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.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has a long and checkered history of letting confidential informants run wild. Joshua Caleb Sutter firmly fits into this framework. A longtime occultist and neo-Nazi, Sutter became an FBI informant roughly 20 years ago. Since then, he's earned at least $140,000 infiltrating a range of far-right organizations, most notoriously the Atomwaffen Division (AWD) starting in 2017. WIRED found evidence of Sutter's extensive influence on and promotion of an international child abuse network that goes alternatively by "com" or "764." 764, as WIRED reported in March along with The Washington Post ... is the target of an international law enforcement investigation, with more than a dozen members arrested in the United States, Europe, and Brazil. Participants in 764 and its affiliated splinter groups like CLVT, 7997, H3ll, and Harm Nation extort minors into sexually exploiting or harming themselves. They find minors via Instagram, Roblox, Minecraft, and other popular games and social media apps where children congregate online. "The informant market is run on this tacit, uncomfortable understanding that the cure sometimes might be worse than the disease," [Harvard Law School professor Alexandra] Natapoff tells WIRED. By utilizing people with criminal or extremist histories to infiltrate hard-to-penetrate milieus like gangs, organized crime, or terrorist groups ... the US government rewards such people for continuing to swim in the same waters. "Baked into that arrangement is the well-understood, avoidable phenomenon that these individuals are going to commit criminal acts," Natapoff says. According to a New York University Law School study, 41 percent of all federal terrorism cases after 9/11 involve the use of a confidential source.

Note: US agencies used at least 1,000 ex-Nazis as spies and informants during the Cold War. Nazi doctors were also used to teach mind control methods to the CIA. For more along these lines, a Human Rights Watch report found that the nearly all of the highest-profile domestic terrorism plots in the US since 9/11 featured the direct involvement of government agents or informants. The FBI has even targeted vulnerable minors, some of them with brain development issues.

Last Tuesday, former president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte was arrested in Manila and taken to the Hague, where he will be tried for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court. From 2016-2022, Duterte's government carried out a campaign of mass killings of suspected drug users. It's estimated that 27,000 people, most of them poor and indigent, were executed without trial by police officers and vigilantes at his behest. Children were also routinely killed during Duterte's drug raids- both as collateral victims and as targets. While this happened, the United States provided tens of millions of dollars annually to both the Philippine military and the Philippine National Police. Many of the killings examined by [Human Rights Watch] followed a pattern: a group of plainclothes gunmen would enter the home of a suspected drug user, kill them without ever issuing an arrest, and plant drugs or weapons next to the body. Sometimes the gunmen would self-identify as police officers, and other times they would not. Police would also detain suspected drug users without charges and torture them for bribes. Less than a month after Duterte took office, then- Secretary of State John Kerry announced a $32 million weapons and training package specifically to support the Philippine National Police. Obama's administration authorized $90 million in military aid to the Philippines in 2016 and roughly $1 billion during the 8 years he was in office.

Note: Read our Substack on the dark truth of the war on drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the war on drugs.

The countless victims of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's bloody war on drugs are celebrating his arrest on charges of crimes against humanity as a momentous first step toward justice. Many of those who financed, enforced, and even continued in his state-sponsored killing campaign have not been held accountable. That list includes U.S. presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and current Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The Philippines remains one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid in the Indo-Pacific region. In 2018 and 2024, two international people's tribunals in Brussels brought together families of victims of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines under both the Duterte and Marcos administrations. Both tribunals ... found the Trump and Biden administrations complicit in heavily funding state-sponsored killings in the Philippines. The killings targeted not only drug users, but also dissidents and activists as well. Duterte established, and Marcos beefed up and continued, the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, or NTF-ELCAC, which immediately weaponized the Philippines civilian bureaucracy to go after government critics and activists on the grounds that they were fronts for the Communist Party of the Philippines. With no due process, activists under Duterte and Marcos continued to be systematically killed, illegally arrested, and targeted by state forces, even going as far as to be subjected to abduction, torture, and forced to sign affidavits claiming to be captured guerrillas.

Note: Read our Substack on the dark truth of the war on drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the war on drugs.

Starting this week, I once again have the privilege of teaching law students about the First Amendment. I am in the United States on a green card, and recent events suggest that I should be careful in what I say–perhaps even about free speech. The Trump administration is working to deport immigrants, including green-card holders, for what appears to be nothing more than the expression of political views with which the government disagrees. These actions ... make it difficult to work out how to teach cases that boldly proclaim this country is committed to a vision of free speech that, right now, feels very far away. In recent weeks, the Trump administration has been–is there any other way to describe it?–rounding up dissidents. To more easily chase down people with ideas it dislikes, the government is asking universities for the names and nationalities of people who took part in largely peaceful protests and engaged in protected speech. Exactly what kind of expression gets you in trouble is not clear–no doubt that's partly the point. [Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Troy] Edgar repeatedly refused to answer [NPR journalist Michel] Martin's simple question: "Is any criticism of the United States government a deportable offense?" A 2010 Supreme Court decision upheld a law banning certain forms of speech that are classified as "material support" to foreign terrorist groups–in that case, the speech included training designated groups on how to pursue their aims peacefully. But even in that case, which upheld a stunningly broad speech restriction, the Court also insisted that ... advocacy of unlawful action is protected so long as it is not done in coordination with terrorist groups. This ... rests "at the heart of the First Amendment": "viewpoint discrimination is uniquely harmful to a free and democratic society."

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and immigration enforcement corruption.

The for-profit prison company GEO Group has surged in value under President Donald Trump. Its stock price doubled after Election Day. But despite its soaring fortunes, the $4 billion company continues to resist having to pay detainees more than $1 a day for cleaning facilities where the government has forced them to live. At the 1,575-bed detention center GEO runs for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Tacoma, Washington, detainees once prepared meals, washed laundry and scrubbed toilets, doing jobs that would otherwise require 85 full-time employees, the company estimated. The state's minimum wage at the time was $11 an hour. (It's now $16.66.) In 2017, Washington sued GEO to enforce it, and in October 2021 a federal jury ruled unanimously in the state's favor. This year, GEO and Washington are back in court – for a third time – as the company tries to reverse the earlier decision that sided with the state. Mike Faulk, a spokesperson for the Washington state attorney general's office, said testimony in the minimum-wage issue highlights the problem with housing detainees in private prisons: profit motive. Not only did GEO pay $1 a day for cleaning in Tacoma, it budgeted less than $1 per meal that each detainee ate, one kitchen worker testified. "So the grade of food is abysmal," Faulk said of the detainee's testimony. "He routinely picked out grasshoppers/insects from the food." Conditions in Tacoma are worsening as the number of detainees rises.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corporate corruption and immigration enforcement corruption.

Business is booming for Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) top deportation flight contractor. On February 28, ICE posted a previously unreported notice that it would award a no-bid contract to CSI Aviation to remove immigrants via flights. The contract is worth up to $128 million and will last for at least six months beginning on March 1, and possibly extend up to a year. ICE modified this contract last Friday to increase the number of ICE removal flights. The recent no-bid contract is the latest of numerous awards in the company's history with ICE, amounting to a combined total of at least $1.6 billion in federal funding since 2005, although business has especially surged in recent years. CSI has long worked with ICE to remove immigrants using planes, working with a network of subcontractors such as GlobalX. Last year, 74% of ICE's 1,564 removal flights were on GlobalX planes. In late 2017, 92 Somali immigrants on a CSI-contracted plane were forced to stay shackled for nearly two days. For about 23 hours, the plane simply sat on a tarmac, and the immigrants were not allowed off. "As the plane sat on the runway, the 92 detainees remained bound, their handcuffs secured to their waists, and their feet shackled together," according to a lawsuit. "The guards did not loosen the shackles, even when the deportees told them that the shackles were painful because they were too tight, that their arms and legs were swollen and were bruised. When the plane's toilets overfilled with human waste, some of the detainees were left to urinate into bottles or on themselves," the lawsuit states.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corporate corruption and immigration enforcement corruption.

In January, President Donald Trump announced plans to detain up to 30,000 immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally at Guantanamo Bay ahead of deportation as part of his hard-line crackdown. Trump said he was signing an executive order "to instruct the departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay." 41 migrants were at the Guantánamo Bay base awaiting deportation, nearly evenly divided between low and high threat levels. All have since been flown to Alexandria, Louisiana, on non-military aircraft on Tuesday and Wednesday, where they are being held at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) processing facility, according to a U.S. official who spoke to ABC News. California Democrat Rep. Sara Jacobs toured the facilities on Friday as part of a bipartisan delegation from the House Armed Services Committee. Jacobs told ABC News that officials at Guantanamo Bay said it cost $16 million to stand up the migrant camp, noting that each tent allegedly cost $3.1 million to construct, despite not being up to DHS standards. U.S. officials told ABC News the tents did not comply with ICE's requirements for migrant detention, including provisions for air-conditioning and other amenities. Some of the hundreds of U.S. troops sent to Guantánamo Bay to prepare the base for housing migrants may be reassigned to assist with the southern border mission in another capacity.

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

President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order banning "federal censorship" of online speech. "Over the last four years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans' speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform or otherwise suppress speech that the federal government did not approve," the executive order read. The order bans federal officials from any conduct that would "unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen." It also prohibits taxpayer resources from being used to curtail free speech and instructs the Department of Justice and other agencies to investigate the actions the Biden administration took and to propose "remedial actions." Limiting communication and coordination between Big Tech companies and the federal government could jeopardize public safety in natural disasters and health emergencies, some observers warned. Multiple lawsuits have accused the Biden administration of leaning on social media platforms to take down lawful speech about the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently backed up those claims, alleging senior administration officials pressured his employees to inappropriately take down or throttle content during the pandemic. The Biden administration has said it was combating the spread of falsehoods to protect the public.

Note: Watch our latest 31-min documentary about moving beyond media polarization, which includes a deeper look into content that was being censored that turned out to be true or worthy of investigation. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship.

The Trump administration's unveiling Tuesday of more than 2,000 documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy set off a scramble for any scraps of revelatory information. The newly unredacted files reveal details about CIA agents and operations that the agency kept secret for decades. [A] 1964 document delves into the CIA's operations out of Mexico City at the time, revealing that the agency had no agents actively operating from Cuba. But the agency had "a number of sources with access to Cuba in third party nationals who are debriefed each time they return to Mexico City from Cuba," according to the ... file. Questions surrounding the CIA's activity in Mexico City arose after a previous document release revealed that Oswald had visited the Cuban Consulate and the Soviet Embassy there weeks before the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination. [Another] one-page document divulges that Manuel Machado Llosas – treasurer of the Mexican revolutionary movement and a friend of Cuban president and dictator Fidel Castro – was a CIA agent. Machado Llosas was slated to be stationed in Mexico City, where the document says the CIA planned to "use him to report on the activities of Cuban revolutionaries" and leverage his friendship with Castro and other Cuban leaders so he could act as a "‘political action' asset." [A] newly unredacted memo reveals that the CIA surveilled Washington Post reporter Michael Getler.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the JFK assassination.

When the final, declassified records from the John F. Kennedy assassination files were posted on the National Archives' website last week, the first document researchers and reporters searched for was White House adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s June 1961 memorandum to the president titled "CIA Reorganization." "How could I have been so stupid as to let them proceed?" President John Kennedy asked his advisers following the CIA's infamous fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Beyond the fact that the U.S. invasion of Cuba was an egregious act of aggression – violating international law and Cuba's sovereignty – its failure was a catastrophic embarrassment for JFK, only weeks into his White House tenure. Kennedy held CIA director Allen Dulles, and his deputy for covert operations Richard Bissell, personally responsible for deceiving him on the prospects for success of the ill-planned paramilitary assault. Indeed, as he processed the implications of the failed invasion, Kennedy vented his desire to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds." That concept was more than angry rhetoric; the president actually set in motion a secret set of deliberations on breaking up the intelligence, espionage and covert action functions of the CIA and subordinating its operations to the State Department. The CIA's operational branches would be "reconstituted" under a new agency.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the JFK assassination.

A former policy adviser to Barack Obama's administration flew to Britain planning to rape a nine-year-old child. Rahamim "Rami" Shy, 47, an investment banker who helped co-ordinate the US government's counter-terror response, travelled from New York to Bedfordshire to meet an English schoolgirl. He spent more than a month planning the trip and had packed his suitcases with cuddly toys and condoms, Luton Crown Court heard. On an online forum and messaging apps, Shy described the "unspeakable acts" he was planning in graphic detail to someone he believed to be the girl's grandmother. But the grandmother, using the name Debbie, was in fact an online decoy created by an undercover officer from Bedfordshire Police. In his messages, Shy described the girl as a "tad late" in starting sexual activity at the age of nine, and said that it was an "honour" to be considered "her first", the court heard. He flew to Gatwick on Feb 23 last year then drove to Bedford to meet the undercover officer, and was promptly arrested. During the trial, the court heard Shy, after arriving in Britain, tried to delete the "depraved messages" he had sent. Other messages retrieved from his phone revealed he had discussed his sexual interest in children with others. A cache of indecent images of children were discovered on his phone by police. Shy was previously employed at banking group Citi, and had worked in a senior role at the US treasury department.

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

A secret list of more than 300 people who belonged to a network that called publicly for the legalisation of sex with children has been handed to the BBC. A small number of those named on the list may still have contact with children. They were all members of a group called the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). The Metropolitan Police had the list for about 20 years from the late 1970s. Most PIE members were based in the UK - but there are also details of people in other parts of western Europe, Australia and the US. The BBC has established that a small number of the men are still alive and may currently be in contact with, or have care of, children through paid work or volunteering. PIE was formed in 1974. Its leaders sought to further their cause by attempting to align themselves with feminist, anti-racist and gay rights movements. It was not an illegal organisation and cost Ł4 a year to join, and to receive its members' magazine. Over a decade, PIE spokesmen gave interviews to the media arguing that adults and children had a human right to have sex with each other. Four years old, they argued, was an age at which most children could give consent. Records ... for 45% of the people on the list [showed] that half of them had been convicted or cautioned (or had been charged and died before trial) for sexual offences against children. Charges included distributing abuse images, kidnap and rape.

Note: Margaret Thatcher herself protected top diplomat Sir Peter Hayman from an investigation into his involvement with child sex abuse material. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on sexual abuse scandals.

One day last spring, the investigative journalist Alex Renton received an unusual email. It contained a scan of a typewritten document marked with the dates 1983/1984, which appeared to be an authentic list of members of an organisation known as the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). PIE operated legally in the UK for a decade from 1974 until the mid-1980s, lobbying publicly for a change in the age of consent – proposing in 1977 that there shouldn't be one at all. PIE members received a magazine, Magpie, which included news, non-nude photographs of children and a "contact page". PIE was disbanded in 1984 after several prosecutions relating to child pornography and conspiracy to promote indecent acts via the contact page. There were more than 300 names on the member list that Renton now had in his possession, a number of which he already knew. The police had the list from the late 1970s, Renton says. He and his team were able to find further information for around 45 per cent of the names on the list and discovered that half of these had convictions or cautions, or had been charged and died before trial, for sexual offences against children. And 65 members, Renton notes, "worked in what we now call regulated professions, which are child facing. "We've got about 30 teachers, as well as social workers, clergy, doctors. There's a number of eminent psychologists and quite a large sector of people in youth work."

Note: Margaret Thatcher herself protected top diplomat Sir Peter Hayman from an investigation into his involvement with child sex abuse material. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on sexual abuse scandals.

Former US congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard's ascendance to director of national intelligence last month signaled a major shift in views toward government surveillance at the highest rung of the US intelligence community. Major privacy groups this week urged Gabbard to declassify information concerning Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)–the nation's cornerstone wiretap authority ... known to vacuum up large quantities of calls, texts, and emails belonging to Americans. The groups privately urged Gabbard this week to declassify information regarding the types of US businesses that can now be secretly compelled to install wiretaps on the US National Security Agency's (NSA) behalf. While it's no secret that the government routinely compels phone and email service providers like AT&T and Google into conducting wiretaps, Congress passed a new provision last year expanding the range of businesses that can receive such orders. Legal experts had warned in advance that the provision was far too ambiguous and likely to vastly increase the number of Americans whose communications are wiretapped. But their warnings were not heeded. In response to questions from the US Senate ... Gabbard backed the idea of requiring the Federal Bureau of Investigation to obtain warrants before accessing the communications of Americans swept up by the 702 program.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy.

The Trump administration's Federal Trade Commission has removed four years' worth of business guidance blogs as of Tuesday morning, including important consumer protection information related to artificial intelligence and the agency's landmark privacy lawsuits under former chair Lina Khan against companies like Amazon and Microsoft. More than 300 blogs were removed. On the FTC's website, the page hosting all of the agency's business-related blogs and guidance no longer includes any information published during former president Joe Biden's administration. These blogs contained advice from the FTC on how big tech companies could avoid violating consumer protection laws. Removing blogs raises serious compliance concerns under the Federal Records Act and the Open Government Data Act, one former FTC official tells WIRED. During the Biden administration, FTC leadership would place "warning" labels above previous administrations' public decisions it no longer agreed with, the source said, fearing that removal would violate the law. Since President Donald Trump designated Andrew Ferguson to replace Khan as FTC chair in January, the Republican regulator has vowed to leverage his authority to go after big tech companies. Unlike Khan, however, Ferguson's criticisms center around the Republican party's long-standing allegations that social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, censor conservative speech online.

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

A three-step process called "Buy, Borrow, Die" ... allows people to amass a huge fortune, spend as much of it as they want, and pass the rest–untaxed–on to their heirs. The technique is so cleverly designed that the standard wish list of progressive tax reforms would leave it completely intact. The ... wealth [of the superrich] consists almost entirely of stock in the companies they've built or invested in. Instead of selling their assets to make major purchases, the superrich can use them as collateral to secure loans, which, because they must eventually be repaid, are also not considered taxable income. You might think this couldn't possibly go on forever. Eventually, the rich will need to sell off some of their assets to pay back the loan. That brings us to step three: die. According to a provision of the tax code known as "stepped-up basis"–or, more evocatively, the "angel of death" loophole–when an individual dies, the value that their assets gained during their lifetime becomes immune to taxation. Those assets can then be sold by the billionaire's heirs to pay off any outstanding loans without them having to worry about taxes. All of this is completely, perfectly legal. The strategy has basically killed the entire concept of an income tax for the wealthiest individuals. The result is a two-tiered tax system: one for the many, who earn their income through wages and pay taxes, and another for the few, who accumulate wealth through paper assets and largely do not pay taxes.

Note: Average individuals also pay more in taxes than major corporations. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on financial inequality.

Lawmakers are facing a deadline to reauthorize the federal program providing insurance to homeowners when private insurers abandon their climate-battered locales. The 56-year-old program holds nearly five million policies and more than $22 billion in liabilities. It was envisioned as a stopgap measure for the working class – but the wealthy are now exploiting the program at the expense of low-income homeowners. That includes Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate. A 2020 study ... found that the program "provides a substantial subsidy to upper-income groups." How? By charging lower-income households higher premiums than high-income households – even though the latter's properties are generating far higher loss ratios. The study found that "almost all of the excess (flood) losses are in the highest income segments" because "insufficient premium is collected from the higher income groups." In other words, "Buyers that can most afford the premium are not paying their proper rate." Facing the program's March 14 expiration, lawmakers have been trying again to greenlight it with few reforms. But Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently gummed up the works with amendments barring the program from insuring second homes and placing a cap on eligible home values. "Is there some level of rich person's mansion that maybe the average ordinary taxpayer should not have to subsidize their insurance?" Paul asked.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on financial inequality.

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics. Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. Officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. A March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which was written by five prominent scientists and declared that no "laboratory-based scenario" for the pandemic virus was plausible. But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely. One of the authors of that paper, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote in the Slack messages, "The lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario."

Note: Watch our Mindful News Brief on the origins of COVID. Read how the NIH bypassed the oversight process, allowing controversial gain-of-function experiments to proceed unchecked. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and COVID corruption.

Five years ago, at the urging of federal officials, much of the United States locked down to stop the spread of COVID – a decision that, over time, polarized the country and changed the relationship between many Americans and their government. Now, two prominent political scientists are making the case that there's no clear evidence that those lockdowns saved lives and that it's time for a national reckoning about the decision-making that led to those lockdowns in the first place. Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee [wrote] about [it in] their new book "In COVID's Wake." The biggest theme that runs through the book [is that] truth-seeking institutions did not function as well as they should have during COVID. There was a premature policy consensus. And there was an intolerance of criticism and divergent points of view that emerged fairly quickly in the pandemic, and that hurt us, that hurt our policy responses, that hurt our ability to course correct over the course of the pandemic as we learned more and had greater reason to course correct. There wasn't enough public deliberation about these matters. Too much power was accorded to narrow experts in public health and epidemiology, in particular. There should have been a wider conversation simply involving many more people with broader expertise. But it also should have involved ordinary people in the public, who after all, were being the ones asked to make sacrifices.

Note: The full text of this article is available here. Watch our Mindful News Brief on the origins of COVID. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on COVID corruption.

With the release of more John F. Kennedy assassination records from the National Archives, [a] little paragraph rose from the dust. We already knew the government was opening the mail of American citizens. But it turns out the CIA had as many as 300 of its employees engaged in various aspects of its mail "coverage" operation – which included reading Lee Harvey Oswald's letters – at a cost of $1 million a year. Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post editor and reporter ... published a startling conclusion on the Substack page that he edits, JFKFacts: "The fact pattern emerging from the new JFK documents shows that: A small clique in CIA counterintelligence was responsible for JFK's assassination." "I'm not saying that [the CIA's counterintelligence chief James Angleton] was the mastermind of the assassination. But he was the mastermind behind Oswald," Morley said. "The failure of Angleton to intercept or do anything about Oswald at the same time that he's running operations around him – that combination, yes – that tells me Angleton played a complicit role in Kennedy's assassination." The FBI memo reveals information that had been hidden until now: "The envelopes were microfilmed and the names and addresses appearing thereon were indexed with IBM equipment. Several months ago CIA began opening some of this mail, microfilming the contents and indexing pertinent data therein. Approximately 250,000 names have been indexed by CIA."

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the Kennedy assassination.

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.