Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America, and by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Trevor Aronson from The Intercept.
He wrote this extremely important book back, I don't know, a decade ago.
The Terror Factory, Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism, about all the entrapments, so, so many entrapments.
And he's been on the FBI's case ever since.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Trevor?
I'm great, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
Sure, the FBI is not very happy to have you around doing what you do.
Informant reveals FBI's already vast powers to investigate right-wing extremists.
You know, it is the 21st century, and the FBI's been around for a while, and they figured out how to carve their way around all sorts of amendments decades ago.
I remember after September 11th, Ron Paul saying, you're telling me that this FBI didn't have the authority to investigate this thing and prevent it?
Come on.
We all know that's not how that attack happened.
But they passed a whole Patriot Act and a million laws since then.
But they still, if you listen to the FBI, just don't have enough power to keep us safe, do they?
No, that's what they always say.
Whenever there's a situation where, for whatever reason, an attack occurs and the FBI wasn't able to stop it, it's never because the FBI, for whatever reason, wasn't able to do its job and stop him.
It's because they didn't have the authority to do so.
We've seen this.
This is the same kind of play that played out after 9-11, which was to say that, hey, 9-11 occurred because we, the FBI, did not have the proper authorities to be able to stop it.
And so we need new authorities.
And that's how we got the Patriot Act, which has had repercussions over the last decade.
And the reason that I wrote this particular story is that I thought it was very prescient in the sense that we're basically at that same kind of debate where, because we've had this string of right-wing attacks, most recently and most tragically the Walmart shooting in Texas, we've had FBI current and former FBI Justice Department officials saying, hey, we need new authorities because we can't take on the threat of white supremacists and other right-wing threats without these new powers.
And the truth is that the FBI already has more than enough powers to take on all sorts of threats, including from white supremacists and right-wing extremists.
And so what this, what I tried to show in this story is that, you know, very clearly here is this example of this man who, as an informant, spied on militia groups without any sort of predicate or reason to believe that they were breaking the law, which basically shows that if the FBI wants to investigate you, they can.
You know, they don't need any new authorities to do so.
And, well, so there's so many things brought up here, but just on that point right there, there is no real predicate, any kind of thing that you would need to show, for example, probable cause to a judge or why you need a warrant to search somebody's property or anything like that.
You can essentially, an FBI agent can infiltrate an informant into wherever, whoever, whichever group he wants, whichever, you know, whichever people he chooses to target.
And based on just their own say-so, is that it?
Yeah, so there's two primary loopholes that the FBI has to basically get around most of the constitutional protections that I think people assume that they have, or really, you know, we should have, but do not as a result of these loopholes.
And the two are what are called assessments, which is a post-9-11 construction or authority whereby if someone calls up the FBI and says, hey, you know, my neighbor, John, is building a bomb in his garage.
And I think, you know, I overheard him say he wants to bomb the downtown bank or whatever.
The FBI has 72 hours to basically use all manner of powers to investigate that person as a potential national security threat, even though, you know, there is no predicate, no firm reason to believe that he is doing these things.
You know, for all we know, the anonymous tipster was, you know, an ex-lover, a neighbor who's angry because of some neighborly dispute.
You know, all sorts of specious reasons are possible with anonymous tips.
And for that reason, the FBI is able to basically investigate you without believing you have any sort of activity that's criminal or have any sort of probable cause or basis for probable cause.
And then the second is the use of informants.
So under FBI policy, the FBI can't send in an undercover agent to investigate you to go to a function where you're at or go to a party or, you know, your business or knock on your door and become your friend unless they have probable cause that they are able to show to their superiors that this person has committed these acts that suggest he is committing a crime.
The exception with informants is that while they're not able to do that with agents, they can do that with informants.
They can send someone in to spend months with you reporting information back to the FBI even though they have no reason to suspect that you have committed a crime.
And so the story that I wrote most recently in The Intercept is about this man named Chris Stevens who was a former top-rated army sniper and was recruited by the FBI to investigate the militia, the California state militia in California, obviously.
And the FBI had no basis for suspicion of this group other than their ideology.
Their, you know, their choosing to get together as a militia and practice firearms and other tactical training.
And they sent Chris Stevens in for months and he reported information back to them.
And there was, you know, as he tells me, you know, all these months he spent with them he didn't see anyone commit any sort of criminal activity in his presence.
And yet the FBI continued to send him over and over.
And so what that shows is, A, you know, the FBI has a vast amount of power to investigate just about anyone it wants, including potential right-wing threats.
But B, that, you know, the FBI is in fact investigating people based solely on ideology.
And the reason that's troubling, obviously, is that, you know, who decides what ideology is popular, right?
Who decides what ideology is worth investigating?
And then secondly, that it contradicts, you know, months and months and years and years of testimony from FBI officials, including most recently Director Christopher Wray when they've gone before Congress and said, we do not investigate based on ideology.
We investigate based on violence.
And what this case shows, as other cases have shown, particularly the investigation of Moss post-9-11, is that, you know, the FBI has found all sorts of authorities to justify spying on people, you know, based on ideology alone.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Again, that's right there in the margin at ScottHorton.org.
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Well, okay, so again, so many points to go back over there to highlight and ask you about.
But I guess one thing would be, I guess the question of just how ideologically right-wing or how far to the right one has to be to join a militia.
And this is something that we saw back in the 1990s constantly, especially after the Oklahoma City bombing.
And we hear all the time now is this conflation between Nazis and militia groups.
And in some cases, I guess, you know, there must be overlap.
And certainly sometimes Nazi groups call themselves this or that militia.
But then again, most of the militias, certainly back in the 1990s, I knew a lot more about them back then.
But most of them had nothing to do with hating blacks and Jews whatsoever.
They were just saying, no more Wacos.
And if the hostage rescue team ever comes to try to massacre 100 people in our neighborhood, we're going to massacre them first.
Which is actually, you know what, a left, right and center and regular American ideology.
The FBI doesn't have the authority to massacre American civilians.
And American civilians do have the right to use firearms to protect themselves from unreasonable, unlawful, deadly force by government death squads, such as the hostage rescue team and Delta Force who murdered the Branch Davidians.
And I remember back in the 1990s, for example, Bill Curtis from investigative reports on A&E went and spent weeks and weeks with all these various different militias.
And at the end of the thing, he goes, these guys aren't terrorists.
These guys aren't Nazis.
These guys aren't haters at all.
They're the men of the neighborhood.
And whether liberals like it or not, that's the law in America.
That the people of this country have the right to bear arms as a deterrent against our government becoming a centralized tyranny.
Sure.
I mean, personally speaking, I've never had an interest in joining a militia.
But I can, you know, it's worth noting that obviously militias are something that are basically protected in the Constitution, right?
The Second Amendment says that a well-regulated militia is allowed along with the right to bear arms.
And so, you know, these militia groups, you know, point to that as saying, you know, we're not only doing nothing illegal.
We're doing something that our Constitution protects us in doing.
And, you know, there are, you know, in fairness, there are overlaps, certainly among domestic terrorist ideologies as defined by the FBI.
You know, you will find perhaps white supremacists within militia groups, just as you might find sovereign citizens within white supremacist groups and within militia groups.
There's going to be overlap in those ideologies to a certain extent, just as you find overlap within international ideologies, right?
I mean, there have certainly been examples of people who were with al-Qaeda and joined ISIS as just one example.
But that said, you know, that doesn't mean that all members of a militia are white supremacist neo-Nazis, people who want to overthrow the government or whatever it is that the FBI might, you know, fear from them in a worst-case scenario.
And, you know, what my story about Chris Stevens showed is that, you know, he would go to these meetings and trainings among the Northern California state militia.
This was a group that was not hiding its activity.
I mean, in fact, Stevens found out about their meetings and their trainings because they were posting them on Facebook, right?
They were out in the open.
This is what they're doing.
And Stevens went to those trainings and meetings with them.
And what he told the FBI was like, yeah, you know, there are a couple of people there that are racist and, you know, a few of them might have some mental issues.
But for the most part, these are normal people who are just, you know, spending their time doing this because this is what they're choosing to do.
There's no, you know, talk of conspiracy to overthrow the government or harm people.
I mean, he was unable in those months to substantiate any sort of criminal activity.
And yet the FBI continued to send him in.
And this is why it's really troubling, this sense that, or this idea that the FBI denies that it investigates based on ideology, but then clearly does, because ultimately the FBI is the one who's choosing to, choosing what ideologies it views as kind of prime to investigate.
And obviously we're seeing that with, you know, kind of, you know, Muslims talk about it where they say, well, look, you know, we're being investigated and spied on by informants simply because we choose to go to the mosque every Friday.
And at the same time, you see it on the right wing side where, you know, we have investigations of militia groups like this simply because the FBI is concerned that because it's an armed group that their ideology is somehow dangerous.
And I think, you know, the FBI policy is really dangerous in the sense that, you know, we are allowing them essentially to choose who is dangerous and investigate them, even though there are supposed to be these constitutional protections in place that prevent the FBI from doing that.
But, you know, because of this informant loophole, because of the assessments that exists post 9-11 for national security purposes, there are a number of means that the FBI can use to investigate, you know, people that they are just suspicious of for whatever reason.
And, you know, the core of the ideology of these militia guys, if you talk to them always, they'll say the U.S. Constitution.
That's what they're loyal to.
They're, you know, it's the old adage, right, where a patriot is someone who is ready to defend his country from his own government, which is the greatest enemy of the country, the freedom of the people inside the country, obviously, in the first place.
And so, yeah, the Second Amendment being part of that, of course, as well.
So it is kind of funny, and it goes to show where the FBI has really proven these guys' point, where the government is completely outside the Constitution.
We live in a post-constitutional era, and if you are for keeping it, then you actually have something to fight for, because you look at the current situation, the National Police Force has all these loopholes that make the Bill of Rights a dead letter.
Yeah, and I think that's really worth, you know, the other thing I think is worth noting, too, is that we live in this really politically polarized moment where I think the, for criticism of the FBI, ends up being something that is, you know, that I think we kind of see too much through a political lens, right?
And so, and then also what's happening in this post-Trump era, or in the kind of the Trumpian era that we now live in, is that we've seen this reversal where it used to be liberals that tended to be very kind of critical of the FBI, and, you know, concerned about it.
And now we have this kind of flip where kind of I think liberal audiences are seeing the FBI as kind of the saviour of the republic, because they're the ones with Jim Comey and Andrew McCabe who investigated Trump, and they're the ones who are continuing to investigate these things, while the more conservative and the right wing of the populace had previously been very supportive of the FBI and kind of law and order, and now are very critical of the FBI for the same reasons that the liberals are, because they investigated Trump.
And I think this creates a real problem, because I think if we are to really kind of fairly examine the abuses of the FBI, you know, we need to kind of step aside from our personal politics a little bit and what we hope the FBI will do for whatever reason and look at it in a more cool-headed way and say, here's what they're supposed to be doing and here's how they're abusing these issues.
I mean, as just one example, certainly there have been problems with how the FBI has used the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and FISA evidence for years and years and years, but we really only started to talk about it that in a meaningful way when it became part of the Trump-Russia investigation, right?
And so I think what I hope will kind of come from this era will be that we'll continue to be more critical of the FBI, because I think, you know, this is an area where they have enormous power and an enormous ability to abuse that power and yet, you know, need to be regulated in a more meaningful way, and yet we're in this moment where we're kind of viewing the FBI as either the enemy or the ally, when in fact they're really neither of those things in a sense.
They're just a government agency that needs to be much better regulated than they are, and I think we need to kind of keep that in mind.
And so why this article was important to me about this informant who investigated these militias without probable cause is that we have this narrative happening now where a lot of people both on the right and the left are saying, hey, you know, white supremacists are a problem, right-wing threats are a problem, we need to give the FBI more powers, and to me that's a very scary prospect, particularly when we can already show that the FBI is investigating right-wing threats in an abusive way and giving them more power is likely just to make this problem even worse.
And so for that reason, I think the FBI and its powers are really kind of a story that in general needs a lot better coverage than we're giving it.
And I hear from kind of leftist groups sometimes at least about how the government should put these right-wing groups on the terrorist list and this kind of thing, but I get that email, I'm on a lot of email lists, and I get this stuff from right-wingers all the time, put Antifa on the, Antifa or whatever, put them on the terrorist list, have them classified as a terrorist group, sign the petition here, which first of all, yeah, that's not how it works.
But then secondly, here are people who are being persecuted essentially by this lawless FBI for their political beliefs, and it can't possibly occur to them that standing up for freedom for themselves and somebody else is what's called for here.
Instead, they just want to inflict the police state, the same police state on their enemies instead of their own selves, which is how we got here.
Everybody preferring to see the state persecute the enemy, their political enemies, rather than seeing the state itself as the danger.
So, you know, here we are.
Yeah, I think that's a really kind of prescient warning in the sense that I do think that we are looking to, you know, from a political perspective, I think a lot of people want to see their enemy punished the other side of the aisle, or, you know, if you're a liberal, it's Trump.
If you're, you know, a conservative Republican, it's the people who investigated Trump.
And I think what concerns me is that whenever, you know, these discussions happen, I tend not to think of them as being like, well, you know, if new powers are given, how is that going to affect the immediate person?
My concern is, like, how does it affect all of us later on?
Because what we know in the FBI's history is that, you know, it tends to use abusive powers against more marginalized populations and then over time uses that against all of us.
So in a sense, you know, what we saw post-9-11 was the grand use of these informants in Muslim communities and these really egregious sting operations.
But now we see them, you know, throughout FBI investigations, including white-collar investigations that are investigating, you know, business people and average Americans and getting them in money-laundering stings, for example.
And we see this kind of extension of the abuse.
And I think when people talk about expanding powers to investigate right-wing groups or domestic terrorist groups, however you want to phrase it, they need to think, well, how does this apply, you know, down the line?
Like, I don't think anyone is against, like, saying, hey, the KKK is a pretty terrible organization, we should probably investigate them.
But it really opens Pandora's box if you say, hey, we should create a domestic terrorism list and include the KKK on it.
Because then the question is, like, well, who decides who gets on that list?
And what does being on that list mean at a time when we have a president of the United States that Antifa should be on that list, right?
And so, you know, for all we know, we have a list like that, then, like, you know, groups that are advocating for the First or Second Amendment or advocating for specific causes end up being put on that list.
And so, you know, this kind of...
The fact that we have kind of included kind of terrorism as a criminal charge has created this kind of charged, politically charged environment where, you know, terrorism is what we say it is, and that becomes a tool for authoritarianism.
Yeah, well, and of course there's the whole criminality of association here, too, where instead of acts being illegal, now it's membership in a group itself that's the problem.
So if you're part of a group and then one guy does something wrong, now you all get prosecuted under whatever RICO or gang statutes or whatever this kind of thing.
Already that's, you know, abusive, where innocent people are caught up in that kind of deal.
But now...
So here's another thing, too, and this is probably the best thing about this show, Trevor, because I've been doing it for so long that that means I've been talking with you for years and years now, which means that now we're in the future after our predictions have already come true.
So, like, for example, if we go way back to our early interviews, we would talk about how, geez, the FBI is spending so much time entrapping nobodies into fake terrorist plots, of course they're missing real terrorist plots.
They must be.
And then what happened?
We saw over and over again with...
Oh, geez, I'm sorry.
I'm spacing on the Fort Hood shooter.
Oh, Nidal Hasan.
Yeah, pardon me.
Yeah, Nidal Hasan, and, you know, whatever, tons of them.
The Times Square attack and many others.
The FBI was, you know, had some indication but didn't do their job.
And then I know on the Boston case specifically that you reported that those particular cops who should have been working the Russians' tip-off about the Tsarnaev brothers were instead working on an entrapment case.
So it wasn't just the FBI.
It was this office.
They were busy on a fake entrapment case while the actual Boston plot unfolded right under their noses there.
And I think we still don't have the full story of what all was going on with that.
But I wonder if that's...if you think that that's a real worry here, too, where you have all this manpower infiltrating these militia groups who aren't doing anything, and meanwhile you have real Nazis seething with rage who are ready to go out there and murder an innocent person or more in order to make a point, and those guys are going unnoticed because the resources are being diverted off onto, well, gee, I guess, 1% doctrine.
We better investigate everyone to the right of Rush Limbaugh, otherwise we might miss something, or, you know, this kind of thing.
Yeah, I think that's an obvious concern.
I mean, you know, there is this fantasy that the FBI's resources are essentially infinite, right?
And that's not true at all.
I mean, the FBI has a specific number of agents and informants, and it only stands to reason that, you know, just using round numbers, if 50 agents are off doing, you know, cases that are questionable in their, you know, threat to national security, such as entrapment cases of Muslims, then that's 50 agents that aren't available to pursue threats that might pose a greater danger to the United States.
And, you know, I think we can point to an odd number of cases where people slip through the cracks.
You know, the Tsarnaev brothers, for example, as you mentioned, Omar Mateen in Orlando was investigated three times by the FBI before he shot up that club in Orlando.
And so, you know, certainly that stands to reason that by going after militia groups or doing really, you know, egregious investigations, such as the, you know, the investigation of the Cliven Bundy and his supporters after the standoff in Nevada, you know, what are they missing as a result?
And I think, you know, that's one of those things we can't know but can certainly point at examples where it does seem there be this rising threat of neo-Nazi and white supremacist violence, and that is something that clearly caught the FBI by surprise.
And, you know, the question is, how big is this threat?
You know, what should we be doing about it?
And the FBI really can't answer those questions, in large part because they're so focused on other threats.
You know, part of it is militia groups, and they're going after them, as I documented in this story.
But still the larger issue is, you know, the concern about ISIS or al-Qaeda-inspired terrorists in the United States.
Michael McGarrity, who's the head of FBI counterterrorism, testified before Congress a few months ago and said that, you know, eight of every ten counterterrorism agents is focused on what they call jihadi-inspired violence.
So that means that only two of every ten are looking at, like, white supremacist groups and neo-Nazis.
And so it raises obvious questions.
Is that enough?
I mean, are there examples where, had they not been so obsessed with jihadi-inspired violence in their term, might they have stopped some of this white supremacist and neo-Nazi violence?
And I think you have a number of people, including Michael German, the former FBI agent, who argue that, you know, there is this greater threat among the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists, and we would have a better handle on what that threat is if we weren't so overly obsessed with, you know, the prospect of an ISIS or al-Qaeda-inspired attack.
Yeah, and even then, you know, all the...
I guess people talk about the numbers.
There's so many more white supremacist attacks than jihadist ones, but there ain't very many jihadist ones.
And as you've documented, absolute lion's share of those are put-up jobs by the FBI in the first place that don't count.
And so they're still, overall, in raw numbers.
This is all still very marginal stuff.
I mean, hey, if somebody kills one of your family members in some massacre, it's a big deal to you.
Don't get me wrong.
But in a country of 330 million people, or whatever it is now, this is not a danger for the average person anywhere they are in this country.
No, yeah, I mean, you are far more likely, you know, to experience a violent crime, like, you know, like a murder from someone uninvolved in the terrorist organization, just a random crime, or for a woman, the potential for rape.
Those are, like, far more common and, you know, crimes than anything like being involved or being a victim of an act of terrorism.
I mean, this is, like, you know, these are acts of terrorism, like we saw with the Walmart shooting or, like, Omar Mateen or 9-11, for example.
You know, these are horrific incidents that get a lot of attention.
But, you know, there are violent crimes like rape and murder every day that we're really, you don't really hear a lot about.
And so, you know, as Americans, we do have this weird inability to assess risk in a proper way.
You know, the chance of your being killed by a random, you know, violent crime criminal because he's breaking into your house is much higher than, you know, getting involved in a terrorist or being victimized in a terrorist incident.
And yet we spend all of this time and money, you know, trying to prevent those terrorist incidents from happening.
And I think that just gets at the priorities of the government and the kind of money gravy train that has existed since 9-11 by, you know, pointing to terrorism as this great threat has meant that, you know, agencies like the FBI get, you know, substantial funding to stop that threat.
Well, so we talk about how the militias are unfairly conflated with the Nazi groups, but it's the same thing on the left, too, right?
Where Black Lives Matter protest groups are lumped in with Antifa, which even they are just, what do they do, break some windows or get in a fistfight sometimes or whatever?
They're not that bad.
And then there's this whole, what, the black identity extremist thing because one guy sniped some cops in Dallas.
And so they tried to pretend that this is what a whole, the black Israelites are going to overthrow Waco if we don't stop them now, is that it, or what?
Yeah, no, there's, yeah, this is not unique to the right wing.
There's also, on the left wing, as you mentioned, there's examples of this.
You know, certainly, you know, I think even, you know, the right wing in particular and the FBI kind of throws Antifa into, I think, into the anarchist ideology.
But like, you know, Antifa is essentially like an anti-ideology, right?
It's anti-fascist.
It is essentially a tactic.
So the idea that this is a group or an ideology seems a little bit, you know, not just a little bit, seems crazy to me.
And then the other that you mentioned, the FBI had come up with this ideology, they coined this term called black identity extremists because there were a few cases where they felt this was emblematic of this burgeoning ideology in their view that some black extremists believe that violence against police officers was justified in order to combat kind of institutional racism.
And if you look at the cases, you know, there aren't enough cases to support this.
Many of the cases that they included actually had more roots in sovereign citizens.
There's a, you know, sovereign citizen ideology, not just the violent part of it, but also just the tax evasion part of it has really become popular among the black community in the last decade or so.
Yeah, we remember there was that young lady who had the paper license plate thing and they followed her home and murdered her in her home a couple of years ago for this.
And so I think there's a fair amount of conflation between black sovereign citizens and this idea of black identity extremists because in the FBI's view, I think they look at it kind of in a very binary sense sometimes in that sovereign citizens, because it's rooted in white racism, it has to be like a white right wing thing and black people can't be part of the right wing in the FBI's view.
So how is this even possible?
Right.
So I think it does.
Well, of course, the whole thing about the sovereign citizens thing is mostly this is what my friend Anthony Gregory calls the technicalitarian movement, right, where they get just lost in this completely like misunderstood sort of, you know, like trutherism about how the law works.
And if only you carry a little flag without gold fringe and you spell your name in lowercase letters, then the law doesn't apply to you and you can, the judge will be forced to let you go and all these.
None of it's true.
You don't have to pay your taxes because of only we understand that the loophole says this and that and whatever.
But it has nothing to do with being violent or killing cops or whatever.
Now there could be, I know there have been right wingers, there's the guy and his son who got in a shootout with some cops who they believed in this stuff, but that's a correlation without causation, man.
The same thing for, what's his name, Randy Quaid.
Is he the goofiest one of the Quaids?
I can never remember their names because I don't care about actors, but the goofy Quaid, he believes in this stuff.
He's not a murderer, he's just a kook.
You know?
No, no, absolutely.
There's nothing inherently violent as I understand it about what these people believe, but what ends up happening is oftentimes it attracts people who, you know, because they believe this, they're probably not the brightest of the bulbs and at times they're fairly paranoid.
And so what ends up happening for a lot of them, and I think this happened with Jerry Cain and his son who killed the cops in Arkansas, is that you end up driving around with these fake license plates, and so as a result you get pulled over a lot, right?
It stands to reason that if you've got, you know, some fake license plate, a cop sees that you get pulled over, but instead of them making this connection that, hey, the reason I'm getting pulled over is because I'm refusing to follow this law and have a proper license plate, it's that, like, oh, the cops are out to get me because I've got the truth to their big scam, right?
Like, you know, we don't need to follow these laws and so they're persecuting me.
And I think that paranoia ends up being what inspires violence among the sovereign citizens.
And so as a result, I think the FBI at times has considered anyone following these crazy sovereign citizen ideas, you know, whether it's tax protesting or filing liens against your enemies, as kind of part of this sovereign citizen ideology and as such part of a domestic terrorism ideology.
And what we see when we look at the case examples that the FBI and Department of Justice have at times shown for what was then termed black identity extremism, even though the FBI has since abandoned that term, they included cases like that, black people who were involved in tax protest movements based on sovereign citizen ideology.
And so there was nothing inherently violent about what they were doing.
They were just, they were tax protesters, right?
That's a crime, but that isn't a violent crime, that isn't terrorism.
But there has been that conflation and I think that's kind of one of the inherent flaws you see in the FBI's kind of attempt to kind of create this bucket of terrorism category where, you know, we can say, you know, these black extremists are part of that.
And, you know, it's a similar problem as we've talked about that we see with the conflation of militia groups and white supremacists and sovereign citizens on the right wing side as well.
All right, now I got to ask you one thing and it's totally unfair and I'm putting you on the spot because I don't think you've ever written about this or anything, but if not, I'd like to challenge you to look into it.
Do you know about Pat Conn?
I don't think so.
I'm happy to look into it, but can you rehash my memory about what I might have read about this?
Yeah, so I guess the best thing to refer you to would be James Ridgway in Mother Jones back say 10 years ago or so in search of John Doe 2.
And you'll like Ridgway and you like Mother Jones and in fact, you wrote The Terror Factory was originally a special in Mother Jones, wasn't it back then?
That's right.
Yeah, he's right for Mother Jones.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I don't remember having read this story, but I'll have to look it up.
So essentially the deal is this Pat Conn stands for Patriot Conspiracy and that was the FBI project to infiltrate the radical right in the 1990s.
And I think there's a lot of really sound reason to believe that that operation is what led to the Oklahoma City bombing that that was essentially one of these stings gone wrong where one of the primary ringleaders was actually not just an informant, but an agent provocateur Andre Strauss Meyer and how really all of McVeigh's friends involved in the thing were either undercover informants or flip States witnesses or were somehow compromised by the FBI, but also compromise the FBI right back.
And so when the plan to stop the attack failed, they covered the whole thing up and blamed it all on McVeigh because all of his friends that helped him do it.
We're all working with the FBI had every ability in the world to stop the thing, but didn't and had all the prior knowledge in the world to stop it, but didn't and and there's just a ton there and and it took years and years and years before somebody finally, I think, leave the name.
I think it came out in court in the Jesse Trinidad case that this FBI project Pat Conn and then it turned out that there was so much going on there, including the gun shop in Arizona that ended up being implicated in the gun walking scandal in the Obama years that was one of the same gun shops that had been set up by the FBI in the first place, I think, or had been part of this Pat Conn operation going way back to the 90s.
Wow, that's fascinating.
I didn't know that.
You know, it goes in the realm of, oh, that's a big right wing conspiracy theory.
But on the other hand, you know, Danny Colson, who helped run the Oklahoma bombing investigation, said that, yeah, we didn't nail all these angles down.
They admitted that they didn't want to risk the death penalty against McVeigh, but that was their excuse by implicating the rest of his friends who did it when the real reason was that the FBI could have stopped it and they were afraid of accountability on that.
But I would love to see a reporter of your caliber and with your experience in the FBI and these investigations take a brand new, fresh look from the 2019 perspective on Pat Conn and what it really meant and the death that Kenny's trying to do and the rest of it, too, if he got into it.
I'd love to see it.
Yeah, I'll look it up.
Yeah, I appreciate the tip.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, listen, you do such great work and I am so lucky to have you come on the show and talk with us about it as you do.
So thank you again, Trevor.
Of course.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That is Trevor Aronson.
He wrote The Terror Factory about, of course, the FBI.
Yeah, they're The Terror Factory.
And here he is at The Intercept.
Informant reveals FBI's already vast powers to investigate right-wing extremists.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org at ScottHorton.org AntiWar.com and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Climbed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us
