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New evidence has emerged that allegedly shows the FBI manufactured and planted evidence to secure the conviction of NXIVM sex cult founder Keith Raniere, according to the latest appeal for his release.

Raniere was convicted in October 2020 of racketeering, sex trafficking, forced labor conspiracy, and wire fraud conspiracy and was sentenced to 120 years in prison. He was also fined $1.75 million.

If the FBI were shown to have acted improperly, it could have implications beyond the case if Congress investigates, as well being a blow to public trust in an agency that is already expected to face a major shake-up after Donald Trump takes office early next year.

Evidence of government malfeasance, provided in the appeal documents, included more than 100 photos planted across a digital camera memory card and backup hard drive, according to court documents filed in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals Oct. 28 as part of an appeal seeking a new trial. Evidence also included property search records that contained anomalies and improprieties – revealing a staged crime scene, according to court records filed in the Eastern District of New York on Nov. 28 as part of a motion to vacate the original sentence.

“The search of 8 Hale (a property where Raniere had resided) was deliberately and fraudulently staged and that search scene collection photographs were also deliberately staged,” wrote Mark Daniel Bowling, a former FBI agent and former agent for the Department of Energy’s Office of Inspector General, one of the experts hired by Raniere’s legal team.

“Further, I agree that at least four of the nine search team members were complicit in this fraudulent conduct, with two of them as key orchestrators,” he added. “During my nearly 20 years in the FBI, I have never seen a search executed with this level of corrupt and illegal behavior,” added Bowling referring to the search on March 27, 2018.

The FBI declined comment to Newsweek on the case.

Raniere’s legal team has hired seven digital forensic experts, four of whom are former FBI examiners, and a former FBI crime scene and senior evidence technician photographer for the new appeal.

How was Raniere Convicted?

Raniere founded NXIVM as what he called a self-help group in the 1990s and was accused of creating a sex cult known as DOS within the organization. Its female members said they served as “slaves” and “masters.” Multiple women testified that they joined DOS after being told it was a “women’s empowerment” group. They said they later discovered they would be expected to have sex with Raniere, send him nude photos and have his initials branded onto their bodies.

One piece of evidence was an alleged late discovery, 11 months after the search was conducted, by agents of more than a dozen images of a female that the FBI said was a minor, based on the photo’s metadata showing it was taken in 2005, when the female was under age 18. The woman, with the pseudonym Camila, said in a victim impact statement she had a sexual relationship with Raniere.

Within a few weeks of when the photo evidence and child pornography charges were filed, Raniere’s five codefendants all took plea deals, making it harder for his defense to argue for his innocence.

What are the Allegations of Malfeasance?

However, the experts now hired by the defense say in a report that the photo metadata had been changed to make it appear that Camila was under 18 when the pictures were taken, while Raniere’s lawyers say she was a legal adult when a relationship began.

Raniere’s lawyers previously filed a motion for a new trial alleging malfeasance by the FBI on the grounds of the allegedly manufactured photo evidence, which was rejected in April by Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York. They filed a new appeal on that case in October.

In its own filing responding to the defense’s motion for a hearing on a new trial the government admitted that an unidentified FBI photo technician had accessed critical and unpreserved evidence, which the defense’s experts say was an unprecedented act that taints the evidence.

“If he’s not a digital forensic examiner, why is he taking a piece of digital forensic evidence and plugging it into his machine?” asked Micah Sturgis, an independent forensics expert and owner of Sturgis Forensics LLC, who reviewed the reports by the seven forensic experts for Newsweek but is not involved in the case. He reviewed the initial and subsequent reports by the former FBI experts for the initial motion for a new trial, and the government’s own filing in response to the motion for a new trial which was denied and is now pending appeal.

“I’m sure that violates the FBI policy,” Sturgis added. “That would definitely violate any type of local law enforcement policy … It appears to me that the FBI has altered the images, or they have changed the evidence to fit their narrative.”

Sturgis worked as a digital forensic expert for law enforcement for 10 years and was trained by the U.S. Secret Service at the National Computer Forensic Institute. He said he was limited in his assessment because he didn’t have access to the original evidence, but he knows the agents who drafted the defense’s reports personally and by reputation and he believes them.

Sturgis said he was surprised that the judge didn’t give more credence to the report by the former FBI agents as part of the motion for a new trial and alongside the new search findings, in the motion to vacate the original sentence.

“When you’ve got that and it’s being shoved in your face by seven experts, and a judge turns his nose up at it, that entire judicial system needs to be brought into question,” he said.

What Happened in the Search?

Kenneth DeNardo, a 23-year veteran of the FBI who worked as a senior evidence technician and photographer for the evidence response team and is now among the experts paid by Raniere’s defense said he has “never seen a search with this magnitude of malfeasance.”

He alleged that FBI agents had pre-filled the list of personnel on the scene and one agent signed off as several other agents, against agency protocol. He also said that an agent pre-filled the evidence recovery log for the search at 8 Hale before even arriving to conduct the search. FBI protocol requires evidence logs be filled out on site to ensure an accurate real-time record of the search, but this didn’t happen at 8 Hale.

“This is evidenced by crossed-out entries on a later page of the log that correspond to items already listed on an earlier page, albeit in a different sequence, revealing a pre-choreographed effort to fit a predetermined narrative rather than the required real-time documentation. This constitutes evidence fabrication,” he wrote.

He cites multiple other problems with the search, including the fact that a dog was apparently present (a paw was photographed at the scene), despite never being logged as part of the search. Such oversights are serious violations of protocol that indicate an overall pattern of inaccuracy and falsification, DeNardo said.

He said it appears that FBI agents “choreographed” finding key evidence in an upstairs room right away, instead of starting the search with the first room downstairs, per standard FBI procedure. DeNardo said that agents manufactured a scene on a bookshelf by adding and arranging items including two uncollected books on sex trafficking. DeNardo said he also believes one camera was planted on the scene because it was staged on a countertop and photographed, but never taken into evidence.

Another camera, the one allegedly used to take photos of Camila, was discovered almost a year after the search and has an unknown origin, because it was not clearly visible in any FBI photograph taken on the property, according to DeNardo’s report.

The Digital Evidence

The latest court filings also go into more detail outlining what it said were major problems with the digital material that the FBI said it had found within law enforcement’s evidence 11 months after the search of the Hale property.

The case against Raniere was built on two key pieces of digital evidence: a camera card and an external hard drive, said J. Richard Kiper, a retired FBI special agent and computer forensic examiner and instructor who produced a report for the defense on the digital forensic evidence.

Prosecutors said that Raniere used the camera and its card to take explicit photographs of women, including of Camile when she was allegedly 15.

But Kiper and the other experts say the camera card was likely altered between April 11, 2019, and June 11, 2019, while in FBI custody.

According to FBI practice, no examination of electronic evidence can take place before a forensic image (exact copy) has been made of the device by the CART (Computer Analysis Response Team) lab. However, on September 19, 2019, an FBI examiner took the camera card out of evidence control for “review” before CART had processed the evidence, according to court documents. This is a major violation of chain-of-custody standards, Kiper said.

On the same day the camera card was accessed without a write-blocker, which meant it could have been manipulated, the experts said.

“Them taking an SD card that’s in question, and that’s important evidence, and plugging it into a computer that’s not write-blocked – that right there is enough, in my opinion, to have tainted everything. If they allow that to happen there, what more have they done?” Sturgis said.

Kiper said that’s because there was no write-blocker, it could not be determined what was originally on that memory card.

What’s Next?

The FBI has until March 2025 to respond to the filing from Raniere’s legal team.

In the meantime, Sturgis says this evidence could have ramifications far beyond Raniere’s case, particularly if Congress decides to step in and examine the allegations.

“If the FBI manufactured evidence in this case, then the American people need to be concerned with their freedoms and what can happen to them if they’re being investigated by the FBI,” he said. “At what point do you lose complete trust in our federal government or our state government or even our local government?”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the chair of the subcommittee on federal courts, oversight, agency action, and federal rights, declined to comment on the allegations that the FBI had engaged in major malfeasance.

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OPINION:

Democrats were so committed to the FBI and its cherished Russian dossier in 2017 that they vouched for its author, Christopher Steele, quoted it at hearings and saw it as a sure way to bring down new President Donald Trump.

But then Kash Patel crashed their party.

Mr. Patel, as senior counsel and overseer of spook programs, was a critical figure in then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes’ investigation of the FBI’s drive to entrap Mr. Trump in a Russia election conspiracy.

In January 2018, the Republican released the bombshell Nunes memo. It exposed for the first time how the FBI took Mr. Steele’s unreliable gossip and cited it to back up its court affidavits. The FBI corrupted what was supposed to be a fact-based judicial process under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on an American’s communications — in this case, those of Trump volunteer Carter Page.

Worse, Mr. Patel discovered that the senior FBI leaders at the time, James Comey, Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok, never told the court that the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic Party funded and trafficked the dossier.

The Patel-driven Nunes memo brought howls of protest from Democrats and the aligned news media.

But a year later, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz released his damning report that corroborated Mr. Patel’s work. He concluded that the FBI concealed facts, lied and rigged the affidavits.

Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff tried to counter Nunes-Patel with his own memo. It proved laughably wrong.

If the Senate confirms Mr. Patel’s appointment, he will become the protagonist in a streaming TV original series. The whistleblower who exposed the FBI arrives triumphant as its top cop.

FBI Director Christopher Wray, who will either resign or be fired, never came to grips with what he inherited in August 2017: a scandal-marred front office that needed shaking up. A place that embraced a hoax to bring down a president. Instead, Mr. Wray’s FBI continued to do the Democrats’ bidding by putting parents under surveillance, targeting pro-lifers and whistleblowers and raiding Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.

In the meantime, FBI agents did the Black Lives Matter kneel in public and put out inaccurate crime statistics.

Mr. Patel’s congressional investigation, over 60 interviews and thousands of pages of documents provided him with a unique view of how the once-august bureau operates.

Mr. Patel’s federal resume includes stints as a Department of Justice prosecutor, senior intelligence and Pentagon official and Trump White House National Security Council staffer.

He told his story in a 2023 book, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy,” which displays a dramatic cover photo of Mr. Patel exiting Mr. Trump’s Marine One.

The book begins innocently enough.

“I’m just a guy from Queens and Long Island with the same story as so many others,” he writes. “I didn’t have some special upbringing or education. My parents aren’t rich or famous. They’re just a couple of working-class immigrants from India.”

But he quickly gets to the point.

“The Nunes Memo and [House committee] documents later revealed that the Deep State conducted an unprecedented spying operation against the Trump campaign in an apparent effort to tarnish Trump’s reputation and derail his election,” he writes.

He adds, “The FBI knew about Steele’s bias and that the Clinton campaign and the [Democratic National Committee] had paid for the dossier at the time they submitted their FISA warrant application to spy on Carter Page, but they never told the FISA judge either of these facts, as was required by law.”

As the 2016 election approached, the FBI realized it had nothing to leak after opening the Crossfire Hurricane investigation of Mr. Trump that summer.

“In my opinion,” Mr. Patel writes, “the FBI agents behind Crossfire Hurricane must have been getting nervous as the 2016 campaign came to a close. They launched a FISA warrant based on the Democrat Steele Dossier, sicced an FBI informant on a Trump campaign official, doctored evidence, hid exculpatory information, spied on the Trump campaign, and buttressed their case with drunken tavern talk. Yet despite all that, the FBI’s investigation was coming up with nothing. Nobody in the Trump campaign was found coordinating with the Russians.”

The “drunken tavern talk” refers to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer telling a Department of State official that he shared a drink with Trump volunteer George Papadopoulos, who supposedly said something incriminating about Russia, which he later denied.

This hearsay tidbit was enough for the aforementioned Mr. McCabe, who was then FBI deputy director.

In a list of egregious FBI acts later documented by special counsel John Durham, his report singled out this McCabe gambit as one of the worst.

On July 31, 2016, a momentous date in sordid FBI history, Mr. McCabe ordered Mr. Strzok to open a full investigation of Trump world immediately, the Durham report states. (A week later, Mr. Strzok texted his girlfriend that “we’ll stop” Mr. Trump from becoming president.)

“The matter was opened as a full investigation without ever having spoken to the persons who provided the information,” Mr. Durham said. “Further, the FBI did so without any significant review of its own intelligence databases, collection and examination of any relevant intelligence from other U.S. intelligence entities, interviews of witnesses essential to understand the raw information it had received or using any of the standard analytical tools typically employed by the FBI in evaluating raw intelligence.”

When hearing of Mr. Patel’s nomination, Mr. McCabe rushed to his employer, CNN, to express his disgust at Mr. Trump’s choice, which he described as horrible, unthinkable and conniving.

Stay tuned. 2025 will be a lot like 2017.

• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times. 

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The insurgents faced little resistance from government troops during the shock offensive, according to residents and fighters.

Witnesses said two airstrikes on the city’s edge late on Friday targeted insurgent reinforcements and hit near residential areas. A war monitor said 20 fighters were killed.

Syria’s armed forces said in a statement on Saturday that to absorb the large attack on Aleppo and save lives, it has redeployed and is preparing for a counter-attack. The statement acknowledged that insurgents entered large parts of the city but said they have not established bases or checkpoints.

Insurgents were filmed outside police headquarters, in the city centre, and outside the Aleppo Citadel. They tore down posters of Syrian President Bashar Assad, stepping on some and burning others.

The surprise takeover is a huge setback for Assad, who managed to regain total control of the city in 2016, after expelling insurgents and thousands of civilians from its eastern neighbourhoods following a gruelling military campaign in which his forces were backed by Russia, Iran and its allied groups.

Aleppo has not been attacked by opposition forces since then. The 2016 battle for Aleppo was a turning point in the war between Syrian government forces and rebel fighters after 2011 protests against Assad’s rule turned into an all-out war.

At that time Russian warplanes had repeatedly launched deadly airstrikes, helping Assad regain control.

Friday’s push into Aleppo followed weeks of low-level violence, including government attacks on opposition-held areas. Turkey, which has backed opposition groups, failed in its efforts to prevent the government attacks, which were seen as a violation of a 2019 agreement sponsored by Russia, Turkey and Iran to freeze the line of the conflict.

The offensive came as Iran-linked groups, primarily Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which has backed Syrian government forces since 2015, have been preoccupied with their own battles at home. A ceasefire in Hezbollah’s two-month war with Israel took effect Wednesday, the day the Syrian opposition factions announced their offensive. Israel has also escalated its attacks against Hezbollah and Iran-linked targets in Syria during the last 70 days.

A witness in Aleppo said government troops remained in the city’s airport and at a military academy but most of the forces have already filed out of the city from the south. Syrian Kurdish forces remained in two neighbourhoods.

The redeployment “is a temporary measure and (the military central command and armed forces) will work to guarantee the security and peace of all our people in Aleppo,” the military statement said.

Speaking from the heart of the city in Saadallah Aljabri square, opposition fighter Mohammad Al Abdo, said it was his first time back in Aleppo in 13 years, when his older brother was killed at the start of the war.

“God willing, the rest of Aleppo province will be liberated” from government forces, he said.

There was light traffic in the city centre on Saturday. Opposition fighters fired in the air in celebration but there was no sign of clashes or government troops presence.

Abdulkafi Alhamdo, an teacher who fled Aleppo in 2016 and returned Friday night after hearing the insurgents were inside, described “mixed feelings of pain, sadness and old memories.”

“As I entered Aleppo, I kept telling myself this is impossible! How did this happen?” He said he strolled through the city at night, visiting the citadel, where the insurgents raised their flags, a major square and the university of Aleppo, as well as the last spot he was in before he was forced to leave for the countryside.

“I walked in (the empty) streets of Aleppo, shouting, ‘People, people of Aleppo. We are your sons,’” Alhamdo told The Associated Press in a series of messages.

The insurgents launched their shock offensive in the Aleppo and Idlib countryside on Wednesday and wrestled control of dozens of villages and towns before entering Aleppo on Friday.

Schools and government offices were closed on Saturday as most people stayed indoors, according to Sham FM radio, a pro-government station. Witnesses said the insurgents deployed security forces around the city to prevent any acts of violence or looting.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the city’s airport has been shut and all flights suspended. On Friday, Aleppo’s two key public hospitals were reportedly full of patients while many private facilities closed, OCHA said.

In social media posts, the insurgents were pictured outside of Aleppo Citadel, the medieval palace in the old city centre, and one of the largest in the world. In cellphone videos, they recorded themselves having conversations with residents they visited at home, seeking to reassure them they will cause no harm.

The Syrian Kurdish-led administration in the country’s east said nearly 3,000 people, most of them students, had arrived in their areas after fleeing the fighting in Aleppo, which has a sizeable Kurdish population.

State media reported that a number of “terrorists,” including sleeper cells, infiltrated parts of the city. Government troops chased them and arrested a number who posed for pictures near city landmarks, state media said.

On a state TV morning show Saturday, commentators said army reinforcements and Russia’s assistance will repel the “terrorist groups,” blaming Turkey for supporting the insurgents’ push into Aleppo and Idlib provinces.

Russia’s state news agency Tass quoted Oleg Ignasyuk, a Russian Defence Ministry official coordinating in Syria, as saying that Russian warplanes targeted and killed 200 militants who launched the offensive in the northwest on Friday. It provided no further details.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a special security discussion Friday evening with the heads of the defense establishment to discuss new internal fighting in Syria and the ceasefire in Lebanon that halted more than 13 months of fighting with Hezbollah.

Syrian rebel jihadists opposed to President Bashar Assad launched a surprise offensive through government-held towns in recent days. The opposition fighters, led by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, launched an incursion on Wednesday into a dozen towns and villages in the northern province of Aleppo.

On Friday they said they’d reached the center of the city of Aleppo itself, as they pressed their lightning offensive against forces of the Iranian- and Russian-backed government. Assad and his allies Russia, Iran and regional Shi’ite militias had retaken all of Aleppo city in late 2016, with insurgents agreeing to withdraw after months of bombardment and siege in a battle that turned the tide against the opposition.

Channel 12 news reported that Jerusalem was concerned about the potential spillover ramifications of chaotic developments in Syria, as well as the possibility of unspecified Syrian strategic weapons falling into the wrong hands.

An unnamed Israeli official told Ynet: “This is something we need to closely monitor and see how it develops.”

They added, “It doesn’t necessarily affect us, especially not in the short term, but any erosion of stability in a neighboring country could also impact us. It seems here that there are also opportunities for change.”

The fighting is some of the deadliest in years, with 255 people killed, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Most of the dead have been combatants, but the toll also includes 24 civilians, most killed in Russian air strikes.

SOHR, which relies on a network of sources inside Syria and is of unclear funding, has been accused in the past of inflating regime losses.

Rebel commander in the Jaish al-Izza rebel brigade Mustafa Abdul Jaber said the speedy advance was due to insufficient Iran-backed manpower in the broader province. Iran’s allies in the region have suffered a series of blows at the hands of Israel as the Gaza war expanded to the Middle East.

Opposition sources in touch with Turkish intelligence said Turkey had given a green light to the offensive. But Turkish foreign ministry spokesperson Oncu Keceli said Turkey sought to avoid greater instability in the region and had warned that recent attacks undermined de-escalation agreements.

The attack was the biggest since March 2020, when Russia and Turkey agreed to a deal to de-escalate the conflict.

Syrian state television denied rebels had reached Aleppo and said Russia was providing Syria’s military with air support.

The Syrian military said it continued to confront the attack, saying in a statement it had inflicted heavy losses on the insurgents in the countryside of Aleppo and Idlib.

David Carden, UN Deputy Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Syria Crisis, said: “We’re deeply alarmed by the situation unfolding in northwest Syria.”

“Relentless attacks over the past three days have claimed the lives of at least 27 civilians, including children as young as eight years old,” he told Reuters. “Civilians and civilian infrastructure are not targets and must be protected under International Humanitarian Law.”

Syrian state news agency SANA said four civilians including two students were killed on Friday in Aleppo by insurgent shelling of university student dormitories. It was not clear if they were among the 27 dead reported by the UN official.

Russian and Syrian warplanes bombed the area near the border with Turkey on Thursday to try to push back the insurgent offensive.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow regarded the rebel attack as a violation of Syria’s sovereignty and wanted the authorities to act fast to regain control.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said “more than 14,000 people –- nearly half are children — have been displaced” by the violence.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi pledged “continued support for the government, nation and army of Syria,” in a phone call with his Syrian counterpart Bassam al-Sabbagh, according to a statement.

The Idlib area has been subject to a Turkish- and Russian-brokered truce since 2020. The ceasefire has been repeatedly violated but had largely held.

An AFP correspondent in the rebel enclave saw jihadists advancing in tanks as intense exchanges of fire took place in an area just seven kilometers (a little over four miles) from Aleppo. AFP images showed abandoned army tanks and other military vehicles.

The correspondent said the jihadists and their Turkey-backed allies took orders from a joint operations command.

Analyst Nick Heras, of the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, said the fighters were “trying to preempt the possibility of a Syrian military campaign in the region of Aleppo.” According to Heras, the Syrian government and its key backer Russia had been preparing for such a campaign.

Russia intervened in Syria in 2015, turning the tide of the civil war that broke out four years earlier in favor of the government, whose forces at the time had lost control of most of the country.

Other interests are also at stake.

As well as Russia, Syrian President Assad has been propped up by Iran and allied groups, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Iran-backed militias have a heavy presence in the Aleppo region after providing crucial ground support to the army in its recapture of rebel-held areas of the city in 2016.

Heras said anti-government forces are “in a better position to take and seize villages than Russian-backed Syrian government forces, while the Iranians are focused on Lebanon.”

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.

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