Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier returns home to North Dakota
Peltier was released from a high-security prison in Florida Tuesday morning and returned by plane after his life sentence for the 1975 killings of two FBI agents was commuted by President Joe Biden in the final hours of his term. He returned home by plane Tuesday The 80-year-old will serve out his sentence in home confinement.
The celebratory welcome will be hosted by NDN Collective and held in Belcourt, North Dakota at the Sky Dancer Event Center. It is scheduled to begin at noon.
"We made a commitment to free Leonard Peltier and bring him back to his homelands – this is us fulfilling that commitment," said Nick Tilsen, Founder and CEO of NDN Collective. "We are welcoming Leonard back home in a beautiful way to thank him for his legacy by feeding the people, thanking everyone who fought for him for years, and honoring those who fought for his freedom but are no longer with us."
Peltier's imprisonment symbolized systemic injustice for Native Americans across the country who believe his innocence.
He was active in the American Indian Movement, which fought for Native American treaty rights and was subject to FBI surveillance and harassment.
Peltier's conviction stemmed from a standoff at the Oglala Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota in which agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams were killed. The agents were there to serve arrest warrants for robbery and assault with a dangerous weapon, the FBI said.
Though Peltier acknowledged being at the scene and firing a gun from a distance, he said he fired in self-defense. A woman who claimed to have seen Peltier shoot the agents later recanted her testimony, saying it had been coerced.
Former FBI Director Christopher Wray called Peltier a "remorseless killer" and called his commutation "an affront to the rule of law" in a letter to Biden.
Activists who have called for Peltier's release for nearly half a century celebrated Tuesday.
"This is a historical day, it really is," said his niece Shannon Cartwright. "Not just for us as a family but the Native people."
Note: The above video first aired on Feb. 18, 2025.
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CNN
7 minutes ago
- CNN
How watches stolen from Keanu Reeves in Los Angeles ended up in the hands of a gang in Chile
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He demanded an end to Chile's participation in the Visa Waiver program, which allows its citizens to enter the US without a visa for travel of up to 90 days for tourism or business. His comments caused an uproar in the South American country. During a recent visit to Chile, US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem signed a letter of intent to expand a Biometric Identification Transnational Migration Alert program with Chile, arguing that is necessary for tracking criminals. Regarding visas, she said, 'Chile's continued collaboration with our visa waiver program is invaluable to our country, and we appreciate their partnership in that regard.' Meanwhile, the deputy legal attaché at the US Embassy, Blaine Freestone, who will be responsible for personally presenting the watches to Reeves, emphasized that 'thanks to the ongoing cooperation with Chilean authorities, justice is being delivered to victims of transnational crimes.' 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New York Times
37 minutes ago
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Durham's Debunking of the ‘Clinton Plan' Emails, Explained
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Mr. Trump and his aides have coupled those releases with wild and inaccurate claims about what they show, spinning the reports as proof of his long-running narrative that the investigation was a hoax instigated by enemies for political reasons. There are different versions of this narrative: blaming President Barack Obama and his appointees, a supposed cabal of career national security officials, Hillary Clinton and her 2016 presidential campaign, or some combination of them. The latest declassification centers on Mrs. Clinton. What is the 'Clinton Plan' theory? The theory posits that Mrs. Clinton and her campaign must have set out to frame Mr. Trump for collusion by putting forward information they knew to be false. It is a way to blame Mrs. Clinton for the fact that Mr. Trump's campaign came under suspicions that prompted the Russia investigation eventually led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel. In reality, the F.B.I. opened its investigation based on a lead it received from the Australian government in late July 2016, after WikiLeaks released Democratic emails stolen by Russian hackers and disrupted the Democratic convention. The tip involved a Trump campaign adviser suggesting, before the hacking had become public, that the campaign had received outreach from Russia and knew what it would do. Trump allies interested in blaming Mrs. Clinton's campaign have focused, as an origin story, on a purported July 27, 2016, email that said Mrs. Clinton had approved a plan by a campaign foreign policy adviser to link Mr. Trump to Russia as a way of distracting from the scandal over her use of a personal email server while secretary of state. When did the 'Clinton Plan' enter the discourse? It became a topic of discussion in late September 2020, as that year's presidential campaign neared an end. John Ratcliffe, a top intelligence official under Mr. Trump, declassified and made public that Russian intelligence analysis claimed Mrs. Clinton had 'approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal' against Mr. Trump by tying him to President Vladimir V. Putin and Russian hacking. While acknowledging that the information might be inaccurate or a fabrication, Mr. Ratcliffe also revealed that John Brennan, the C.I.A. director in 2016, had mentioned this claim in Russian intelligence analysis in a briefing to Mr. Obama about Russia's election meddling in August of that year. Later, John H. Durham, the special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to scour the Russia investigation for wrongdoing, referred to the purported email in his 2023 final report as the 'Clinton Plan intelligence.' Where did the information come from? In 2016, a Dutch spy agency hacked a Russian spy agency and copied internal memos and messages by Russian intelligence analysts. The Russians were writing reports about various topics based on the emails of American victims of Russian hacking operations. The Dutch shared a copy of the trove with the United States. From the beginning, U.S. officials have said, they viewed the material with caution. Among other things, some reports were said to make inconsistent or false claims — raising the possibility that Russians had exaggerated things for their own purposes, or knew the server was compromised and deliberately mixed in disinformation. What is the new report? It is a 29-page annex to Mr. Durham's 2023 report. The annex, which was declassified on Thursday, quotes the purported July 27 email and reveals that there was a related one on July 25. The report also shows how Mr. Durham expended significant effort trying to prove that the emails were real, but gathered evidence that led him to conclude that Russian spies likely concocted them. What are the two purported emails? Both are attributed to Leonard Benardo of the Open Society Foundations network, the philanthropic arm of the liberal financier George Soros, whom Russian state media and some conservatives have vilified. The July 25 message contained two paragraphs about reporting on the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and its political impact. It then stated: 'Julie says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump. Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the F.B.I. will put more oil into the fire.' The message dated July 27 opens by claiming that 'HRC approved Julia's idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections. That should distract people from her own missing email, especially if the affair goes to the Olympic level.' An accompanying memo by Russian intelligence analysts identified the person who supposedly proposed the plan as neither Julie nor Julia, but Julianne Smith, a foreign policy adviser for the Clinton campaign who worked at a think tank called the Center for a New American Security. What did interviews show? Early in his scrutiny of the purported emails in 2020 and early 2021, Mr. Durham wrote, he interviewed several intelligence analysts who said that the emails appeared 'likely authentic.' But he described subsequently gathering evidence that pointed in the other direction. Some of the evidence was interviews that took place later in 2021 and in 2022. Mrs. Clinton and high-level campaign officials told Mr. Durham that the material Mr. Ratcliffe had declassified was ridiculous and looked like Russian disinformation. Ms. Smith said she had not seen the purported Benardo emails and had no memory of suggesting to campaign leaders that they should attack Mr. Trump over Russia. After Mr. Benardo saw the purported emails in May 2021, he said that they were unfamiliar, and that he did not recall drafting them, did not know who 'Julie' was and would not use the phrase 'put more oil into the fire.' What did think tank emails show? Mr. Durham did not identify the intended recipients of the emails supposedly from Mr. Benardo. But he gathered emails from four liberal-leaning think tanks, including Mr. Benardo's employer and Ms. Smith's, in an effort to find copies proving they were real. The organizations did not have copies of the purported emails on their servers. But in that process, Mr. Durham uncovered other 'emails, attachments and documents that contain language and references with the exact same or similar verbiage' to the two messages. Those included a July 25 email by a Carnegie Endowment cybersecurity expert that contained an extensive passage about Russian hacking that was echoed, verbatim, as the opening of the purported July 25 message attributed to Mr. Benardo. Was there any contrary evidence? Mr. Durham obtained text messages from Ms. Smith on July 25 showing that she had unsuccessfully tried to determine whether the F.B.I. had opened an investigation into the Democratic National Committee breach, although she did not mention Mr. Trump. That exchange, Mr. Durham wrote, 'supports the notion that the campaign might have wanted or expected F.B.I. or other agencies to aid that effort' by investigating the hacking. He also obtained a July 27 email from Ms. Smith asking her colleagues at the think tank to sign a bipartisan statement criticizing Mr. Trump's denunciations of NATO as reckless and too friendly to Russia. That email 'certainly lends at least some credence that such a plan existed,' Mr. Durham wrote. What else was in the trove of Russian memos? It included other evidence supporting doubts about whether the emails were real. There were two versions of the supposed July 25 email — one that contained a sentence referring to the Olympics doping scandal and one that did not have it. There were also messages between Russians reacting to material appearing in American news outlets about the Russian hacking. The Trump administration redacted some discussion and details about those messages, but Mr. Durham cited them directly in between reproducing the July 25 and July 27 messages. In one, Russians discussed creating something that would seem to come from 'some dark forces, like the F.B.I. for instance, or better yet, Clinton sympathizers in IC, Pentagon, Deep State,' using an apparent abbreviation for intelligence community. The other appeared to discuss making something to 'illuminate' how Mrs. Clinton was trying to vilify Moscow and discredit Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump. The purported July 27 email was attached to that message, Mr. Durham reported. What is the bottom line? The two crucial emails were most likely manufactured by Russian spies, who appear to have assembled them in part using passages lifted from various hacked messages written by people other than Mr. Benardo. 'The office's best assessment is that the July 25 and July 27 emails that purport to be from Benardo were ultimately a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking of the U.S.-based think tanks, including the Open Society Foundations, the Carnegie Endowment and others,' Mr. Durham's annex says.
Bloomberg
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FBI Redacted Trump's Name in Epstein Files for Privacy Reasons
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