Or Trump trying to execute a coup, then eating stolen documents But this does seem like a very big story! |
No way. This was sheer incompetence as well as a disturbing willingness for the public and local LEO to accept whatever they were told just because someone flashed credentials. I mean giving away free luxury apartments and opening up your building surveillance system at the flash of a badge? It's like people forgot about the constitution under Trump. |
The damage Donald Trump did to our federal law enforcement and national security agencies is incalculable. The intelligence community has bounced back, the State Department is getting there, the FBI is trying (note that the agent who wrote the arrest affidavit just started with the FBI in 2021), but DHS is a disaster. |
These guys had many layers of "cover" to make them seem legit. From the arrest affidavit:
To create phony PIV cards designed to look like that issued by DHS + adding bogus federal government log-in screens to your laptop smells like something state-sponsored. It's a very sophisticated effort - where would you even get this made? They made sure to flash this stuff in front of multiple federal law enforcement that lived in the building to add credibility to their background story. That's really good tradecraft. These guys were really playing the long con here and doing it well. It seems that they blabbed a bit too much and that's what piqued the curiosity of a skeptical USPIS inspector who followed up on their gut instinct. |
DHS failed early on. In the arrest affidavit one of the skeptical DHS employees looked them up in DHS employee databases but couldn't find them. DHS didn't follow up and investigate for some reason. Making a fake PIV and login screen isn't too crazy since this is something you would see on every TSA (DHS) computer screen at the airport. But the DHS.us email address on a business card should have been an instant referral to the IG and security because that is so obviously fake. The secret service guys were willfully blind about all this in my opinion. You don't get to use an active investigation to live in free apartments and party. It's also very common to look someone up in the internal email system if someone asks you for something related to LEO activities. |
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I would love to know if the USPIS inspector is a man or a woman. I bet it's a woman.
So many male law enforcement officers took these guys' word at face value without so much as a second glance or an ounce of skepticism. Only one DHS employee/witness bothered to search for these guys in their internal database, and even then they accepted their excuse of "we are undercover, so we are not listed in the database." |
| Won’t the apartment management company get sued by residents for releasing their PII to these fraudsters? How on earth did they get away with not paying rent? |
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In my opinion, the tradecraft on display here right down to the Persian surnames used for offenders smacks of a state actor who would not just want to infiltrate USSS and DHS, BUT be sure that , if caught, cast the shadow on their arch enemy- the Iranians Answer : Israel and the Mossad In my opinion, I see a scenario where Tishman was paid in cash and got to devalue the apartment buildings on his tax returns for being " under occupied" to boot. In other words, just like Trump's play book |
Good lord yes, I mentioned that upthread. Tishman Speyer and Bozzuto are both huge companies, it’s unfathomable that they could let something like this go on. |
Ha ! A DHS employee gave a 13 year old American child's PII to a Yemeni foreign national and she was not even fired |
| Iranian agents who were to figure out how to get close enough to someone of value and one day get the order to exact revenge for the assassination of Soleimani. I would bet the bank on that |
Can someone point me to an article or a thread here about this craziness? |
+1 I’ve been wondering about that but the threat is to former Trump administration officials like Bolton and Trump’s Iran pointman whose name I forget. |
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Yeah, I don't understand how these guys were NOT paying rent on the units. Tishman-Speyer just wouldn't give these guys free apartments without formal payment arrangements with the USG. It doesn't happen like that.
So someone within Tishman-Speyer was likely in on the scheme, either working with these guys directly or getting paid to look the other way. The leasing office would try to rent these units out, unless told by someone at TS central offices that they were not to be leased. This goes a lot higher than just inept security guards at the apartment development. |
Remember, both of these guys are American citizens. Ali has a wife and 4 kids, the youngest of whom is a newborn (one month old!). These guys will squeal. They were spending tons of money on this - who was funding it? My guess is that cryptocurrency is involved. Also, it sounds like Ali had his own apartment in the building, but no reports of him being seen with wife + kids. So he likely slept elsewhere (NoVA?) with his family. Lots of layers to peel back here. |