Government Corruption News Stories

Excerpts of Key Government Corruption News Stories in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

A disturbing trend of undercover federal agents engaging minors online to plan acts related to terrorism abroad, then arresting them shortly after they turn 18, ought to raise eyebrows as well as outrage, given that many of these targets are teens who have significant cognitive and intellectual disabilities. The most recent case in Colorado involves Humzah Mashkoor, an 18-year-old from Westminster charged with "attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization," according to a U.S. Department of Justice December 2023 press release. Months earlier, in July last year, FBI agents arrested Davin Daniel Meyer, 18, of Castle Rock, charged with the same crime, which can carry a stiff penalty of decades in prison. And in June, 18-year-old Mateo Ventura of Massachusetts was charged with a similar crime of intention after being in contact not with terrorists but with undercover FBI agents. A fourth case occurred last year in Philadelphia. When you look at the striking similarities of these cases, it's not unreasonable to conclude that federal agents are failing morally and ethically by seemingly coaxing and cajoling minors – including two Colorado children with limited intellectual capacity and no history of harming anyone – to cross a line. The FBI agents then "get their man" – even before these individuals are in fact men. Enough time has gone by to show the human element to this story, but no reporters seem to be interested.

Note: Read more about the FBI's manufacture of terrorist plots. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on law enforcement corruption and terrorism from reliable major media sources.

A flurry of reports picked up on the arrest of Mateo Ventura, an 18-year-old resident of the sleepy town of Wakefield, echoing government claims that an international terrorist financier and ISIS supporter had just been busted. The Department of Justice's own press release on the case likewise trumpeted Ventura's arrest for "knowingly concealing the source of material support or resources that he intended to go to a foreign terrorist organization." Ventura had never actually funded any terrorist group. The only "terrorist" he is accused of ever being in contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him online as a 16-year-old, solicited small cash donations in the form of gift cards, and directed him not to tell anyone else. Mateo suffered from childhood developmental issues and had been forced to leave his school due to bullying. His case is less a serious terrorism bust than one of the many instances in which a troubled or mentally unfit young man was groomed by undercover FBI agents to commit a crime that would not have otherwise happened. This law enforcement tactic has been criticized by national security researchers who have scrutinized the FBI's role in manufacturing terrorism cases using vulnerable people who would have been unable to commit crimes without prolonged government assistance and encouragement. A 2014 Human Rights Watch report ... said, "In this way, the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals."

Note: Read more about the FBI's manufacture of terrorist plots. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on law enforcement corruption and terrorism from reliable major media sources.

Humzah Mashkoor had just cleared security at Denver International Airport when the FBI showed up. The agents had come to arrest the 18-year-old, who is diagnosed with a developmental disability, and charge him with terror-related crimes. Mashkoor had gone to the airport ... as part of his alleged plot to join the Islamic State. The trip had been spurred by over a year of online exchanges starting when Mashkoor was 16 years old with four people he believed were members of ISIS. According to the Justice Department's criminal complaint, the four were actually undercover FBI agents. As a result of his conversations with the FBI, Mashkoor could face a lengthy sentence for attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization. Law enforcement agents first became aware of Mashkoor's online activities in support of ISIS in November 2021. But instead of alerting his family ... FBI agents posing as ISIS members befriended him a year later and strung him along until he became a legal adult. Almost all of the conduct he is alleged to have committed took place when he was a juvenile. "This case appears consistent with a common fact pattern seen in tens, if not hundreds, of terrorism-related cases in which the FBI has effectively manufactured terrorist prosecutions," said Sahar Aziz, a national security expert. "If there was a serious terrorist threat in America, the FBI would not be spending its time entrapping a mentally ill minor."

Note: Read more about the FBI's manufacture of terrorist plots. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on law enforcement corruption and terrorism from reliable major media sources.

The now-former mayor of College Park, Maryland, was arrested on child pornography charges Thursday morning, adding to a long list of mayors accused of preying on young children. Patrick Wojahn, 47, is charged with 40 counts of possession of child exploitative material and 16 counts of distribution of child exploitative material. Wojahn's case isn't an unusual one. At least 12 additional then-current and former mayors have been accused of child sex crimes since 2021, ranging from child pornography to sexual assault. Phil Briggs, the mayor of Spencerville, Ohio, resigned last month after he was arrested for allegedly secretly recording his girlfriend's teenage daughters while they undressed. Ted Tomaszewski, the former mayor of Mansfield Township, New Jersey, was charged in January with sexual assault, luring and child endangerment. He is accused of engaging in multiple sex acts with a 15-year-old. Carl Johnson, the former mayor of West Bountiful, Utah, and a former bishop for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was charged in September 2022 with sexually abusing three girls under the age of 13. He pleaded not guilty to seven counts of aggravated abuse of a child. An earlier Fox News Digital analysis found that at least 349 public school educators were arrested on child sex-related crimes spanning nearly every state in the country last year, averaging to almost an arrest every day on crimes ranging from grooming to child porn to raping students.

Note: Why is Fox News the only major media outlet covering this shocking issue? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and sexual abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.

Border Patrol agents are warning that kids as young as 8 are being drugged and smuggled into the US by traffickers posing as their parents or family members – and nobody knows how common the horrifying practice is. Authorities have rescued children caught up in two different instances of such smuggling in recent weeks – including one instance in which the alleged traffickers had birth certificates for multiple kids to whom they weren't related, according to the Border Patrol. Authorities say it's not clear what is happening to the children once they are smuggled into the US – but many are vulnerable to being exploited for child labor and child sex trafficking. "Sometimes we encounter criminal actions so horrendous, they defy human decency," said Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol chief of California's El Centro sector in the southeast of the state, in response to the case. In one case, border agents rescued a child at the California border who had been "heavily dosed with sleep aids to prevent him from talking" to authorities, Bovino said Friday. Those agents found that the traffickers had birth certificates for more children. Under the Biden-Harris administration, the number of children crossing illegally into the US alone and without relatives has skyrocketed. Thousands of those children have also gone unaccounted for after they've been released to sponsors, who whistleblowers say aren't properly vetted, in the US.

Note: Why is this horrific issue not being discussed on a significant mainstream level? According to a report by The Center for Public Integrity, thousands have disappeared from sponsors' homes after the federal government placed them there. Watch our Mindful News Brief video on how the US government facilitates child trafficking at the border.

Tech companies have outfitted classrooms across the U.S. with devices and technologies that allow for constant surveillance and data gathering. Firms such as Gaggle, Securly and Bark (to name a few) now collect data from tens of thousands of K-12 students. They are not required to disclose how they use that data, or guarantee its safety from hackers. In their new book, Surveillance Education: Navigating the Conspicuous Absence of Privacy in Schools, Nolan Higdon and Allison Butler show how all-encompassing surveillance is now all too real, and everything from basic privacy rights to educational quality is at stake. The tech industry has done a great job of convincing us that their platforms – like social media and email – are "free." But the truth is, they come at a cost: our privacy. These companies make money from our data, and all the content and information we share online is basically unpaid labor. So, when the COVID-19 lockdowns hit, a lot of people just assumed that using Zoom, Canvas and Moodle for online learning was a "free" alternative to in-person classes. In reality, we were giving up even more of our labor and privacy to an industry that ended up making record profits. Your data can be used against you ... or taken out of context, such as sarcasm being used to deny you a job or admission to a school. Data breaches happen all the time, which could lead to identity theft or other personal information becoming public.

Note: Learn about Proctorio, an AI surveillance anti-cheating software used in schools to monitor children through webcams–conducting "desk scans," "face detection," and "gaze detection" to flag potential cheating and to spot anybody "looking away from the screen for an extended period of time." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

In America's schools, 30 million lunches are served every day. There are standards in place for things like calories, sodium, and added sugar. The USDA asserts that lunches consumed from schools are the most nutritious. We sent school lunches to the Health Research Institute, an accredited lab in Iowa, to hunt for what standards don't cover: heavy metals, pesticides, and veterinary drugs. Our tests revealed unseen, largely unregulated components increasingly connected to everything from attention deficit disorder and liver disease to hormone disruption and cancer. Samples we collected from schools in Washington DC, Virginia, and Maryland included common fare like breadsticks, pizza, potatoes, and fruit. The lab identified more than 50 pesticides in our samples, with dozens often layered into one meal. 38 different pesticides were detected in just one elementary school lunch. 23 pesticides were found in a single strawberry cup. The fungicide, carbendazim, which is banned in most European countries, Brazil and Australia because it is increasingly connected to cancer, infertility, and birth defects, was found in five of our twelve samples. Glyphosate, a widely used and controversial weed killer ... connected to cancer, diabetes, and heart problems, was detected in multiple samples, often in wheat-based products like bread. Cadmium, a known carcinogen, was detected in our samples at a level 12 times higher than the FDA's limit for bottled water.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption and toxic chemicals from reliable major media sources.

A federal court in California ruled late Tuesday against the Environmental Protection Agency, ordering officials to take action over concerns about potential health risks from currently recommended levels of fluoride in the American drinking water supply. The ruling by District Court Judge Edward Chen ... deals a blow to public health groups in the growing debate about whether the benefits of continuing to add fluoride to the water supply outweighs its risks. While Chen was careful to say that his ruling "does not conclude with certainty that fluoridated water is injurious to public health," he said that evidence of its potential risk was now enough to warrant forcing the EPA to take action. "In all, there is substantial and scientifically credible evidence establishing that fluoride poses a risk to human health; it is associated with a reduction in the IQ of children and is hazardous at dosages that are far too close to fluoride levels in the drinking water of the United States," the judge wrote in his ruling. The judge's ruling cites a review by the National Institutes of Health's toxicology program finalized last month, which concluded that "higher levels" of fluoride is now linked to lowered IQ in children. Chen said he left it up to the EPA which of a number of options the agency could take in response to his ruling. They range from a warning label about fluoride's risks at current levels to taking steps towards tightening restrictions on its addition to drinking water.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health and government corruption from reliable major media sources.

The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) internal watchdog has found that top agency officials retaliated against three staffers for expressing different scientific opinions. The employees who were victims of this alleged retaliation thought chemicals should be considered more toxic, while top officials sought to consider them safer, according to the reports from the EPA's inspector general. EPA scientist Sarah Gallagher says she thought the agency should consider the chemical as toxic to fetal development, while another official wanted to classify it as a lower-priority body weight issue. In another case documented in a report finding retaliation against scientist Martin Phillips, a senior science adviser allegedly changed an assessment in a way that removed "reproductive toxicity" as a concern from safety information that goes to people who work with the chemical. In a third report finding retaliation against scientist William Irwin, a manager also allegedly tried to remove evidence of reproductive toxicity. These instances appeared to have a chilling effect that could impact other agency scientists' willingness to stand up to management. "Other assessors noticed how those who disagreed with management were perceived," the reports said. They added that a person whose name was redacted testified that disagreeing or delaying the resolution of backlogged cases could cause management to label an employee "problematic."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and toxic chemicals from reliable major media sources.

For nearly 40 years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, [Anthony] Fauci had served as the ... director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a subsidiary of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Prior to COVID-19, Fauci had long supported funding pandemic research that other scientists found risky, if not downright dangerous. In 2014, there was a series of embarrassing safety lapses at U.S. government labs. In October 2014, President Barack Obama's administration paused federal funding of gain-of-function research that could make ... viruses transmissible via the respiratory route in mammals. In 2017, the White House produced the ... P3CO framework. Under P3CO, the NIH would forward grant proposals involving research on known pandemic pathogens or research that might create or enhance such pathogens to a new P3CO committee within HHS for a department-level risk-benefit analysis. To date, the P3CO committee has vetted just three research proposals involving so-called enhanced potential pandemic pathogens, out of potentially dozens that should have been examined. Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins ... found a way to skirt the oversight process. They "realized that if they don't [forward proposals to HHS for review], there is no review." In 2014, [EcoHealth Alliance] received a five-year, $3.7 million NIAID grant to collect virus samples from human beings and bats in China and then experiment on these viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. EcoHealth announced that it intended to create "chimeric" or hybrid viruses out of spike proteins, the part of a virus that allows it to enter and infect hosts cells, from SARS-like coronaviruses discovered in the wild and the backbone of another, already-known SARS virus. When EcoHealth's year five report was eventually submitted two years late, in 2021, it showed that additional chimeric viruses created in Wuhan demonstrated both enhanced transmission and lethality in humanized mice. By that time, the COVID-19 pandemic was already well underway.

Note: Don't miss our Mindful News Brief on the origins of COVID. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on COVID-19 and government corruption from reliable major media sources.

The city's ex-COVID czar got the boot from his job at a pharmaceutical firm Monday – a week after he was caught bragging about hosting sex parties and attending an underground rave at the height of the pandemic. Dr. Jay Varma was serving as a senior health adviser to then-Mayor Bill de Blasio during COVID-19 when he and his wife put on the sex- and drug-fueled debauchery and attended a packed Wall Street rave, according to secretly recorded conversations the doctor had with a woman. "Varma boasted about harassing people into submission over the vaccine mandate and admitted to participating in illegal sex parties, all while he, former Health Commissioner Dr. David Chokshi, and then-Mayor Bill de Blasio imposed draconian measures that shut down the entire city," [city Councilman Bob Holden] said. Varma's seamy chats ... were made public last week. Michael Kane of Teachers for Choice said, "What disgusts me the most was hearing Varma say having drug-fueled group sex orgies was necessary for him to be his ‘authentic self' because COVID had him ‘pent up.'" Varma said at one point, "My wife and I had one with our friends in August [2020] of like that first summer." "So we rented a hotel ... we all took, like, you know, molly [MDMA] and like it was like eight or nine or us, eight to 10 of us were in a room and everybody had a blast because everybody was like so pent up."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health and government corruption from reliable major media sources.

Former New York City Mayor's Office Senior Advisor for Public Health Jay Varma admitted to pushing monkeypox drug TPOXX despite the low risk of the disease to the general public, according to undercover video shared by podcaster Steven Crowder. Varma helped guide former NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio's response to COVID-19, including crucial decisions about public schools and issuing a vaccine mandate for healthcare workers. He was exposed last week for having admitted to hosting large nude gatherings during the pandemic while urging city residents to remain isolated. In the new clip shared by Crowder, Varma revealed the risk of monkeypox to the general U.S. population is "very low," and it is mainly a concern for gay men who have unprotected sex. Despite this, Varma said he was pushing to receive FDA approval for TPOXX, otherwise known as Tecovirimat. "We want the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, to approve our drug specifically for monkeypox," he said. Varma added the news cycle was a key component of his push to get approval for the drug. "We also need to keep up the people's belief that the [TPOXX] drug works," Varma said. "So, that's why spinning it in the media is helpful. Basically what we're trying to get the media to say is ‘oh, the drug didn't work because it was designed the wrong way, so they're going to do another study and it'll probably work,'" he added. "That's what we want the story to be."

Note: Back in 2022, Dr. Jay Varma appeared on a talk show, warning that he feared "monkeypox could become permanently entrenched." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health and government corruption from reliable major media sources.

A MintPress News investigation into the funding sources of U.S. foreign policy think tanks has found that they are sponsored to the tune of millions of dollars every year by weapons contractors. Arms manufacturing companies donated at least $7.8 million last year to the top fifty U.S. think tanks, who, in turn, pump out reports demanding more war and higher military spending, which significantly increase their sponsors' profits. The only losers in this closed, circular system are the American public, saddled with higher taxes, and the tens of millions of people around the world who are victims of the U.S. war machine. The think tanks receiving the most tainted cash were, in order, the Atlantic Council, CSIS, CNAS, the Hudson Institute, and the Council on Foreign Relations, while the weapons manufacturers most active on K-Street were Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and General Atomics. There is obviously a massive conflict of interest if groups advising the U.S. government on military policy are awash with cash from the arms industry. The Atlantic Council alone is funded by 22 weapons companies, totaling at least $2.69 million last year. Even a group like the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, established in 1910 as an organization dedicated to reducing global conflict, is sponsored by corporations making weapons of war, including Boeing and Leonardo, who donate tens of thousands of dollars annually.

Note: Learn more about arms industry corruption in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.

On Oct. 14, 2020, three weeks out from the election, with Joe and President Donald Trump neck and neck in the polls, the New York Post's first story about Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop exploded like a bomb. The front page featured an email from Hunter's Burisma paymaster, Vadym Pozharskyi, thanking him for "the opportunity to meet your father." It was hard to square with Joe's assertions throughout the campaign that he knew nothing about Hunter's seeming international influence-peddling operation. Even as Twitter and Facebook, in collusion with the FBI, censored The Post, and the mainstream media collectively looked the other way, the Biden campaign knew that the sheer weight of the evidence would eventually be impossible to ignore. [Antony] Blinken's solution was to set in motion one of the most brazen dirty tricks in US electoral history. Using the intelligence community to sound the false alarm of "Russian disinformation," ground already prepared by corrupt elements inside the FBI, he set out to discredit the whole laptop story. CIA veteran Mike Morell [organized] 50 intelligence colleagues to sign a letter falsely insinuating that the damning material from Hunter's laptop published by The Post was Russian disinformation. The Dirty 51 letter, as it came to be known, was timed to appear on the eve of the final presidential debate, to maximize its benefit to Joe, by giving him a "talking point to push back on [President] Trump on this issue," as Morell put it.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.

At Fort Liberty, thousands of soldiers who were trained on the Army's antiterrorism policy saw slides that labeled several legitimate nonprofits as terrorist organizations – a blunder that went on for seven years before photos of the slides were posted to social media this summer, prompting outrage. Nonprofits that were incorrectly labeled as terrorist groups included People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, known as PETA, as well as the anti-abortion groups Operation Rescue and National Right to Life. The advocacy groups Earth First, Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front were also listed. "Incorrectly labeling legitimate organizations as terrorist groups not only undermines the credibility of the training, but also puts service members at risk of being unfairly scrutinized or penalized based on their associations or memberships," said Rep. Andy Kim, D-NJ. "We must be cautious and purposeful in how we define and identify threats to our national security." The soldier who created the slides was an employee of the local garrison and added the nonprofits based on open-source research. The Army didn't find any evidence that the soldier sought to subvert Defense Department policy or to further a personal political viewpoint. Members of Congress first became aware of Fort Liberty's antiterrorism training this summer, when photos of slides used during a July 10 training were shared online.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.

UnHerd, the Britain-based publication I lead, published an investigation on April 17 into a transatlantic organization called the Global Disinformation Index. Having received money from the U.S. State Department, as well as the British, German and European Union governments, the GDI issues what amount to blacklists of news publications, on highly tendentious grounds, that online advertising exchanges then consult and can use to justify turning off ad revenue. What has emerged ... is an opaque network of private and government-supported enterprises that appear intent on censoring political views they find unpalatable. When the [GDI] was originally set up, in 2018, it defined disinformation as "deliberately false content, designed to deceive." On this basis, you could see the argument for having fact-checkers to identify the most egregious offenders. But mission creep has set in at the GDI. It has since come up with a definition of disinformation that encompasses anything that deploys an "adversarial narrative" – stories that might be factually true but pit people against one another by creating "a risk of harm to at-risk individuals, groups or institutions" – with institutions defined as including "the current scientific or medical consensus." The de facto alliance between government and groups working to defund disfavored publications – a sort of state censorship laundering arrangement – is particularly alarming. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act [bars] the Defense Department from placing military-recruitment advertising in publications utilizing GDI, NewsGuard or "any similar entity." The unaddressed problem with these disinformation referees is how their rulings affect online ad services themselves, not just advertisers, with the power to throttle revenue to publications simply for ideological reasons.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and media manipulation from reliable sources.

The FBI is abusing its security clearance process to "purge" political conservatives from the bureau, according to recent whistleblower disclosures. The federal law enforcement agency's Security Division has been suspending or revoking clearances for employees whose political affiliation or COVID-19 vaccination status are suspect, a supervisory special agent who formerly worked in the division alleges. he unnamed agent, who is described as "a registered Democrat" and is represented by the nonprofit Empower Oversight, further claims that high-ranking officials in the division believed "if an FBI employee fit a certain profile as a political conservative, they were viewed as security concerns and unworthy to work at the FBI." In the case of Marcus Allen, a former FBI staff operations specialist (SOS) suspended without pay for more than two years, the officials ignored "possibly exculpatory information" and overruled investigators who "concluded [that] the suspension of his security clearance was not warranted." That decision came after Allen informed his supervisors ... that he did not intend to take the COVID-19 vaccine. "The FBI has used the clearance process as a means to force employees out of the FBI by inflicting severe financial distress: suspending their clearance, suspending them from duty without pay, [and] requiring them to obtain permission to take any other job while stuck in this unpaid limbo," [Empower President Tristan Leavitt] told House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.

In February 2023, government recruiters came to the student union at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Activists had come to protest the expansion of Camp Grayling, already the largest National Guard training facility in the country. "Want blood on your hands?" read the flyers activists distributed on recruiting tables. "Sign up for a government job." When the recruiters returned from lunch, two protesters rushed in, dousing the NSA recruiting table and two Navy personnel with fake blood sprayed out of a ketchup container. The local sheriff's office in Oakland County, Michigan, documented the incident in a case report as a hate crime against law enforcement. The FBI recorded the incident as part of a terrorism investigation. Treating the Stop Camp Grayling protesters as terrorists is the latest episode in a worldwide trend of governments smearing climate and environmental activists as terrorists. Misapplication of the terrorism label frequently serves as pretext for invasive surveillance and sustained scrutiny. Stop Camp Grayling – like most other movements organized around environmental activism – is not engaged in any type of systematic criminal activity. Movement adherents have never endangered human life. Yet the FBI saw fit to share an activist zine with military intelligence, drag in other alphabet agencies, and justify physical surveillance operations – all underpinned by the designation of the movement as worthy of a domestic terrorism investigation.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.

A whistleblower group is suing the Department of Justice over its efforts to "secretly surveil" congressional staff conducting oversight on the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation. Empower Oversight Whistleblowers and Research says in a civil suit filed Tuesday that the DOJ has repeatedly stonewalled records requests involving the "undisputed" surveillance. Its suit seeks to force the Justice Department to hand over records related to the alleged unconstitutional surveillance. Empower's founder, Jason Foster, discovered in October that he was one of those congressional staff members surveilled by the Justice Department while serving as Iowa GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley's chief investigative counsel. "Last fall, @Google told me @TheJusticeDept forced it to secretly turn over my comms records in 2017," Foster posted on X, referencing a Sept. 12 subpoena that year for his private cell phone and email communications. Foster confirmed the DOJ and FBI also "targeted a dozen or so other Capitol Hill attorneys' personal accounts – from both political parties" who were looking into the FBI misconduct that included Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuses as well. Both federal law-enforcement agencies later imposed non-disclosure orders for six years on Google and other big tech giants such as Apple and Verizon that had been subpoenaed for congressional staff communications.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

In a Brooklyn subway station on Sunday afternoon, police shot and injured three people and a fellow New York Police Department officer over a $2.90 fare. Sunday's police shooting should be a lesson in why the subway should not be teeming with cops, responding to "crimes" of poverty – like fare evasion and panhandling – with deadly force. The NYPD recorded more stops of New Yorkers in 2023 than it has in nearly a decade, and 89 percent of those who were stopped are Black and Latine. A staggering 93 percent of riders arrested for subway fare evasion were Black or Latine. Police have arrested 1,700 people for fare evasion and ticketed another 28,000 people so far this year. Overtime pay for police in the subways skyrocketed from $4 million in 2022 to $155 million in 2023. "The NYPD spent $150 Million *extra* last year to catch people who weren't able to afford to pay the subway fare. They owed just $104,000," wrote civil rights attorney Scott Hechinger on X, referring to the total of fares unpaid by fare evaders caught by police in 2023. "$150 million could buy free fares ... for 95,000 poor New Yorkers." It would be naive, however, to overlook the deeply entrenched political economy of carceral punishment in New York and throughout the country – treating poor people, particularly Black people, as accounts from which to extract fines or bodies to fill jails and prisons. It will take more than fiscal sense to upend the current bipartisan political consensus around "law and order."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on police corruption from reliable major media sources.

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