Former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, founder of Boiling Frogs Post, is boiling mad these days and has launched a campaign to blow the cover off the cover-up of powerful criminals, including pedophiles, operating at the highest levels of the United States government. The ACLU calls her a “silenced patriot.” Edmonds started the National Security Whistleblowers movement as a result of her findings and her treatment as she tried to report criminal activity within the U.S. government. The abject failure of federal investigators, as well as the U.S. media, to cover the rest of the Hastert crimes is what upsets Edmonds today. What exactly were Hastert’s crimes and what was he indicted for?
Dennis Hastert rose from wrestling and football coach at the local small-town high school in Yorkville, Illinois to become a U.S. Representative, and then Speaker of the House. His fall from grace will see him sentenced in February 2016 with what could be from months to years in prison. Edmonds, a Farsi and Turkish language speaker, was hired by the FBI to translate wiretaps and other intelligence on targeted individuals. In the course of her duties, according to Edmonds, with her Top Secret clearance, she learned of treason, blackmail of Members of Congress, bribery, and other criminal activities, including pedophilia. The information that Edmonds gleaned from the wiretaps that she was translating provides context for the White House scandal that became known as the “Valerie Plame Affair.” When Edmonds reported the content of this intelligence to her superiors, she eventually was slapped with a “State Secrets” gag order and prohibited from talking about what she learned. She skirted that gag order by placing photographs online of the targeted individuals whose conversations she had translated, thereby discovering their criminal activities. Finally, in 2009, as a result of another lawsuit on an entirely different subject, Edmonds was able to air her information publicly under oath. That deposition is here. Edmonds has written two books about her experiences, a memoir, Classified Woman, and a novel, The Lone Gladio.
The renewal of Edmonds’s ire came as the former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, J. Dennis Hastert, appeared in Court defending himself against two felony accusations: one, that he withdrew cash from his bank account in a way to evade federal scrutiny and two, that he lied to investigators about the reason he was making the withdrawals. The media awkwardly reported Hastert’s clumsy situation; mentioning the indictment, even mentioning the “prior misconduct” against “Individual A,” while giving a complete pass on why “Individual A” was being paid $3.5 million by Hastert for hush money.
To be fair, the problem is not only the media’s, but mainly belongs to the federal investigators. Why on earth would a federal investigator examine only half of a crime? I’m sure a regular television news viewer must be left scratching her head trying to make sense of a narrative that just doesn’t make sense. Here, Hastert gets indicted for withdrawing his own money from his own bank account in order to hide something so valuable that it’s worth millions of dollars to Hastert to hide, yet not one day does the federal investigator even inquire what that might be. The indictment merely reads, “He had been withdrawing cash in increments of less than $10,000 to evade currency transaction reporting requirements because he wanted his agreement to compensate Individual A to remain secret so as to cover up his past misconduct.” Neither the Feds nor the indictment goes any further.
Now, we know that the investigators and the media could easily have gone further. The sister of one alleged Hastert victim made a post on her FaceBook page that she was pleased at the Hastert indictment because of what Hastert had done to her brother. She went on to explain the time that her brother “came out” as gay and mentioned Dennis Hastert as his first same-sex partner. Burdge claims that the Hastert “misconduct” goes far deeper than is being made public and believes that Hastert’s relationship with her brother ended after her brother left high school.
In her deposition, when Dennis Hastert’s name was mentioned, Edmonds commented that the problem that she stumbled upon while translating these conversations was that illegal activities that went against the interests of the U.S. and that benefitted foreign governments and foreign entities were discussed. In her deposition, she testified that it was well known that Hastert engaged in activities in non-secure locations and was videotaped; Edmonds testified that Hastert was not the only Member of Congress who was given this treatment. What she describes is a criminal enterprise that has embedded itself inside the U.S. government, operating both overtly and covertly for the interests of foreign governments and foreign companies. According to Edmonds, this enterprise carried out blackmail of U.S. political personalities, espionage, efforts to get highly classified U.S. weapons technology, and bribery. Edmonds’s whistleblowing was investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General (OIG), which issued a report stating that the FBI should have done a more thorough job of investigating Edmonds’s allegations.
So, when Edmonds saw that Hastert had been indicted, she hoped that some of these larger issues were going to finally be investigated in public. She wanted the wrongs to be corrected. But she also had feelings of foreboding; that the case would go nowhere, that the Prosecutor would be forced to “lose” or “drop the case.” She calls it the scandal “too deep, too dark and covers too many people from both sides of the political aisle for it to ever proceed in public.”
Edmonds poses several questions about the U.S. media narrative that scrupulously avoids allegations from other witnesses about Hastert’s activities. A real investigation by either the media or the Feds could have helped to expose what’s really wrong with U.S. leadership in Washington, D.C. I believe this would help us to also fundamentally change the scorched earth policies that are burning the people of the U.S. as well as people in the rest of the world. Edmonds was able to overhear the plans that Wesley Clark describes as a “policy coup” that changed the course of U.S. foreign policy. Edmonds has now launched a social network campaign to prevent Dennis Hastert’s plea deal and expose the real crimes. The United Kingdom is embroiled in a few scandals of its own along these very same lines: from the Westminster pedophile scandal to the Hillary Clinton e-mail imbroglio that seemed to implicate former President George W. Bush and former Prime Minister Tony Blair in a commitment to go to war together, the U.S. and the U.K., against Iraq.
I hope Sibel Edmonds is successful and we all will get to know in full public view even a portion of what she came to know, as an FBI translator, of the unprosecuted criminals operating inside the U.S. government.