with and some the videos of the prison cameras were cut. At that time, prison guards [redacted] were paid $6,500 so that they would not visit prisoners at this time. Within 15 minutes, a man named [redacted] entered your brother's prison cell and strangled him." For more, internal US Bureau of Prison (BOP) documents suggest a possible cover-up, while a 60 Minutes 2020 investigation uncovered compelling evidence that challenges the official suicide ruling in Epstein's death–including suspicious neck fractures, missing surveillance footage, and a series of unexplained security failures.

The name of Former US President George Bush has allegedly appeared in the latest tranche of Epstein Files released by the US authorities. The files linked to Jeffrey Epstein include a reference to "George Bush 1" in a complaint filed with the New York Police Department. The mention has reignited online attention and prompted fresh scrutiny of what the files actually show – and what they do not. The latest tranche contains police reports, witness statements and investigative notes in which a purported victim's account names several highprofile figures. In one document, an email or interview summary records the victim saying he "was also raped by George Bush 1," and the name appears as a referenced party rather than in Epstein's own logs. The files also include other sensational claims attributed to the same source. On social media platform X, a user shared the screenshots from the document showing an email correspondence which contains the purported Epstein victim's account notes "Thanks M, I didn't realize Bush raped him too. Ok." It also mentions some more details like - While on this yacht he witnessed African American males having sex with white blonde females, all of whom were bleeding during intercourse. "He was a victim of a type of ritualistic sacrifice in which his feet were cut with a scimitar but left no scarring. On the yacht he witnessed babies being dismembered, their intestines removed, and individuals eating the feces from these intestines," it adds.

Note: Don't miss Part 1 and Part 2 of our in-depth investigative series on this massive elite crime ring now coming to light in the documents being made public. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking ring.

A confidential informant told the FBI in 2017 that Jeffrey Epstein had a "personal hacker," according to a document released by the Department of Justice on Friday. The document, which was released as part of the Justice Department's legally required effort to publish documents related to its investigation into the late sex offender, does not identify who the alleged hacker was, but does include several details about them. According to the informant, the hacker was an Italian born in the southern region of Calabria and specialized in finding vulnerabilities in iOS, BlackBerry devices, and the Firefox browser. The hacker allegedly developed zero-day exploits and offensive cyber tools and sold them to several countries, including an unnamed central African government, the U.K., and the United States. The informant told the FBI that Epstein's hacker sold a zero-day to Hezbollah, which paid him with "a trunk of cash." Per the informant, the hacker "was very good at finding vulnerabilities." It's important to note that this document contains allegations from only the informant, not from the FBI directly, so it's unclear how trustworthy the information and allegations are.

Note: A zero-day hack is when attackers secretly exploit a software flaw before the company even knows the flaw exists or has time to fix it. Don't miss Part 1 and Part 2 of our in-depth investigative series on this massive elite crime ring now coming to light in the documents being made public. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking ring.

In mid-December, as negotiations to end Russia's war in Ukraine gathered pace, a group of Ukrainian officials sat in a conference room in New York for a meeting with senior executives at BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager. They had come to discuss a crucial element of a peace plan drafted by Kyiv and Washington: Ukraine's postwar recovery. BlackRock had been enlisted to help build a strategy for what President Volodymyr Zelensky has called an $800 billion "prosperity plan." The meeting, held at BlackRock's headquarters, kick-started work on identifying funding sources and investment priorities. BlackRock's role has generated more questions than answers, as the Trump administration steers plans for rebuilding Ukraine toward American business interests. Seven European and Ukrainian officials ... voiced doubts about BlackRock's ability to attract the enormous investments envisioned. The involvement in the talks of a private firm whose main business is to maximize financial returns has reinforced concerns that the Trump administration views Ukraine's reconstruction as a profit-making opportunity for the U.S. government and American companies, rather than as primarily a humanitarian or security matter. Last year, President Trump pushed for a deal granting the United States a stake in Ukraine's mineral wealth. In peace talks with Kyiv, the president's main negotiators have been real estate developers.

Note: First, Blackrock buys up government bonds used to finance military spending, meaning it directly profits from the debt created by war itself. Then, after the war, Blackrock is set to profit again – this time from reconstruction contracts, land grabs, and privatization efforts. Read about this and more with our Substack, Working Together To End the War On Peace in Ukraine, which challenges the dominant narrative on the Ukraine war, arguing that US and NATO policies, covert intelligence agency operations, media censorship, and corporate profiteering have fueled the conflict while blocking genuine peace efforts.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will launch a study on cellphone radiation, a department spokesman said on Thursday, building on Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr's criticism linking them to neurological damage and cancer. Last year, the department said 22 states had restricted cellphone use in schools to improve the mental and physical health of children under the "Make America Healthy Again" movement. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration also took down old webpages saying cellphones are not dangerous. "The FDA removed webpages with old conclusions about cell phone radiation while HHS undertakes a study on electromagnetic radiation and health research to identify gaps in knowledge, including on new technologies, to ensure safety and efficacy," said HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon. "The study was directed by President Trump's MAHA Commission in its strategy report," Nixon added. However, some webpages of agencies such as the FDA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continue to say that to date there is no credible evidence pointing to health problems from cellphone radiation. The National Cancer Institute, under the National Institutes of Health, says "evidence to date suggests that cellphone use does not cause brain or other kinds of cancer in humans."

Note: Unlike the US, many countries have regulations in place to protect people from cell phone radiation exposure. Check out this comprehensive list of countries with official recommendations and policies on cell phone radiation exposure. A ProPublica investigation found that the FCC brushed aside findings from other government scientists showing evidence of rare cancers linked to cellphone radiation. In 2011, the World Health Organization's cancer research arm classified wireless radiation as "possibly carcinogenic to humans," and in 2018 a major US government study found "clear evidence" that cellphone radiation caused cancer in laboratory animals. Read more about how Big Wireless made us think cell phones carry no cancer risks.

The relatively small Somali community in the U.S., estimated at 260,000, has lately been receiving national attention thanks to a massive fraud scandal in Minnesota. A central theme of Trump's anti-Somali rancor is that they come from a war-torn country without an effective centralized state, which in Trump's reasoning speaks to their quality as a people, and therefore, their ability to contribute to American society. It is worth reminding ourselves, however, that Somalia's state collapse and political instability is as much a result of imperial interventions, including from the U.S., as anything else. Cold War geopolitical machinations partly created the contextual background to the 1977-78 Somalia-Ethiopia war. Somalia's defeat in this war set the stage for the disintegration of the state in 1991. This threw the country into a prolonged state of conflict, resulting in mass displacement and migration. U.S. drone strikes in Somalia have continued over the past two decades with varying degrees of intensity at different times. Since Trump returned to office, his administration has dramatically increased the drone campaign, while the transparency of the decision-making process and consequences of these strikes have become more opaque. Recent scholarship has noted the link between U.S. militarism in Somalia and the policing and surveillance of Somali immigrants in the U.S. Trump's xenophobic rhetoric ... conveniently omits the U.S role in fomenting instability.

Note: Read about the terrible consequences of US policy in Somalia. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.

"We had no way to compete with their technology, with their weapons. I swear, I've never seen anything like it," a Venezuelan security guard says in a video widely shared on social media and promoted by the White House. His account tells how U.S. special forces in Venezuela captured then-President Maduro using new technology which incapacitated the entire protective team and allowed two dozen U.S. troops to easily defeat hundreds of defenders. Guard: "At one point, they launched something–I don't know how to describe it... it was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside. We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move." In the 90's and early 2000s, the Pentagon poured resources into the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, now rebranded the Joint Intermedia Force Capabilities Office. Their task was to develop non-lethal, or less-lethal weapons which ... would disable or incapacitate people. The Pentagon worked on a wide variety of concepts, including strobe dazzlers, malodorants and electroshock projectiles. One of the biggest was the millimeter-wave Active Denial System or ‘pain beam' which could inflict severe pain and drive back rioters from several hundred meters away. A patented device known as Electromagnetic Personnel Interdiction Control (EPIC) ... uses radio waves "to excite and interrupt the normal process of human hearing and equilibrium."

Note: Acoustic or sonic weapons can vibrate the insides of humans to stun them, nauseate them, or even "liquefy their bowels and reduce them to quivering diarrheic messes," according to a Pentagon briefing. These devices can also cause excruciating pain, with some able to heat up skin from a distance and others that can beam sound into the skull of a human. Learn more about non-lethal weapons in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.

The Defense Department has spent more than a year testing a device purchased in an undercover operation that some investigators think could be the cause of a series of mysterious ailments impacting US spies, diplomats and troops that are colloquially known as Havana Syndrome. A division of the Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations, purchased the device for millions of dollars in the waning days of the Biden administration, using funding provided by the Defense Department, according to two ... sources. Officials paid "eight figures" for the device, these people said, declining to offer a more specific number. The device is still being studied and there is ongoing debate ... over its link to the roughly dozens of anomalous health incidents that remain officially unexplained. The device acquired by HSI produces pulsed radio waves, one of the sources said, which some officials and academics have speculated for years could be the cause of the incidents. Although the device is not entirely Russian in origin, it contains Russian components. The device could fit in a backpack. Havana Syndrome, known officially as "anomalous health episodes" ... first emerged in late 2016, when a cluster of US diplomats stationed in the Cuban capital of Havana began reporting symptoms consistent with head trauma, including vertigo and extreme headaches. In subsequent years, there have been cases reported around the world.

Note: Read more about Havana Syndrome. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.

More than a decade ago, I walked into the Challenger Memorial Youth Center in Los Angeles County to gather data for a lawsuit related to their "failure to provide an adequate education to detained youth." What our team found was much more horrifying: masses of teachers not showing up or late to work, leaving youth in their cells; children in solitary confinement for weeks; sexual assault by probation officers and detention staff; teacher-run fight clubs during class; and more. These abuses continue even today, as exposed earlier this year by sex tapes recorded in a juvenile detention facility in Seattle and videos of gladiator fights between teens in custody in Los Angeles County. The juvenile justice system was originally designed to be supportive and child-centered, but it became increasingly punitive and harsh through the War on Drugs in the 1980s, which resulted in exponentially higher rates of arrests and imprisonment. As a result, children with externalizing symptoms of trauma – abuse, neglect, domestic violence – have been incarcerated without treatment for their behavioral and mental health symptoms. Youth incarceration is extremely harmful to communities, causing worse adult health and functional limits. If we want a healthy society, we need to address trauma through treatment, not incarceration. Punishment provides immediate, visible results, while empowering youth requires patience, understanding and time.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and sexual abuse scandals.

CIA and DEA ... drug operations were intimately tied to the Latin American anticommunist brigades funded by Western capital throughout the Cold War, and the brutal liquidation of the Left these narco-terrorists often carried out. Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro is being held in a Brooklyn jail charged with smuggling cocaine into the United States. But even the Drug Enforcement Agency estimates that less than 10 percent of cocaine shipments to the U.S come through Venezuela. The vast majority of cocaine shipments originate in Colombia and move through the Pacific route and Mexico. There are no shortages of Latin American leaders and military chiefs who are heavily involved in drug trafficking but who are considered close allies of the United States. One of them, former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, was pardoned by Donald Trump last month, after he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiring to distribute over 400 tons of cocaine in the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also Trump's national security advisor, comes out of the rightwing Cuban exile community in Miami, one that has for decades engaged in drug trafficking and a dirty war against those it condemns, like Maduro, of being communists. These anti-communist Cubans, including Rubio's inner circle, have [close ties] with the drug trade and [support] Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa, whose family fruit business is accused of trafficking 700 kilos of cocaine. Rubio hailed Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa, who leads a country whose homicide rate has risen eightfold since 2016, as an ‘incredibly willing partner' who ‘has done more just in the last couple years to take the fight to these narco-terrorists and these threats to the security and stability of Ecuador than any previous administration.' Just five months earlier, a damning investigation revealed that Noboa's family fruit business had trafficked 700 kilos of cocaine to Europe in banana crates between 2020 and 2022.

Note: Read our in-depth Substack, "How The Deep State Won the War on Drugs: A Complete Timeline," which reveals undeniable evidence that drug trafficking is an essential tool used by the US government and authoritarian regimes around the world to maintain power. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the war on drugs.

In 1993, 60 Minutes aired a report detailing how the CIA recruited Venezuelan military officer Gen. RamĂłn GuillĂ©n Dávila, enabling the shipment of roughly 22 tons of cocaine into U.S. cities under the guise of an intelligence operation. Once the so-called "Cartel of the Suns" outlived its usefulness to U.S. intelligence, it quietly vanished–only to be revived years later by the U.S. government as a political weapon in its campaign against Venezuela. The Trump administration has accused Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of leading the long-defunct "Cartel of the Suns." But as journalist Diego Sequera explains, the cartel's origins trace back to the early 1990s, when the CIA allegedly directed one of its top Venezuelan military assets to facilitate the shipment of tons of cocaine into U.S. cities. The "Cartel of the Suns" functions less as a criminal organization than as a political fiction–one born from a U.S. intelligence operation, buried when it became inconvenient, and resurrected decades later to justify coercive measures against a government Washington seeks to remove. What remains consistent is not the evidence, but the utility of the accusation. And in the end, the "Cartel of the Suns" tells us far less about Venezuela than it does about U.S. power: how an intelligence-linked drug operation can be erased from history when it implicates Washington, then revived as propaganda when regime change again becomes the goal. The cartel never needed to exist–only the narrative did.

Note: Read our in-depth Substack investigation and timeline exploring how the deep state won the war on drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the war on drugs.

Thousands of surveillance reports compiled by undercover police officers who spied on political campaigners were routinely passed to MI5, documents obtained by the spycops inquiry have revealed. Police sent undercover officers on long-term deployments to infiltrate mainly leftwing protest groups and gather enormous quantities of information about their political and personal activities. It can now be revealed that most of those clandestine reports were sent to MI5, helping the Security Service to build up large files on peaceful protesters who were engaged in democratic protests for an array of causes. MI5 still retains these surveillance reports in its files today. Officers have been criticised for spying on thousands of political organisations such as campaigns against racism and nuclear weapons, the Socialist Workers party, justice campaigns and trade unions. Their reports logged personal information about protesters, including their marriages, sexuality, holiday plans and bank accounts, as well as their plans for political action such as demonstrations. Stamped on the surveillance reports are a tell-tale sign – Box 500, a nickname for MI5 ... which confirms that they were sent to the Security Service by the police spies. Working in tandem, senior police officers running the undercover spies and MI5 met regularly to discuss the political groups they wanted to infiltrate. On several occasions, MI5 warned that particular police spies were in danger of being rumbled by activists.

Note: Read more about the spycops scandal and the dozens of activists tricked into having romantic relationships with undercover police. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on police corruption.

A military contractor with a lineage going back to the notorious mercenary firm Blackwater will help U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement track down a list of 1.5 million targeted immigrants across the country. ICE inked a deal with Constellis Holdings to provide "skip tracing" services, tasking the company with hunting immigrants down and relaying their locations to ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations wing for apprehension. Contractors will receive monetary bounties in exchange for turning over the whereabouts of specified immigrants as quickly as possible, using whatever physical and digital surveillance tools they see fit. Constellis was formed in 2014 through the merger of Academi, previously known as Blackwater, and Triple Canopy, a rival mercenary contractor. The combined companies and their subsidiaries have reaped billions from contracts for guarding foreign military installations, embassies, and domestic properties, along with work for the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. spy agencies. In 2007, Blackwater mercenaries massacred 14 civilians in Baghdad; several of its contractors serving prison sentences for the killings were pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2020. The government has so far paid Constellis $1.5 million, with the potential for the total to grow to more than $113 million by the contract's end in 2027. Constellis ... secured a $250 million construction contract at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, earlier this year.

Note: Erik Prince's Blackwater got caught systematically defrauding the government. Then Blackwater changed its name to Academi and made over $300 million off the Afghan drug trade. More recently, Prince was recruiting ex spies to infiltrate progressive activist groups. Furthermore, the bounty-based approach mirrors a core tactic of the War on Terror, when US forces offered cash rewards for tips that fueled mass detentions in Afghanistan and beyond. This swept up thousands of people who posed no threat and had no ties to terrorism.

The police department in Heber City, Utah, was forced to explain why a police report software declared that an officer had somehow shapeshifted into a frog. As Salt Lake City-based Fox 13 reports, the flawed tool seems to have picked up on some unrelated background chatter to devise its fantastical fairy tale ending. "The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be ‘The Princess and the Frog,'" police sergeant Rick Keel told the broadcaster, referring to Disney's 2009 musical comedy. "That's when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports." The department had begun testing an AI-powered software called Draft One to automatically generate police reports from body camera footage. The goal was to reduce the amount of paperwork – but considering that immense mistakes are falling through the cracks, results clearly vary. Draft One was first announced by police tech company Axon – the same firm behind the Taser, a popular electroshock weapon – last year. The software makes use of OpenAI's GPT large language models to generate entire police reports from body camera audio. Experts quickly warned that hallucinations could fall through the cracks in these important documents. Critics also argue that the tool could be used to introduce deniability and make officers less accountable in case mistakes were to fall through the cracks.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and police corruption.

Jeffrey Collins has watched 14 men draw their final breaths. Over 25 years at the Associated Press, the South Carolina-based journalist has repeatedly served as an observer inside the state's execution chamber, watching from feet away as prison officials kill men who were sentenced to capital punishment. South Carolina has recently kept him unusually busy, with seven back-to-back executions in 14 months. The state revived the death penalty last September after a 13-year pause caused by the decision of pharmaceutical makers to stop selling lethal injection drugs to the state. Officials acquired pentobarbital, a sedative, only after legislators passed a law shielding the identities of suppliers. That secrecy surrounding the execution process means the role of observers has never been more vital. Executions aren't filmed, making journalists' accounts the only impartial record of state-sponsored killings, their words often cited by lawyers and courts. "I don't think executions should be publicly broadcast, but I think they need to be videotaped," [said Collins]. "We don't get to see everything. With lethal injections, there could be problems if the needle isn't put in the vein correctly or the drugs are bad, but we don't get any look into either of those things. With firing squads ... the target could get placed poorly. But when the curtain opens, the target has already been placed, so we don't get to witness that either. The secrecy prevents the entire story from being told."

Note: Wrongful convictions and official misconduct have led to at least 93 innocent defendants being sentenced to death. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption.

In prisons and jails across the US, people are routinely fed unhealthy, tasteless or inedible meals. Many are left hungry and malnourished, with devastating long-term health consequences. The hidden crisis affecting millions of incarcerated people is the subject of Eating Behind Bars, a new book offering a disturbing account of how correctional institutions punish their residents through the food they provide and withhold. The book by Leslie Soble ... describes roaches and rats in prison kitchens, rotten meat and guard dogs who are fed better meals than incarcerated people. It is a compelling, and at times nauseating, indictment of the criminal justice system. Soble manages the Food in Prison Project at Impact Justice, a national non-profit that advocates for reforms and supports incarcerated people. The prison food crisis [is] a public health crisis, with estimates suggesting each year behind bars reduces life expectancy by two years. It's a labor rights issue, as incarcerated people earn pennies per hour running the kitchens, barely enough to buy canteen snacks to supplement their meager diets. And there are environmental ramifications: US correctional facilities create an estimated 300,000 tons of food waste annually as residents reject unpalatable offerings. A typical prison diet is very high in ultra-processed foods, highly refined carbohydrates, sugar and salt, and very low in fresh fruits and vegetables, quality protein, whole grains.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption.

Every year millions of people cycle through America's prisons and jails. Many of them never make it home. Using information from a federal government database of more than 21,000 deaths, The Marshall Project is now able to show how people are dying in America's prisons and jails. For incarcerated people under the age of 55, just under half of the deaths we could identify were from largely preventable causes – like suicide or drug overdoses. Older incarcerated people tended to die from natural causes. In more than a third of cases, we simply could not determine a cause of death, because there was not enough information. Our analysis is based on data collected by the Justice Department under the Death In Custody Reporting Act, which Congress passed a quarter-century ago with the intention of creating a record of everyone who dies in law enforcement custody. The data contained information like names, dates and brief descriptions of the circumstances surrounding each person who died in prisons, jails and during the course of arrest between Oct. 1, 2019 and Sept. 30, 2023. The government's data is riddled with errors. Not only did we find hundreds of deaths missing from the dataset, but the majority of the descriptions detailing how each person died didn't meet the government's own minimum quality standards. Almost one-in-10 of the deaths in the dataset were suicides – making it the third most common way people of all ages died.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption.

Even as US beef prices have continued to surge, American cattle ranchers have come under increased financial pressure–and a new report from More Perfect Union claims that this is due in part to industry consolidation in the meat-packing industry. Bill Bullard, the CEO of the trade association R-CALF USA, explained to More Perfect Union that cattle ranchers are essentially at the bottom of the pyramid in the beef-producing process, while the top is occupied by "four meat packers controlling 80% of the market." "It's there that the meat packers are able to exert their market power in order to leverage down the price that the cattle feeder receives for the animals," Bullard said. To illustrate the impact this has had on farmers, Bullard pointed out that cattle producers in 1980 received 63 cents for every dollar paid by consumers for beef, whereas four decades later they were receiving just 37 cents for every dollar. "That allocation has flipped on its head because the marketplace is fundamentally broken," Bullard [said]. Angela Huffman, president of Farm Action, recently highlighted the role played by the four big meatpacking companies–Tyson, Cargill, National Beef, and JBS–in hurting US ranchers. Dan Osborn, an independent US Senate candidate running in Nebraska, has made the dangers of corporate consolidation a central theme of his campaign. "If you're a farmer, your inputs, your seed, your chemicals, you have to buy from monopolies," he said.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on food system corruption.

On November 18, Donald Trump suffered a major political defeat when the House of Representatives passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act by a nearly unanimous vote: 427–1. But the final version specified that the Department of Justice must make public "all unclassified" documents on Epstein. The word unclassified potentially gives Trump and the CIA wide latitude to hold back Epstein-related materials that they claim are too sensitive to release. People have linked Epstein to the spy world for years. In 2019, Vicky Ward, writing in The Daily Beast, reported that Trump's then–labor secretary, Alex Acosta–who, as a federal prosecutor, had cut a notorious sweetheart plea deal with Epstein before his trial in 2008–had made some startling comments about Epstein when he was being vetted for his role in the first Trump administration. As Ward noted, Acosta claimed that he had "cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein's attorneys because he had ‘been told' to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. ‘I was told Epstein "belonged to intelligence" and to leave it alone,' he told his interviewers in the Trump transition [team]." Just as much of the policing of the American empire is now done by private military companies (notably Constellis, formerly known as Academi and Blackwater), billionaires like Epstein have their own private foreign policy. Whatever work Epstein did with the CIA or the Mossad would have been as a peer rather than an employee.

Note: Our latest 7-min video with Joe Martino of Collective Evolution explores compelling evidence that Epstein was heavily involved in both CIA and Mossad operations. Even after his conviction as a sex offender, Epstein was meeting with top officials at the CIA and the White House. Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations.

By leveraging the dual-use nature of many of their products, where defense technologies can be integrated into the commercial sector and vice versa, Pentagon contractors like Palantir, Skydio, and General Atomics have gained ground at home for surveillance technologies – especially drones – proliferating war-tested military tech within the domestic sphere. Palantir's Gotham platform was initially promoted as intelligence software for defense and counter-terrorism purposes. Now adopted among U.S. law enforcement, hundreds of police departments can use Gotham to analyze data on civilians' whereabouts. Palantir has gone on to sell similar software to other government agencies, obtaining a $30 million ICE contract this spring to help the agency track undocumented immigrants. L3Harris Stingrays, or cell site simulators, are sophisticated phone trackers originally designed for military use. Police departments subsequently adopted these systems to track and collect information on crime suspects. Defense contractors are similarly leveraging their battle-tested drones to capitalize on a booming domestic market. The broader public safety drone market is expected to nearly triple within the next 10 years. The DRONE Act, meanwhile, included in the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act, would let police purchase and operate the systems with federal grants, thus flooding drone procurement processes with more federal funds.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and police corruption.

Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.