The Integrity Trap: On the Plausibility of a U.S. Counterintelligence Test
How a packet of dubious documents following a viral Reddit AMA may have revealed more about the system than intended.
On April 28, just days after publishing an op-ed in El Ciudadano urging Latin American governments to reassess their cooperation with the FBI and DOJ if they fail to intervene in Northern Kentucky, I hosted a Reddit AMA that reached over 800,000 views. The goal was simple: circumvent what appeared to be a soft media blackout on my investigation into systemic corruption.
That AMA rattled cages. A self-reported law enforcement veteran deleted his account following a partial evidence drop. The mod team initially removed the AMA on suspicion of incredibility before restoring it. Behind the scenes, I received messages of quiet support. Publicly, I was met with silence or ridicule.
And then, like clockwork, came the documents.
They were sent over Signal: a collection of purportedly leaked congressional reports and emails alleging the existence of “the 7th Floor” and links to elite trafficking networks inside the U.S. government. Some were annotated with typed notes—analysis, supposedly, from insiders. The content was dramatic. Urgent. Bizarrely stylized. And, most importantly, unverifiable.
My first instinct? Not to trust them.
The language was off. The notations were untraceable. The tone was conspiratorial. The core documents themselves lacked the structural logic and legal cadence I’ve come to expect from authentic materials. And the individual who sent them was unusually pushy about me publishing them immediately.
In isolation, that might mean little. But in context? It suggests something else entirely.
Just three days earlier, I had sent op-eds to major international outlets in countries like France, South Africa, Canada, and Australia. It was a calculated move. A way to raise the cost of silence and to distract from the AMA blindside. The very next day, a whistleblower reached out, referencing a letter I had previously sent to a high-level U.S. official and flagging a potential compromise of communication lines among the administration. The implication: surveillance. Plausible deniability.
Then, following the Reddit AMA, I received the documents. And what I strongly suspect is that those files may have been part of a counterintelligence integrity test. The kind used not to destroy you immediately, but to erode your credibility incrementally. To bait you into publishing fake materials, and then use the fallout to reframe your entire body of work as delusional.
That is a classic tactic. It’s happened before.
In the 1960s, COINTELPRO seeded disinformation to fracture the civil rights movement. More recently, WikiLeaks-style drops have been diluted with forged documents to pollute legitimate investigations. The goal is always the same: discredit, distract, and delegitimize.
And the timing here? Telling.
Within days:
Two suspects were arrested in a bizarre theft case involving DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.
My Delphi Murders comment on Reddit was met with a permanent ban for merely offering help.
Mods of that subreddit privately attacked my character.
I was hit with the “Sensitive But Unclassified” label by the State Department in our private communications.
All while these supposed leaks showed up in my inbox after the AMA.
It’s not definitive. That’s the nature of these operations: built-in plausible deniability. But it is, at minimum, a plausible theory. The surrounding posture also basically screams containment and the presence of intelligence agencies.
Regardless of who was behind it, the documents failed because I didn’t publish them. I trust my instincts more than adrenaline, and I have no interest in becoming another case study in the intelligence community’s long record of manipulating truth-tellers. And, most importantly, I understand the stakes.
What I’m building is not just a story. It’s a record. A living ledger of institutional failure. Every piece of it is verified. Every name. Every quote. Every file. That’s how you fight systemic unreality: with receipts.
So yes, this may have been an op. Or it may have been someone else, trying to attach their pet theory to a movement bigger than them. Either way, it was a test.
And I passed.