Federal Bureau of Investigation
The FBI investigates federal crimes and runs domestic counterintelligence. Its COINTELPRO program, exposed in 1971, secretly surveilled and disrupted civil-rights leaders and dissidents, a documented abuse that colors how the bureau's role is read in later cases. Files here range from that acknowledged record to unresolved investigations where the bureau's conclusions are still disputed.
The FBI ran a secret campaign to spy on and sabotage domestic political activists
For fifteen years the FBI ran a secret program, code-named COINTELPRO, to not just watch but actively disrupt civil-rights, anti-war and other domestic political movements, a claim that sounded like paranoia until burglars stole the paperwork and Congress confirmed the rest.
Read the case file →Nixon's re-election committee conspired to break into Democratic headquarters and the White House covered it up
Five men were caught bugging Democratic Party headquarters in June 1972 with ties running straight back to the president's own re-election committee, and the ensuing cover-up, unravelled by reporters, a Senate committee, the courts and Nixon's own secret tapes, ended in the only resignation of a U.S. president in history.
Read the case file →Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was killed in a 1969 police raid coordinated with the FBI's COINTELPRO program
Before dawn on 4 December 1969, a team of Chicago police officers detailed to Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan raided an apartment at 2337 West Monroe Street. When the shooting stopped, Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, and 22-year-old Panther Mark Clark were dead, and four others were wounded. Officials first described a two-sided gun battle. Physical evidence and a federal grand jury later found that officers had fired dozens of rounds and the people inside at most one. In the years that followed it became documented that the FBI's COINTELPRO program had targeted the Chicago Panthers, that a paid Bureau informant had provided a floor plan of the apartment, and that the survivors and families would win a $1.85 million civil settlement jointly funded by the federal government, the county, and the city. This case file keeps two things apart: an FBI counterintelligence campaign, an informant's floor plan, a lopsided volume of fire, and a landmark settlement on one side, and the strongest framing of the claim, that the killing was a deliberate, coordinated assassination, on the other; it rates the claim substantiated for the facts the record establishes, while noting where criminal intent was never proven in court.
Read the case file →Russiagate was either a criminal collusion or a manufactured deep-state hoax
Russiagate is the umbrella name for the belief, in two mirror-image forms, that something corrupt happened around the 2016 election and the investigation that followed. One version holds that Donald Trump's campaign criminally colluded with Russia to win. The other holds that there was no collusion at all and that Russiagate was a hoax, a deep-state coup by Obama-era officials to frame Trump. This file separates the established record, which is substantial and bipartisan, from the two claims it rates. The record establishes that Russia interfered in 2016, that Mueller did not establish a criminal Trump-Russia conspiracy, and that the FBI made real but non-partisan-motivated errors along the way. Both maximalist stories claim more than the evidence shows.
Read the case file →The FBI blamed the 2001 anthrax attacks on the wrong man, and the true origin is being obscured
In the weeks after 9/11, letters filled with powdered anthrax moved through the US mail, killing five people and sickening seventeen more. After the longest and most expensive investigation in its history, the FBI concluded that a single Army scientist, Dr. Bruce Ivins, had done it alone. He died of an apparent overdose in 2008, before he was charged, so the case was never tested in a courtroom. This file separates what is documented (the attacks, the deaths, and the FBI's conclusion) from what remains disputed: whether that conclusion is right, given a later National Academy of Sciences review that found the science did not definitively point to Ivins, and given that an earlier suspect, Steven Hatfill, was publicly hounded, wholly exonerated, and paid a large settlement.
Read the case file →The wrong men were convicted of assassinating Malcolm X, and the FBI and NYPD buried evidence of it
Malcolm X was shot dead at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on 21 February 1965. Three men were convicted, but one confessed and always swore the other two were innocent, and for decades their supporters said the case was rotten. In 2021 the state agreed: after a 22-month reinvestigation, Muhammad Aziz and the late Khalil Islam were exonerated because the FBI and NYPD had hidden evidence that pointed away from them, and New York paid $36 million. This file separates what is now proven (a wrongful conviction built on withheld evidence) from what is not (how far the agencies' foreknowledge went, and who else took part).
Read the case file →Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by a conspiracy, and James Earl Ray did not act alone
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on 4 April 1968. James Earl Ray, a career criminal and prison escapee, pleaded guilty the next year, then recanted within days and spent the rest of his life demanding a trial he never received. This case file separates what is documented from what is disputed: the FBI's very real COINTELPRO campaign to surveil and destroy King; a 1979 House committee that concluded Ray fired the fatal shot but found a likelihood of a conspiracy; a 1999 Memphis civil jury that blamed a plot including unnamed government agencies; and a 2000 Justice Department review that found the conspiracy allegations not credible. It weighs why the sole-gunman account has never satisfied, including the King family itself, against why no plot has ever been proven.
Read the case file →Ruby Ridge and Waco were deliberate federal massacres of civilians, then covered up
Within eight months, federal agents were involved in two lethal confrontations with armed Americans on their own property: the August 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, where an FBI sniper killed Randy Weaver's unarmed wife Vicki, and the 51-day siege near Waco, Texas, that ended on 19 April 1993 with a fire in which 76 Branch Davidians died. Out of these came a durable belief that the government had set out to slaughter civilians and then buried the truth. This case file separates two very different claims. The first, that federal agencies committed serious, documented misconduct and killed people who should not have died, is established. The second, that these were deliberate, planned massacres concealed by a unified cover-up, is unproven and, on the central question of who started the Waco fire, contradicted by the government's own most independent investigation.
Read the case file →The 2025 Epstein files release was managed to conceal a secret client list and shield powerful people, and the promised names are still being hidden
In 2025 the long-running suspicion that the government was sitting on Epstein secrets collided with the government itself. After officials, the Attorney General among them, publicly raised expectations of a client list and damning files, a joint Department of Justice and FBI memo in July 2025 concluded there was no incriminating client list, no evidence that Epstein blackmailed prominent figures, and no basis to charge uncharged third parties, and it reaffirmed that he died by suicide. The reversal set off a bipartisan firestorm alleging a cover-up. Congress responded by passing the Epstein Files Transparency Act almost unanimously; it was signed into law, and more than three million pages were subsequently released. This case file weighs the specific claim that a hidden client or blackmail list exists and is being concealed, keeping the documented process apart from the claim it rates, and it deals with the records fight rather than accusing any individual.
Read the case file →John Lennon was not killed by a lone gunman but assassinated by the US government, using a mind-controlled patsy
Late on 8 December 1980, Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon four times in the archway of the Dakota, Lennon's apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Chapman remained at the scene reading a copy of 'The Catcher in the Rye' until police arrested him, and the following June he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder against his own lawyers' advice. Because Lennon had been a target of real Nixon-era surveillance, and because the CIA's MKUltra mind-control program was by then a matter of public record, a theory took hold that the murder was no lone act but a state assassination carried out through a programmed patsy. A separate, more forensic strand, argued in detail by the researcher David Whelan, points instead to anomalies in the physical evidence: the medical team's account of the wounds, bullet holes in the Dakota's glass, the doorman's background, and an investigation that ended the moment a confession was in hand. This case file keeps two things apart: a confessed, convicted shooter, and a real but limited FBI surveillance campaign years earlier; and the claims it rates, that an agency ordered the killing and controlled Chapman, or that a second gunman was covered up. It takes the anomalies seriously and one by one, and finds that they do not establish a second shooter; on the larger conspiracy the verdict is unproven, held open by a case that a guilty plea meant was never tried.
Read the case file →D.B. Cooper survived his jump and got away with the only unsolved skyjacking in U.S. history
On Thanksgiving Eve 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked a Boeing 727, collected $200,000 in ransom, and parachuted into the Washington wilderness, and simply vanished. Unlike most conspiracy theories, the strange part here isn't a cover-up. It's that the FBI, with a fully documented crime and real evidence, still cannot say who he was.
Read the case file →Jimmy Hoffa was murdered by the Mafia and secretly buried, and the truth has been hidden ever since
On 30 July 1975, former Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa drove to a suburban Detroit restaurant to meet two mob-connected figures, phoned his wife to say no one had shown up, and was never seen again. His car was left in the parking lot; his body has never been recovered. The FBI's marathon investigation, summarized in the so-called Hoffex memo, concluded he was murdered by organized-crime figures determined to keep him from reclaiming the union. That conclusion is the working theory to this day, yet not one person was ever charged, and every named suspect, every confession, and every burial site has failed to close the case. This file separates what is documented (a disappearance and an FBI finding of murder) from the many theories about exactly who did it and where the body lies, which remain unproven.
Read the case file →The Oklahoma City bombing was a wider plot: a hidden John Doe 2, government foreknowledge, and explosives inside the building
At 9:02 a.m. on 19 April 1995, a rented truck packed with roughly two tonnes of fertilizer-and-fuel explosive tore the face off the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, 19 of them children. It was, until 2001, the deadliest terrorist attack in US history. The core facts were established quickly and are not seriously disputed: an anti-government extremist, Timothy McVeigh, built and drove the bomb, with help from Terry Nichols and the foreknowledge of Michael Fortier. This case file separates that documented spine from the claims that grew around it: that a never-identified John Doe 2 points to a larger cell, that the government knew in advance, and that the truck bomb alone could not have caused the damage. Those claims have real anomalies behind them, and they are unproven.
Read the case file →Journalist Danny Casolaro was murdered to stop him exposing "the Octopus," a web of conspiracies tied to the PROMIS software affair
Joseph Daniel Casolaro was a 44-year-old freelance writer who spent his last year chasing a story he believed connected the Inslaw and PROMIS software scandal to a much larger web of corruption he nicknamed the Octopus, taking in the alleged October Surprise, Iran-Contra, and the collapse of the bank BCCI. On 10 August 1991 he was found dead in the bathtub of his room at the Sheraton in Martinsburg, West Virginia, where he had reportedly gone to meet a source; his wrists had been cut multiple times and a note was present. State authorities ruled it a suicide. His family and many observers did not accept that, pointing to his stated fear that he was being threatened, to a briefcase of documents that vanished, to a body embalmed before an autopsy could be done, and later to FBI records in which investigators themselves questioned the suicide finding. This case file keeps two things apart: a death officially ruled a suicide, and a PROMIS dispute partly validated by a congressional committee but never won in court; and the claim it rates, that Casolaro was murdered to bury the Octopus. On the available evidence that claim is unproven.
Read the case file →The 2026 federal seizures of 2020 ballots and voting machines are uncovering the fraud that stole the election
In early 2026 the federal government took two unprecedented actions around long-settled election claims. On January 28 the FBI raided Fulton County, Georgia's election operations center and seized more than 650 boxes of original 2020 ballots, images, tabulator tapes, and voter rolls; days later it emerged that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, under Tulsi Gabbard, had obtained and forensically examined voting machines from Puerto Rico. Supporters framed both as the beginning of the end for a cover-up: proof, at last, that the 2020 election was stolen and that the machinery of fraud was about to be exposed. This case file separates the documented record, the seizures happened and are being fought in court, from the rated claim, that they are uncovering real election fraud. On the evidence, that claim is debunked: the 2020 Georgia result was checked three separate ways, the affidavit behind the raid recycled complaints the state had already found did not change the count, and the intelligence review turned up no foreign hack. The file names no fraud because the record establishes none.
Read the case file →A secret network of organized Satanic cults was ritually abusing and murdering children across America
The Satanic Panic was a moral panic that swept the United States (and parts of Canada, Britain, and beyond) through the 1980s and into the 1990s. Its central claim was that a secret, organized network of Satanists, sometimes described as intergenerational family cults, was ritually abusing, sacrificing, and murdering large numbers of children, often at day-care centers, and that the evidence was being missed or suppressed. The panic drew on the 1980 book Michelle Remembers, the discredited practice of recovered-memory therapy, suggestive interviews of young children, and sensational media coverage. It produced dozens of criminal prosecutions, several of which ended in long prison sentences. This case file keeps two things apart: a genuine wave of allegations, investigations, and trials, and the real harm done to the falsely accused; and the claim it rates, that an organized Satanic ritual-abuse conspiracy actually existed. On the evidence, including the FBI's own review, that claim is debunked.
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