- The Atomic Man-Boy
- Jul 23, 2007
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BONUS:
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And then in June 2016, an ISIS devotee, Omar Mateen, murdered forty-nine people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. In one of his 911 calls to authorities, Mateen “gave a shoutout to the Tsarnaev brothers,” the FBI said. In fact, Mateen told an Orlando police hostage negotiator that the mass murder was sparked by the US bombing of an ISIS leader in Syria and that the “US is collaborating with Russia and they are killing innocent women and children,” according to a transcript of that phone call, one of many Mateen had with the negotiator during the bloodbath. “My homeboy Tamerlan Tsarnaev did his thing on the Boston Marathon . . . okay, so now it’s my turn."
It remains unclear what Mateen’s connections to the Chechens were, or whether he knew Ibragim Todashev, who told investigators that he and Tamerlan had murdered three men in Waltham, Massachusetts, on September 11, 2011—the same day that Ibragim packed up and moved to Orlando. Like Tamerlan, the FBI had multiple interactions with Omar Mateen, and like Tamerlan, the FBI would have closed the threat assessment investigation into Mateen—despite a call from the owner of a gun shop just weeks “before the Orlando massacre alerting the FBI that Mateen had attempted unsuccessfully to buy body armor but had succeeded in purchasing a large number of bullets.
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Chechen rebels have been found fighting alongside Al Qaeda insurgents all over the world. In fact, one such terrorist trained in Chechnya was Nawaf Alhazmi, who boarded American Airlines Flight 11 on the morning of September 11, 2001, and with his younger brother, Salem Alhazmi, slit the throats of two flight attendants as the plane left Logan Airport and hurtled toward the World Trade Center towers with Muhammad Atta at the controls, according to the 9/11 Commission Report.
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Ironically, it may have very well been Plotnikov himself who helped to turn the informant, when he gave the FBS a list of names of the men he had exchanged jihadist ideals with online. One of those men was Tamerlan Tsarnaev—as noted above, a celebrated bilingual boxer born in Russia, just like Plotnikov. Another was a notorious nineteen-year-old jihadist recruiter named Mahmud Mansour Nidal.
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Nidal had been under surveillance by the United States for months.2 And he had been marked as one of Russia’s most wanted men after being accused of recruiting a brother and sister to serve as suicide bombers in one of the bloodiest attacks attributed to his ragtag group of insurgents. [...] After the blasts, Nidal went underground. So Russian counterterrorism officials building the case against him were surprised when he showed up in May at the Al-Nadiriya Mosque on Kotrova Street in Makhachkala—the main Salafi mosque in Dagestan’s capital—and chatted with Tamerlan, the man they had identified as “the American.” Multiple reports citing Russian sources say that Tamerlan was put under surveillance during his trip by counterterrorism officials after he was spotted meeting with Nidal multiple times near the mosque. And on May 19, 2012, Nidal died. He had been tracked to his hide-out and cut down in a blaze of gunfire after he launched a grenade at the counterterrorism forces that were trying to arrest him.
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Tamerlan applied for a Russian passport to replace the (lost) one issued in Kyrgyzstan that he had used to gain entry into the United States as political refugee in 2002. But, as Congressional investigators would find, he left Russia without picking the new passport up.
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But when Tamerlan landed at Boston’s Logan Airport on July 17, 2012, he had no problem whatsoever. A customs agent “scanned Tsarnaev’s Alien Registration Card [green card] into the computer system and admitted him into the country based on his LPR [legal permanent resident] status.
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This was the very loophole in immigration laws that the 9/11 Commission had said needed to be closed. Even more alarmingly, the report states, the customs agent, Jim Bailey, told investigators “he cannot recall” if he alerted the FBI regarding Tamerlan’s return to the United States without a passport.
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But the idea that a man whose name was on two terrorist watch lists somehow managed to clear customs because, government officials claimed, his name was misspelled on those lists is inconceivable. This is especially true given the multimillion-dollar computer program the DHS had purchased to prevent that very sort of thing from occurring. Even after the Russians had inexplicably notified the United States in writing about the American’s radicalization, he was able to travel to a terrorist hotspot and return without being questioned.
Certainly if he was the informant who helped arrest high-level terror targets or provoke deadly encounters between them and counterterrorism forces in Russia, then only a small handful of intelligence agents and DHS officials would know his identity, or even his code number as a human source. Of course, none of them would ever discuss it publicly.
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“The DHS secretary at the time of the Boston Marathon blasts, Janet Napolitano, was grilled about lapses at a Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on immigration in April 2013.
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Sen. Chuck grassley asks how it’s possible a misspelling caused the problem: “It would be better,” Napolitano told Grassley at the hearing, “if we could discuss those with you in a classified setting.”
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Also in the USCIS file was a form sent to Tamerlan telling him he was scheduled to take the oath of citizenship on October 16, 2012, which would have meant an impossibly short turnaround for a naturalization application opened just months earlier. Clearly something went wrong, and many would say that the gaffe would expose how far the FBI was willing to go to help Tamerlan.
On October 22, 2012—days after the initial oath ceremony for Tamerlan was somehow scuttled—a USCIS officer emailed David Cedearleaf, the FBI’s special agent in the Boston field office’s counterterrorism unit, saying that Tamerlan’s name had popped up on the terrorist watch lists and asking if he “represented a national security concern.” The next day, on October 23, 2012, Cedarleaf, who was also the special agent in Boston assigned to investigate Tamerlan after the FSB warning in 2011, assured USCIS officials in writing that Tamerlan was deserving of full citizenship: “There is no national security concern related to Tsarnaev and nothing that I know of that should preclude issuance of whatever is being applied for.
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There were those unanswered questions, such as how Tamerlan was allowed to travel to a terrorist hotbed; why he recorded his conversations with his mother’s second cousin, a leader in an Islamist organization in the Caucasus; and why his application for citizenship—for which he wasn’t eligible because of his arrest for domestic violence, as explained above—was reopened after his return from Russia.
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Then federal judges started to take a look at the use of Muslim informants after the case of the so-called Newburgh Four, four Muslim men who were arrested in 2009 for allegedly planning to shoot down military airplanes flying out of the Air National Guard base in Newburgh, New York, and allegedly participating in another plot to blow up two Bronx synagogues. There were allegations that the FBI had actually organized both plots and encouraged the four men to carry them out by plying them with food and money. In fact, a report issued by the Human Rights Institute at Columbia University Law School stated that roughly half of the federal prosecutions of Islamic terrorism cases relied on informants: “Indeed, in some cases the Federal Bureau of Investigation may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by conducting sting operations that facilitated or invented the target’s willingness to act. According to multiple studies, nearly 50 percent of the more than 500 federal counterterrorism convictions resulted from informant-based cases; almost 30 percent of those cases were sting operations in which the informant played an active role in the underlying plot.
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Those warning signs had certainly been observed in Tamerlan Tsarnaev. He had stopped drinking and doing drugs. He had traded his designer clothes for traditional Muslim robes, wearing them to the pizza parlors and Starbucks stores in his Cambridge neighborhood. In addition, he was bilingual and hulking. A perfect recruit, according to Dzhokhar’s defense attorneys. In a court filing they would write, “The FBI made more than one visit to talk with Anzor, Zubeidat and Tamerlan, questioned Tamerlan about his Internet searches, and asked him to be an informant.
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One of those (associates of Tamelan who were likely informants) men was Magomed Dolakov. And he fit the description of the mysterious man that Watertown Sergeant Pugliese had seen acting suspiciously during the firefight, hopping a fence and running away.[...] Magomed spent most of his time in the library at MIT, and that is where the FBI found him. They asked him to meet at a nearby Starbucks for a chat. Magomed complied.”
“That interview was the last the FBI had with Magomed, who disappeared days later. Dzhokhar’s defense attorneys were eager to talk to him about the radicalization of their client’s older brother, but no one could find him. “We can’t find him,” defense attorney Miriam Conrad would tell the court, adding, “neither can the government.” The implication was that the government didn’t want Magomed talking, so they may have let him flee.
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And more questions have been raised with a separate investigation into a drug trafficking crew of Eritrean immigrants, a group that would eventually be tied to the gun used to assassinate MIT Police Officer Sean Collier.”
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The FBI was hoping to arrest a multinational crew of Muslim immigrants in Portland, Maine, who were selling crack cocaine and sending the proceeds overseas. Confidential informants were at the center of the investigation, called Operation Run This Town. And ATF agents would trace the Ruger P95 Tamerlan used to murder Sean Collier.
As mentioned a few posts back, Todashev was totally not executed by the FBI when they went to interview him. Which is a shame. I'm sure they wanted what he knew to be in the public record.
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One of the questions that died with Ibragim Todashev was about a gun that was stashed “for protection” at 12 Harding Avenue in Waltham, a gun that went missing after the murders. The gun belonged to Brendan Mess, Hiba Eltilib, his girlfriend, told investigators in the hours after she saw the bodies of her boyfriend (with his throat slashed ear to ear) and his friends (sexually mutilated, with their necks sliced by a blade as well). Left in the apartment was $5,000 in cash and thousands of dollars’ worth of hydroponic marijuana, but the gun was gone, she said. Ibragim had been in the process of confessing to the robbery that he committed with Tamerlan on September 11, 2011, when he died. He never got around to writing exactly what they had stolen.
The missing gun, investigators believed, could explain the two muzzle flashes observed by multiple witnesses during the Watertown firefight. [...] but only one gun was recovered—except for a BB gun that had been discarded on a resident’s lawn. The muzzle flashes indicated that there could be another shooter on the scene, possibly a resident of the house at 89 Dexter Avenue that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had emerged from, or even the man that Tamerlan had called right after the murder of MIT Police Officer Sean Collier: a native of the Caucasus named Viskhan Vakhabov. He and Tamerlan prayed together at the Cambridge mosque. Their brothers were friends and classmates at UMass/Dartmouth, and, prosecutors said, Viskhan was a liar who refused to testify in front of a grand jury on the ground that “he could incriminate himself in the Boston Marathon bombings,” a statement that should have made him a person of interest in connection with the bombing plot. But for some inexplicable reason the federal government did not consider him a suspect and fought hard to keep his interviews with the FBI a secret, calling him an unreliable witness—albeit a witness who had spent a lot of time with both Tsarnaev brothers. The three had even been together in the days immediately before, and then again after, the Boston Marathon attack, going together to Wai Kru to work out.
*Starts banging the table chanting "Gladio! Gladio! Gladio!"*
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Strangely, Gerry Leone, the Middlesex district attorney who first mentioned the “two men” who left the Waltham apartment alive on September 11, 2011, quit his job four days after the Boston Marathon attack, on the same day that the world learned the bombers had killed a police officer, carjacked a young businessman in Cambridge, and engaged investigators in a wild firefight that had left another police officer in critical condition and one of the Tsarnaev brothers dead. [...] Commonwealth, Leone quietly resigned and announced that he would be joining Nixon Peabody, a prestigious 150-year-old law firm that counted many former federal prosecutors, judges, and political advisors among its attorneys. Nixon Peabody boasted of its new hire by describing Leone this way: “As the Department of Justice’s first ever Anti-Terrorism Task Force Coordinator for Massachusetts, Leone initiated nationally recognized and unprecedented cooperation among federal, state and local authorities to protect the Commonwealth from terrorist threats following September 11.
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It remains unclear whether or not Leone ever alerted the FBI about the bizarrely savage triple murder on Harding Avenue in Waltham on September 11, 2011, or about the connection of Tamerlan, who once lived with Brendan Mess as roommates, to the victims. He did, however, call the scene graphic at the time of the slayings. Then there was the odd coincidence of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s title fight wins for Team New England in the National Golden Gloves in 2009 and 2010, which coincided with Gerry Leone’s second job as a Golden Gloves referee at Lowell Stadium, the very same place where Tsarnaev was crowned champion.
When the men were murdered on Harding Avenue, Leone was an executive board member of the Massachusetts Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council, a perfect fit for the former federal prosecutor who had successfully sent failed shoe bomber Richard Reid to Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) Supermax (which has solitary cells for 490 male prisoners), in Florence Colorado, for life. He was also familiar with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, for which he still acted as a consultant. Certainly Leone knew that the date of the murders and the manner in which the men had been nearly beheaded and the two Jewish victims sexually mutilated were indications that Islamic terrorists should have been suspected as the perpetrators. Leone was a very sharp investigator, which led to questions being asked among his peers about whether he had been pressured to put the Harding Avenue investigation on the back burner so some federal agency could continue to run Tamerlan as an asset. Of course, no one would ask those questions publicly.
There is a gag order in place on the entire triple homicide both in the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and in the Middlesex district attorney’s office even at the time of this writing, in 2016. All testimony and evidence in Tsarnaev’s trial pertaining to the Waltham triple murders would be filed under seal, and remain under seal as late as December 2016.
Back to Daniel Morley
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But then a man named Daniel Morley was arrested for attacking his mother, and with that arrest came the discovery of a massive cache of bomb-making materials, including a giant pressure cooker concealed in a duffel bag along with blue surgical gloves, a machete, Russian assault rifles, and an empty box that had contained the exact size and brand of pressure cooker—a six-quart Fagor—used in the bombs that had exploded at the Boston Marathon’s finish line.”
On the back of the box top was a chemical recipe for thermite—a combination of metal powder fuel and metal oxide that, when ignited by heat, can act as an accelerant and is often used for bomb fuses to create a more powerful explosion. The recipe was scribbled in pen like a laboratory formula, much like the ones Daniel used when he was employed as a veterinarian technician in MIT’s Division of Comparative Medicine, a lab located inside the Stata building, outside of which MIT Police Officer Sean Collier had been killed. Daniel’s employment with MIT had been terminated in July 2012. Morley told his mother he didn’t want to conduct tests on animals any longer, but it was more likely that he had been fired.
The police knew what they were looking at in Daniel’s cramped bedroom at his mother’s house. They had all studied the pictures from the marathon bombing enough to know that they were looking at basically every component needed to build the kind of bombs that had been detonated at the marathon.
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Before long, FBI agents from the Boston field office showed up, which struck the cops on the scene as strange. No one had called the FBI yet. One bomb squad technician would later say, “It was very surprising to us that the FBI responded immediately to a scene for a crackpot.” The commanding officers from the MSP and the Topsfield Police Department looked at one another with raised eyebrows. Did you call them?, the questioning looks said. Both shook their heads. The FBI hadn’t been notified, and it was unusual for them to respond without being summoned by a police official. No one knew if they had overheard the radio transmission to Topsfield PD, which was unlikely, or if they had gotten a call from someone inside the house.
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The Boston Marathon attack had happened just two months earlier, and no one was taking any chances with this kid. Besides, the FBI had repeatedly indicated to its law enforcement officers that agents had not “definitively determined where the bombs were built,” [...] That statement was echoed by FBI supervisory agent David McCollum, a chemist forensic examiner in the bureau’s Explosives Unit, who testified, “I do not, based on our analysis, think we can tell where these bombs were built.”
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FBI officials claim Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev built the bombs they used at the marathon by following a recipe in Inspire, an Al Qaeda magazine.
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But the FBI’s analysis of the bombs debunked the bureau heads’ insistence that the Tsarnaev brothers had constructed them. FBI technicians at the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center in Quantico in late April 2013 found that the bombs in Boston had a much more sophisticated design than that shown in the online magazine, including differences in the initiators, power source, and switch or trigger, which used a toy car remote control." (Remember the landlord of the apartments who collected toy car parts?)
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In that same brief, the government made the startling assertion that the Tsarnaev brothers lacked the sophistication to build the bombs, raising the possibility that they had worked with accomplices. “The Marathon bombs were constructed using improvised fuses made from Christmas lights and improvised, remote-control detonators fashioned from model car parts. These relatively sophisticated devices would have been difficult for the Tsarnaevs to fabricate successfully without training or assistance from others.” And even the evidence, the government wrote, didn’t bolster the belief that the brothers built the bombs. “The Tsarnaevs also appeared to have crushed and emptied hundreds of individual fireworks containing black powder in order to obtain explosive fuel for the bombs. The black powder used in fireworks is extremely fine; it was therefore reasonable to expect that if the Tsarnaevs had crushed the fireworks and built the bombs all by themselves, traces of black powder would be found wherever they had done the work. Yet searches of the Tsarnaevs’ residences, three vehicles, and other locations associated with them yielded virtually no traces of black powder, again strongly suggesting that others had built, or at least helped the Tsarnaevs build, the bombs.”
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“So it was an odd coincidence that the bombs the Tsarnaev brothers used at the marathon had been made inside pressure cookers of the same brand and size that Morley kept a box top to in his house.
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Hayward also found other connections, all coincidental, that linked Daniel to Tamerlan Tsarnaev. For one thing, both men had taken classes at Bunker Hill Community College in 2008 and were involved in mixed martial arts and attended boxing gyms in the area, such as the Somerville Boxing Club, at that same time. Both were students of anarchist literature. Tamerlan subscribed to the Sovereign newspaper, which published stories exploring conspiracy theories such as those suggesting that 9/11 was an inside job. The examination of Daniel’s laptop would show that he had a heavy interest in the group Anonymous. His arrest record also raised some eyebrows.
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The NYPD had arrested Daniel in 2011, as he led an Occupy Wall Street march in New York City. A photographer captured the moment when he was thrown to the ground and handcuffed by a captain. Also found in Daniel’s belongings after a search warrant had been approved was a card naming him as a member of the New Hampshire Liberty Forum, a libertarian group based in Keene.
The chief of the Keene Police Department was so worried about anarchist groups in the area that he applied for a grant from the federal government to obtain an armored BearClaw,(lol) exactly like the one used when Dzhokhar was pulled from the boat in Watertown, writing that “groups such as the Sovereign Citizens, Free Staters and Occupy New Hampshire are active and present daily challenges.” The chief also wrote that police were concerned about “several homegrown clusters that are anti-government and pose problems for law enforcement agencies.” Groups like Liberty Forum—whose membership emblem reads “Free State Project. Liberty in Our Lifetime,” which appears next to the slogan “Many Paths to Liberty!”—were not linked to any crimes but could rise up as anarchists against police, according to the chief.
But for some inexplicable reason, the FBI insisted, and continues to insist to this day, that Daniel had nothing to do with the marathon bombings—despite the ball bearings in his bedroom alongside a giant pressure cooker, despite the top of a box for a six-quart Fagor pressure cooker, the same size and brand used in the marathon attacks, despite the fireworks flyers sent to his mother’s house, and despite the connections to Tamerlan mentioned by his mother.
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[Morley's Mother's Boyfriend] asked the author in the driveway of his Topsfield home, “Can the FBI hide someone in a hospital?” He had dealt with Daniel’s mental illness for more than a decade, and every previous hospitalization had lasted for five days. Never two years—which is how long Daniel would stay in the hospital this time.”
“Months after Daniel’s arrest—when he was confined in a psychiatric ward at Tewksbury Hospital, where his mother visited weekly—Topsfield police officials were stunned to learn that he would not be indicted for possession of the explosive materials and weapons stashed in his room. He would not be held accountable for the chaos on his block or the massive police response after he attacked his mother. The office of Essex County Prosecutor Jonathon Blodgett referred all questions regarding Daniel’s case to the FBI. And the FBI wasn’t talking.
Carrie Kimball-Monahan, spokesperson for the Essex County District Attorney’s Office, explained that all of the evidence in the case had been turned over to the FBI. “We nolle prosequi’ed the bomb threat charge,” Kimball-Monahan said, meaning that the case against Morley would be dropped without even being heard in Superior Court, unusual for such serious charges. “Mr. Morley must comply with the Department of Mental Health, including medications, and not abuse his family. If he complies with these conditions and stays out of trouble, the case will be dismissed.”
Oddly, Kimball-Monahan then referred all questions about Daniel to the FBI with no real explanation as to why she did so. Not that it mattered, since the FBI would not answer them.In fact, to this day no one in the federal government has answered the question about whether Daniel may, however unwittingly, have been responsible for building the bombs used at the Boston Marathon. But a friend of Daniel’s who asked not to be identified in these pages said he had told the FBI that Daniel had repeatedly boasted of building bombs that would target “corporate America” and be detonated under billboards for giant companies, like banks. [...] Marc said much the same thing in interviews: “I don’t think Danny bombed the marathon, but he had a lot of anger at corporate America.”
Then there were the similarities between the materials recovered in Daniel’s home and the bombs used at the finish line. In an FBI affidavit filed on April 21, 2013, Special Agent Daniel R. Genck of the counterterrorism squad of the FBI’s Boston field office wrote that “many of the BBs were contained within an adhesive material” and “contained green-colored hobby fuse.”14 Green-colored hobby wire was one of the items recovered in Morley’s bedroom.
And there was the unrecovered machete that prosecutors mentioned in a superseding federal indictment against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a follow up indictment that was filed after the original with additional charges. The machete was not recovered at the crime scene on Boylston Street or near the Watertown firefight. No machete was found at 410 Norfolk Street or in Dzhokhar’s green Honda. There was none in the stolen Mercedes SUV. It remains unclear why prosecutors would mention this machete, a weapon that was never entered into evidence and would never become part of the case against him at trial.
However, Tewksbury police recovered a machete at Daniel’s house. A photo of it was entered into evidence and recorded on Hayward’s report.
“The machete is part of another mystery that continues to swirl around Daniel: the unsolved 7-Eleven robbery that took place at 10:20 P.M. on Thursday, April 18—at the same time Collier was murdered. A video of the robbery shows a man talking on a cell phone while he robbed the clerk of less than $29 in cash. Initially police officials, including MSP Colonel Tim Alben (now retired), blamed the bombers for the 7-Eleven robbery. The following day that statement was retracted, and police officials said the bombers were not responsible. But multiple sources—including David, his mother’s boyfriend and the man he lived with—have said the robber was Daniel.”
“To this day, no one has been charged with the 7-Eleven robbery that police initially announced the Tsarnaev brothers had been involved with. Friends of Daniel have also viewed the screen shot I showed David and have had the same reaction as he did. “No question,” said one, who has been questioned by the FBI, “That’s Danny.” A Cambridge police official also referred questions about the still-unsolved 7-Eleven robbery to the FBI.
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The FBI electronics forensics report also cited circumstantial evidence of Daniel’s involvement. For example, on February 19, 2013, he searched the Internet for the term “learning Russian for beginners.” Then on March 10 he searched for the address of a Manchester, New Hampshire, gun range called Firing Line. Exactly ten days later the Tsarnaev brothers visited that range, where they rented 9mm handguns and engaged in target practice for about an hour, prosecutors said. Daniel had posted pictures of himself on social media websites shooting guns at the Firing Line around the same time.
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“In the days after he was released in June 2015, Daniel was asked if he had robbed the 7-Eleven to distract cops while the Tsarnaev brothers broke into the lab where he had previously been employed, the one where he could have been making thermite, the bomb accelerant for which a recipe had been scrawled on the back of the empty Fagor pressure cooker box. There has never been any explanation as to why the Tsarnaev brothers were on the campus of MIT, and the theory that they went to steal Collier’s gun is debunked by video evidence played in Tsarnaev’s trial. In the grainy video, Collier is shot and Dzhokhar and Tamerlan first flee the shooting, and then Dzhokhar goes back to get the gun as an afterthought, leaving his fingerprints in the cruiser and on “the gun handle. (He was unsuccessful in taking it because of the holster lock.) Morley wasn’t going to talk about the bombs, or the Tsarnaevs, or whether he helped them. He answered me with just two words. “Wasn’t me.” It was the same answer he gave me when I visited him at Tewksbury State Hospital months earlier. “Wasn’t me.”
D-D-DOUBLE BONUS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV1-r6FRpwo
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“The trip to Russia was like part of the plot of a Steven Seagal movie.
Furious federal lawmakers, including Congressman William Keating, had demanded answers from the FBI about the Boston Marathon attack, but the bureau’s top officials refused multiple requests to testify at Congressional hearings. So the lawmakers turned to Seagal—the swarthy action hero who has long been rumored to be a CIA operative and who counts Vladimir Putin among his pals and has connections to politicians in Chechnya—to lead them into a war-torn country full of suicide bombers and brutality, a region where there are roadblocks and cop killings and where people vanished without warning, never to be seen again. Yes, it sounded like a movie, but it was all too real.
Congressman Dana Rohrabacher had heard the stories about Seagal’s connections to the highest levels of government in Russia and asked him if he could open some of the doors that a delegation of lawmakers would otherwise need to kick in to get any cooperation. The FBI had been stonewalling Congress for months—FBI Director Robert Mueller had even rebuffed an invitation to brief federal lawmakers on the Homeland Security Committee in a closed-door classified session—and by June 2013 lawmakers had decided to go to Russia in search of “the answers that the FBI refused to give them. And Seagal was going to lead the group.
Before they left, Rohrabacher explained to reporters that he had known Seagal for a number of years and that the two had often discussed thwarting radical Islamic terrorism.(Hahahaha) He repeatedly praised the actor for going out of his way to set up meetings for the delegation in Russia. Rohrabacher had been a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan and was all too familiar with the way things got done during the Cold War.
Seagal had offered to set up a meeting for the delegation with Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, a man who had been criticized in the State Department’s latest annual human rights report for his heavy-handed antiterrorism tactics, which included abductions of suspected radicals. He was known for burning down the houses of the families of suspected terrorists. The six members of the Congressional delegation thought that a photo op with Kadyrov might not play well with their constituents back home and declined that offer, so instead Seagal set up a meeting with Deputy “Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, along with ranking members of the FSB, to go over the information that the Russian agency had sent to the FBI’s Boston field office about Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother, Zubeidat, back in 2011—information that the FBI had refused to hand over to Congressional investigators. The delegation also wanted a detailed explanation about a communication between the FSB and the FBI on April 22, 2011, regarding another Russian native living in Massachusetts, Ibragim Todashev. Keating said that FSB letter had described Ibragim as among the “matters of significance”—another issue the FBI refused to explain, especially after an investigation had been opened into whether an FBI agent had been justified in shooting Ibragim seven times during an interview at the Russian’s home in Florida. “That letter was dated April 22,” Keating said. “What information about Mr. Todashev did the FBI and CIA share with local law enforcement?”
The Russians challenged us about the FBI’s claim that it requested more information about Tsarnaev, information that the Russians told us they never received. We asked the FBI for specific dates and who that request was sent to and we never got an answer,” Keating said. “The Russians were more cooperative than the FBI.” He found that worrisome.
There would be a mass exodus of federal investigators—including two appointees of President Barack Obama, the heads of the FBI and DHS—and agents, and even a state prosecutor, after the Boston Marathon attacks. Just months after her Congressional testimony on April 23, 2015, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano resigned. Her testimony that a “spelling error” had allowed Tamerlan to pass through US Customs when he returned from Russia though he was on two terrorist watch lists, was laughable. But she didn’t stick around to be scoffed at. She knew what was in the DHS USCIS file on Tamerlan: multiple spellings of his name, aliases, and two different dates of birth. There was also the letter that suggested he had been rewarded—telling him to show up to take the oath of citizenship when he wasn’t eligible to become a citizen.
“She announced her resignation on July 12, 2013. The very next day was the last day that Richard DesLauriers, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston field office, would spend with the bureau. DesLauriers announced that he was resigning—four years before he was eligible for full retirement benefits—just ten days before his boss, FBI Director Robert Mueller III, did the same thing. Mueller had always been viewed with skepticism by Massachusetts law enforcement officials. The crooked FBI agents who ran James “Whitey” Bulger “as an informant had reported to the criminal division of the US Attorney’s Office in Boston, where for a time Mueller had been the acting US attorney. He had presided over the rogue agents during the time when Bulger committed crimes with seeming immunity as a top-echelon FBI informant. Every time local cops got close to making a move against Bulger, their case was blown. And they blamed Mueller and the FBI.
The fallout also affected a special agent whose name came up over and over, David Cedarleaf, a former captain in the US Marines and the agent who corresponded with USCIS to help Tamerlan get his citizenship. He was transferred out of the FBI’s Boston field office. In 2016, US Attorney Carmen Ortiz celebrated the conviction of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev by awarding citations to everyone in that office who had worked on the case, with one exception—Cedarleaf.
By resigning, the FBI officials with direct knowledge of Tamerlan’s relationships could not be compelled to testify in front of Congress. To this day no one in the FBI has.
So that's most of the fun parts of "Maximum Harm." My conclusion: 
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Jul 7, 2021 01:27
