Foreshadowing Bureau Injustice
The FBI’s past political subterfuge previews what lies ahead of midterms and 2024.
In her investigative reports on “the FBI-concocted Whitmer operation,” January 6, and the fake plot against Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, the intrepid Julie Kelly has been exposing FBI stagecraft, entrapment and outright election interference. These operations flow from the FBI’s long experience as a political strike force. Consider, for example, their “Shrimpscam” operation in California back in 1988.
“California Capitol shaken by FBI sting,” headlined a September 4, 1988 UPI report. “More than 30 federal agents carrying search warrants conducted an unprecedented raid on the Capitol offices of four leading lawmakers, seeking evidence of wrongdoing until the wee hours of the morning.” As it emerged in the report, the FBI had manufactured the evidence.
Gulf Shrimp Fisheries, which sought to build a food processing plant in West Sacramento to supply California restaurants, was actually a “dummy company set up by the FBI.” The FBI also established Peachstate Capital West Ltd., with an office one block from the California Capitol.
The FBI companies paid nearly $60,000 in campaign contributions, including $11,500 to Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, $10,000 to Assembly Republican leader Pat Nolan, and $10,500 to assemblywoman Gwen Moore, a Los Angeles Democrat.
As the UPI report noted, Moore was the author of “two FBI-spawned bills” designed to benefit the FBI’s dummy companies. The bills “sailed smoothly through both houses with few dissenting votes,” but Republican Gov. George Deukmejian vetoed the fake measures.
On the night of the raid, the FBI searched the offices of Moore, Sen. Joseph Montoya, Republican Assemblyman Frank Hill, and Pat Nolan, a rising Republican star and likely the primary target. According to Capitol Weekly, the outcry from Jackie Speier staffer Richard Steffen was, “The FBI’s here. They’re raiding Pat Nolan’s office.”
Nolan had been critical of Brown, whose office, as UPI clarified, was “not among those searched by the FBI.” The bureau did have one of its undercover agents shove $1,000 in cash under Brown’s office door, about as subtle as Max Bialystock’s (Zero Mostel) bribe of the theatre critic in The Producers.
To the surprise of no one, a Brown aide returned the money. Brown emerged unscathed and Nolan pleaded guilty to a racketeering charge and spent 29 months in federal custody. Here the FBI was deploying a tactic outlined by comic Yakov Smirnoff.
In the 1981 film Fort Apache, the Bronx, police throw a criminal off a roof. In Russia, Smirnoff countered, the KGB throws a guy off roof “to hit the guy they really want.” Nolan was the guy the FBI wanted to hit, while leaving Willie Brown safe to carry on.
As UPI recalled, one month before the August 1988 raid, Willie Brown spurred the Democrats to choose Michael Dukakis by acclamation. He lost to George H.W. Bush, but unlike Dukakis, Willie Brown wasn’t done.
Willie had his eye on UC law grad Kamala Harris, thirty years his junior, and in a daring act of poontrage, Brown set up Harris in lucrative sinecures. Brown also backed Harris for district attorney of San Francisco and state attorney general.
Had the FBI’s 1988 “Shrimpscam” taken down Willie Brown, it’s highly unlikely that Kamala Harris would now be vice president. Beyond informers, fake legislation and such, the FBI was becoming more like the KGB in other ways.
In 1992, the FBI ran an entrapment scheme on rural Idaho resident Randy Weaver, branded a “white separatist.” A gunfight claimed the life of a U.S. marshal and Weaver’s son Sammy, only 14 years old. The FBI then deployed massive military force, helicopters, armored vehicles and such, against a single family.
Army-trained FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot Randy’s wife Vicki through the head as she held her infant child. The FBI claims “Weaver’s wife was accidentally shot and killed by an FBI sniper,” but a Fox News documentary dug up another side to the story.
The FBI thought Vicki Weaver was the family leader. Snipers are carefully trained to “acquire” their targets. The chances that the killing of Vicki Weaver was an accident range between slim and none.
Attorney General William Barr rallied former AGs to the defense of Horiuchi. FBI boss Louis Freeh recommended Larry Potts, the agent in charge of the Ruby Ridge operation, for deputy director of the FBI, describing Potts as “the very best the FBI has.”
In 2016, the upper reaches of the FBI deployed the Midyear Exam and Crossfire Hurricane operations against candidate and President Donald Trump. James Comey, Peter Strzok et al suffered no criminal prosecution. While the FBI operates as a political strike force, it fails at its job of protecting America.
“Prevention of terrorist attacks is the FBI’s number-one priority,” proclaimed FBI director Robert Mueller in 2003. Yet the FBI failed to stop Nidal Hasan’s Fort Hood massacre in 2009 (14 dead) and the Tsarnaevs’ terrorist attack on Boston Marathon in 2013 (three dead, more than 250 injured).
In 2015, the FBI failed to prevent terrorists Syeed Farook and Tashfeen Malik from murdering 14 innocents in San Bernardino. The FBI played no role in the takedown of the terrorists, and no bystanders were shot by “accident.”
In 2016, the FBI failed to prevent Omar Mateen from murdering 49 and wounding many others in Orlando, Florida. Before that, the FBI failed to stop al Qaeda terrorists from hijacking airliners and claiming some 3,000 lives in attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
It’s not clear which FBI bosses were demoted or lost their jobs over these deadly failures. A ballpark figure is probably zero. Under Christopher Wray, who denied that the FBI spied on Trump, the FBI regards anyone less than worshipful of the Biden Junta as a domestic terrorist. As it turns, the FBI and DOJ were in the tank for Biden in 2020.
“The FBI and Department of Justice,” Rep. Darrell Issa reveals, “were actually feeding Twitter false information saying there was going to be misinformation about Hunter Biden and a laptop coming out, when in fact, switching gears, for two years they had had the real McCoy and knew they had it.”
With no apology to Robert Mueller, the FBI’s number-one priority is partisan subterfuge.
Look for more of the same as crucial midterms approach.
Millions of Americans will be exercising their rights of free speech, protest, and assembly. Biden’s white coat supremacist Anthony Fauci will attempt to ramp up COVID restrictions. The FBI will doubtless deploy more Whitmer-style operations, hardly the limit of FBI power.
Read Julie Kelly, and mark your calendar. August 21 will mark 30 years since the Ruby Ridge siege. In 2022 and beyond, it’s all about memory against forgetting.