jason leopold

Kevin Wolf / AP
The former head of the National Security Agency instructed personnel not to get into a "tit for tat" with President Donald Trump and the media after he accused the intelligence community in a tweetstorm last year of leaking information to the New York Times, according to records obtained by BuzzFeed News.
“We will not get sucked into this,” Adm. Mike Rogers wrote in a Feb. 15, 2017, email to NSA officials in response to a briefing on the tweets. “Everyone needs to do their job...

TheFreedomFest / YouTube / Via youtube.com
Maria Butina
The top congressional committee investigating Russian election interference had been probing the finances of a 29-year-old Russian gun rights activist before she was arrested and charged by the US on Sunday with being an agent of the Kremlin and attempting to influence US politics.
Federal authorities charged Maria Butina with working “as an agent of a foreign government, specifically the Russian Federation,” without notifying the US gov...

Joe Raedle / Getty Images
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence deliberately concealed how the agency came into possession of a dossier prepared by a former British intelligence officer that alleged Russians had been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” Donald Trump for years, according to internal emails obtained by BuzzFeed News under the Freedom of Information Act.
The office issued a statement, which contained incomplete information, because intelligence officials were co...

Valery Sharifulin / TASS
Ukraine's former president Viktor Yanukovych.
After then-president Viktor Yanukovych fled his palace during Ukraine’s bloody 2014 revolution, law enforcement agents across the globe focused on one question: How did the Kremlin-backed politician and his cronies make $40 billion in state assets disappear?
The US, the UK, Latvia, and others pitched in to help the new Ukrainian government answer that question, and they traced how Yanukovych and his top lieutenants — inclu...

David J. Phillip / AP
Three top religious organizations that work closely with the US government on immigration and refugee matters sent a private letter last year to then–homeland security secretary John Kelly, urging him to reject a "harmful" proposal of separating undocumented parents and children at border crossings. They also warned that such a policy would traumatize the children and lead to "irreparable emotional scarring."
"Except in cases of abuse, abandonment, and neglect, it is alw...

Jacquelyn Martin / AP
Top officials at the Bureau of Labor Statistics expressed alarm over a tweet by President Donald Trump last month touting a jobs report before it was officially released, according to newly obtained emails.
In his June 1 tweet, Trump said: "Looking forward to seeing the employment numbers at 8:30 this morning."
According to emails obtained by BuzzFeed News in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, Trump's tweet prompted concerns within the Bureau of Labor Stat...

When the Department of Justice announced this month that investigators had pieced together records found in a shredder belonging to the president’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, critics, legal experts, and journalists feverishly speculated about what they might contain.
Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for adult film star Stormy Daniels and Cohen's devoted nemesis, tweeted that the shredded documents could be a “huge problem.” MSNBC host Ari Melber devoted a large part of his program in May to the...

Social Jacks / Via kickstarter.com
The Customs and Border Protection officer who reportedly tried to pressure a former BuzzFeed News journalist into talking about her sources, and appeared to have collected private information about her and her travels, maintained a website in which he expressed his frustration with his own life and the direction of the government under former president Obama.
The officer, Jeffrey Rambo, also teamed up with an FBI agent in 2014 to try to launch a craft beer b...

When John Kelly was Secretary of Homeland Security, he instructed an official to refrain from sending emails to staff about the department’s work to limit public scrutiny and leaks.
“As we discussed in NYC about the toxic atmosphere here in the D.C. cesspool, my folks are nervous about e-mails you send and ask that you no longer include them on any postings,” Kelly wrote in a June 8, 2017, email. Referring to the Freedom of Information Act, which allows journalists and the public to petition ...

Amid intense scrutiny of contacts between Donald Trump's inner circle and representatives of Vladimir Putin, Ivanka Trump's name has barely come up. But during the campaign, she connected her father’s personal lawyer with a Russian athlete who offered to introduce Donald Trump to Putin to facilitate a 100-story Trump tower in Moscow, according to emails reviewed by BuzzFeed News and four sources with knowledge of the matter.
There is no evidence that Ivanka Trump’s contact with the athlete — ...

Drew Angerer / Getty Images
Records pertaining to the financial activities of President Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen are not missing from a government database; rather, Treasury Department officials have taken the highly unusual step of restricting access to them even from certain law enforcement agencies, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
The New Yorker magazine this week reported that a law enforcement official — worried the information about Cohen’s banking records had b...

All through the hot summer campaign of 2016, as Donald Trump and his aides dismissed talk of unseemly ties to Moscow, two of his key business partners were working furiously on a secret track: negotiations to build what would have been the tallest building in Europe and an icon of the Trump empire — the Trump World Tower Moscow.
Talks to construct the 100-story building continued even as the presidential candidate alternately bragged about his relationship with Vladimir Putin and rejected sug...

Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP
As Gina Haspel, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the CIA, faces a Senate grilling about her role in the agency’s post-9/11 torture program, nearly 300 pages of newly declassified CIA documents give an unprecedented look at the chaotic early days of the agency’s so-called rendition, detention, and interrogation program — including a time when Haspel helped oversee it.
The alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks lied and fabricated information to avoid torture,...

The Environmental Protection Agency’s internal watchdog launched three investigations this year into potential threats against Scott Pruitt, the agency’s administrator. All three cases were closed due to a lack of evidence that Pruitt had been seriously threatened, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News.
One of the threats, made in March, consisted of someone drawing a mustache on Pruitt’s face on the cover of Newsweek and taping the magazine inside of an elevator at an EPA building...

Elizabeth Erin Walsh was escorted from the building by security last Thursday.
Eric Thayer / Reuters
A high-ranking Department of Commerce official was escorted out of the department’s Washington, DC, headquarters by security last Thursday, according to three sources at the agency knowledgeable about the matter.
It is unknown why Elizabeth Erin Walsh was removed from the building, but the sources told BuzzFeed News that there’s an internal investigation underway that involves her, although th...