FBI Raid Thomas Paine’s House, Point Guns At His Young Children; How an Award-Winning Reporter Became Thomas Paine

FBI Raid Thomas Paine’s House, Point Guns At His Young Children; How an Award-Winning Reporter Became Thomas Paine

Posted on August 27, 2018 by Thomas Paine

I can say with certainty, my decision to journey back into journalism was made after the FBI pointed guns at the heads of my wife and children. I knew that first morning (the FBI actually raided my home twice and pointed guns at my family twice) when federal agents raided our home one definitive thing was going to unfold:

These bastards — and their bosses — were going to pay for violating my family. My kids. My home. One way or the other, I would have the last word. As I have throughout my life and career. And I was going to have to go back into journalism to even the score.

I always win. You’ll learn that about me in the coming days and weeks, if you haven’t already learned as a reader of True Pundit. In fact, I already have won. The FBI learned it too. And I have much more to teach the Bureau if it decides it hasn’t been taught enough. True Pundit has broken dozens of key FBI scoops in two years and look at the Bureau. It is in shambles. No one in the media even comes close to our work

My name is Michael Moore. No, not the Lib movie guy Michael Moore (Now you understand why I use a pseudonym) I have won numerous awards in journalism, including the Gerald Loeb Award in 1996. None of that much matters in the scope of things — or life in general — but being nominated for Pulitzer Prizes in your 20s is something I can tell my grandkids about. And the Loeb speaks for itself. A Certified Fraud Examiner too, I worked for Citi running its anti-money laundering Ops in three states. Until the FBI ruined that career.

But it is time for Thomas Paine to go public. The good guys don’t hide, as a Congressman told me this weekend. Especially after being terrorized by the FBI.

These are the times that try men’s souls, the real Thomas Paine penned. Especially when a dozen FBI agents are pointing high-powered rifles at my children during an early-morning search warrant raid.

My boys. Then eight and twelve. With M-4 carbine rifles pointed at their wet heads just before getting on the school bus. One slip of a finger and poof, they’re dead. My wife too. Courtesy of cowboys from the FBI.

That was the first time in about twenty years I seriously thought about going back into journalism. And do things my way this time around. To unmask mother f*ckers like these FBI agents who were terrorizing my kids and wife. That was the seed that created True Pundit.

They come into your home like the FBI did to try and goad you into making a mistake, maybe take a run at one of them – or draw down with my Sig — so they could blow a hole in my pajamas. And be done with me, like their bosses hoped.

BECAUSE as a contractor I knew too much. And I still know too much. And it is almost time to tell the world all about it. We are working on a book that will detail why the FBI turned on me. The reasons are hard to stomach but I am safer if all know.

While the FBI was tossing my house and asking me dumb questions the wheels in my head were already years ahead of those chaotic moments. My wife and boys were in tears but I was already thinking how this could play out.

Taking violent retaliation off the table, getting back into journalism could be the play.

If I could stay out of prison. And stay alive.

For a good stretch that morning I was convinced they were going to stuff me in a van and drive away.

But these cowboys were driving Prius’ and Ford Escapes. This was not the FBI’s varsity. That last conversation I had with the FBI before that encounter was with the Bureau’s third or fourth man in charge of the entire FBI at HQ in Washington D.C. He had asked my Intel group to investigate members of the Justice Department, including Eric Holder. That is what was on my mind during the raid. This was payback, I thought. Sure. I could understand that. But why would someone like Holder or any of his high-ranking goons in Justice send these FBI flunkies to my door?

On a bad day – at a different place – they were potential sitting ducks. But they knew the kids were home and well … Cowboys.

Meanwhile, they are rifling through every room, every drawer looking for anything they can use as leverage against me.

The mind can play tricks on you when you’re rousted out of bed and your adrenaline is spiking. I have no intention of killing or harming these folks – or anyone unless my family is harmed. But I could. Easily. That gives me the upper hand in an interrogation because they are on my turf and I am comfortable knowing I am not at risk as long as I stay cool. So I try to stay cool. You learn working with the feds that their main weapon is fear. They are fear brokers: they peddle it at every turn. If you can get beyond that it’s like the first time you fly in an airplane and break through the clouds and understand there is a whole world above the cloud cover. And it’s beautiful.  Even during a storm.

I am convinced at this point that some job I did for the feds went sideways and I’ve been compromised. Or someone in my group got leaned on and gave me up, divulged some of the sensitive things we worked on. We pulled many jobs, mostly for the federal government and top brass in the FBI and many other agencies. If you are familiar with Fusion GPS in 2016-2018, I was the grandfather of that type of hybrid Intel operation where we combined feds with retired journalists and rained holy hell on private targets. That was in the mid 1990s, long before Fusion GPS. Name a government agency and we worked for it, along with Fortune 100 companies. We could glean corporate Intel from under-used databases, nab public records, or get our hands dirty. We quickly gained a reputation as being among the best at what we did but we stuck to Intel and digging for Intel and did not cross over into setting up a targets like Donald Trump like Fusion GPS did.

But we worked against Trump many years before his political life. We ran an Intel arm for Steve Wynn’s Mirage out of Las Vegas. Wynn and Trump were embroiled in an epic legal battle. It was personal and it was nasty. The stakes were sky high and the money was flowing as these two billionaires went toe to toe with each other. Wynn wanted to come back to Atlantic City and Trump wanted a gaming license in Las Vegas. These two magnates had a team of Intel and ex FBI, CIA on their payrolls digging dirt on one another. We were up to our necks in anti-Trump dirt, working for Wynn’s security Chief Tom Sheer, former FBI SAC of the New York FBI. My crew was on Team Wynn and we were battling Team Trump.

And Sheer was a ball buster and detail-oriented task master, having spent decades working his way up the FBI ladder. This was his first job post Bureau. But I respected him. And that is important in Intel.

Once at breakfast at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia, Sheer complimented me on the group’s performance for gathering Trump Intel for Wynn.

“I don’t understand how you find this stuff,” he said. “We couldn’t find this kind of intelligence in the FBI. However you do it, keep on doing it. Mr. Wynn is happy.”

For the time being at least. Guys like Wynn were rarely happy. He had all the money he could ever want and privately on conference calls he questioned how Trump’s Intel operation was always a step ahead of Mirage’s group. Whatever Wynn threw at Trump, Trump had something better to counter with. And it drove Wynn mad. That wasn’t a reflection on my group, however. We were only a part of Wynn’s machine and we had little say about formulating a strategy to take on Trump.

That is when I first grew respect for Trump. He was a bright adversary and always a step ahead. Just ask Steve Wynn. It was interesting to watch the two men embrace during Trump’s presidential campaign. I had a front-row seat years earlier where these two billionaires tried to destroy each other, throwing untold millions at dirt digging. Politics is a funny thing.

But I am way ahead of the story.

The seeds of True Pundit were sewn shortly after Barack Obama’s election in 2008, when Holder started to grab the reigns of the Justice Department. And the FBI pointed guns at my sons and wife.

During the interrogation by FBI agents I referred back to some “federal” training I had after I left journalism in 1996 at the Bergen Record in Hackensack, N.J. My Intel godfather was Dick Callaghan a north Jersey and New York legend who literally wrote the fugitive apprehension manual for the U.S. Marshals before he took on assorted, more complicated assignments for the Agency and other clandestine folks. Callaghan lured me out of journalism because he thought I was wasting my talents toiling away at a large daily newspaper. He was right. Dick was more like a father to me than a mentor. I mimicked his old school way of intelligence gathering based on the main tenet: Never Rat on Your Friends, Colleagues. Always have their six.

But Callaghan had an even more important mantra: Never Trust the FBI. And he was right about that too. More than anything else. I mean he was right in 1994. “One day,” he used to say, “people will realize the truth about those rat bastards.” Fast forward to 2018. He was right. But it was not easy getting here. The road was a brutal one.

It was the FBI who recruited my crew to work for them in 1996. Right after my journalism career I took my first FBI job. Callaghan always coached me up about working for the FBI once he knew we were doing contract work for the Bureau. Take their money, he said, but watch your back.

We worked many cases for Marshals, FBI, DEA and many others including the Secret Service and some involved truly sinister suspects and defendants. These were bad guys. But I can think of few, if any, of those cases where federal agents rolled into those people’s homes and pointed guns in the faces of their children. That’s simply asking for trouble. On many fronts. It baffles me to this day. If the FBI had waited another hour and my kids were off to school, things could have been much different. But the lead agent didn’t have the brains or experience to comprehend he had put his crew into a potentially dangerous situation. He did no recon on when my sons went to school. And unwittingly, he ultimately unleashed a clandestine collection of current and former law enforcement officials onto his employer in the form of True Pundit. That was a mistake.

But the FBI did not make that mistake just once. The same crew of federal cowboys returned to my home years later with their guns, terrorized my youngest son who has special needs, and bloodied my head. I was unarmed, did not resist, and was making my son breakfast before school.

Moments later I was dragged from the house at gunpoint, tackled by multiple agents and I hit the cement steps outside my door face first because they were holding my hands behind my back. My youngest son, now 11, looked on while screaming with tears rolling down his face. Armed federal agents ripping your father from the house and beating him down before breakfast – years after storming your house with guns – is not the best recipe for a kid already suffering from anxiety and depression.


What was my alleged crime? You would think espionage or perhaps another capital crime like selling U.S. secrets.

No. All my worries about past jobs for the feds going sideways were unwarranted. The FBI was at my house to arrest me for copyright infringement. I had a side business and hobby of selling vintage hockey games and old hockey highlights. Some on VHS and DVD. The FBI terrorized my kids twice and harassed my family for an intellectual property “crime.” Normally a civil issue at best.

The FBI and Justice Department sanctioned pointing automatic weapons at the heads of my young children and wife and beating me down over hockey tapes. Not the dozens of illegal jobs I spearheaded for the Deep State and FBI. Hockey videos and games, with much of the footage 50 years old and older. And none of it was copy written.

The Deep State made sure I lost my job at Citi too. I ran Citi and its affiliates’ anti-money laundering division in Delaware, Chicago and Los Angeles for nearly a decade. The FBI went out of its way to ruin my career.

The Deep State had struck. But Why?

I knew too much. And I still do.
Very soon you will too.

Now, the Deep State will use its minions in the MSM try to discredit and besmirch me because I have announced a tell-all book coming in weeks. But it simply will not work.

I am at peace with myself and how I arrived here, at this point in my life. I believe I had to weather this journey to uncover the corruption in the FBI and DOJ and I have, along with True Pundit. But we are NOT done.

Fire away, Deep State. Short of threatening my family at gunpoint – like the FBI did twice — I am immune to criticism.

I have been on a well-oiled mission since the FBI tried to ruin my life. And now I am public. That makes me even more versatile.

And I have the goods, like I always have, and always deliver what I promise. In journalism or Intel.

When my book comes out in weeks detailing why the FBI tried to ruin me – or prodded me to kill myself so I would not reveal the truth about the Deep State — things will never be the same.

Break me? I grew up in a broken home and lived in the projects. My father was a junkie so I learned to deal with adversity at a young age. I had the strength to rise from the FBI ashes and financial armagedom and out the players in the corrupt institutions that tried to ruin me. The hunted became the hunter.

You didn’t kill me, you made me stronger. When you came into my home and threatened my family, you re-launched my journalism career. Now, look at the FBI. It has been dismantled.

Now it’s almost time for the BIG payback, although we have had fun dismantling the FBI and DOJ for two years now.

I have the D.C. elite terrified. And they should be.

You earned it.