Two Florida House Republicans are among a handful demanding to know what role FBI informants played in helping incite the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6.
Reps. Matt Gaetz, of Fort Walton Beach, and Bill Posey, of Rockledge, signed a letter, dated June 16, to FBI Director Christopher Wray seeking answers to “many questions (that) remain unanswered” while the events of Jan. 6 “come to clearer relief.”
The letter’s other signers include GOP Reps. Paul Gosar of Arizona, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and Louie Gohmert of Texas.
The lawmakers essentially ask three questions, after noting that the Senate Homeland Security and Rules committees jointly released a 95-page report that outlined problems that impeded efforts to prevent the riot. Those included, according to the letter, “federal intelligence agencies failing to warn of a potential for violence, to a lack of planning and preparation by U.S. Capitol Police and law enforcement leadership.”
The letter to Wray asks:
First, in the year leading up to Jan. 6 and on Jan. 6 itself “to what extent were the three primary militia groups (the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters) infiltrated by agencies of the federal government (including the FBI), or informants of said agencies?”
Secondly, “exactly how many federal undercover agents or confidential informants were present at the Capitol or in the Capitol during the ‘siege’ and what roles did they play (merely passive informants or active instigators)?”
Finally, “Of all the unindicted co-conspirators referenced in the charging documents of those indicted for crimes on 1/6, how many worked as a confidential informant or as an undercover operative for the federal government (FBI, Army Counterintelligence, etc.)?”
The lawmakers gave Wray an Aug. 1 deadline to respond.
Those questions were asked verbatim and rhetorically two days before the letter by Revolver News, the conservative news website that has done diligent reporting on the Jan. 6 mayhem. Gaetz cited the article in a press release to constituents.
“I certainly hope our nation’s premier law enforcement organization is not actually working to violate federal law, so I look forward to Director Wray’s response in August to my letter regarding this issue,” Gaetz said in the statement.
In a lengthy report that provided the preface to the lawmakers’ letter to Wray, Revolver News noted something curious about Jan. 6 and that alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in October, in which the FBI made 14 arrests.
According to Revolver News, at least five of the supposed Whitmer kidnappers were undercover FBI agents or confidential informants. And after that plot was foiled, Revolver noted, the head of the FBI office in Detroit was promoted to D.C.
Regarding Jan. 6 and possible parallels to the Michigan incident, the website observed, “In many cases the unindicted co-conspirators appear to be much more aggressive and egregious participants in the very so-called ‘conspiracy’ serving as the basis for charging those indicted.”
“The question immediately arises as to why this is the case and forces us to consider whether certain individuals are being protected from indictment because they were involved in 1/6 as undercover operatives or confidential informants for a federal agency,” the report continues.
“If it turns out that an extraordinary percentage of the members of these groups involved in planning and executing the Capitol Siege were federal informants or undercover operatives, the implications would be nothing short of staggering. This would be far worse than the already bad situation of the government knowing about the possibility of violence and doing nothing,” Revolver News added.
“Instead, this would imply that elements of the federal government were active instigators in the most egregious and spectacular aspects of 1/6, amounting to a monumental entrapment scheme used as a pretext to imprison otherwise harmless protestors at the Capitol — and in a much larger sense used to frame the entire MAGA movement as potential domestic terrorists.”
Wray has a duty to shed light on this possibility. And given the FBI’s role in promoting the false Trump-Russia collusion narrative, the American people deserve answers.
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