[‘Outraged’ Senator Ron Wyden urges agency to explain tactics
from 2020 protests reminiscent of rogue behaviour from decades past]
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FEARS OF RENEWED FBI ABUSE OF POWER AFTER INFORMANT INFILTRATED BLM
PROTESTS
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Ed Pilkington
February 14, 2023
The Guardian
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_ ‘Outraged’ Senator Ron Wyden urges agency to explain tactics
from 2020 protests reminiscent of rogue behaviour from decades past _
A crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters runs from pepper ball shots
from riot police in Denver in May 2020., Paul Winner/Rex/Shutterstock
The FBI’s use of an informant to infiltrate Black Lives Matter in
Denver [[link removed]] during the wave of
protests over the 2020 police killing of George Floyd has prompted
concern in Congress that the federal agency is once again abusing its
powers to harass and intimidate minority groups.
Ron Wyden, the Democratic senator from Oregon, is calling for the FBI
[[link removed]] to explain how it came to
recruit a violent felon as an informant who then went on to gain
prominence among Denver racial justice activists. The informant is
alleged to have encouraged protesters to engage in increasingly
violent demonstrations while trying to entrap them in criminal
misdeeds.
“If the allegations are true, the FBI’s use of an informant to spy
on first amendment-protected activity and stoke violence at peaceful
protests is an outrageous abuse of law-enforcement resources and
authority,” Wyden told the Guardian.
Wyden sits on the Senate intelligence committee which has oversight
over federal intelligence-gathering agencies, including the FBI. He
also fought for public disclosure of Donald Trump’s deployment in
2020 of more than 750 officers
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to his home town of Portland, Oregon, based on what he called
“politicised and false intelligence reports”.
The FBI’s infiltration of Black Lives Matter in Denver “appears to
show another instance of the Trump administration trampling on the
rights of Americans in order to divide our country and gain a
political advantage”, Wyden said. “The FBI owes the public a full
accounting of its actions, including how anyone responsible for
attempting to entrap and discredit racial justice activists will be
held accountable.”
The Guardian contacted the FBI for a response but did not immediately
hear back.
The new revelations of alleged FBI abuses towards Black activists
comes at a paradoxical moment, given the efforts of the incoming
Republican House leadership. On Thursday Jim Jordan, a staunch Trump
loyalist from Ohio, chaired the opening hearing
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of his subcommittee on the “weaponization of the federal
government” which seeks to show that the main victim of federal
overreach is not minority and progressive groups but Donald Trump and
his far-right supporters.
The actions of the FBI informant, Michael Windecker, or Mickey, as he
was known, are revealed in a new 10-episode podcast by the
investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson. Drawing on hours of
undercover FBI recordings, along with internal FBI reports and
interviews Aaronson conducted with genuine racial justice protest
leaders, Alphabet Boys [[link removed]] pieces
together how Windecker inveigled himself into Black Lives Matter from
May 2020.
Windecker, who the FBI paid $20,000 to spy on the activists, stood out
from the crowd. He was white, while most protesters in Denver were
African American, and dressed in military fatigues. He drove an
ostentatious silver hearse with a boot filled with AR-15-style
semi-automatic rifles and other firearms.
Despite his glaring profile, Windecker managed to convince activists
that he was committed to the struggle for racial justice and could
help them cope with volatility on the streets. He bragged about having
served with the French Foreign Legion and the Kurdish Peshmerga.
As 2020’s long hot summer of protests
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deepened, Windecker became more prominent in the Denver scene. He also
became more proactive in his advice, encouraging activists to consider
taking the protests to the next level.
He told one Black Lives Matter leader: “I can teach you how to shoot
a gun, to hand-to-hand combat, all the way up to like blowing up
fucking buildings and guerrilla warfare tactics and sabotage.”
Audio clippings from the undercover recordings obtained by Aaronson
reveal what Windecker then went on to ask the activist: “How extreme
do you want it to go? Do you want to learn to shoot a gun and throw
someone around, or do you want to go all the way uptown? If that’s
what you want to do, I can make it happen.”
The podcast reports that Windecker went on to give an activist $1,500
to buy a gun for him, which led to the individual being arrested on
weapons charges. Aaronson also alleges that the informant helped to
organize a series of demonstrations in August 2020 that led to violent
assaults on police stations.
Windecker denied being an FBI informant, but when Aaronson told him
about the recordings he fell silent.
Congressman Jordan and his Republican team have taken to calling their
“weaponization” subcommittee “the new Church committee”. The
reference is to the post-Watergate 1970s investigation led by the
Democratic senator Frank Church into the rogue behaviour and abuses of
power by the FBI and other federal agencies.
[Members of the original Church committee in Washington in 1975.]
Members of the original Church committee in Washington in 1975.
Photograph: Henry Griffin/AP
The attempt by Trump-allied Republicans to claim the mantle of the
Church committee to justify weakening federal action against far-right
attacks on American democracy has incensed those who participated in
the 1970s investigation. Gary Hart, the former senator from Colorado
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surviving member of the Church committee, told the Guardian that the
new House “weaponization” panel was the antithesis of what he and
his colleagues had done.
“We did not have a partisan axe to grind, we bent over backwards to
ensure the Church committee was not a partisan activity,” Hart said.
“What is going on in the House today is a purely Republican
operation. They are trying to go back to the bad old days by
destroying oversight, particularly as it applies to rightwing militias
and the insurrection on January 6.”
It is perhaps worth remembering what those “bad old days” of the
1960s and 70s invoked by Hart looked like. Before the Church committee
succeeded in imposing guardrails on the surveillance and other
activities of the FBI, the bureau was largely untethered.
J Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s infamous director, ran rampant,
instructing agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and
otherwise neutralize” dissenting political groups in the US,
especially African American ones. Under the vast Counter Intelligence
Program
[[link removed]],
Cointelpro, which ran from 1956 to 1971, informants were used to
infiltrate the civil rights movement and the Black Panthers, going so
far as to blackmail Martin Luther King in an attempt to cajole him
into killing himself.
One of the Bureau’s favourite tricks was for its undercover FBI
informants to spread rumours that the real leaders of leftwing and
civil rights movements were themselves undercover FBI informants. The
technique, which had a devastating impact on the Panthers, is known in
the trade as “snitch-jacketing”.
Alphabet Boys reveals that, in a chilling echo of Cointelpro, the FBI
informant Windecker used exactly the same “snitch-jacketing”
tactic to sow discord among the Black Lives Matter crowd in Denver
during the 2020 summer of protests. At a time when his own cover was
in danger of being blown, he planted seeds of doubt about key leaders
suggesting they might be cooperating with police.
Hart told the Guardian that he had no special knowledge of the events
in Denver. But he said that the podcast’s disclosures were a timely
warning against complacency.
“The Denver story and other recent stories indicate that in some
ways oversight may have become lax,” he said. “Maybe – and I
don’t know this for sure, but maybe – the FBI is slipping back
into the old patterns.”
===
* Denver Protests; FBI Informants; Church Committee;
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