This letter to the editor was submitted to the Washington Post without a snowball’s chance in hell of being published. It responds to an op-ed written by two NYU law professors, both of whom have served as notably partisan government lawyers in the past. With the Post’s help, the professors pretend to criticize the FBI as part of a broader Stalinist effort by the political left to manipulate federal law enforcement into silencing American voices from the center and right.
To the Editor:
Leftist law professors Ryan Goodman and Andrew Weissmann demand to know “Where was the FBI?” when, they insist, “threats of violence [were] broadcast for weeks on social media by Trump supporters and militia groups before Jan. 6” [op-ed, June 18].
Well, recently credible reporting by online Revolver News, which has pored over reams of court documents connected to the arrests and indictments of hundreds of Americans allegedly involved in the Capitol siege, suggests Director Christopher Wray’s FBI may well have been surreptitiously helping to orchestrate that social media activity and additionally working to prompt disparate groups and individuals to do things they may otherwise never have done.
Court records reportedly indicate there are at least 20 or so unnamed and unindicted co-conspirators who were in the thick of driving the disheartening events of Jan. 6. This could well mean they were functioning as FBI informants or “agitators,” to use a historical term. And just as J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI targeted and infiltrated leftist groups like the Black Panthers to push them toward violence that would discredit them with the public and make their members susceptible to arrest and prosecution, it’s at least plausible — especially in light of James Comey’s FBI helping to perpetuate for years the Russian Collusion hoax and CNN reporting on the bureau’s entrapment of Muslim Americans in alleged “terror plots” — that Mr. Wray’s FBI and Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice are now targeting rightist groups for comparable treatment.
In any case, Messrs. Goodman and Weissmann and all the congressional Democrats claiming we need a commission to unearth the “causes” underlying Jan. 6 best be careful what they wish for. Because if the whole truth ever comes out, it’s likely to prove far more discomfiting for the establishment left than the supposedly rebellious right.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.