USA 2020 Elections: Thread

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https://greenwald.substack.com/p/fbi-using-the-same-fear-tactic-from

FBI Using Same Fear Tactic From First War On Terror, Orchestrating Its
Own Terrorism Plots
by Glenn Greenwald

Questioning the FBI's role in 1/6 was maligned by corporate media as
deranged. But only ignorance about the FBI or a desire to deceive
could produce such a reaction.

The narrative that domestic anti-government extremism is the greatest
threat to U.S. national security — the official position of the U.S.
security state and the Biden administration — received its most potent
boost in October 2020, less than one month before the 2020
presidential election. That was when the F.B.I. and Michigan state
officials announced the arrest of thirteen people on terrorism,
conspiracy and weapons charges, with six of them accused of
participating in a plot to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Governor
Gretchen Whitmer, who had been a particular target of criticism from
President Trump for her advocacy for harsh COVID lockdown measures.

The headlines that followed were dramatic and fear-inducing: “F.B.I.
Says Michigan Anti-Government Group Plotted to Kidnap Gov. Gretchen
Whitmer,” announced The New York Times. That same night, ABC News
began its broadcast this way: "Tonight, we take you into a hidden
world, a place authorities say gave birth to a violent domestic terror
plot in Michigan — foiled by the FBI.”

Democrats and liberal journalists instantly seized on this storyline
to spin a pre-election theme that was as extreme as it was
predictable. Gov. Whitmer herself blamed Trump, claiming that the
plotters “heard the president’s words not as a rebuke but as a
rallying cry — as a call to action.” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) claimed
that “the president is a deranged lunatic and he’s inspired white
supremacists to violence, the latest of which was a plot to kidnap
Gov. Whitmer,” adding: “these groups have attempted to KILL many of us
in recent years. They are following Trump’s lead.” Vox’s paid
television-watcher and video-manipulator, Aaron Rupar, drew this
inference: “Trump hasn't commended the FBI for breaking up Whitmer
kidnapping/murder plot because as always he doesn't want to denounce
his base.” Michael Moore called for Trump's arrest for having incited
the kidnapping plot against Gov. Whitmer. One viral tweet from a
popular Democratic Party activist similarly declared: “Trump should be
arrested for this plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer. There’s no doubt he
inspired this terrorism.”

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo instantly declared it to be a terrorist
attack on America: “We must condemn and call out the cowardly plot
against Governor Whitmer for what it is: Domestic terrorism.” MSNBC's
social media star Kyle Griffin cast it as a coup attempt: “The FBI
thwarted what they described as a plot to violently overthrow the
government and kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.” CNN's Jim
Sciutto pronounced it “deeply alarming.”

A lengthy CNN article — dressed up as an investigative exposé that was
little more than stenography of FBI messaging disseminated from behind
a shield of anonymity — purported in the headline to take the reader
“Inside the plot to kidnap Gov. Whitmer.” It claimed that it all began
when angry discussions about COVID restrictions “spiraled into a
terrorism plot, officials say, with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer the
target of a kidnapping scheme.” CNN heralded the FBI's use of
informants and agents to break up the plot but depicted them as
nothing more than passive bystanders reporting what the domestic
terrorists were plotting:

    The Watchmen had been flagged to the FBI in March, and one of its
members was now an informant. That informant, others on the inside, as
well as undercover operatives and recordings, allowed the bureau to
monitor what was happening from then on.

The article never once hinted at let alone described the highly active
role of these informants and agents themselves in encouraging and
designing the plot. Instead, it depicted these anti-government
activists as leading one another — on their own — to commit what CNN
called “treason in a quaint town.” The more honest headline for this
CNN article would have been: “Inside the FBI's tale of the plot to
kidnap Gov. Whitmer.” But since CNN never questions the FBI — they
employ their top agents and operatives once they leave the bureau in
order to disseminate their propaganda — this is what the country got
from The Most Trusted Name in News:

Gov. Whitmer herself attempted to prolong the news cycle as much as
possible, all but declaring herself off-limits from criticism by
equating any critiques of her governance with incitement to terrorism.
Appearing on Meet the Press two Sundays after the plot was revealed,
Whitmer said it was “incredibly disturbing that the president of the
United States—10 days after a plot to kidnap, put me on trial, and
execute me, 10 days after that was uncovered—the president is at it
again, and inspiring, and incentivizing, and inciting this kind of
domestic terrorism.”

On October 22 — just two weeks before Election Day — MSNBC's Rachel
Maddow hosted Whitmer and told the Michigan Governor that the evidence
was clear that Trump had been "turning on a faucet of violent threats”
against her. Whitmer agreed that Trump was to blame for the kidnapping
plot by having repeatedly attacked her in his rallies:

Joe Biden also made repeated use of this storyline. Appearing at a
campaign rally in Michigan on October 16, the Democratic candidate
blasted Trump for the crime of continuing to criticize Whitmer even
after she was the target of a terror plot. He explicitly blamed Trump
for having incited it: “When the president tweeted 'Liberate Michigan,
Liberate Michigan,' that's the call that was heard. That was the dog
whistle." And he accused Trump of purposely stoking a wave of the
worst kind of terrorism on U.S. soil: “it's the sort of behavior you
might expect from ISIS,” he said of the accused.

    When Governor Whitmer worked to protect her state from a deadly
pandemic, President Trump issued a call to "LIBERATE MICHIGAN!"

    That call was heard.

    He's giving oxygen to the bigotry and hate we see on the march in
our country — and we have to stop it.
    — Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 9, 2020

Yet from the start, there were ample and potent reasons to distrust
the FBI's version of events. To begin with, FBI press releases are
typically filled with lies, yet media outlets — due to some
combination of excessive gullibility, an inability to learn lessons,
or a desire to be deceived — continue to treat them as Gospel. For
another, the majority of "terror plots” the FBI claimed to detect and
break up during the first War on Terror were, in fact, plots
manufactured, funded and driven by the FBI itself.

Indeed, the FBI has previously acknowledged that its own powers and
budget depend on keeping Americans in fear of such attacks. Former FBI
Assistant Director Thomas Fuentes, in a documentary called “The
Newberg Sting” about a 2009 FBI arrest of four men on terrorism
charges, uttered this extremely candid admission:

    If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement
agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the
proposal that “We won the war on terror and everything’s great,” cuz
the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in
half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope
Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.

In the Whitmer kidnapping case, the FBI's own affidavit in support of
the charges acknowledged the involvement in the plot of both
informants and undercover FBI agents “over several months.”

Excerpt of FBI affidavit criminal complaint accompanying the criminal
complaint in U.S. District Court against six defendants in the Whitmer
plot

In sum, there was no way to avoid suspicions about the FBI's crucial
role in a plot like this absent extreme ignorance about the bureau's
behavior over the last two decades or an intentional desire to sow
fear about right-wing extremists attacking Democratic Party officials
one month before the 2020 presidential election. In fact, the signs of
FBI involvement were there from the start for those who — unlike CNN —
wanted to know the truth.

A report from the Detroit Free Press published just two days after
CNN's FBI stenography noted that the FBI agents were incapable of
identifying any specifics of this supposed plot, adding that defense
attorneys were adamant that those accused were merely engaged in idle
chatter, boasting that they were never really serious about following
through. Then the paper added that, for defense lawyers, “it remains
to be seen what roles the undercover informants and FBI agents played
in the case, and whether they pushed the others into carrying out the
plan.” Meanwhile, an actually independent journalist, Michael Tracey,
had no trouble identifying the telltale signs of FBI orchestration
that were so apparent countless times during the first War on Terror.
Three days before the CNN story, he wrote:

But the value of depicting Trump as having incited a frightening
terrorist attack just weeks before the election, and the zeal to feed
the broader narrative pushed by the U.S. security state that
anti-government extremism is America's greatest national security
threat, drowned out any skepticism. The storyline was clear and
unquestioned: Trump was inciting ISIS-like terrorism on U.S. soil and
right-wing extremists, who would fester even after Trump was done,
were the primary menace that requires new domestic powers and larger
budgets in order to defeat.

Yet just as happened with so many other narratives — from the origins
of COVID to Hunter Biden's corrupt use of his ties to his father —
Trump's defeat means the media is now willing to reconsider some of
the propaganda that was pushed in the lead-up to the election. An
excellent piece of investigative journalism published by BuzzFeed on
Tuesday documents that, far from being passive observers of the plot,
FBI informants and agents were the key drivers of it:

    An examination of the case by BuzzFeed News also reveals that some
of those informants, acting under the direction of the FBI, played a
far larger role than has previously been reported. Working in secret,
they did more than just passively observe and report on the actions of
the suspects. Instead, they had a hand in nearly every aspect of the
alleged plot, starting with its inception. The extent of their
involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been
a conspiracy without them.

So central to this plot were those acting at the behest of the FBI
that many of the accused plotters only met each other because of
meetings arranged at the direction of the FBI, who targeted them based
on social media postings and other political activities that suggested
anti-government and anti-Whitmer sentiments which could be exploited:

    A longtime government informant from Wisconsin, for example,
helped organize a series of meetings around the country where many of
the alleged plotters first met one another and the earliest notions of
a plan took root, some of those people say. The Wisconsin informant
even paid for some hotel rooms and food as an incentive to get people
to come.

One of the FBI's informants, a former Iraq War soldier, “became so
deeply enmeshed in a Michigan militant group that he rose to become
its second-in-command.” With his leadership role in one of the key
groups, and all while acting under the direction of the FBI, he was
“encouraging members to collaborate with other potential suspects and
paying for their transportation to meetings.” Indeed, he even “prodded
the alleged mastermind of the kidnapping plot to advance his plan,
then baited the trap that led to the arrest.”

A review of not only the BuzzFeed reporting but also the underlying
court documents leaves little doubt that the primary impetus for this
plot came over and over from the FBI. On July 12, a lawyer for one of
the defendants filed a motion asking the court to compel the FBI to
turn over all chats which their agents and informants involving the
plot. He did so on the ground that the few chats they had obtained
themselves — from their own clients — repeatedly show the FBI pushing
and prodding its agents over and over to lure defendants into more
meetings, to join in "recon” exercises, and to take as many steps as
possible toward the plot.

While it was clear from the start that there were FBI informants and
agents in the middle of all of this, it turns out that at least half
of those involved were acting on FBI orders: twelve informants and
agents. As BuzzFeed says, those acting at the behest of the FBI “had a
hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its
inception.” All of that, concluded the reporters, “raises questions as
to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.”

But this evidence does not so much raise that question as much as it
answers it. The idea of kidnapping Gov. Whitmer came from the FBI. It
was a plot designed by the agency, and they then went on the hunt to
target people they believed they could manipulate into joining their
plot — either people were easily manipulated due to psychological
weakness, financial vulnerability, and/or their strongly held
political views. In sum, the FBI devised this plot, was the primary
organizer of it, funded it, purposely directed their targets to pose
for incriminating pictures that they then released to the press, and
then heaped praise on themselves for stopping what they themselves had
created.

For anyone covering the FBI during the first War on Terror, none of
this is new. So many of the supposed “terror plots” the FBI purported
to disrupt over the last twenty years were — just like the Michigan
plot — ones that were created and driven by, and would not have
happened without, the FBI's own planning, funding and direction.

Just as they are doing now, the FBI used those plots to elevate fear
levels and justify more domestic surveillance power and funding for
the U.S. security state. While the targets then were typically young
American Muslims with anti-government views rather than young
right-wing white men with anti-government views, the tactics were
identical.

The examples are far too numerous to count. As one illustrative
example, in 2015, the FBI flamboyantly praised itself for arresting
three Brooklyn men on charges of “attempt and conspiracy to provide
material support to the Islamic State of Iraq.” Then, as now, outlets
such as The New York Times promoted the FBI's
maximalist-fear-mongering version of events: “3 Brooklyn Men Accused
of Plot to Aid ISIS’ Fight,” blared the headline.

But even that largely pro-FBI Times article raised the question of
whether this plot was real or manufactured by the bureau:

    The case against the three men relies in part on a confidential
informant paid by the government, court documents show. Defense
lawyers have criticized the government’s use of informers in similar
cases, saying they may lure targets into making extreme plans or
statements. In some cases, the threat has turned out to be overstated.

And the FBI itself admitted that the “threats of violence” from the
three arrested — such as killing President Obama — “had an
‘aspirational’ quality to them, with no indication that the suspects
were close to staging an attack, large or small.” The Times article
also noted that the FBI observed that “in online postings, the two
younger men seem to be searching for meaning in their lives,” adding
that “as they were led into court, the youthfulness of Mr. Juraboev
and Mr. Saidakhmetov was striking.”

Analyzing all the evidence in this case, my then-colleague at The
Intercept Murtaza Hussain documented “the integral role a paid
informant appears to have played in generating the charges against the
men, and helping turn a fantastical ‘plot’ into something even
remotely tangible.” Indeed, he wrote, “none of the three men was in
any condition to travel or support the Islamic State, without help
from the FBI informant.” It was only when the FBI sent an older Muslim
man to gain their trust — acting as an FBI informant and being paid
for his services — did anything resembling a crime start to form. The
paid FBI informant encouraged the young men to pursue the plan more
concretely, and only then did they begin agreeing with the informant's
proposed plot. The informant befriended them, moved in with them, and
spent months “convincing both of them that he intended to travel to
Syria and join Islamic State.”

Just as was true in the Michigan case, Hussain wrote about this
arrest: “Crucially, it appears that only after the introduction of the
informant did any actual arrangements to commit a criminal act come
into existence.” In sum, "the covert informant under the direction of
the FBI” — which employs teams of psychologists and other mental
health professions who are experts in how to manipulate people's
thinking — “evidently helped encourage the two toward terrorism over
the course of these months.”

Article by Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept, Feb. 20, 2015

I have also covered countless other FBI plots over the years where all
the same attributes were present. After the 2015 “ISIS arrest,” I
wrote an article compiling how often the FBI was doing this and asked
this question in the headline: “Why Does the FBI Have to Manufacture
its Own Plots if Terrorism and ISIS Are Such Grave Threats?,” noting
that the bureau's behavior “is akin to having the DEA constantly warn
of the severe threat posed by drug addiction while it simultaneously
uses pushers on its payroll to deliberately get people hooked on drugs
so that they can arrest the addicts they’ve created and thus justify
their own warnings and budgets."

Months before the 2015 ISIS arrests, the FBI issued a press release
praising itself for arresting “a Cincinnati-area man for a plot to
attack the U.S. Capitol and kill government officials.” But as I
reported, the scary terrorist was “20-year-old Christopher Cornell,
[who] is unemployed, lives at home, spends most of his time playing
video games in his bedroom, still addresses his mother as ‘Mommy’ and
regards his cat as his best friend; he was described as ‘a typical
student’ and ‘quiet but not overly reserved’ by the principal of the
local high school he graduated in 2012.”

Then House Speaker John Boehner immediately seized on that arrest to
warn Americans to be afraid: “We live in a dangerous country, and we
get reminded every week of the dangers that are out there.” Boehner
also told Americans they should be grateful for domestic surveillance
and not try to curb it: the Speaker claimed that “the National
Security Agency’s snooping powers helped stop a plot to attack the
Capitol and that his colleagues need to keep that in mind as they
debate whether to renew the law that allows the government to collect
bulk information from its citizens.” Yet the only way Cornell got
close to any crimes was because the FBI informant began suggesting to
him that he act on his rage against U.S. officials by attacking the
Capitol.

Salon articles of my reporting on FBI's creation of terror plots it
"stops": Nov. 28, 2010 and Sep. 29, 2011

One of the most egregious cases I covered was the 2011 arrest of James
Cromitie, an African-American convert to Islam who the FBI attempted
to convince — over the course of eight months — to join a terror plot,
only for him to adamantly refuse over and over. Only once they dangled
a payment of $250,000 in front of his nose right after the
impoverished American had lost his job did he agree to join, and then
the FBI swooped in, arrested him, and touted their heroic efforts in
stopping a terrorist plot.

The U.S. federal judge who sentenced Cromitie to decades in prison,
Colleen McMahon, said she did so only because the law of “entrapment”
is so narrow that it is virtually impossible for a defendant to win,
but in doing so, she repeatedly condemned the FBI in the harshest
terms for single-handedly converting Cromitie from a helpless but
resentful anti-government fanatic into a criminal. The defendant “was
incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own,” she said,
adding: “only the government could have made a terrorist out of Mr.
Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.” She
added: “There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that James
Cromitie could never have dreamed up the scenario in which he actually
became involved.”

Her written ruling is worth quoting at length because of how relevant
it is to current FBI activities. The judge began by noting that
Cromitie “had successfully resisted going too far for eight months,”
and agreed only after “the Government dangled what had to be almost
irresistible temptation in front of an impoverished man from what I
have come (after literally dozens of cases) to view as the saddest and
most dysfunctional community in the Southern District of New York.” It
was the FBI’s own informant, she wrote, who “was the prime mover and
instigator of all the criminal activity that occurred.” She then wrote
(emphasis added):

    The Government indisputably “manufactured” the crimes of which
defendants stand convicted. The Government invented all of the details
of the scheme – many of them, such as the trip to Connecticut and the
inclusion of Stewart AFB as a target, for specific legal purposes of
which the defendants could not possibly have been aware (the former
gave rise to federal jurisdiction and the latter mandated a
twenty-five year minimum sentence). The Government selected the
targets. The Government designed and built the phony ordnance that the
defendants planted (or planned to plant) at Government-selected
targets. The Government provided every item used in the plot: cameras,
cell phones, cars, maps and even a gun. The Government did all the
driving (as none of the defendants had a car or a driver’s license).
The Government funded the entire project. And the Government, through
its agent, offered the defendants large sums of money, contingent on
their participation in the heinous scheme.

    Additionally, before deciding that the defendants (particularly
Cromitie, who was in their sights for nine months) presented any real
danger, the Government appears to have done minimal due diligence,
relying instead on reports from its Confidential Informant, who passed
on information about Cromitie information that could easily have been
verified (or not verified, since much of it was untrue), but that no
one thought it necessary to check before offering a jihadist
opportunity to a man who had no contact with any extremist groups and
no history of anything other than drug crimes.

One of the reporters who has most extensively covered the FBI's role
in manufacturing terrorism cases it then proceeds to "break up” is
Trevor Aaronson. In 2011, he documented, working with the
Investigative Reporting Program at the University of
California-Berkeley, that of 508 post-9/11 terrorism defendants,
“nearly half the prosecutions involved the use of informants, many of
them incentivized by money.” After 9/11, the FBI's budget-increasing,
power-enhancing strategy was to target “tens of thousands of
law-abiding people, seeking to identify those disgruntled few who
might participate in a plot given the means and the opportunity” by
monitoring their social media postings, and “then, in case after case,
the government provides the plot, the means, and the opportunity.” Of
the terrorism arrests from sting operations, almost 1/3 were ones in
which “defendants participated in plots led by an agent provocateur—an
FBI operative instigating terrorist action.”

It is this long history and mountain of evidence that compels an
investigation into the role played by the FBI in the planning of the
1/6 riot at the Capitol. And it is that same evidence that made the
corporate media's derisive reaction to such demands — as voiced by
Darren Beattie's Revolver News, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and myself —
so ignorant and subservient. They acted as if only some unhinged
conspiracy theorist could possibly believe that the FBI would have
informants and agents embedded in the groups that planned that Capitol
riot rather than what it is: the only logical conclusion for anyone
who knows how the FBI actually behaves.

Indeed, the BuzzFeed reporters who investigated the FBI's key role in
the Michigan case must have been very disturbed by what they found
since they used their reporting to raise that taboo topic: what role
did the FBI have in 1/6? Moreover, they asked, is this yet another era
where the FBI is targeting Americans not for criminality but for their
political views, and then orchestrating their own plots that justify
the U.S. security state's massive budget and unlimited powers?

    Instead, [the accused] say, they were targeted because of their
political views. Some describe the case as a premeditated campaign by
the government to undermine the Patriot movement, an ideology based on
fealty to the Second Amendment and the conviction that the government
has violated the Constitution and is therefore illegitimate. They
argue that the recordings and text messages that the government calls
proof of a criminal conspiracy are in fact constitutionally protected
speech — expressions of frustration at what they see as the
government’s betrayal of its citizens.

    The Michigan case is unfolding at another fraught moment in
American history. In court, the government has drawn a direct line
between the alleged kidnapping plot and the Jan. 6 insurrection,
holding up the storming of the US Capitol as evidence that the
Michigan defendants posed a profound threat. . . . [I]f the defense is
able to undermine the methods used to build the Michigan case, it
could add weight to the theory that the administration is conducting a
witch hunt against militant groups — and, by extension, that the Jan.
6 insurrection was a black op engineered by the FBI.

When Carlson raised these same questions on his Fox program, he did
what I did when doing so: cited my reporting as well as Trevor
Aaronson's about the FBI's long history of orchestrating such plots
and luring people into them using informants and undercover agents.
Much of that reporting about the FBI's tactics was published by The
Intercept, which — when aimed at American Muslims during the First War
on Terror — had an editorial view that it was extremely improper and
dangerous for the FBI to do this. But now that it is being done to
American anti-government activists on the right, the site's liberal
editors seem happy about it. They got Aaronson to write an article
under the headline “Tucker Carlson Distorted My Reporting in His
Latest Jan. 6 Conspiracy Theory.”

But that headline was an absolute lie. There was nothing in Aaronson's
article that pointed to any "distortions” in how Carlson (or I) cited
Aaronson's work. To the contrary, Aaronson himself acknowledged that
the FBI's past history — including in the Whitmer case — made such
questions highly rational and necessary:

    In many of these stings, informants or undercover agents provided
all the money and weapons for terrorist plots, and sometimes even the
ideas — raising significant questions about whether any of these
people would have committed the crimes were it not for the FBI’s
encouragement. Many targets of these FBI stings were mentally ill or
otherwise easily manipulated. . . .

    Carlson’s claim fits an existing and well-established argument:
that the FBI creates crimes through aggressive stings where no crimes
would otherwise exist. . . . I think it’s worth noting that there’s a
reason for the cultural stickiness of the claim by Revolver and
Carlson. It might be a conspiracy theory, but it’s not exactly
“baseless,” as the Post described it. That’s because there are genuine
concerns that the sting tactics used over the past two decades against
impressionable Muslims will be used against equally impressionable
Americans with right-wing ideologies. In the supposed plot to kidnap
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, for example, FBI agents and an
informant played significant roles, raising the same question that
surrounds so many supposed Islamic State and Al Qaeda cases in the
United States: Would this plot have happened were it not for the FBI?

    In addition, there is evidence the FBI is assigning informants to
infiltrate groups based solely on right-wing ideology. And the
increase in right-wing violence in recent years has prompted calls for
new anti-terorrism laws that would give the FBI even more power.

    I think the FBI’s investigation of potential right-wing threats,
and the degree to which the bureau replicates its abusive post-9/11
tactics, will be a critically important story in the coming years. How
news organizations report on it will be a significant test.

While Aaronson insists that no proof has yet been presented that the
FBI had foreknowledge of the 1/6 plot or encouraged it to happen, and
also seized on a minor error in the Revolver News article originally
raising these questions about "confidential informants” — an error I
noted in my own article about this topic while explaining that it was
ancillary and insignificant to the overall question — Aaronson's
article has far more in common with the primary theme raised by
Carlson than it does arguments that Carlson "distorted” anything. In
particular, Aaronson writes, the FBI's ample history requires a
serious investigation into the role it may have played in knowing
about and/or encouraging the 1/6 plotters.

As I documented in my own reporting on this question, there is ample
evidence to believe that the FBI had informants embedded in at least
two of three key groups it says were behind the 1/6 Capitol riot. As I
noted at the time, most of the corporate press spewed contempt and
scorn on these questions because 1/6 has become an event that carries
virtually religious importance to them, and their reverence for the
U.S. security state makes them resistant to any suggestions that the
FBI may have acted deceitfully — an utterly bizarre mindset for U.S.
journalists to possess. But such is the state of the liberal sector of
the corporate press today.

Now that one of their own liberal members in good standing — BuzzFeed
— has not only proven the FBI's key role in the Whitmer plot but also
themselves suggested that it makes more plausible the bureau's
involvement in 1/6, these questions are becoming increasingly
unavoidable. Both the Whitmer plot and especially 1/6 are absolutely
crucial to everything that has happened since: the launch of the new
War on Terror, billions more in funds for the security state,
proposals for greater surveillance, Biden's use of the intelligence
community to insist that anti-government activists constitute the
greatest threat to U.S. national security. Asking what role the FBI
played in the episode at the Capitol is not only rational but
imperative.