Related info:
– On The Assassination Of Journalist Michael Hastings: ‘We Got The Message …’ (Veterans Today):
– DHS Insider Update … Looks Like “It’s About To Get Very Ugly” … Very Soon!!! (Canada Free Press):
“The revelation last month that the Justice Department seized two months of telephone records from the Associated Press (AP) last year is only a small part of the story. The public admission is that the Holder Justice Department obtained only telephone records from three locations, something like 20 lines, and records of calls from the House press gallery for about two months. That’s one of the biggest lies ever told,” stated my source.
“The truth is that it was not limited to AP, and not limited to just number identification and call duration, but was an extensive and active wiretapping operation that included every reporter’s telephone conversations, landline and cell, text messages from their personal and business cellular telephones and other electronic devices. The primary focus is on the press gallery, where everything was monitored in real time.”
“Not only were the communications of reporters compromised, so were the private communications of congressmen and their aides. Listen to what I am saying,” he stressed, “the operation was much larger than anyone can imagine. Recordings, actual voice recordings, were turned over to the Obama administration, along with transcripts of texts, other communications and contacts.”
– ?’Paranoid’ Michael Hastings told WikiLeaks lawyer he was being investigated by the FBI only a few hours before deadly car crash (Daily Mail, June 20, 2013):
- Whistleblowing site makes claim day after journalist’s death
- Friends and colleagues say award-winning reporter had been nervous
In the hours leading up to his death in a fiery car crash, a ‘paranoid’ Michael Hastings told WikiLeaks he was being investigated by the FBI, according to the whistleblowing website.
A tweet sent from WikiLeaks yesterday claimed: ‘Michael Hastings contacted WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before he died, saying that the FBI was investigating him.’
The Rollingstone and Buzzfeed reporter, who famously brought down General Stanley McChrystal with his 2010 profile, died in a crash in Los Angeles at about 4.30am on Tuesday.
Allegations: Michael Hastings was said to be researching a piece on Paula Broadwell, who had an affair with former CIA director David Petraeus, in the weeks before he died
Since the award-winning journalist’s death, conspiracy theorists have suggested the crash may have been suspicious, casting doubt on whether a Mercedez-Benz would catch fire so quickly after a crash.
Fueling the suspicions, WikiLeaks posted a tweet claiming: ‘Michael Hastings death has a very serious non-public complication. We will have more details later.’
Three hours later the website claimed Mr Hastings had contacted their lawyer a few hours before he died.
Los Angeles police are still investigating the crash but say they have found no suspicious circumstances.
Friends have said that the journalist had been concerned in the lead up to his death, but said they could not be sure if that contributed to his death.
‘He was incredibly tense and very worried, and was concerned that the government was looking in on his material,’ Cenk Uygur, a friend and fellow journalist, said.
‘I don’t know what his state of mind was at 4:30 in the morning, but I do know what his state of mind was in general, and it was a nervous wreck,’ Mr Uygur told New York Magazine.
BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith added that Mr Hastings had told friends and family ‘he was concerned that he was under investigation.’
The 33-year-old reporter had been working on a story about Florida socialite Jill Kelley’s lawsuit against the Department of Defense and the FBI in the weeks before the crash.
Ms Kelley alleges that military officials and the FBI leaked her name to the media to discredit her after she reported receiving emails from Paula Broadwell, who had an affair with the former CIA director David Petraeus, according to the Los Angeles Times.
A friend of Mr Hastings, who asked to remain anonymous, said the reporter was ‘very paranoid that he was being watched by the FBI’.
Mr Hastings had claimed to have been investigated by the FBI before. In an interview with Reddit last year he said the Pentagon had investigated him three times in the past 18 months.
He added that although he did receive death threats from people who didn’t approve of what he had written, the more dangerous threat was an attack on his career.
‘There’s a more insidious response most of the time when you p*** off the powerful. They come after your career, they try to come after your credibility,’ he said.
‘They do cocktail party whisper campaigns. They try to make you “controversial”. ‘
The reporter was no stranger to death threats. In his book, The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan, he recalls the time one of General McChrystal’s staff members told him: ‘We’ll hunt you down and kill you if we don’t like what you write’.
Hastings wrote: ‘I wasn’t disturbed by the claim. Whenever I’d been reporting around groups of dudes whose job it was to kill people, one of them would usually mention that they were going to kill me.’
His last published piece had been about the widely reported NSA scandal for Buzzfeed, which ended with: ‘Perhaps more information will soon be forthcoming.’
Mr Uygur said: ‘Michael Hastings was a journalist who definitely gave the government trouble, the Pentagon trouble, so if they were surveilling him it wouldn’t be that surprising.’
‘I know that made him nervous,’ he told CBS Los Angeles, adding that he had no idea whether it actually led to his death.
Police have not yet confirmed that the person killed was Mr Hastings because the body was burned beyond recognition.
An official cause of death is not expected for up to six weeks.