USA 2020 Elections: Thread

[grarpamp]

Questions About the FBI's Role In 1/6 Are Mocked Because The FBI
Shapes Liberal Corporate Media
The FBI has built a massive network of spies to prevent another
domestic attack. But are they busting terrorist plots - or leading
them?

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/questions-about-the-fbis-role-in

https://www.revolver.news/2021/06/federal-foreknowledge-jan-6-unindicted-co-conspirators-raise-disturbing-questions/
https://twitter.com/ColumbiaBugle/status/1404984630160203781
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08850600490252641
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/19/proud-boys-fbi-classification-extremist-group-white-nationalism-report
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/27/proud-boys-leader-enrique-tarrio-fbi-informant
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2021/03/05/confidential-informant-expected-testify-whitmer-plot-hearings-resume-friday/4590870001/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-michigan-plot-to-kidnap-governor-informants-were-key-11603013401
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapment-fake-terror-plots
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/19/preemptive-prosecution-muslims-cointelpro
https://theintercept.com/2015/01/16/latest-fbi-boast-disrupting-terror-u-s-plot-deserves-scrutiny-skepticism/
https://theintercept.com/2015/02/26/fbi-manufacture-plots-terrorism-isis-grave-threats/
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/07/fbi-terrorist-informants/
https://theintercept.com/series/the-threat-within/
https://www.ted.com/talks/trevor_aaronson_how_this_fbi_strategy_is_actually_creating_us_based_terrorists
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/14/politics/capitol-riot-video-footage/index.html
https://abc7.com/pipe-bomb-suspect-fbi-bombs-washington-dc-explosives-near-capitol-building/10402921/
https://twitter.com/rgoodlaw/status/1404886283088973827
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-new-domestic-war-on-terror-has
https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/1405606134325645312
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/14/us/politics/andrew-mccabe-fbi.html
https://twitter.com/FrankFigliuzzi1

The axis of liberal media outlets and their allied activist groups —
CNN, NBC News, The Washington Post, Media Matters — are in an angry
uproar over a recent report questioning the foreknowledge and
involvement of the FBI in the January 6 Capitol riot. As soon as that
new report was published on Monday, a consensus instantly emerged in
these liberal media precincts that this is an unhinged, ignorant and
insane conspiracy theory that deserves no consideration.
CNN, June 16, 2021, with scandal-plagued anchor Chris Cuomo and
disgraced former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe

The original report, published by Revolver News and then amplified by
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, documented ample evidence of FBI
infiltration of the three key groups at the center of the 1/6
investigation — the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the Three
Percenters — and noted how many alleged riot leaders from these groups
have not yet been indicted. While low-level protesters have been
aggressively charged with major felonies and held without bail, many
of the alleged plot leaders have thus far been shielded from charges.

The implications of these facts are obvious. It seems extremely likely
that the FBI had numerous ways to know of any organized plots
regarding the January 6 riot (just as the U.S. intelligence community,
by its own admission, had ample advanced clues of the 9/11 attack but,
according to their excuse, tragically failed to “connect the dots”).
There is no doubt that the FBI has infiltrated at least some if not
all of these groups — which it has been warning for years pose a grave
national security threat — with informants and/or undercover spies. It
is known that Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio has served as an FBI
informant in the past, and the disrupted 2020 plot by Three Percenters
members to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) was shaped and driven
by what The Wall Street Journal reported were the FBI’s “undercover
agents and confidential informants.”
Wall Street Journal, Oct. 18, 2020

What would be shocking and strange is not if the FBI had embedded
informants and other infiltrators in the groups planning the January 6
Capitol riot. What would be shocking and strange — bizarre and
inexplicable — is if the FBI did not have those groups under tight
control. And yet the suggestion that FBI informants may have played
some role in the planning of the January 6 riot was instantly depicted
as something akin to, say, 9/11 truth theories or questions about the
CIA’s role in JFK’s assassination or, until a few weeks ago, the COVID
lab-leak theory: as something that, from the perspective of
Respectable Serious Circles, only a barely-sane, tin-foil-hat-wearing
lunatic would even entertain.

This reaction is particularly confounding given how often the FBI did
exactly this during the first War on Terror, and how commonplace
discussions of this tactic were in mainstream liberal circles. Over
the last decade, I reported on countless cases for The Guardian and
The Intercept where the FBI targeted some young American Muslims they
viewed as easily manipulated — due to financial distress, emotional
problems, or both — and then deployed informants and undercover agents
to dupe them into agreeing to join terrorist plots that had been
created, designed and funded by the FBI itself, only to then
congratulate themselves for breaking up the plot which they themselves
initiated. As I asked in one headline about a particularly egregious
entrapment case: “Why Does the FBI Have to Manufacture its Own Plots
if Terrorism and ISIS Are Such Grave Threats?”

In 2011, Mother Jones published an outstanding, lengthy investigation
by reporter Trevor Aaronson, entitled “The Informations,” which asked:
“The FBI has built a massive network of spies to prevent another
domestic attack. But are they busting terrorist plots—or leading
them?” Aaronson covered numerous similar cases for The Intercept where
the FBI designed, directed and even funded the terror plots and other
criminal rings they then boasted of disrupting. A widely praised
TEDTalk by Aaronson, which, in the words of organizers, “reveals a
disturbing FBI practice that breeds terrorist plots by exploiting
Muslim-Americans with mental health problems,” featured this central
claim: “There's an organization responsible for more terrorism plots
in the United States than al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab and ISIS combined: The
FBI.”
The Guardian, Nov. 16, 2011

So far from being some warped conspiracy theory, that the FBI
purposely targets vulnerable people and infiltrates groups in order to
create attacks and direct targets to engage in them is indisputably
true, well established, and a commonly reported fact in mainstream
liberal media. Exactly that has been happening for decades.

Yet the DNC-loyal sector of the corporate media reacted to the
Revolver News article and Carlson’s segment which raised these
questions as though they were positing something that no sentient
being could possibly regard as viable. CNN — which spent years leading
its viewers to believe that the Kremlin controlled the U.S. Government
through sexual and financial blackmail — published what they labeled a
“fact-check” that denounced this as a “haywire theory” that “is
nothing more than a conspiratorial web of unproven claims, half-truths
and inaccurate drivel about perceived bombshells in court filings.”

As it usually does, The Washington Post — which told Americans that
Russians had invaded the U.S. electricity grid and that a huge army of
Kremlin-loyal American writers was shaping our discourse — echoed the
instant CNN/liberal consensus by mocking it as “Tucker Carlson’s wild,
baseless theory,” claiming that “it’s the kind of suggestion
journalists in other organizations would quite possibly be fired for
if they sought to push it nearly as hard.” The standard liberal blob
of HuffPost/ DailyBeast/ BusinessInsider all recited from the herd
script. “A laughable conspiracy theory,” chortled The Huffington Post,
who has done more to help the FBI find citizens allegedly at the
Capitol riot than any local law enforcement agency.
The Huffington Post, June 18, 2021

What accounts for this furious liberal #Resistance to questioning the
FBI’s role in the January 6 riot and asking whether there are vital
facts that are being concealed? There was one minor analytical flaw in
both the Revolver News article and Carlson segment that they seized on
by pretending that it was central to the question rather than what it
was: a completely ancillary distraction. It is true that it is highly
unlikely, probably close to impossible, that the FBI would refer to
someone they were directing or collaborating with as an “unindicted
co-conspirator” because, by definition, someone working at the behest
of the FBI would not be a “conspirator” in a plot since they would
lack the necessary intent to forward that plot (their intent, instead,
is to tell the FBI what is being plotted). CNN hauled out some career
federal prosecutor and current corporate lawyer, their “Senior Legal
Analyst” Elie Honig, to spend five minutes pretending that this
single-handedly destroys the case.

But rather than some devastating theory-destroying point, this is
ultimately irrelevant to the evidence marshaled by Revolver News.
While it is true that “unindicted co-conspirator” almost certainly
does not refer to FBI informants or operatives, the numerous
references to Person-1, Person-2, etc. very well could [indeed, in the
case of the FBI-directed plot to kidnap Gov. Whitmer, CHS-1, CHS-2,
etc. (confidential human source) is how the FBI informants driving
that plot were referenced]. These are common tactics that the FBI uses
to reference the acts of their own unindicted informants without
revealing their identity. And while some of the unnamed-but-referenced
people in the charging documents are known (one is the spouse one of
those charged), several are not.

The questions raised by the Revolver News reporting, which none of
these smug FBI defenders and guardians of the liberal consensus can
answer, remain:

    How is it remotely credible that the FBI did not have informants
in these three groups that they have been identifying as major threats
for years, especially given the reporting that the leader of the Proud
Boys — conveniently arrested the day before January 6 — was an FBI
informant in the past, along with the confirmed reporting that the FBI
had multiple informants in the Michigan Three Percenters case?

    Why are low-level protesters being charged with major crimes while
the alleged organizers of this riot and the leaders of these groups
have not been?

    Why are enormous amounts of video surveillance footage from
January 6 still being concealed?

    What happened to the alleged planting of pipe bombs near the Capitol?

    Why did the FBI not take more aggressive action given the
once-denied but now-confirmed fact that the social media platform
Parler sent the FBI advanced warnings of specific plots to use
violence at the Capitol?

    A big deal:@RepMaloney: "Committee has obtained docs showing that
... Parler sent the FBI evidence of planned violence in DC on January
6. Parlor referred this content to FBI for investigation OVER 50
TIMES" including "specific threats of violence being planned at the
Capitol." pic.twitter.com/67ZsMxyPJn
    — Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) June 15, 2021



If the FBI had advanced knowledge of what was being plotted yet did
nothing to stop the attack, it raises numerous possibilities about why
that is. It could be that they just had yet another “intelligence
failure” of the kind that they claimed caused them to miss the 9/11
attack and therefore need massive new surveillance authorities, budget
increases, and new Patriot-Act-type laws to fix it. It could be that
they allowed the riot to happen because they did not take it seriously
enough or because some of them supported the cause behind it, or
because they realized that there would be benefits to the security
state if it happened. Or it could be that they were using those
operatives under their control to plot with, direct, and drive the
attack -- as they have done so many times in the past — and allowed it
to happen out of either negligence or intent.

Nobody is claiming to know the answers to those questions, including
Revolver News, Carlson, or anyone else. Instead, they are doing the
work of actual journalists — pointing out the gaping holes in the
public record about what we do and do not know about an event that is
being exploited to launch a new domestic War on Terror, prompt massive
new police and security state spending, and empower and justify new
domestic surveillance and censorship authorities. Anyone not asking
these questions or, worse, trying to delegitmize them, is a
propagandist and has no business calling themselves a journalist.

But why does this description apply to so many in the undifferentiated
liberal corporate media blob, the employees who work for media
corporations and barely pretend any longer to conceal their
DNC-supporting posture? One answer is that, as a result of the Trump
years, they now revere security state institutions like the FBI and
CIA, and are thus reflexively angered by suggestion that these
agencies may be less than truthful in their statements and less than
honorable in their conduct:
Pew Research, July 24, 2018

But the primary reason is that their newsrooms are filled with former
FBI operatives, CIA agents, and other former employees of the security
state. CNN has more FBI agents and federal prosecutors working for it
than anyone outside of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI headquarters in
Washington. When they go to analyze any matters involving the FBI,
they rely on career FBI agents and officials to tell them what to
think. And you’ll never guess what these FBI operatives tell them:
trust the FBI; only malicious conspiracists wonder if the FBI is lying
and has been engaged in treachery; those who malign the FBI are liars.
Here is just one of CNN’s countless FBI operatives doing her job:

In virtually every segment that they have done since the Revolver News
article was published, CNN, in order to angrily mock questions about
the FBI, brings on FBI officials like former FBI Deputy Director
Andrew McCabe — who got caught lying to the FBI and barely escaped
prosecution for it — to insist that the honorable agency would never
do any such thing:

    CHRIS CUOMO: Let's talk about what is true, and not true, in this
scenario. Former FBI Director Andrew McCabe.

    "Person one, person two, unindicted co-conspirator, those are you
guys. Those are - those are Feds, undercover." What's the reality?

    ANDREW MCCABE, CNN SENIOR LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST, FORMER DEPUTY
DIRECTOR, FBI: The reality, Chris, is that we're going to - we're
going to go into, very briefly, a little law lesson here, because I am
convinced that your viewers are smarter than Tucker Carlson.

Just think about a purported news outlet saying this: Let's talk about
what is true, and not true, in this scenario. Former FBI Director
Andrew McCabe.

While MSNBC prefers ex-CIA officials like John Brennan, CNN is
practically overrun with former FBI officials, agents and operatives.
But NBC News is also the home to FBI caricatures like this:

Look at these FBI cartoons these media corporations employ. Then they
haul them out to tell everyone that only malignant conspiracists and
insane losers would ponder the possibility that the FBI was engaged in
deceit or other forms of manipulation regarding an event that has
taken on central importance in their quest for more power and money.
And their liberal viewers and the liberal journalists who watch these
networks nod in agreement because they think they are hearing from the
real, honest experts: the security state agents they have been trained
to revere.

But all the mockery in the world does not make these questions
disappear. Of course the FBI was infiltrating the groups they claim
were behind these attacks. There may be good reasons why that did not
enable the FBI to stop this riot or why they have not yet indicted
these ringleaders. But those answers are not yet known. And gullible
conspiracists are not the ones who want answers to these questions
but, instead, are the ones doing everything possible to protect the
FBI from having to provide them.