Tag: Audrey Hudson

Homeland Security settles lawsuit of reporter whose home they illegally searched

7:06 pm

In a lawsuit settlement Homeland Security has agreed to pay $50,000 and promise to return everything they seized — including confidential files and paperwork that identified Homeland Security whistleblowers –during an illegal raid of a reporter’s home.

Audrey Hudson, an award-winning journalist most recently at the Washington Times, told The Daily Signal she was awoken by her barking dog around 4:30 a.m. on Aug. 6, 2013, to discover armed government agents had descended on her property under the cover of darkness. The agents had a search warrant for her husband’s firearms. As they scoured the home, Hudson was read her Miranda rights.

While inside Hudson’s house, a U.S. Coast Guard agent confiscated documents that contained “confidential notes, draft articles, and other newsgathering materials” that Hudson never intended for anyone else to see. The documents included the identities of whistleblowers at the Department of Homeland Security. The Coast Guard is part of Homeland Security.

The settlement requires the government to return all documents, destroy all notes made from these papers, and promise it did not copy anything. Does anyone believe this?

Posted from Sedona, Arizona, where Diane and I will be for the next week.

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The Washington Times and the journalist whose confidential files were taken illegally during a house search on an unrelated matter are suing Homeland Security.

11:15 am

The Washington Times and the journalist whose confidential files were taken illegally during a house search on an unrelated matter are suing Homeland Security.

The suit is also demanding that they be allowed depose the Homeland Security agent “who attended the raid and was involved in collecting the reporter’s materials to determine how widely information from the newspaper’s documents was distributed within the government.” That agent appeared to be on a fishing expedition to get these files, containing the names of several Homeland whistle-blowers, and then pass that information along to higher-ups in the agency.

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The Washington Times is preparing to take legal action in connection with the raid of a reporter’s home by government officials.

8:20 am

The Washington Times is preparing to take legal action in connection with the raid of a reporter’s home by government officials.

The warrant was narrowly written to limit the raid to a search for weapons owned by the reporter’s husband. Instead, the raiders carefully picked through the reporter’s files and took those pertaining to her stories about the TSA. The man in charge of this search also happened to be a former TSA employee who apparently had a direct interest in those files.

That her private files were seized, says Mrs. Hudson [the reporter], is particularly disturbing because of interactions that she and her husband had during the search of their home, as well as months afterwards, with Coast Guard investigator Miguel Bosch. According to his profile on the networking site LinkedIn, Mr. Bosch worked at the Federal Air Marshal Service from April 2001 through November 2007.

It was Mr. Bosch, Mrs. Hudson says, who asked her during the Aug. 6 search if she was the same Audrey Hudson who had written the air marshal stories. It was also Mr. Bosch, she says, who phoned Mr. Flanagan a month later to say that documents taken during the search had been cleared.

During the call, according Mrs. Hudson, Mr. Bosch said the files had been taken to make sure that they contained only “FOIA-able” information and that he had circulated them to the Transportation Security Administration, which oversees the Federal Air Marshal Service, in order to verify that “it was legitimate” for her to possess such information.

“Essentially, the files that included the identities of numerous government whistleblowers were turned over to the same government agency and officials who they were exposing for wrongdoing,” Mrs. Hudson said.

In other words, Bosch used the search to obtain the files so that the TSA could identify Mrs. Hudson’s sources within the agency. Expect those individuals to be punished in the coming years, for the crime of telling the truth about America’s KGB.

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