Last week, during an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, FBI Director Chris Wray said that the FBI doesn’t “monitor protests.” Subsequently, an incredulous public response ensued via every social media platform imaginable.
Having supervised the FBI’s Washington Field Office (WFO) surveillance squads, I can say with complete confidence that the FBI does monitor protests. But, that statement doesn’t necessarily contradict Director Wray’s comments to Holt.
During the summer of “mostly peaceful” protests in 2020, the FBI was involved in monitoring protestors — more accurately described as rioters. The BLM movement, supplemented by ANTIFA anarchists, capitalized on the use of force incident that resulted in the death of George Floyd. Despite Floyd’s extensive criminal record, and the toxic levels of fentanyl and methamphetamine in his body at the time of his death, Floyd was lionized by BLM activists. He was simply a catalyst for leftists waiting for an opportunity to agitate and profit. Former Baltimore Police officer Eric Garner’s use of force continues to be hotly debated, and the now infamous phrase “I can’t breathe” was used by BLM agitators to spark a wave of rioting, looting, destruction, and death not seen since the LA riots of 1992.
A more effective action program could not have been concocted in Moscow or Beijing. All of America was focused on the anarchy unleashed in the name of police brutality and institutional racism. Americans would do well to remember, chaos is an often utilized technique of foreign adversaries in ongoing efforts to weaken American influence abroad. While social media pundits play checkers, foreign intelligence services play three dimensional chess, often co-opting domestic issues and media voices obsessed with pursuing their own interests to the detriment of institutions tasked with national security responsibilities.
As citizens, we should be thoroughly skeptical of those who advocate for the dismantlement of any component of our national security apparatus. Because, quite simply, that is also the goal of every foreign intelligence service which exists, solely to advance tyranny. Though abuses abound throughout the intelligence community, only robust efforts to reform can balance the critical interests of civil liberties and national survival. It is a fact that we are currently in an asymmetric life and death battle, struggling against a fifth column, and its useful idiots, as well as existential external threats.
Though the FBI tasked surveillance resources to monitor BLM and ANTIFA riots, that allocation of resources paled in comparison to the response to January 6th (J6) protests on Capitol Hill in 2021. During my twenty year career as an FBI agent, I had never witnessed an investigation of such scale and proportion. The J6 investigation involved every FBI division and resulted in the creation of three new WFO squads dedicated to the J6 matter. In fact, after my retirement as a supervisor, my supervisory position was reassigned to one of the J6 squads, leaving a single supervisor to manage WFO’s surveillance operations. Hardly ideal.
The common denominator between the BLM and ANTIFA riots and the J6 protests is violence. However, the scale of the violence involved in both events in is no way comparable. And, the violence perpetrated on J6 can be reasonably attributed to anarchist elements like ANTIFA. As Americans have witnessed since the release of J6 footage, the vast majority of people on Capitol Hill that day were conducting themselves in a peaceful manner. No law enforcement deaths were involved — that Democrat canard has been thoroughly debunked. The only homicide that day was perpetrated on Ashli Babbitt by Capitol Police Officer Michael Byrd.
However, threats of violence have been the pretext for DOJ intrusion into local school board matters, and has resulted in the furor directed at the FBI surveillance of soccer moms. As disconcerting as this is, it should be more properly viewed as a Biden administration abuse of the DOJ and FBI through it’s feckless instrumentalities, Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Chris Wray. Either could have refused to utilize FBI surveillance resources in that way. I’ve personally conducted countless surveillance operations on domestic criminal, counterterrorism, and counterintelligence targets at sensitive locations. I can’t say I would have been comfortable surveilling a soccer mom in her minivan, but it’s a far more innocuous enterprise than the public has been led to believe. Most agents are common sense people, many from military and local law enforcement backgrounds. Rest assured, they aren’t shy about being vocal when tasked with something they view as spurious and a waste of investigative resources. It’s not a popular or clickbait-worthy bit of information, but it happens to be the truth.
The recent eruption of Hamas activism on college campuses has many people clamoring for FBI involvement — by many of the same dolts who have been militating for defunding, abolishing, or otherwise deconstructing a critical component of our national security apparatus. It all just sounds so bolshevik to me. Maybe that’s because I’m an old counterintelligence agent, and I spent a lot of time peering into the hall of mirrors. In any case, the FBI may very well be watching these Hamas stooges. In fact, if I were a betting man, I’d put money on it.
The occurrence or substantive threat of violence is usually the trigger for the assignment of FBI surveillance resources to an otherwise First Amendment protected activity. And that’s what Director Wray was getting at when he said, “Of course demonstrations themselves are not something that we, the FBI, get involved in, but when violence ensues, that’s when we get concerned, when you have threats of violence.” You probably haven’t heard that quote from Holt’s interview. That’s because social media pundits can’t twist you up and drive you to their content with a reasonable response.
So, the FBI does monitor protests — violent ones, and that’s basically what Wray said. But, I’m not suggesting citizens should relax, not with a cadre of DEI employees flooding the ranks. Trump can undo, with the stroke of a pen, what Biden has managed to corrupt. And he should on day one.