After nearly three years of making a request to the FBI for documents concerning the website Stormfront, the agency responded to a journalist telling her that their records concerning the organization are “lost”:
It took two and a half years for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to tell journalist Emma Best it misplaced (or just plain lost) chunks of investigative records about the hate-filled white supremacist forum Stormfront.
According to MuckRock, which broke the news, Best asked for all investigative records on the infamous forum that the FBI had in its possession. Instead, the bureau provided her with 104-pages of pre-processed records and admitted, “there were additional records potentially responsive for your Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts (FOIPA) request.”
The FBI then explained it lost those records.
“We were advised that the potentially responsive records were not in their expected location and could not be located after a reasonable search. Following a reasonable waiting period, another attempt was made to obtain this material. This search for the missing records also met with unsuccessful results,” the agency said.
Stormfront—a hateful online forum of neo-Nazi content boasting “White Pride, Worldwide” in its slogan, was established by a former member of the Ku Klux Klan in 1995—has in the past been seen as a gathering place for domestic terrorists, with its users once linked to over 100 murders according to a 2014 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Organized as a message board, users can share articles and engage in discussions, which has helped build a hateful community of like-minded users.
Best did tweet that the FBI often comes up with these types of responses to vast FOIA requests and it doesn’t always mean the agency lost the records.
“To be clear: FBI claims this a lot,” she said. “My implication wasn’t that they lost it on purpose, just that they either didn’t look very hard or have an organizational system that would have Hoover spinning in his grave.”
With a spate of violent white nationalist terrorism over the last year, the FBI and broader federal authorities have come under fire for not taking the threat of domestic terror seriously and failing to predict its severity. Losing records on perhaps one of the key radicalization grounds on the internet for white nationalism doesn’t exactly indenture much faith the bureau sees neo-Nazi terror on the same level as ISIS. (source, source)
Years ago, there was an infamous neo-Nazi name Hal Turner who was known for promoting violence and revolution in his shows. He was eventually arrested and brought to court in Connecticut after he called for violence against three state employees. During the trial in Hartford in 2009, Hal Turner asserted that he broke no laws because he was trained by the FBI and for a period of at least five years, from 2002 to 2007, worked for the FBI in a professional capacity provoking people to violence:
A lawyer for Harold “Hal” Turner, the blogger and Internet radio host accused of encouraging people to “take up arms” against two Connecticut legislators and a state ethics official, said Tuesday that the comments are protected by the First Amendment.
Turner knew just where the line was between protected political speech and criminal conduct because the FBI taught him when the agency used him as an informant, his attorney, Michael A. Orozco of Newark, N.J., said outside a Hartford courtroom.
“Mr. Turner was trained by the FBI,” Orozco said. “He was told where the line was – what he could say.” Turner, of New Jersey, worked as an “agent provocateur” for the FBI from roughly 2002 to 2007, Orozco said.
“His job was basically to publish information which would cause other parties to act in a manner that would cause their arrest,” Orozco said. On several occasions, Turner passed on to the FBI information about threats from readers.
The comments that got Turner in trouble were written and published after Turner left the service of the FBI, Orozco said. An FBI spokesman in Washington declined to comment on any role Turner may have had with the bureau.
Turner was charged by the Connecticut State Capitol Police on June 3 with inciting injury to persons or property after he posted material on his website criticizing proposed legislation that would have shifted some control of Roman Catholic Church affairs from the church to lay members. Turner was accused of targeting state Rep. Michael Lawlor, state Sen. Andrew McDonald and Thomas Jones, an employee in the State Ethics Office.
He allegedly threatened to make public their home addresses and wrote, “It is our intent to foment direct action against these individuals personally. These beastly government officials should be made an example of as a warning to others in government: Obey the Constitution or die.”
On June 24, federal authorities arrested Turner on charges that he threatened to assault and murder three federal judges in Chicago in retaliation for their ruling upholding a gun ban.
“Let me be the first to say this plainly: These judges deserve to be killed,” Turner allegedly wrote on his website.
But Orozco, writing in a motion to dismiss the federal charges, said that as offensive as some may find those writings, they are protected speech.
In Hartford Tuesday, Orozco said he will use the same First Amendment argument to defend Turner on the Connecticut charges.
“Mr. Turner’s blog tends to have a small following of right-wing followers,” Orozco wrote in his federal motion. “The language used by this segment of the population to express its views is sometimes harsh or often peppered with violence. Regardless of how many people may have viewed it, given his public status and shock jock persona, there can be no doubt that Turner’s statements were nothing more than politically charged rhetoric of someone unhappy with the judge’s opinion in NRA v. Chicago, and are therefore protected.”
Turner’s writing is “the same political hyperbole” that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled is protected speech. “There was never intent in Mr. Turner’s words to incite violence, nor is there any evidence that the judges in this case ever felt threatened by Mr. Turner’s statements,” Orozco wrote. “They are merely the expressions of a shock jock who uses exaggeration to make his political points. When these statements are viewed within the context of right-wing propaganda, they are typical language of that segment of the population; and as such, the court here cannot find them to be criminal without infringing on Mr. Turner’s First Amendment rights.” (source, source)
The Hal Turner story is a crucial reminder that the entire National Socialist movement, even from the pre-World War II days, always was and always will be a government-backed operation whose purpose is to provoke the people of a society to war on behalf of the banking and industrial interests who stand to benefit from it.
What then is to be said of Stormfront and its revolutionary owner, Don Black, who is openly affiliated with David Duke? What is to be said about the funding of Stormfron, about which almost nothing is known? Why is Duke so ofte promoted as the “face” of “white nationalism” and has been for so many years?
Could it be that Duke, Black, and Stormfront are part of a government operation whose mission in talking about “white nationalism” and criticizing Jews is not to actually promote “white nationalism” or even to give a legitimate criticism of Jewish behavior, but to make themselves the central point of control over the public discourse of these two items in order that they might be used as selectively-applied weapons against the public for the interests of those who fund them?
The FBI does not just “lose” papers on somebody, and given so man “co-incidences” involving government actions and strange or outright illegal activity which have been definitively proved, it would seem only to arouse more suspicion with Stormfront as just another outlet for controlling people’s behavior and giving them an illusion of choice or action when they are in fact just serving the will of a much more powerful and evil master who will then turn on him later.
Comments are closed.