AI Mode reply for A man accused of making the threatening calls to Katie Miller

Prosecutors are expected to charge a man soon for allegedly threatening Katie Miller, the wife of top White House official Stephen Miller, despite FBI fears that no federal crime was committed, according to a report.

Justice Department prosecutors in Boston are being encouraged to bring charges even though there are internal concerns about the strength of the evidence, Bloomberg reported Monday.

The news comes after the resignation of FBI Deputy Director Andrew Bailey, who reportedly disagreed with how the bureau demoted two counterterrorism agents who pushed back on the probe into Miller's caller.

The Justice Department is preparing to file an indictment or a criminal complaint potentially this week, people familiar with the matter told the publication. The specific charge hasn't been decided upon. Yet prosecutors in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's office, like some in the FBI, are wary about whether they have enough proof to secure a conviction, they added.

Former Justice Department officials familiar with the case told Bloomberg that the criteria for a federal threats case don't appear to have been met. Instead, they said, the case was more of a matter for local police.

MAGA podcaster Katie Miller doesn't think

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast, nor did the FBI. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's office in Boston declined to comment to Bloomberg.

Last Friday, Michael Burgwald, the FBI's Washington Field Office counterterrorism chief, and his deputy, Courtland Rae, were removed from their positions and transferred to FBI headquarters.

The decision came amid the Millers' frustration that investigators were moving too slowly, Bloomberg Law reported.

"Senior leadership at the FBI determined they were stifling investigations into very serious threats and made a unilateral decision to remove them," White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told the outlet last week.

Miller is an architect of the Trump administration's immigration policy. / Evelyn Hockstein / REUTERS

Burgwald and Rae led the FBI Washington field office's counterterrorism division. They reportedly questioned the directive to look into Miller's allegations.

"Harassing phone calls aren't even in the ballpark of terrorism unless an actual terrorist is doing the dialing," as one ex-FBI official briefed on the matter told MS NOW.

The FBI said the two agents were demoted by Washington bureau chief Darren Cox, not FBI Director Kash Patel, though MS NOW reported Patel was displeased with them regarding the Miller matter.

"This was a personnel decision made at the Washington field office level alone based on our constant evaluation of mission needs. Any suggestion otherwise is false," Cox said. "Director Patel did not order this decision."

Katie Miller, 34, was an assistant press secretary in the Department of Homeland Security in the first Trump administration. She later joined then-Vice President Mike Pence's communications staff. For the first half of 2025, she was the communications director for the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Miller is now a podcast host, and occasionally appears on Fox News. In May, she said on that network that a viral post by the Democrats' official X account telling her husband to "shut up" was "violent."

A man types on a computer keyboard in front of the displayed cyber code in this illustration picture taken on March 1, 2017. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/Illustration Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

AMSTERDAM, Sept 28 (Reuters) - A Dutch man ​whose journey from cybercriminal to reformed security professional was widely covered in the international media has been arrested as part ‌of an investigation into the hacker group ShinyHunters, Dutch police and the man's boss said on Monday.

The Misinformation Monitor newsletter rounds up international misinformation narratives, with a "Real or Fake?" quiz in every edition. Sign up here.

The statement did not name the man. But ​Benjamin Korper of Amsterdam-based cybersecurity company Neo Security said it was Pepijn van der Stap, the company's offensive security lead.

The arrest comes amid escalating concern over ShinyHunters, a hacking group known ​for large-scale data breaches and extortion, and its recent theft of what it said was terabytes of sensitive personnel data from US FBI servers. ​At least some of the data includes employees' intelligence assignments and medical records, Reuters has reported. Some compared this to the disastrous 2015 hack of the US Office of Personnel Management.

An internal memo circulated to staffers said the FBI was operating under the presumption that hackers stole data pertaining to all bureau employees, according to a person briefed on ​the matter. In a statement, the FBI said it was "working around the clock" to investigate the hack and was "in regular communication with anyone ​who may be impacted." The memo's existence was earlier reported by MS Now.

"This was not a threat," they said. "Nothing will happen."

Van der Stap's 2023 convictions of data theft and extortion had already received widespread publicity, as did ​his subsequent public disavowal of cybercrime. ​On his personal website, Van ⁠der Stap acknowledged that his journey "hasn't been a straight line" but said his experience had taught him that "knowledge is for building and protecting, not breaking."

Korper said he had carefully vetted Van der Stap before hiring him, ​monitored him during his employment, and was shocked by the arrest.

"I truly believe that people deserve a ​second chance, but in ⁠this case I was not thanked for it," Korper said. "Absolutely everybody I talked to is flabbergasted."

The executive said he had hired an outside firm to investigate whether Van der Stap had hacked Neo Security or its customers, but so far investigators have found no evidence that he acted against his ⁠employer or ​its clients.

Korper and Van der Stap have not been in touch since the arrest, Korper ​said. Attempts by Reuters to reach Van der Stap or identify a lawyer or representative were not successful.

Adds comment from FBI in paragraph 6

Reporting by Anthony Deutsch in Amsterdam, and Raphael Satter and Andrew Goudsward ​in Washington; Additional reporting by AJ Vicens in Detroit. Writing by Makini Brice and Raphael Satter; Editing by Andrew Heavens, David Gaffen and David Gregorio

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Photo Illustration by Eric Faison/The Daily Beast/Getty

Donald Trump has lost another senior official, with the FBI’s deputy director leaving days after two veteran counterterrorism chiefs were abruptly reassigned over their handling of an investigation involving Stephen Miller’s wife.

FBI Deputy Director Andrew Bailey announced on Monday that he was stepping down to return to his family in Missouri, just one year after taking on the job as the bureau’s second highest ranking official following the departure of MAGA podcaster Dan Bongino.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

The theft by a criminal hacking group of reams of sensitive personal data involving potentially tens of thousands of former and current F.B.I. employees is emerging as one of the worst breaches of sensitive government information, leaving the bureau rushing to protect its personnel as an uncertain deadline loomed.

Nearly a week after the group, known as ShinyHunters, revealed it had pilfered intimate details about bureau personnel from the agency’s jobs portal and threatened to leak them online, F.B.I. investigators are still piecing together how the breach took place and the total damage.

The hack appears to have swept up home addresses, Social Security numbers, secretive job assignments and much more, according to a New York Times analysis of some of the records. Some are already comparing it to China’s breach of more than 20 million records from the Office of Personnel Management over a decade ago, considered so catastrophic that officials and lawmakers vowed to never let something like it happen again.

Many F.B.I. employees first learned about the hack when news reports about it surfaced on Tuesday, according to current and former officials. The next day, F.B.I. staff received an email reminding them that October is cybersecurity awareness month, which struck some as tone deaf in light of the breach, one of those people said.

On Friday, bureau leaders, in an internal memo to its rank and file, declared the hack a cybersecurity incident and acknowledged its employees had personal information stolen.

“We are operating under the premise that the threat actor is also exfiltrating PII of all F.B.I. employees,” according to the memo, which was described by someone who had seen it, using the abbreviation for personally identifiable information.

The memo said the agency would offer virtual briefings in the weeks ahead and instructed employees to remain vigilant at home and at work, report any unsolicited contacts or threats, avoid answering calls from unknown numbers and set up voice mail accounts with A.I.-generated voices. “Bureau leadership remains committed to supporting the safety of you and your family,” it said.

Still, many past and present personnel remain in the dark about whether their data has been purloined. In recent days, some have anxiously asked Times reporters whether their names are contained in the hacked data, wondering whether they needed to take steps to protect themselves or their families.

In a statement on Monday, the agency said it was “working around the clock to investigate the cyber incident involving FBIJobs.gov and is in regular communication with anyone who may be impacted — including multiple bureau-wide communications within 24 hours of public reporting.”

It added, “The F.B.I. treats the security of its information and the safety of its work force as top priorities, and our investigation is ongoing.”

In announcing its hack, ShinyHunters, believed to be a loose collective of young hackers operating across the globe, said it had targeted the F.B.I. as retribution for a public advisory the bureau had issued in the spring, warning that the group was known to harass victims and family members with threatening or coercive maneuvers. In their note, the hackers demanded that the F.B.I. “correct or simply REMOVE” the advisory or risk further consequences.

In an email to The Times on Friday, ShinyHunters said that the bureau had until the end of Tuesday to fulfill its request, even as the hackers themselves appeared to acknowledge that the bureau was unlikely to acquiesce.

That note left open the possibility that the hackers would not dump the data online, even as the group reiterated its deadline. But on Monday, in a new statement, the group claimed it never intended to do so.

“Since the very beginning we had made our decision that we would never publish this data,” the group said. “We have never intended to nor have we ever planned to.” It added that the hack and threat to the F.B.I. was a “marketing campaign to protect our business” and said that “we are not taking any further actions” with the data, including revealing more about what is contained in the files.

“We seek no escalation as our goals have widely been accomplished,” it said.

It remains to be seen what ShinyHunters will do, and security researchers warned that even if they did not publish it online they could still sell it to other criminals or foreign governments.

It is also unclear just how much sensitive information the hackers stole. The group claimed publicly to have stolen records on everyone who has applied for a job at the F.B.I., and told The Times that the people with compromised information numbered in the tens of thousands.

Ciaran Martin, the former head of Britain’s cyberdefense agency, said the F.B.I. hack likely had “huge impact on the operational capability” of the bureau and could rank as one of the most consequential data breaches in history — graver even than the Office of Personnel Management burglary.

“Losing the data on 20 million federal employees to the Chinese was bad,” Mr. Martin said. “But you knew the Chinese weren’t going to sell or publish it.”

From Sensitive Job Assignments to T.S.A. PreCheck

A sample of records that the hackers have shared with The Times and other news organizations includes newer hires as well as retired ones, with birth dates ranging from the early 1940s to the mid 2000s. The most recent date references in the spreadsheet were from late April, suggesting the stolen files are at most only months old.

Current and former U.S. officials said that at least portions of the sample, and potentially all of it, appeared to be authentic.

A Times review of the sample found that it contained a range of private personal data, including:

• The names, home addresses, phone numbers, work emails, Social Security numbers and birth dates and hire dates of current and former F.B.I. personnel.

• Names and numbers for spouses and other emergency contacts, including in some cases parents, siblings and even children.

• Employee identification numbers that are used for the Transportation Security Administration’s PreCheck program, which could aid spies in tracking travel itineraries of agents, including those that work undercover.

• Names of the units in which F.B.I. personnel are employed and their job titles, as well as the names of supervisors. While some list mundane departments, others reveal extraordinarily sensitive assignments including counterintelligence, narcotics and various desks focused on Russian, Chinese and Iranian national security threats. F.B.I. agents in those roles are generally expected to zealously protect their work in such fields to avoid putting a target on their back.

Additionally, ShinyHunters said that it had stolen medical data about employees, including psychiatric records and documents related to blood and urine tests. It also said that it had additional background check files on employees.

Former bureau officials and security experts said the hacked data prompted no end of worries. The data could also make it far easier for violent criminals to seek revenge against F.B.I. agents who sent them to prison. When they submit paperwork against criminal suspects, F.B.I. agents sign their names to the records but are typically trained to not let delicate personal information easily emerge online.

“It doesn’t take much imagination to picture scenarios where employees or their families could be threatened or harmed by this kind of information being released,” said Andrew Brandt, a threat intelligence researcher at the cybersecurity company Huntress. “The bigger worry is ShinyHunters selling the data to other criminal or nation-state groups who could put it to more damaging use, rather than dumping it themselves.”

Security experts said that given the breadth of the records, they would be of enormous value if they were acquired by foreign spies, who could then use the material to build elaborate dossiers on F.B.I. agents — including those who may be undercover or later assigned to such a post — and track them for years, if not decades. Aided by artificial intelligence, spies or hackers could also combine the information with other exposed data that is already in their hands or that is easily acquired on the dark web.

“Breaches do not exist in a vacuum,” Justin Sherman, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, wrote in a recent essay arguing that different exposed data sets can be combined and analyzed by hostile spy services.

A History of Security Lapses

The hack is just the latest in a string of embarrassing security failures for the F.B.I.

Two years ago, government investigators learned that Chinese spies had compromised vast segments of the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure in a hacking campaign known as Salt Typhoon. Among the most startling revelations was that the breach included sensitive wiretap networks at Verizon and AT&T that process court-authorized surveillance orders for the F.B.I. to monitor domestic criminal suspects.

China has denied involvement, but U.S. intelligence officials considered the compromise a counterintelligence failure of the highest magnitude, with national security implications that could last for years. It prompted such alarm within the F.B.I. that field offices were told to check if informants had been potentially compromised and, if necessary, take steps to ensure their safety.

The bureau still does not understand the full scale or scope of Salt Typhoon and its exposure from it, according to current and former U.S. officials. But the F.B.I. received another blow this spring when suspected Chinese hackers were found again inside a network it maintains for domestic surveillance orders.

In the case of ShinyHunters, it was not Chinese spies but a notorious gang of cybercriminals who hit the F.B.I. Already, bureau leadership had warned staff that hackers linked to ShinyHunters who infiltrated AT&T in 2024 may have stolen months of call and text logs belonging to some of its agents, which also fanned concerns about whether its informants had been exposed, as Bloomberg reported last year.

The members of ShinyHunters are seen as highly skilled — and audacious — English-speaking hackers who extort their victims for millions of dollars and brag about their exploits. In their recent correspondence with The Times, the hackers have favored British spellings of certain words.

A French citizen charged with participating in some ShinyHunters attacks was arrested in Morocco in 2022, extradited to the United States and sentenced to three years in prison. Other suspected members were arrested last year in France.

On Monday, a security journalist, Brian Krebs, reported that authorities in the Netherlands had arrested a 23-year-old convicted cybercriminal on suspicion of aiding in data thefts and extortions tied to ShinyHunters just days before the F.B.I. breach. ShinyHunters said in response on Monday that the Dutch suspect “has no association with us.”

The F.B.I.’s Dallas field office has been leading an investigation into ShinyHunters and working with international partners to hunt down other members, according to people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly.

It is not clear exactly how ShinyHunters pulled off the F.B.I. hack. The group said it had used a zero-day, or previously undiscovered, coding flaw within the Oracle PeopleSoft software, an application that companies use for human resources and financial management.

But some security researchers said the story may be more complicated. On Friday, Google revealed in a blog post that its threat intelligence teams have recently seen ShinyHunters renewing a campaign of “mass exploitation” against victims using a bug with Oracle PeopleSoft that was publicly disclosed with a patch in June. The post does not mention the F.B.I. breach, but a person familiar with the matter said investigators believe the known bug was involved in the ShinyHunters theft of personnel files.

The flaw was considered important enough that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency promptly added it to a catalog of high-risk known vulnerabilities that federal agencies are instructed to quickly address.

“This type of vulnerability is a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and poses significant risks to the federal enterprise,” CISA said at the time.

An Uncertain Deadline

In response to questions from The Times, ShinyHunters said in an email on Friday that the F.B.I. had not contacted the group and that it would hold firm to its Tuesday deadline.

The hackers said that the severity of the breach was “SIGNIFICANTLY” worse than publicly known but did not explain in what way. Cybersecurity researchers who have followed the collective have said it has a track record of sometimes embellishing its activities but so far, in this breach, its claims have been largely corroborated.

“We have no intention to reveal the true impact, we will leave that to the F.B.I.,” ShinyHunters said. “If they lie, we will not correct them.”

The group also said that it was aggrieved by the F.B.I.’s advisory and that the hack was “all about protecting our business.”

“This is happening so we are heard and acknowledged,” ShinyHunters said. “We may sound like children whose feelings are hurt, sure, but in our game, reputation is all that matters.”

Related Content

“With great pride in what we have accomplished, I am announcing that I am stepping down to return to my family in Missouri,” Bailey wrote on social media. “I am confident Director Patel will continue to reform the FBI, combat violent crime, defend the homeland, ensure strong organizational accountability, and restore public trust in this institution of excellence.”

The departure marks a dramatic turn for Bailey, a loyalist of President Donald Trump who had been floated as a candidate early in the administration to run the FBI or Justice Department.

It is also the latest shake-up at the federal law enforcement agency under FBI Director Kash Patel. Bailey was hired to serve as the co-deputy director alongside Dan Bongino, a conservative podcast host and former Secret Service officer.

Neither Bongino nor Bailey had FBI experience, which made them highly unusual picks for a position that typically goes to a veteran of the bureau. The position does not require Senate confirmation and is tasked with running the day-to-day operations of the FBI.

Earlier this year, Bongino quit amid frustrations about the demands of the position, The Washington Post previously reported. He was replaced with Christopher Raia, a career FBI official.

During Bailey’s tenure, the department has seen an unprecedented wave of dismissals and transfers of experienced FBI agents.

Last week, for example, the top two agents running the counterterrorism division in the Washington field office were transferred because of their work investigating threats against Katie Miller — a conservative podcaster who is the wife of top Trump aide Stephen Miller — according to three people familiar with the matter.

The officials were transferred because top officials felt work on the probe was moving too slowly, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel matter.

Bailey resigned from his position as Missouri attorney general last September to assume the role as FBI co-deputy director.

He is a military veteran who as Missouri’s chief legal officer mounted high-profile legal fights aligned with Trump’s agenda. He sued Starbucks over its diversity, equity and inclusion policies; fought transgender care policies; and waged legal battles against “sanctuary city” policies.

Among the most notable parts of Bailey’s short FBI tenure was his presence on the scene as the FBI executed search warrants in January to seize 2020 ballots and other election material from Fulton County, Georgia.

It is rare for an FBI deputy director to personally oversee such a routine development in an investigation, but Bailey’s presence was also notable given the political tensions surrounding the probe and Trump’s repeated insistence, without evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen. The FBI has said it is investigating whether what it has described in court filings as “deficiencies” in the 2020 vote tabulation in Fulton County, home to Atlanta, were the result of intentional wrongdoing that could constitute a crime.