Op-Ed: Abolish The FBI

We often hear figures on the right reference something called “the deep state” — a term that conjures up images of Illuminatis or reptilians plotting from deep in Comet Pizza’s basement to slightly inconvenience Donald Trump. The deep state is intransigent and immune to human action. 

The pursuit of a faceless, nameless and enigmatic “deep state” is convenient for conservatives like Sean Hannity, who doesn’t want to make too many powerful enemies in the permanent bureaucracy when the Trump moment is over. It’s also useful for Trump himself, who is either afraid of cleaning house or doesn’t really care. 

What talk radio, Breitbart and Fox News call the deep state doesn’t do a very good job of keeping itself secret. It’s a clique of permanent employees at the Department of Justice and the State Department. 

According to data gathered by The Hill in 2016, 99% of political campaign contributions from Department of Justice employees went to Hillary Clinton. That figure was repeated in the amount was provided to Clinton from the State Department. These lopsided rates are higher than in other notoriously out-of-touch elite institutions like academia (93%) and journalism (96%). The people in charge of upholding our rights and keeping ordinary citizens safe don’t represent the national mix of perspectives at all.

These figures go a long way in explaining the brazenness of the FBI’s abuse of power in trying to overthrow a duly elected president. Yet, even this is nothing compared to the “dirty war” they are waging against every day political dissidents. 

Strong financial pressure from the Jewish community along with the individual political prejudices inculcated in individual agents and federal lawyers at “critical theory” obsessed elite universities are reflected in the Department of Homeland Security’s upcoming memo on domestic law enforcement priorities. DHS is demanding the secret police prioritize resources against the largely inactive “far-right,” all while actual rioters and murders on the left operate unimpeded.   

Legal Alchemy 

FBI agents are often just bounty hunters in pursuit of targets put on the cork board by the DoJ, which has set aside infinite resources for a single-minded focus: arrest “white supremacists.”

Because most groups and individuals the Anti-Defamation League and New York Times categorize as “white supremacists” know they’re under the dissident’s microscope, they are unusually well-behaved. In response to this, the DoJ, FBI and in some cases local law enforcement have been engaging in legal alchemy — seeking to transform law-abiding citizens into dangerous and violent white terrorists they can parade for the cameras – against those who are white and support nationalism.

So far, tactics we’ve seen in the last 3 years include abusing speech-chilling “conspiracy” laws (Rise Above Movement), launching absurd manhunts for people who put up a sticker (a case in Virginia), giving a man 3.5 years for identifying “antifa” rioters online (Daniel McMahon), even wasting massive amounts of resources to try and turn an internet flame war on Telegram into a federal spectacle (Christopher Cantwell). 
 
Yet despite federal prosecutors stretching sometimes archaic laws like a Gumby toy to try and make populism and nationalist dissent into a crime, it’s still apparently not enough to justify the resources allocated to combat the ADL, “antifa” and mass media induced “white terrorism” moral panic.   

Recently a source brought to my attention that a number of Proud Boys members were being approached by FBI agents offering a 5 figure payoff to fly to Portland to “infiltrate Antifa.” The Proud Boys, a pro-Trump conservative fraternity, are eager to protect their country from anarchist terrorism and naturally were tempted by the offer. 

The problem is the individuals who were approached have no background in the anarchist movement and know nothing about its inner workings, ideology or players. The anarchists in the Pacific Northwest are seasoned and extremely violent. A trained intelligence operative knows these red-state, pick up truck driving MAGA fans would’ve been immediately sniffed out upon approach and put in a life or death situation.  

They ultimately decided against the idea. While the FBI’s motive for such a reckless plan is impossible to ascertain, an educated guess is that they were looking to invent facts on the ground to bolster the absurd media lie that the ongoing Black Lives Matter and anarchist riots are being organized by “white supremacists” impersonating the “peaceful anti-racist protesters” to make them look bad. For the record, the FBI branch in the Pacific Northwest classifies the Proud Boys, who are led by a black Cuban descended man named Enrique Tarrio, as a “white supremacist” group.

The FBI’s unabashed role as a Stasi-like political police and a new generation of dissidents have made it more difficult for them to recruit informants. For this reason, individual agents in search of ADL medals have been approaching individuals in different factions on what they deem the “far-right” with the opportunity to help them prosecute antifa. The problem is that the individuals who agree to such schemes are almost always being targeted for entrapment themselves.  

The case of libertarian Christopher Cantwell, who used to speak candidly about racial issues, is particularly illuminating in this regard. 

Cantwell endured countless legal troubles after appearing in a highly edited and prejudicing Vice Media documentary made during his appearance to the Unite the Right demonstration in 2017. It later emerged that the two anarchist’s who accused him of assaulting them unjustly with pepper spray were lying and he was able to obtain a plea to regain his freedom. 

According to a blog post titled “I am a Federal Informant,” Cantwell recalled that an FBI agent named Dino Capuzzo approached him with a plan to build a case against the left-wing extremist groups who have since admitted to being behind the violence and chaos at the Charlottesville rally. Understandably, many people warned Cantwell that this was likely a trap and began to see him with suspicion. 

Cantwell then gave the FBI access to all of his materials from the event in hopes of clearing his name after being falsely incarcerated. While there is no evidence that this footage in particular was used to prosecute any nationalists, it certainly was not used to arrest any anarchists — many who recently went on to riot and assault people in Richmond.

Instead, Capuzzo went on to become the point man in railroading members of the Rise Above Movement, who engaged in minimal and textbook self-defense at the rally. The Western District of Virginia US Attorney Thomas Cullen relied on blog posts from an “antifa” chapter in Northern California (NOCARA) and materials maliciously pieced together to paint a false picture from NGO ProPublica to build a federal case and Judge Norman Moon to force the defendants to plea. 

As the Rise Above Movement members worked on their appeal in 2018, the main researcher helping their lawyers collect evidence proving their innocence, Daniel McMahon, was suddenly subpoenaed to Charlottesville by Cullen.

A source familiar with McMahon told National Justice that while they did not know why he was subpoenaed, they did confirm that McMahon confided to them that FBI agents, just like with Cantwell, approached him asking for all the materials he had put together to help Rise Above Movement’s appeal in order to aid their supposed investigation into “antifa.”

Months later, no anarchists were arrested. Instead, FBI agents were directed by US Attorney Cullen to swarm McMahon’s home in Florida for charges of “cyberstalking” and “racially motivated threats” against Don Gathers, a Black Lives Matter supporter presented as a “victim” in the RAM case but who McMahon exposed as the aggressor assaulting people with a rod in Charlottesville.  

Last year, Christopher Cantwell had a dispute with members of a “fedposting” internet troll group called the Bowl Patrol. 

At one point, credentials Cantwell had provided to these trolls at a previous point were used to post messages on his site that he believed were illegal. 

He made the mistake of reporting the incident to the FBI in February 2019. Federal agents then asked him to give them access to his electronics so that they could “investigate” what happened to his website, which he obliged to.

Once again, the opposite happened. By January 2020, the FBI charged Cantwell with “interstate threats” that went back to June 2019 (and are thus self-evidently not credible) in relation to an internet feud where he told Bowl Patrol member “Cheddar Mane” that he was going to “fuck his wife in front of his children.” 

Cantwell is in New Hampshire, while his “victim” is in Missouri. In spite of this, the Judge in Cantwell’s case ruled to detain him until trial, making it difficult for him to build his defense.  

While it could be argued that the trolls Cantwell sparred with online were at least just as guilty (if not more), the FBI was deliberately aiming to punish and make an example of the better known political figure.

Filings in United States v. Cantwell, which is about to go to trial, show that federal agents utilized a network of informants and implied threats of prosecution against the case’s alleged victim “Cheddar Mane” to collect evidence against Cantwell. Resources and tactics intended to counter actual terrorism and interstate crime were mobilized to build a petty internet rat race between two people who have never met face to face into a federal case.

The FBI’s Tradition of Destroying and Fabricating Evidence 

The FBI’s handling of pertinent evidence would promptly trigger a federal investigation if it occurred in a small town police department. 

High profile controversies like the Ruby Ridge incident featured FBI agents destroying their own reports. At Waco, damning evidence of the FBI’s use of pyrotechnic devices to start the fire that killed 87 Americans — many of them women and children – was withheld by the bureau even after Congress and a federal court had demanded it. Federal Marshals were personally dispatched by Janet Reno to recover the various cameras the FBI had installed in the Branch Dravidian compound, showing the agency’s guilt in the massacre. 

The FBI and federal prosecutors were once again excoriated by a judge after it emerged that they hid a tactical operations log showing that they provoked the 2014 standoff with the Bundy family by surrounding their ranch with snipers. The case was subsequently thrown out due to the prosecution’s bad faith. The outcome prompted an enraged statement from the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt, who predicted the blunder would embolden the militia movement. 

The FBI’s most recent scandal, the “Russian interference” hoax, saw members of the Mueller investigation team destroy their cell phones in order to prevent proof of bias or coup-plotting from ever seeing the light of day.

In the aforementioned cases, there were at least some consequences and justice was eventually done, but the FBI’s manipulation of evidence is systematic and goes unnoticed against smaller targets. In a recent entrapment case against a skinhead group, the FBI destroyed evidence specifically requested by the defense attorney of Justin Daniel Lough as crucial for proving his innocence. Lacking the exonerating materials (the FBI’s own wiretaps), the indigent defendants were forced into an unforgiving plea. 

What Does the FBI Even Do? 
 
While the FBI is portrayed heroically and uncritically in movies and television shows, it continues to fail in performing most of its stated task. 

The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has done great work in recent years, with historic busts that target dangerous drugs like heroin and fentanyl. The FBI will often assist in these cases, but the DEA does most of the heavy lifting. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), America’s most maligned federal institution, has also been doing fantastic work breaking records for combating child sex abuse, trafficking, and a myriad of other anti-social crimes. 

Yet it remains to be seen what positive role the FBI plays in the homeland. In the current era of unbridled plutocratic corruption, white collar crime prosecutions have fallen to their lowest in 20 years.

Unfathomable amounts of child pornography are being produced and posted to the internet every day, yet the FBI’s unit dealing with this remains severely understaffed and underfunded.

The FBI’s own murder rate statistics show a rapid rise in killings on our city streets, yet the agency is in no hurry to help fulfill Donald Trump’s promises for “law and order.”

Anarchists and Black Lives Matter groups regularly kill and pillage through cities and towns in America with almost no law enforcement opposition. When Senator Ted Cruz demanded FBI director Christopher Wray open up an investigation into these anarchist groups, he outright refused, claiming that “antifa” is an “ideology” rather than an organization.  Wray went on to emphasize nonsense like “white supremacist domestic terrorism” and “Russian election interference” as priorities for his agency instead.

The FBI also burns through mountains of resources giving credence to obvious racism hoaxes, such as the 15 agents sent to investigate Bubba Wallace’s claims of a noose in his parking garage. FBI agents also use their position to open up civil rights cases against local police officers being frivolously accused of racist misconduct, thus granting legitimacy to the left-wing extremist agenda of accusing every day police officers of being white supremacists out to murder unarmed black men. 

It would be wrong to suggest the FBI is useless. They are useful tools of the powerful, and have been very effective in punishing and chilling lawful political dissent — railroading those who engage in it. The ongoing rise of pseudo-bolshevik militants, who are sailing down an open highway, would not have been possible without their over-the-top oppression of nationalists over the past three years. The moral panic around white racism currently engulfing our country would not be possible without them forcing arrests to help keep the myth alive.  

Yet outside of terrorizing and framing innocent white men, they don’t appear to fulfill any legitimate law enforcement purpose.  

 

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