Most Americans familiar with U.S. v. Raniere encountered the case through sensationalized media headlines and Hollywood’s NXIVM mythology, but the underlying evidence reveals massive malfeasance at the FBI and Department of Justice. Jack Smith, former Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland, and former FBI Director Christopher Wray are all implicated in this scandal.
Within days of my reporting on this issue, a sudden, coordinated, full-force mainstream media resurgence of the case six years post-trial exploded out of nowhere. National media outlets regurgitated the same salacious narrative, but made no mention of the clear-cut proof of government fabrication of evidence I’ve revealed through my exclusive reporting, and no mention of the fact that the Second Circuit Court had just effectively rubber-stamped it.
What I’ve uncovered is not just about one case. It’s about the media-government lawfare machine that has been weaponized by powerful interests against President Trump and others, like myself, who challenge the status quo.
Seven experts (four former FBI agents) concluded, under penalty of perjury, that core evidence in U.S. v. Raniere – a camera’s memory card and a hard drive – was extensively falsified, with planted files and manipulated timestamps. They jointly wrote:
“[T]he involvement of government personnel in this evidentiary fraud is inescapable – an unprecedented finding in our combined 150+ years of forensic experience.”
Newsweek’s own independent expert agreed.
Now, newly obtained proof exposes a major FBI and prosecutorial lie:
During the fifth week of this six-week trial, the FBI and DOJ lied to the judge. They told him – and testified before the jury – that the original FBI examiner who analyzed the camera and memory card was unavailable to testify because he had suddenly been dispatched to Ghana. THIS IS DIRECTLY CONTRADICTED BY NEW EVIDENCE.
Here’s what the DOJ said:
- A USA Moira Kim Penza told the court during the fifth week of trial: “CART Analyst Flatley is in Africa right now.”
- FBI Senior Forensic Examiner Brian Booth testified: “Right now Stephen Flatley is out on assignment in Ghana.”
- AUSA Tanya Hajjar repeated the claim five-and-a-half years later in a 2025 appellate filing, asserting that Flatley was “unavailable to testify.”
Newly obtained records from the Ghana Immigration Service show that FLATLEY DID NOT ENTER GHANA AT ANY POINT DURING OR AFTER THE TRIAL IN 2019.
According to these records, Flatley had traveled there several times the year before, but never after.
Why does this lie matter?
Flatley’s prior sworn testimony in another federal case (U.S. v. Hirst, SDNY, 2016) would have blown up the government’s entire theory of guilt as to the most prejudicial charges, which depended on the authenticity of digital timestamps.
Flatley had already testified that such timestamps are easy to change and are therefore unreliable. That is the exact opposite of what prosecutors needed the jury to believe.
So instead, Flatley “disappears” under a false Ghana story, and the prosecution substitutes Examiner Brian Booth, who told the jury the opposite – that the pertinent timestamps are “not easily modifiable,” “purposefully designed that way,” and are therefore reliable.
A retired FBI Quantico Unit Chief reviewed Booth’s testimony and concluded it was “knowingly false.” Anyone can Google how to alter timestamps in seconds.
SYSTEMATIC ONGOING COVER-UP
The misconduct in this case, described by former U.S. Attorneys and former FBI officials as the most“widespread government malfeasance” they have ever seen in a single case, has been silenced at every level:
Last month, in October 2025, the Second Circuit affirmed. They refused to engage with the actual findings of FBI malfeasance and praised Judge Garaufis for his “skill, patience, and restraint” in this case, where a massive cover-up government crime has taken place. This has created a disastrous loophole that guts the Sixth Amendment and turns post-conviction review into a thinly-veiled sham, allowing judges to deny relief simply by accepting affidavits from government witnesses who have never testified or been subject to cross-examination.
- Earlier that year, TMZ’s pre-recorded interview with Dershowitz about this subject was spiked despite third-party coverage teasing it. Then, Hollywood suddenly made this over six-year-old case culturally relevant again. In 2025, The White Lotus and Sirens — two of the most-watched shows on television — wove Raniere and NXIVM into their plots. This case keeps getting artificially elevated, even above far more recent high-profile cases. This is not a coincidence. It’s narrative enforcement.
- After my reporting began in late October 2025, a coordinated media resurgence — Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Variety, NY Post, People, Fox Radio, The Guardian, even reruns of American Greed — blasted the salacious DOJ trial narrative while ignoring the only thing actually new in this case: documented FBI/DOJ criminal misconduct and a recent appellate decision eroding fundamental constitutional safeguards.
This case exposes what top former DOJ and FBI officials have called “indictable government crime,” and it provides a clear path to scrutinize Jack Smith, Merrick Garland, Christopher Wray, and other key actors that persecuted President Trump, as well as complicit MSM actors.
FIRE, NOT SMOKE: THE GOVERNMENT’S OWN RECORDS PROVE PERVASIVE FBI/DOJ MALFEASANCE
Independent of any opinion about the defendant’s guilt or innocence, the government’s own records, via chain-of-custody logs, forensic notes, trial transcripts, and post-trial disclosures, reveal intentional, coordinated misconduct by multiple FBI and DOJ personnel. And it all centers on the same key evidence that experts determined was falsified by the government.
Before seeing the violations, here is what the FBI’s digital-evidence policy explicitly requires:
- Original evidence must be preserved before review.
- CART, the FBI’s digital forensics unit, must create a forensic image — a frozen-in-time snapshot — before anyone examines the device.
- Every handler must appear on the chain of custody.
- No one outside of CART may access a device before forensic imaging.
All of these safeguards exist to protect the integrity of digital evidence, which is especially vulnerable to alteration. For the camera and memory card, these rules were knowingly broken.
Here are some examples of how these rules were broken:
1. Special Agent Maegan Rees
Held the unpreserved camera + card for 17 days, even though the camera couldn’t power on. This is explicitly prohibited and no explanation has ever been offered.
The chain of custody shows SA Rees holding the item for “Review” (prohibited) from July 10-27, 2018, months before being sent to CART in February 2019.
2. Special Agent Michael Lever
At the prosecution’s direction, on September 19, 2018, Lever secretly gave the unpreserved memory card to an unidentified FBI “technician” who kept entirely off the chain of custody, which is another direct violation of FBI protocol.
The chain of custody shows SA Lever checking out the unpreserved item for “Evidence Review” on September 19, 2018, for 7 days (itself prohibited by FBI protocol).
At trial, the government’s expert FBI Examiner, Brian Booth, admits data changed on that date:
In a filing 4+ years post-trial, occurring on July 21, 2023, the prosecution asserts this alteration came from an FBI “photo technician.” However, no such person is listed on the chain of custody:
3. The secret technician altered the evidence
According to the prosecution, this technician is the one who altered the card’s data before a forensic image existed, permanently compromising its integrity.
4. DOJ admits evidence alteration — and their excuse makes it worse
In the above filing excerpt, the prosecution admitted the data was altered, but claims only “last access dates” were changed because the technician did not use proper forensic tools (called a write-blocker) while “copying” photos.
But this is a categorically prohibited procedure. The card had not been preserved by CART. And because no forensic image existed, the full extent of what was altered that day is unknowable.
5. The government hid the technician for over four years
The technician’s involvement was concealed for more than four years after trial – until the filing excerpted above – and EDNY still refuses to identify them. Four former FBI CART examiners have jointly stated these were “knowing violations of FBI protocol” so severe that they equate to a fireable offense.
These offenses are only a fraction of the documented misconduct. For example, the FBI’s ownsearch logs prove that agents manufactured fake scenes with planted items, and the resulting photos were then presented as genuine evidence at trial. This is proven by the FBI’s own search records, uncovered by a twenty-three-year veteran of the FBI in their sworn report (Finding 6) and confirmed by a retired FBI Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge.
The Courts Made It Worse
The Second Circuit’s refusal even to acknowledge these findings effectively sanctioned the government’s misconduct thus creating an extremely dangerous precedent.
In fact, several of the same actors implicated in this case have since appeared in several controversial prosecutions:
- Jack Smith’s Mar-a-Lago prosecution
- The Douglass Mackey “meme case” prosecution
- The OneTaste prosecution
If the demonstrable corruption in this case is not confronted, these bad actors will keep poisoning other cases. These tactics will become normalized, and the American justice system will become even more vulnerable to political, institutional, and private weaponization.
Part of the weaponization in this case is the DOJ/MSM use of labels to shut down scrutiny: anyone who questions this case is smeared as “defending a sex-trafficker.” But even those headline-driving charges collapse under inspection. One “sex-trafficking” count involved an adult woman who was told to ask Raniere to take a nude photo of her; she refused, and nothing happened, yet Raniere was convicted of attempted sex trafficking for this “attempt” and given 40 years hard time for it.
Excerpt of the Prosecution’s Closing Statement (6/17/2019)
If bad actors in the FBI can plant or falsify digital evidence in this case — without consequence, and with judicial cover — they will be able to do it in any case, against any American.
This case is the most well-documented example of modern-day DOJ-media lawfare I have ever seen, implicating actors across the FBI, DOJ, the media, New York State (via a joint task force), the BOP, and even the judiciary. It is so thoroughly documented that it could actually lead to indictments, which may be the reason why all reporting about this is being suppressed.
The cover-up counterattacks will come. They always do, but I welcome them because I have the receipts. The machinery exposed here is the very one that persecuted President Trump. It presents a clear path to scrutinize, potentially with legal consequences, Jack Smith, Merrick Garland, Christopher Wray, and the MSM networks that manufacture convictions-by-lawfare.
