Free Republic

Anxious FBI chiefs are trawling through 'numerous' top-level investigations spanning 22 years for fear they were compromised by convicted bureau spook Charles McGonigal, DailyMail.com can reveal. The forensic clean-up operation ranges over the entire time the philandering former head of counterintelligence in New York worked for the agency. McGonigal, 55, has already been sentenced to four years and two months in prison for taking money and conspiring with a sanctioned Russian oligarch who is a crony of despot President Vladimir Putin. But the full possible repercussions of his treachery are outlined in a sentencing memorandum by the US government for...

Speaking of Kennedy, no single American has felt the sting of the Times’ historic disdain for so-called conspiracy theorists more than JFK’s legendary press secretary, Pierre Salinger. Unlike Landis, Salinger made the mistake of exposing a conspiracy that was very much in play when he exposed it. I speak here of the case of TWA Flight 800. The 747 was en route from New York to Paris when it crashed off the coast of Long Island in July 1996, killing all 230 people on board.

This is an abbreviated version of the excellent Epix Documentary. The linked page has links to Part 1 and Part 2 of this program. Highly recommended as an introduction or a refresher to the TWA 800 disaster. (Spoiler alert: It was a Navy missile.) ML/NJ

A retired FBI agent was indicted on murder charges Thursday for allegedly taking bribes from a mobster to supply him with inside information that led to four underworld slayings in Brooklyn. R. Lindley DeVecchio, 65, was arrested in a case of "confidential leaks, payoffs and death" dating back two decades, District Attorney Charles Hynes said. DeVecchio pleaded not guilty and was released on $1 million bail. He did not speak at his arraignment. One of the two alleged mob hitmen behind the slayings was jailed without bail. The other was in Florida, awaiting extradition.

The wreckage of TWA Flight 800 is set to be destroyed — nearly 25 years after the doomed aircraft crashed off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people on board. For the last two decades, the reconstructed Boeing 747 has been housed in a Virginia hangar and used by the National Transportation Safety Board as a training tool for accident investigators. But the federal agency on Monday announced it planned to decommission and destroy the wreckage, as its lease on the 30,000-square-foot Ashburn warehouse is set to expire.

Here are two unfortunate realities: the first is that whistleblowing becomes virtuous only when a Republican is the one being whistled on; the second is that deep state Democrats have a habit of manipulating whistleblower laws when it suits their purposes ... The first case involves TWA Flight 800, the 747 that inexplicably crashed off the coast of Long Island in July 1996. As to deep state involvement, the Clinton Department of Justice illegally seized control of the investigation from the National Transportation Safety Board and handed it off to the FBI, which, in turn, ceded real control of the...

If there was a reason President Donald Trump chose the small Pennsylvania town of Montoursville to hold a campaign rally, no one in the media is saying what it is. In the absence of any answers, let me suggest one, admittedly more speculative than proven but a possibility nonetheless. In 1996, during the midst of Bill Clinton's desperate drive to become president, 16 French club members from the Montoursville high school and five of their chaperones died in the crash of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island.

This Saturday at 8:45 p.m. and Sunday at 10 p.m., on C-SPAN’s "Book-TV", a national TV audience will get to see, unedited, my take on the fate of TWA Flight 800. In truth, the story should have been on every network. My book, TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-Up, The Conspiracy, addresses the most successful cover-up in American peacetime history, the one that followed the destruction of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island in July 1996. The fact that the Clinton White House orchestrated this cover-up during the heat of the 1996 election campaign should have made...

If you had told me on the morning of July 7 that I would have lunch on July 8 with the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, I would have likely countered with tales of flying pigs or Hamlet-writing monkeys. I knew the odds. In 2013-14, the TWA 800 Project Team made a systematic attempt to get the NTSB to reopen the investigation into the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800. The Project Team included high-level whistleblowers, family members of the victims, and eyewitnesses. Collectively, team members had a whole lot more juice than I did, but for all...

Twenty years ago this Sunday, TWA Flight 800, a 747 bound for Paris, exploded off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people on board. In the last few years, researchers have unearthed an astonishing treasure trove of CIA documents, secured a confirmed video of a Long Island missile launch five days before TWA 800’s demise, and persuaded numerous witnesses and whistleblowers from inside the investigation to come forward. Here is what we now know.

James Sanders was the first investigative reporter to take a serious look at what happened to TWA Flight 800. For his efforts, he, his wife Elizabeth, a TWA trainer, and one of his sources, TWA Capt. Terry Stacey were arrested. The Sanderses were tried and convicted in federal court of conspiracy to steal airplane parts. Learn more in TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-Up, The Conspiracy (Regnery: July 5).July 12, 1996, Westhampton, Long Island, a repairman using his video camera to film the dawn, instead captured a large missile solid-fuel exhaust plume climbing into the sky. Then something large fell...

Years ago, in another lifetime, I flew the mighty F-4S Phantom II in the jet route structure. Several times I flew high enough for the engine exhaust to condense in the minus 60°F atmosphere. At 30,000 feet, I’d look in the mirrors on the canopy bow and watch a pair of thick contrails swirl behind me, laying down a set of unmistakable tracks proving that I was no longer just turning jet fuel into jet noise but I was leaving a trail visible for all to see for miles and miles. Some people on the ground, primarily those on the...

Throughout the TWA 800 investigation, authorities held the grief of family members in ready reserve to ward off tough questions. Within months of the July 1996 crash, FBI honcho Jim Kallstrom was citing the "consternation and pain" of the families to silence critics. True to form, the media interviewed only those family members that affirmed the government position. Many parents, like Lisa Michelson, did not. -- Jack CashillWhen I came home from work on the evening of July 17, 1996 I turned on the television and the newscasts were all saying the same thing: TWA Flight 800, bound for Paris,...

When I see former FBI New York honcho Jim Kallstrom appear on Fox News, I see a tortured soul. As boldly honest as he has been on the subject of Islamic terrorism, this once honorable man has lived a lie for the last twenty years on the subject of TWA Flight 800. Others have lived the lie as well, but none so personally. It was Kallstrom who spoke to the press, Kallstrom who testified at congressional hearings, Kallstrom who consoled the families of the 230 dead with the assurance he would leave “no stone unturned” in his pursuit of the...

Ex FBI Agent James Kallstrom tells Meygan of the enemy within.

As I hoped would happen, American Thinker’s series on TWA Flight 800 has prompted individuals with first hand knowledge to come forward. “Mark Johnson” is one. An air traffic controller (ATC), he worked the night of July 17, 1996 -- the night TWA Flight 800 was destroyed -- at the New York Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) located in Westbury, New York. Johnson has provided me with his real name, and I have confirmed that he was in a position to know what he says he knows. He requested that I use an alias because he has children who depend...

TWA 800 was destroyed twenty years ago this July off the coast of Long Island. Mike Wire was one of the 258 FBI witnesses who reported an apparent missile strike. The New York Times, which owned the story, interviewed not a single one of them. In the absence of real information, the CIA and FBI collaborated to discredit the eyewitnesses and advance an exploding fuel tank theory. Wire’s case is just one shocking example out of many. To learn more, see Jack Cashill’s introductory article in this series or his book, TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-Up, The Conspiracy (Regnery:...

On the pleasant summer evening of July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 left JFK Airport in New York bound for Paris. Twelve minutes after takeoff, about ten miles south of the popular south shore of Long Island, at least two surface-to-air missiles blew the 747 out of the sky, killing all 230 people on board. I write the above with 100 percent confidence. I owe that confidence to the efforts of a small corps of committed individuals -- eyewitnesses, independent researchers, whistleblowers from within the investigation, and family members who have turned their grief into action. In attempting to get...

Usama bin Laden may have gotten the idea for the 9/11 attacks after watching news coverage of the 1999 crash of EgyptAir Flight 990, in which a jihadist co-pilot caused the airliner to nosedive into the Atlantic, according to a first-hand account from one of the terror chief’s top lieutenants. Bin Laden wondered why the co-pilot in the deliberate crash did not fly the plane into buildings, Nasir al Wuhayshi said in the latest AQAP newsletter, in an account translated by the Long War Journal. Al Wuhayshi, former adviser to bin Laden and leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian...

Was TWA Flight 800 shot out of the sky? As a former pilot, that is a question I get asked about all the time. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but let’s be clear: Yes. I say it was. And I believe the FBI covered it up. LOOK BACK: REPORTING THE CRASH OF TWA FLIGHT 800 ON JULY 17, 1996 There are many reasons to disbelieve the official explanation of what happened to TWA 800 almost 19 years ago, on July 17, 1996, off the South Shore of Long Island. There’s hardly an airline pilot among the hundreds I know who buys...