Federal Agent Quotes

... If there is anyone present here today who objects to this union, please take it up with the two armed federal agents who are getting hitched.

And thus Charles found himself wandering around a hotel, trailing federal agents as he held a cardboard coffee cup holder in each hand, instead of out killing misbehaving werewolves.

She shook her head slowly. “I don’t believe you. You can’t be a cop.” “Not a cop.” “Federal agent?” “FBI.” “Even more unlikely.” “J. Edgar rolls over in his grave every day, but that’s the way it is.

As soon as there was an answer, he stepped closer to the speaker and said, "Federal agents, ma'am" "Nice try, asshole

What other stuff do they teach you at federal agent school?” I ask. It shouldn’t bother me that he’s fitting in so well. So what if he’s faking it? Good for him. I guess what bothers me is him faking it better than I am.

‎"I feel certain that Conservatism is through unless Conservatives can demonstrate and communicate the difference between being concerned with [the unemployed, the sick without medical care, human welfare, etc.] and believing that the federal government is the proper agent for their solution.

I think Bob appreciated my outfit. He made me buy the more expensive pendant. You might think that was to my disadvantage, but I accept that status comes with a price.” “Not usually so immediately.” I shake my head. “You better not be hitting on federal agent ladies. They’ll arrest you.” His grin widens. “I like handcuffs.” I groan. “There is something seriously wrong with you.” “Nothing that a night being worked over by a hot representative of justice couldn’t fix.

Well, you know what Stalin said: it’s not who votes that counts. It’s who counts the votes.

As a federal agent, I want you to know I'm disgusted by your lack of respect for the law." "But you're impressed too," Henry said without turning around. "You're disguspressed.

this morning I go to pay for breakfast and there, right there at the Kroger check-out, staring me in the face is a national magazine with your picture on the cover. Counterfeit Countess, it said. In great big, bold type: Counterfeit! Countess! Counterfeit,” he reiterated, “a word interchangeable with forgery and often associated with arrest.” Ah, yes. Patrice had called from Austin and warned me she had sold the story to Woman’s World magazine. “Last sentence?” Mittwede asked. “You know what it is?’ “No, I’ve not seen it.” “Tanya says, ‘I’m going to grow up and be a con artist.’” It had struck me as pretty funny when I said it, but Mittwede had better delivery. I think it was the hysteria. He was saying, “I remember that story. That was like a year and a half ago. You didn’t tell me you were that girl, the Dallas Countess. I already knew the story but I read it again, and I know all the cops have read it again, too. And now your picture is with Passport Services and at the check-out counter. You think federal agents don’t buy groceries? You’re fucking crazy. We’re going to be arrested.” “You maybe need to take a Valium.” “I threw them all in the fire!”   ~~~~~~

Yep, I was so mature, I decided I would just have to reward myself by doing the naked lambada with a Federal Agent.

Once, when a government agent arrived at her home with a ream of paper that documented the case against her, she asked if that law was more powerful than natural law. He told her that, yes, it was a powerful law, the law of the federal government. Then, she said, it should be more powerful that this, and she threw it into her woodstove.

*You're a woman, women are pigs.You pig-woman* Well,that Miss Federal Pigs to you*

While I oppose most gun control proposals, there is one group of Americans I do believe should be disarmed: federal agents.

Shit, Karl, you can’t say that in front of a federal agent,” Aiden protested, his eyes wide. “I’m not. I’m saying it in private to my…” Karl shrugged. “Boyfriend, partner, whatever the hell title you want, if fucktoy’s not acceptable, and I’m guessing it isn’t.” “It really isn’t,” Aiden said, a warning snap in his voice, “and neither is threatening to kill people.

According to one study, “a quarter of the workers rebuilding the city were immigrants lacking papers, almost all of them Hispanic, making far less money than legal workers.” In Mississippi, a class-action lawsuit forced several companies to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in back wages to immigrant workers. Some were not paid at all. On one Halliburton/KBR job site, undocumented immigrant workers reported being wakened in the middle of the night by their employer (a subsubcontractor), who allegedly told them that immigration agents were on their way. Most workers fled to avoid arrest; after all, they could end up in one of the new immigration prisons that Halliburton/KBR had been contracted to build for the federal government.

We are gathered here tonight to join these two lives, these two hearts, these two souls, in marriage. If there is anyone present here today who objects to this union, please take it up with the two armed federal agents

We are gathered here tonight to join these two lives, these two hearts, these two souls, in marriage. If there is anyone present here today who objects to this union, please take it up with the two armed federal agents who are getting hitched.” Zane

This monograph by Special Agent Ken Lanning (1992) is merely a guide for those who may investigate this phenomenon, as the title indicates, and not a study. The author is a well known skeptic regarding cult and ritual abuse allegations and has consulted on a number of cases but to our knowledge has not personally investigated the majority of these cases, some of which have produced convictions. p179 [refers to Lanning, K. V. (1992) Investigator's guide to allegations of "ritual" child abuse. Quantico, VA: National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime.]

Perhaps it was true a century ago—I deeply regret that it is no longer true—but the United States criminal justice system long ago lost any legitimate claim to the loyal cooperation of American citizens. You cannot write tens of thousands of criminal statutes, including many touching upon conduct that is neither immoral nor dangerous, write those laws as broadly as you can imagine, scatter them throughout the thousands of pages of the United States Code—and then expect decent law-abiding, unsuspecting citizens to cooperate with an investigation into whether they may have violated some law they have never even heard about. The next time some police officer or government agent asks you whether you would be willing to answer a few questions about where you have been and what you have been doing, you must respectfully but very firmly decline.

I saw, during the midterm campaign of 2006, how difficult it was for opponents of stem cell research to run against hope. And so it was in the 2008 presidential contest. This was hope in the collective, a definition that should always apply to the expression of a people's political will. Christopher Reeve had believed in a formula: optimism + information = hope. In this case, the informing agent was us. Granted, it may all look different in six months to a year, but it is hard not to be buoyed by the desire for positive change as articulated and advanced by Barack Obama. It is okay to hope. This time the aspiration of many will not be derided as desperation by a few, as it was during the stem cell debate of '06. By the time you read this book, President Obama and the 111th Congress will have established federal funding for stem cell research. The dam has broken. Just as I'd hoped.

VERY EARLY ONE MORNING in July 1977, the FBI, having been tipped off about Operation Snow White, carried out raids on Scientology offices in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, carting off nearly fifty thousand documents. One of the files was titled “Operation Freakout.” It concerned the treatment of Paulette Cooper, the journalist who had published an exposé of Scientology, The Scandal of Scientology, six years earlier. After having been indicted for perjury and making bomb threats against Scientology, Cooper had gone into a deep depression. She stopped eating. At one point, she weighed just eighty-three pounds. She considered suicide. Finally, she persuaded a doctor to give her sodium pentothal, or “truth serum,” and question her under the anesthesia. The government was sufficiently impressed that the prosecutor dropped the case against her, but her reputation was ruined, she was broke, and her health was uncertain. The day after the FBI raid on the Scientology headquarters, Cooper was flying back from Africa, on assignment for a travel magazine, when she read a story in the International Herald Tribune about the raid. One of the files the federal agents discovered was titled “Operation Freakout.” The goal of the operation was to get Cooper “incarcerated in a mental institution or jail.

Thank all that is holy that we don’t have mandatory military service, or these people might actually be dangerous.

In the event that Ripley is determined to merely be pretending to provide services for SPYDER while, in actuality, continuing to act in the capacity of a federal agent, then SPYDER shall retaliate in a manner such as, but not limited to, the following: removal of Ripley’s head by force from the rest of his body, extraction of Ripley’s cerebellum via his nasal passages, excessive bludgeoning, or defenestration.” Despite

would be impossible to tell the difference, in all that gear, between an agente federal de migración and a narcotraficante in disguise, and Luca isn’t sure there’s much difference between them anyway because a gun is a gun is a gun.

The police state We now have well over 100,000 domestic federal law enforcement agents armed and ready to enforce the laws to “make everyone safe and secure.” We also have our TSA “friends” at the airports protecting us with an army of over 50,000 bureaucrats. The Department of Homeland Security has more than 240,000 employees. The FBI has about 35,000 employees. Around 90,000 IRS employees enforce draconian tax laws that limit self-sufficiency, put people in fear, and are used as a political tool to help suppress dissenters to the empire. There are many thousands of others “making sure we’re safe and secure from our foreign enemies” while our domestic enemies, including politicians, bureaucrats, and government profiteers, are ignored.

A friend once told me a story about a former Black Panther leader in a Midwest community who in the 1960s had his phone tapped, while federal agents followed him everywhere. Forced to go underground, he later entered the drug trade & eventually got good at it. However, he told my friend, soon after this nobody kept tabs on him--he wasn't followed or harassed. He later became the number one drug dealer in the area. As he said this, my friend noted a breaking in his voice; the pain, perhaps, of being pushed away from being a committed community activist.

So street-level FBI agents turned secrets into information, and senior FBI leaders brought that information to reporters, to prosecutors, to federal grand juries, and into the public realm. That was the beginning of the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency. Without the FBI, the reporters would have been lost.

The fact that Cooper Dayton was running down the side streets of Bethesda and not driving back to D.C. by now was proof that his father had been dead wrong. His haircut was plenty professional. Too professional, even. How else could Ben Pultz have made him as a federal agent from thirty feet away and taken off running? Not from his jeans and T-shirt. Not from the weapons carefully hidden under his intentionally oversized jacket. It had to be the bureau-regulation hair. Apparently Pultz didn’t think he looked like a “boy band reject,” though Cooper doubted his dad, Sherriff Dayton, would be swayed by the opinion of a fleeing homicide suspect.

The ambulance arrived when the police cars did. They were accompanied by a man in a black suit who had the look of a federal agent. It didn’t surprise Cecily that he went right up to Tate and drew him to one side. While Cecily was being checked over by a paramedic, Gabrini, who’d already been loaded onto a gurney, was being watched by two police officers. Tate came back to Cecily while the federal agent paused by the police officers. “You can take him to the hospital to have his ribs strapped,” the man told the ambulance attendant. “But we’ll have transport for him to New Jersey with two federal marshals.” “Marshals!” Gabrini exclaimed, holding his side, because the outburst had hurt. “Marshals,” the federal agent replied. There was something menacing about the smile that accompanied the words. “It seems that you’re wanted in Jersey for much more serious crimes than breaking an entering and assault with a deadly weapon, Mr. Gabrini.” “Not in Jersey,” Gabrini began. “No, those other charges, they’re in D.C.” “You’ll get to D.C. eventually,” the federal agent murmured, then the dark man smiled. And Gabrini knew at once that he wasn’t connected in any way at all to the government. Gabrini was suddenly yelling his head off, begging for federal protection, but nobody paid him much attention. He was carried off in the ambulance with the sedan following close behind.

Former federal prosecutor Doug Burns is convinced there were ample grounds to fire Comey, none of which amounted to obstruction of justice: Comey’s announcement of a no prosecution of Hillary Clinton was totally improper, as FBI officials or agents never make such prosecutorial decisions. Similarly, Comey’s factual condemnation of her was totally inappropriate. And last, his explanations of the law were both bizarre and incorrect. While the president did himself no favors in his interview with NBC’s Lest Holt, legally the Comey termination was not obstruction of justice.58 While no legitimate case can be made against Trump for obstruction, a case can be made that Comey committed crimes.

My personal heroes are not athletes, musicians, or actors. My heroes are our military service members, law enforcement officers, and federal special agents who put their lives on the line to keep America safe from its enemies. I sleep well because they often don’t. My freedom isn’t free; it comes at an extremely high price. I’m a firm believer in the Wounded Warriors Project trademarked statement: “The greatest casualty is being forgotten.” The

De facto segregation, we tell ourselves, has various causes. when African Americans moved into a neighborhood like Ferguson, a few racially prejudiced white families decided to leave, and then as the number of black families grew, the neighborhood deteriorated, and "white flight" followed. Real estate agents steered whites away from black neighborhoods, and blacks away from white ones. Banks discriminated with "redlining," refusing to give mortgages to African Americans or extracting unusually severe terms from them with subprime loans. African Americans haven't generally gotten the educations that would enable them to earn sufficient incomes to live in white suburbs, and, as a result, many remain concentrated in urban neighborhoods. Besides, black families prefer to live with one another. All this has some truth, but it remains a small part of the truth, submerged by a far more important one: until the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. Today's residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States. The policy was so systematic and forceful that its effects endure to the present time. Without our government's purposeful imposition of racial segregation, the other causes - private prejudice, white flight, real estate steering, bank redlining, income differences, and self-segregation - still would have existed but with far less opportunity for expression. Segregation by intentional government action is not de facto. Rather, it is what courts call de jure: segregation by law and public policy.

Even the cinema stories of fabulous Hollywood are loaded. One has only to listen to the cheers of an African audience as Hollywood’s heroes slaughter red Indians or Asiatics to understand the effectiveness of this weapon. For, in the developing continents, where the colonialist heritage has left a vast majority still illiterate, even the smallest child gets the message contained in the blood and thunder stories emanating from California. And along with murder and the Wild West goes an incessant barrage of anti-socialist propaganda, in which the trade union man, the revolutionary, or the man of dark skin is generally cast as the villain, while the policeman, the gum-shoe, the Federal agent — in a word, the CIA — type spy is ever the hero. Here, truly, is the ideological under-belly of those political murders which so often use local people as their instruments. While Hollywood takes care of fiction, the enormous monopoly press, together with the outflow of slick, clever, expensive magazines, attends to what it chooses to call ‘news. Within separate countries, one or two news agencies control the news handouts, so that a deadly uniformity is achieved, regardless of the number of separate newspapers or magazines; while internationally, the financial preponderance of the United States is felt more and more through its foreign correspondents and offices abroad, as well as through its influence over inter-national capitalist journalism. Under this guise, a flood of anti-liberation propaganda emanates from the capital cities of the West, directed against China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria, Ghana and all countries which hack out their own independent path to freedom. Prejudice is rife. For example, wherever there is armed struggle against the forces of reaction, the nationalists are referred to as rebels, terrorists, or frequently ‘communist terrorists'!

Since 1917, threatening the president has been a federal crime. As later amended, the law carries a penalty of up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000, or both. The same penalty applies to threatening the president-elect, vice president, vice president–elect, or any officer in the line of succession to become president. Threats against the first lady and first children are evaluated in the same way as threats against the president and vice president, but the number of threats against them is far lower.

Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in the federal building that housed the Department of Homeland Security, about fifteen stories up, locked in a standard federal issue interrogation room. Metal chair, metal table, big one-way mirror window, just like the movies. My arms were bound behind me with at least three flex-cuffs. The only addition to the room were the four tactical team members standing in each corner of the room, M4 rifles slung across their chests. Books, Splitter, Data and old Rattler himself, Agent Simmons.

For the US to be like Russia today,” he wrote, “it would be necessary to have massive corruption by the majority of members of Congress as well as by the Departments of Justice and Treasury, and agents of the FBI, CIA, DIA, IRS, Marshall Service, Border Patrol, state and local police officers, the Federal Reserve Bank, Supreme Court justices, US district court judges, support of the varied organized crime families, the leadership of the Fortune 500 companies, at least half of the banks in the US, and the New York Stock Exchange.

Nearly two decades later, on his final day in office, President Clinton had issued Rich a highly unusual pardon. It was unusual because the pardon was given to a fugitive, which was, to my knowledge, unprecedented. It was also unusual, and suspicious, because it had not gone through the normal review process at the Department of Justice. The pardon had only been seen by then–Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, who, without seeking input from the prosecutors or agents who knew the case, cryptically told the White House he was “neutral, leaning positive.” The New York Times editorial board called the pardon “a shocking abuse of federal power.

If there was any doubt about the authenticity of his fake ID, it would now be put to the test. As Sage waited for the Secret Service to do their due diligence, I wondered how much our mission to find Dad would be set back by Sage taking a quick detour to federal prison. “He’s clear,” the lead agent finally said. Great, we could go in. Sage politely insisted that Rayna and I enter before him. “Not sure that’s such a good idea,” I said, but he wouldn’t hear it. Rayna, Ben, and I shared a knowing smile. Then I shrugged and stepped over the threshold…immediately triggering the Piri alarm. I don’t know how she knew; she was all the way in the kitchen. But the minute I stepped into the foyer she raced in, arms waving in the air, a high-pitched scream keening from her lungs. “AIIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!” “He made me do it, Piri,” I said, happily tossing Sage under the bus. “I tried to tell him-“ Piri strode right up to Sage, her head barely reaching his sternum, and jabbed her finger into his chest to emphasize each scolding word. “You never let a woman enter this house before a man! Very bad luck! And when the senator’s doing business! Jaj!” She pushed us back outside, closed the door, and spit three times on the porch (barely missing the shoes of one of the Secret Service agents), then turned her baleful eyes to Sage, asking him to do the same. “I don’t think I really need to spit on Clea’s porch,” Sage said uncomfortably, but Piri’s glare only grew more and more violent until he withered under its power…and spit three times. Piri smiled smugly and opened the door, gesturing for Sage to enter. Ben went next, bending to Piri’s ear to murmur, “If it’d been me, I would have gone in first.” “That’s because you’re a smart boy,” Piri said, kissing him on both cheeks. Once we were all in, Piri greeted us as if for the first time, with huge hugs and two-cheeked kisses. As she led us to the luncheon raging in the other room, Ben crowed to Sage, “You know, a real European scholar would be up on old-school superstitions.” Sage grimaced.

President Theodore Roosevelt had created the bureau in 1908, hoping to fill the void in federal law enforcement. (Because of lingering opposition to a national police force, Roosevelt’s attorney general had acted without legislative approval, leading one congressman to label the new organization a “bureaucratic bastard.”) When White entered the bureau, it still had only a few hundred agents and only a smattering of field offices. Its jurisdiction over crimes was limited, and agents handled a hodgepodge of cases: they investigated antitrust and banking violations; the interstate shipment of stolen cars, contraceptives, prizefighting films, and smutty books; escapes by federal prisoners; and crimes committed on Indian reservations.

Hoover fed the story to sympathetic reporters—so-called friends of the bureau. One article about the case, which was syndicated by William Randolph Hearst’s company, blared, NEVER TOLD BEFORE! —How the Government with the Most Gigantic Fingerprint System on Earth Fights Crime with Unheard-of Science Refinements; Revealing How Clever Sleuths Ended a Reign of Murder and Terror in the Lonely Hills of the Osage Indian Country, and Then Rounded Up the Nation’s Most Desperate Gang In 1932, the bureau began working with the radio program The Lucky Strike Hour to dramatize its cases. One of the first episodes was based on the murders of the Osage. At Hoover’s request, Agent Burger had even written up fictional scenes, which were shared with the program’s producers. In one of these scenes, Ramsey shows Ernest Burkhart the gun he plans to use to kill Roan, saying, “Look at her, ain’t she a dandy?” The broadcasted radio program concluded, “So another story ends and the moral is identical with that set forth in all the others of this series….[ The criminal] was no match for the Federal Agent of Washington in a battle of wits.” Though Hoover privately commended White and his men for capturing Hale and his gang and gave the agents a slight pay increase—“ a small way at least to recognize their efficiency and application to duty”—he never mentioned them by name as he promoted the case. They did not quite fit the profile of college-educated recruits that became part of Hoover’s mythology. Plus, Hoover never wanted his men to overshadow him.

There has been so much misinformation spread about the nature of this interview that the actual events that took place merit discussion. After being discreetly delivered by the Secret Service to the FBI’s basement garage, Hillary Clinton was interviewed by a five-member joint FBI and Department of Justice team. She was accompanied by five members of her legal team. None of Clinton’s lawyers who were there remained investigative subjects in the case at that point. The interview, which went on for more than three hours, was conducted in a secure conference room deep inside FBI headquarters and led by the two senior special agents on the case. With the exception of the secret entry to the FBI building, they treated her like any other interview subject. I was not there, which only surprises those who don’t know the FBI and its work. The director does not attend these kinds of interviews. My job was to make final decisions on the case, not to conduct the investigation. We had professional investigators, schooled on all of the intricacies of the case, assigned to do that. We also as a matter of procedure don’t tape interviews of people not under arrest. We instead have professionals who take detailed notes. Secretary Clinton was not placed under oath during the interview, but this too was standard procedure. The FBI doesn’t administer oaths during voluntary interviews. Regardless, under federal law, it would still have been a felony if Clinton was found to have lied to the FBI during her interview, whether she was under oath or not. In short, despite a whole lot of noise in the media and Congress after the fact, the agents interviewed Hillary Clinton following the FBI’s standard operating procedures.

Here, new agents receive a total of sixteen weeks of training, combined with another twelve and a half weeks of training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) at Glynco, Georgia. To apply to be a Secret Service agent, an individual must be a U.S. citizen. At the time of appointment, he or she must be at least twenty-one years of age but younger than thirty-seven. Agents need a bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university or three years of work experience in the criminal investigative or law enforcement fields that require knowledge and application of laws relating to criminal violations. Agents’ uncorrected vision can be no worse than 20/60, correctable to 20/20 in each eye. Besides passing a background examination, potential agents must take drug tests and pass a polygraph before they are hired and given a top secret security clearance.

He’s hot—and he’s FBI. Everyone knows you have that Fed fetish. I bet he owns handcuffs,” she adds, with a dramatic wink. “And there is no way he’s bad in bed. No way. You know how you can just tell sometimes by looking at a guy? Just by the way he moves? That’s what you need. A guy who knows what he’s doing in bed. And at the very least this guy is packing.” “Wait. Are you talking about my brother?” Sophie interjects. Sophie has a half-brother I’ve never met. “Obviously, Sophie. How many federal agents do I know?” Everly responds in a ‘duh’ tone of voice. “It’s actually a great idea, but please do not talk about my brother’s junk in front of me. It’s disgusting.” Sophie winces and rubs at her baby bump. “I think Boyd’s a bit of a player though. He’s never even introduced me to anyone he’s seeing. But good plan. You guys talk about it. I’m going to the restroom.” She pushes back her chair and stands, then immediately sits again, looking at us in a panic. “I think my water just broke.” “I’ve got this,” Everly announces, waving her hands excitedly as she flags down the waitress. “I’m gonna need a pot of boiling water, some towels and the check.” “Oh, my God,” Sophie mutters and digs her cell phone out of her purse. “Just the check,” I tell the waitress. I turn back to Everly as Sophie calls her husband. “You’re not delivering Sophie’s baby, Everly. Her water broke ten seconds ago and her husband—the gynecologist—is in their condo upstairs. So even if this baby was coming in the next five minutes, which it is not, you’re still not delivering it at a table in Serafina.” Everly slumps in her chair and shakes her head. “I’ve been watching YouTube videos on childbirth for months, just in case. What a waste.” She sighs, then perks up. “Can I at least be in the delivery room?” “No,” we all respond in unison.

The establishment of what would become the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1908—led from 1924 until 1972 by J. Edgar Hoover—was a direct response to the revolutionary wave that gripped the American working class. FBI agents, often little more than state-employed goons and thugs, ruthlessly hunted down those on the left. The FBI spied on and infiltrated labor unions, political parties, radical groups—especially those led by African Americans—antiwar groups, and later the civil rights movement in order to discredit anyone, including politicians such as Henry Wallace, who questioned the power of the state and big business. Agents burglarized homes and offices. They illegally opened mail and planted unlawful wiretaps, created blacklists, and demanded loyalty oaths. They destroyed careers and sometimes lives. By the time they were done, America’s progressive and radical movements, which had given the country the middle class and opened up our political system, did not exist. It was upon the corpses of these radical movements, which had fought for the working class, that the corporate state was erected in the late twentieth century.

The Republican Roosevelt wanted to fight plutocrats as well as anarchists. Their plunder of oil, coal, minerals, and timber on federal lands appalled him, in his role as the founder of America’s national parks. Corporate criminals, carving up public property for their private profit, paid bribes to politicians to protect their land rackets. Using thousand-dollar bills as weapons, they ransacked millions of acres of the last American frontiers. In 1905, a federal investigation, led in part by a scurrilous Secret Service agent named William J. Burns, had led to the indictment and conviction of Senator John H. Mitchell and Representative John H. Williamson of Oregon, both Republicans, for their roles in the pillage of the great forests of the Cascade Range. An Oregon newspaper editorial correctly asserted that Burns and his government investigators had used “the methods of Russian spies and detectives.” The senator died while his case was on appeal; the congressman’s conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court on grounds of “outrageous conduct,” including Burns’s brazen tampering with jurors and witnesses. Burns left the government and became a famous private eye; his skills at tapping telephones and bugging hotel rooms eventually won him a job as J. Edgar Hoover’s

Author’s Note Caroline is a marriage of fact and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s fiction. I have knowingly departed from Wilder’s version of events only where the historical record stands in contradiction to her stories. Most prominently: Census records, as well as the Ingalls family Bible, demonstrate that Caroline Celestia Ingalls was born in Rutland Township, Montgomery County, Kansas on August 3, 1870. (Wilder, not anticipating writing a sequel to Little House in the Big Woods, set her first novel in 1873 and included her little sister. Consequently, when Wilder decided to continue her family’s saga by doubling back to earlier events, Carrie’s birth was omitted from Little House on the Prairie to avoid confusion.) No events corresponding to Wilder’s descriptions of a “war dance” in the chapter of Little House on the Prairie entitled “Indian War-Cry” are known to have occurred in the vicinity of Rutland Township during the Ingalls family’s residence there. Drum Creek, where Osage leaders met with federal Indian agents in the late summer of 1870 and agreed peaceably to sell their Kansas lands and relocate to present-day Oklahoma, was nearly twenty miles from the Ingalls claim. I have therefore adopted western scholar Frances Kay’s conjecture that Wilder’s family was frightened by the mourning songs sung by Osage women as they grieved the loss of their lands and ancestral graves in the days following the agreement. In this instance, like so many others involving the Osages, the Ingalls family’s reactions were entirely a product of their own deep prejudices and misconceptions.

The committee looked into one of the most notorious COINTELPRO actions in L.A., the framing of Gerard “Geronimo” Pratt, a Black Panther and a decorated Vietnam vet. Pratt would be imprisoned for twenty-seven years for a murder the FBI knew he didn’t commit. He was in Oakland at the time of the crime, four hundred miles away, at a Black Panther house that the Bureau had wiretapped. It had transcripts of a call he’d made to the Panther headquarters in Los Angeles just hours before the murder. Still, Bureau agents enlisted a federal informant to lie on the stand about Pratt’s involvement. Even before the frame-up, FBI gunmen had attempted to kill Pratt by shooting at him through the window of his apartment; he survived only because a spine injury he’d sustained in the war made it more comfortable to sleep on the floor. Pratt was serving a life sentence when the Church Committee released its landmark findings, confirming what he’d long suspected: LASO and the LAPD were complicit in the COINTELPRO operation. The committee quoted a report that the FBI’s Los Angeles outpost had sent to Hoover himself, advising that “the Los Angeles [Field] Office [of the FBI] is furnishing on a daily basis information to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office Intelligence Division and the Los Angeles Police Department Intelligence and Criminal Conspiracy Divisions concerning the activities of black nationalist groups in the anticipation that such information might lead to the arrest of the militants.” By the Church Committee’s estimation, this meant that Los Angeles law enforcement was guilty of obstructing justice and hindering prosecution.

Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest. Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine. In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.

The truth about angry and aggressive policing came out in 2020.

It’s like making magic out here in the real world. A community is formed that believes in the possibilities in life and cheers for everyone at all the victories. The really cool part is that kind of mindset tends to have an affect on the rest of my life. Anything becomes possible and courage appears out of nowhere to try even bigger things that have nothing to do with books. All of life opens up.

Charlestown’s most characteristic pastime had long been the reckless sport of “looping.” The young “looper” played by a rigid set of rules. First, he stole a car in downtown Boston. Then he roared into Charlestown, accelerating as he reached City Square, where the District 15 police station stood in a welter of bars, nightclubs, and pool halls. Often he had to take a turn around the square before the first policeman dashed for his patrol car or motorcycle. Then the chase was on: down Chelsea Street to Hayes Square, up the long slope of Bunker Hill Street to St. Francis de Sales’ Church at the crest, then down again, picking up speed, often to 70 or 80 miles per hour, until a screeching left into Sullivan Square took him onto Main Street, where, dodging the stanchions of the El, he roared into City Square again, completing the “loop.” All that remained was to ditch the car before the police caught up. Looping was an initiation rite, proof that a Townie had come of age. But it was something else as well: a challenge flung at authority, a middle finger raised to the powers that be. Before long, looping became a kind of civic spectacle, pitting the Town’s young heroes against the forces of law and order. Plans for a loop circulated well in advance. At the appointed hour, hundreds of men, women, and children gathered along Bunker Hill Street, awaiting the gladiators. When the stolen car came in sight, racing up the long hill, a cheer would rise from the spectators, followed by jeers for the pursuing policemen. The first recorded “loop” was performed in 1925 by a sixteen-year-old daredevil named Jimmy “Speed King” Murphy, but most renowned of all was “Shiner” Sheehan, the teenage son of a federal alcohol agent, whose exploits so electrified the Town that he drew round him a group of young acolytes. Membership in their “Speeders Club” was limited to those who could produce newspaper clippings showing they had bested the police.

Over the next few years, the number of African Americans seeking jobs and homes in and near Palo Alto grew, but no developer who depended on federal government loan insurance would sell to them, and no California state-licensed real estate agent would show them houses. But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family. Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a 'Negro invasion' was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines-"Colored Buyers!"-which they ran in San Francisco newspapers. African Americans desperate for housing, purchased the homes at inflated prices. Within a three-month period, one agent alone sold sixty previously white-owned properties to African Americans. The California real estate commissioner refused to take any action, asserting that while regulations prohibited licensed agents from engaging in 'unethical practices,' the exploitation of racial fear was not within the real estate commission's jurisdiction. Although the local real estate board would ordinarily 'blackball' any agent who sold to a nonwhite buyer in the city's white neighborhoods (thereby denying the agent access to the multiple listing service upon which his or her business depended), once wholesale blockbusting began, the board was unconcerned, even supportive.

Over the next few years, the number of African Americans seeking jobs and homes in and near Palo Alto grew, but no developer who depended on federal government loan insurance would sell to them, and no California state-licensed real estate agent would show them houses. But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family. Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a 'Negro invasion' was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines-"Colored Buyers!"-which they ran in San Francisco newspapers. African Americans desperate for housing, purchased the homes at inflated prices. Within a three-month period, one agent alone sold sixty previously white-owned properties to African Americans. The California real estate commissioner refused to take any action, asserting that while regulations prohibited licensed agents from engaging in 'unethical practices,' the exploitation of racial fear was not within the real estate commission's jurisdiction. Although the local real estate board would ordinarily 'blackball' any agent who sold to a nonwhite buyer in the city's white neighborhoods (thereby denying the agent access to the multiple listing service upon which his or her business depended), once wholesale blockbusting began, the board was unconcerned, even supportive. At the time, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration not only refused to insure mortgages for African Americans in designated white neighborhoods like Ladera; they also would not insure mortgages for whites in a neighborhood where African Americans were present. So once East Palo Alto was integrated, whites wanting to move into the area could no longer obtain government-insured mortgages. State-regulated insurance companies, like the Equitable Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, also declared that their policy was not to issue mortgages to whites in integrated neighborhoods. State insurance regulators had no objection to this stance. The Bank of America and other leading California banks had similar policies, also with the consent of federal banking regulators. Within six years the population of East Palo Alto was 82 percent black. Conditions deteriorated as African Americans who had been excluded from other neighborhoods doubled up in single-family homes. Their East Palo Alto houses had been priced so much higher than similar properties for whites that the owners had difficulty making payments without additional rental income. Federal and state hosing policy had created a slum in East Palo Alto. With the increased density of the area, the school district could no longer accommodate all Palo Alto students, so in 1958 it proposed to create a second high school to accommodate teh expanding student population. The district decided to construct the new school in the heart of what had become the East Palo Alto ghetto, so black students in Palo Alto's existing integrated building would have to withdraw, creating a segregated African American school in the eastern section and a white one to the west. the board ignored pleas of African American and liberal white activists that it draw an east-west school boundary to establish two integrated secondary schools. In ways like these, federal, state, and local governments purposely created segregation in every metropolitan area of the nation.

Having lost the national debate when it came to restricting Mexicans, and fearing they were losing the larger struggle in defense of Anglo-Saxonism, white supremacists took control of the newly established U.S. Border Patrol and turned it into a vanguard of race vigilantism. . . The Juárez-El Paso bridge became something like a stage, or a gauntlet; as Mexicans crossed, they were showered with spit and racial epithets by federal employees of the U.S. government. Border patrol agents beat, shot, and hung migrants with regularity. . . Migrants had no rights, which gave the patrol absolute impunity.

We were all trying to act normal, like we hadn’t been doing things in secret the night before. Ashley and Nefarious were pretending like they hadn’t subdued four federal agents and sprung Murray Hill, while I was pretending like I had no idea that they had subdued four federal agents and sprung Murray Hill.

The purchase of Louisiana from a beleaguered France, engineered by Thomas Jefferson, created not an 'empire for liberty,' as Jefferson had promised, but an empire for slavery. With New Orleans and its vast hinterland now under American rule, planters quickly occupied the rich lands between the western Appalachian ranges and the Mississippi River. The two great thrusts of slavery's expansion - one east to west from the Chesapeake and lowcountry, the other south to north from the lower Mississippi Valley - soon joined. Before long, slaveholders were casting covetous eyes on the southwestern corner of the North American continent, a vision that they translated into reality with the successful American assault on Mexico in 1848. The territorial settlement that followed the Mexican War exposed the federal government's long-established role as the agent of slavery's expansion. Federal diplomats who had wrested Louisiana from the French in 1803 took Florida from the Spanish in 1819. Between these two landmarks in slavery's expansion, federal soldiers and state militiamen forcibly expropriated millions of acres of land from the Indians through armed conquest and defended the slave regime from black insurrectionists and foreign invaders. After defeating slave rebels in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, in 1811 and British invaders in New Orleans in 1814, federal soldiers turned their attention to sweeping aside Native peoples.

I am aware - and have been aware since the seed for this idea was first planted in my mind - that I would likely face two outcomes for writing this book. Firstly, I would likely be called a Fascist, both by progressives and conservatives who, in America, operate entirely within the same post-Enlightenment paradigm. Secondly it’s possible, if not likely, that I’ll face accusations of being a federal agent trying to inspire either violence or subversion. My Ashkenazi ethnicity does not help with accusations like these; when I encourage people to become traditional Christians instead of Fascists, I have - more than once - been met with the sentiment that I am “just another Jew trying to harm White people.

Sound of Freedom When I read the plot of Sound of Freedom, I was wondering what’s so new or special about the film that it has reviewed by many as best Hollywood film of 2023. This year has been a highly competitive year when it comes to sequels of some great successes in Hollywood, and I was surprised how this film based on child trafficking has managed to top score charts. After freeing the boy, the federal agent discovers that the child’s sister continues to be in possession of the people who trafficked children and then embarks on a risky mission to liberate her. This appears to be a fairly standard setup for a story of this kind. When he realised that she was going to die soon, he quit his job and went far into the Colombian jungle, putting everything on the line in an attempt to save her life. I was sure I have seen many similar plots before, but after watching the film, I must say it exceeded the expectations and conveyed some messages that world needs to be remined off again and again. Here are the few reasons why it’s a must watch. Visit my website: Filmworld.online

OVER THE next few years, the number of African Americans seeking jobs and homes in and near Palo Alto grew, but no developer who depended on federal government loan insurance would sell to them, and no California state-licensed real estate agent would show them houses. But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family. Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a “Negro invasion” was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines—“Colored Buyers!”—which they ran in San Francisco newspapers.

He seemed like the kind of agent that slept with handcuffs on his bedside table, and not for any enjoyable reason.

There are some cherished values that resist being quantified or squeezed into monetary terms, but are no less real for that. Agents of democratic societies are responsible to the people, but we should remember that “the people” refers not only to

The plan was as tactically sound as the available information

At a hotel. The Hyatt.” “For how long?” “I’ll give you the details later, I promise. But first you need to let me finish. If Spiderman knows about Richard, then that means he’s been watching him.” Cathy’s eyes widened in horror as the truth dawned on her. “That madman knows where we live?” “I believe so. It’s possible that he’s been watching all of you.” Cathy’s face paled as she pressed her hand over her mouth. After a moment Cathy said, “What am I going to do?” “There’s a federal agent parked across the street,” Jared cut in. “His name is Ronald Holt. He’ll remain parked outside the house twenty-four-seven. He won’t go anywhere unless he has a replacement.” “But I don’t think that’s enough,” Lizzy added. “I think you should take Brittany to Dad’s place and stay there until the feds catch him and put him behind bars.” Cathy’s face paled. “You don’t understand. Brittany has only recently begun to make friends. For the first time in her life she feels as if she’s starting to fit in. I know what it’s like to feel lost and out of place at school. I can’t uproot her now and take away what little bit of confidence she’s gained. I won’t do it.” “But you can’t take the added risk of keeping her in school or taking her to swim practice right now.” “She can’t stop living.” Cathy pointed a finger at Lizzy. “You said that yourself. You said you were miserable from all those years of hiding from your own shadow.” “But you were the one who was right when you said that hiding from my own shadow was better than the alternative.” Lizzy didn’t believe that for herself any longer, but Brittany had her whole life ahead of her, and Lizzy would say anything to make her sister understand that they needed to protect Brittany at all costs. Cathy shook her head. “I can’t do that to Brittany. She’s too young. She wouldn’t understand. I won’t have her life turned upside down because of that maniac. I won’t allow him to do this to me again.” “You must.” Lizzy lifted a hand to comfort her sister. Cathy backed away, her eyes feral. “Don’t touch me. I want you to get out of here. Stay away from

I’m not real certain we were ready for the kind of desegregation that currently exists. I think it would have caused some bad feelings and potentially would have hurt the school system,” said Bunton, who was ultimately appointed a federal judge by President Carter and went on to issue a landmark decision finding the FBI guilty of racial bias in the treatment of its Hispanic agents. At that time there were three high schools in the town: Ector, which was located on the Southside and 90 percent minority; Odessa High, the town’s first high school, which was 93 percent white; and Permian, which served the newer parts of town and was 99 percent white. One obvious way of accomplishing desegregation would have been to shift students among these three

I am a federal agent. This is kidnapping." "There's been a lot of that lately,

a man with a face like boiled meat and two little pig’s eyes identified himself as a federal agent

The theory that they owed allegiance to their respective States was founded on the fact that the Federal Government was of the States; the sequence was, that the navy belonged to the States, not to their agent the Federal Government; and, when the States ceased to be united, the naval vessels and armament should have been divided among the owners. While we honor the sentiment which caused them to surrender their heart-bound associations, and the profession to which they were bred, on which they relied for subsistence, to go, with nothing save their swords and faithful hearts, to fight, to bleed, and to die if need be, in defense of their homes and a righteous cause, we can but remember how much was lost by their view of what their honor and duty demanded

While establishment media wholeheartedly ignored the agent’s methods, they did not go unnoticed by political commentator Mike Cernovich, who tweeted: Holy f*ck, this is an interrogation technique where the federal agent tries to use stress tactics to implant a false memory into the interview subject. You rarely get stuff like this on audio.397 Strasser had obviously received interrogation training, either in the Air Force or as a federal law enforcement officer.

They were fascinated by the raw audio. There are very, very few audio recordings available of an actual federal agent aggressively interrogating a regular American for telling an inconvenient truth. It was not intended, but in a small way, the Hopkins release also exposed how the federal government treats a whistleblower. It was on tape,

The award-winning American TV series Breaking Bad has a scene in its second season set in the murder capital of Ciudad Juárez. In this episode, American and Mexican agents are lured to a patch of desert just south of the border looking for an informant. They discover the informant’s head has been cut off and stuck on the body of a giant turtle. But as they approach, the severed cranium, turned into an IED, explodes, killing agents. The episode was released in 2009. I thought it was unrealistic, a bit fantastic. Until July 15, 2010. In the real Ciudad Juárez on that day, gangsters kidnapped a man, dressed him in a police uniform, shot him, and dumped him bleeding on a downtown street. A cameraman filmed what happened after federal police and paramedics got close. The video shows medics bent over the dumped man, checking for vital signs. Suddenly a bang rings out, and the image shakes vigorously as the cameraman runs for his life. Gangsters had used a cell phone to detonate twenty-two pounds of explosives packed into a nearby car. A minute later, the camera turns back around to reveal the burning car pouring smoke over screaming victims. A medic lies on the ground, covered in blood but still moving, a stunned look on his face. Panicked officers are scared to go near him. The medic dies minutes later along with a federal agent and a civilian. I’m not suggesting that Breaking Bad inspired the murders. TV shows don’t kill people. Car bombs kill people. The point of the story is that the Mexican Drug War is saturated with stranger-than-fiction violence. Mexican writer Alejandro Almazán suffered from a similar dilemma. As he was writing his novel Among Dogs, he envisioned a scene in which thugs decapitate a man and stick a hound’s head on his corpse. It seemed pretty out there. But then in real life some gangsters did exactly that, only with a pig’s head. It is just hard to compete with the sanguine criminal imagination. Cartel thugs have put a severed head in a cooler and delivered it to a newspaper; they have dressed up a murdered policeman in a comedy sombrero and carved a smile on his cheeks; and they have even sewn a human face onto a soccer ball.

Before opening the gate, I was told, the doorman would push one of two buttons. One would ring a bell that would bring the maître d’ bustling out to meet the patrons. The other button would sound an alarm that meant revenue agents. The doorman would delay the federal agents as long as he could. By the time they got inside there was no evidence of liquor in the place, except for a few drinks sitting in front of individual customers. If they tried to confiscate those, an angry argument would ensue about whether the prohibition law meant it was illegal to drink liquor or simply precluded its sale. The

Nor are any of the statements or activities of the Trump campaign, no matter how distasteful, the behaviors or actions of clandestine agents of the Russian regime. However, even a cursory glance at the evidence reveals to intelligence professionals that the probability that Vladimir Putin has handled Trump and his associates, doing their bidding without even knowing it, is well within the KGB playbook. These Americans may be not be real agents of the Russian Federation but they may have unwittingly exposed themselves to a massive intelligence manipulation machine that, once involved, may be completely out of their control to extract themselves. The rhetoric election of 2016 reveals that damage has already been done.

I told her to send the agent a letter, explaining that she would be happy to consider answering any questions he might have, but only if he would extend her the minimal courtesy of putting those questions in writing, so that she could also put her answers in writing. What on earth would be so unreasonable about a request like that? Nothing at all. It would enable this woman to think carefully about her answers, possibly obtain the assistance of a lawyer, and check her records to make sure that her answers were accurate. It would also eliminate the very terrible danger, discussed at great length in this book, that the agent might later unintentionally misquote her in ways that could make her statements sound more damaging than they really were. The request was perfectly reasonable—and, I might add, it was exactly what any federal agency will tell you to do if you want to get important information out of them. (“Put it in writing, and we will get back to you in a couple months. Maybe.”) But that was the end of the investigation, as I knew it would be. When the federal agent was advised that my client would not talk to him unless he was willing to put his questions in writing, he angrily replied that he refused to interview anybody that way, and she has not heard from him in months. Just think about that. That tells you just about everything you need to know about the motives of this government agent. He was more than happy to talk to my client as long as he could have the element of surprise and the ability to hold all the cards by asking her a bunch of questions in an informal interview that would not be recorded—and he knew from years of experience that he would have no difficulty getting any jury or judge to believe him if he later testified from his notes about his recollection of that conversation. But when he was asked if he would simply agree to allow the exchange to be put in writing, he refused. That is the kind of unreasonable behavior you can expect when a government agent has become spoiled through years of always having it his way, dealing only with people who are never able to effectively contradict his recollection of exactly what was said, and by whom.   Don’t

She wrote the phone number down on another slip of paper, rushed into the bathroom, crumpled up the letter, and flushed it down the toilet. For one paralyzing moment she envisioned federal law enforcement agents hiding somewhere in the White House intercepting her toilet water and reconstructing the letter. But that was impossible. That was the stuff of Orwell’s 1984. Yet in some ways, by living at the White House, she had already seen Orwell’s masterpiece of “fascism perfected” in a way most Americans could never imagine. She

IN THE NINE YEARS since the standoff at Ruby Ridge and in the six years since this book first appeared, much has happened. Yet little has changed. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent on hearings and investigations that failed to resolve the most basic questions about the standoff. Almost $3.5 million was paid out in settlements that settled nothing. Nine years later, the courts are still flip-flopping over whether a federal agent should be tried for his actions at Ruby Ridge. Investigators, lawyers, and federal officers are still debating who shot first. Top FBI officials are still denying that they approved the bureau’s unprecedented and illegal orders to shoot civilians without provocation. Nine years later, the sniper who killed Vicki Weaver still works for the FBI. The case continues to hum on Internet Web sites and scream from right-wing newspapers. The words Ruby Ridge are fixed at the bottom of every news story about the ten-year crisis of confidence and competence in the FBI. And every time a person holes up in a ramshackle house, every time a suspect refuses to come out, every time a person accuses the government of going too far, someone is likely to say, “We don’t want this to become another Ruby Ridge.” The Weaver case gave a name to that sometimes dangerous space between people and their government. It brought paranoia into the mainstream. For how can you convince people that their government isn’t out to get them when, on Ruby Ridge, the FBI gave itself permission to shoot its own citizens? How can you tell people to trust a government that covered up details of the case and assigned agents to investigate themselves?

YOU CAN SEE FOR MILES in both directions from the point on Ruby Ridge. From here, the paths of the Weaver family and the federal government seem inevitable, trucks barreling toward each another on a one-lane road. The government’s route to Ruby Ridge was a twenty-year drift toward militaristic law enforcement, in which quiet agents in suits gave way to federal SWAT teams competing for funding, in which unchecked arrogance and zeal allowed federal agents to act as if their ends justified their means. For the Weavers, the trail to this place cuts right through our own backyards, through patriotism, the military, fundamentalist Christianity, and eventually paranoia. Randy and Vicki’s story is a map of disenfranchisement. They were seduced by conspiracy and a religion called Christian Identity, by beliefs steeped in racism and fear of government oppression, beliefs that helped bring about the very thing they feared. Ultimately, you come to the Weaver story along the same trail Randy and Vicki took, from the heart of Christian Iowa to the deep woods of North Idaho. There is much to ponder along the way—the accountability of government and the danger of paranoia, the villainy of coincidence and the desperate need to decide, every day all over again, where society’s lines will be drawn. Up a twisting, rutted dirt road, past gnarled pine trees and scrub grass, you come finally to a sign at the edge of the old Weaver property. Two sets of unbending law clashed on the mountain, two incompatible views of the world, outlined by defiant red letters painted on a plywood sign: “Every knee shall bow to Yahshua Messiah.

You can also go to prison for up to six months for the unauthorized use of the character or the name Woodsy Owl for the purpose of making a profit.14 The same is also true if you knowingly possess any alligator grass or water chestnut or hyacinth plants that have been shipped across state lines, or just the seeds of such grass or plants, even if you were not the one who sent or received them when they crossed state lines.15 (In fact, you can also be sent to prison—even if you played no part in that supposedly dangerous shipment—if all you did was advertise your willingness to do such a dangerous thing.) It is also a federal offense, again carrying a potential penalty of up to six months in a federal prison, if you use the Swiss coat of arms in any advertising for your business.16 I would include a picture of that coat of arms here so you could see what I am talking about, but I cannot take the chance that I might be sent to prison. Two years ago, young sailors thought they were doing a good deed by freeing a five-hundred-pound sea turtle who had become entangled in a buoy line that wrapped around its head and fins, but they were later told by an agent from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that what they did was a violation of the Endangered Species Act, which makes it illegal to handle an endangered or protected species.17 Luckily for them, they were members of the Kennedy family, so they were not prosecuted. But they could have been, and their good intentions and their ignorance of this law would have been no defense at all.18 To

In the United States, a park ranger is more likely to be assaulted in the line of duty than is any other federal officer, including those who work for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF); the Secret Service; and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). A park ranger is twelve times more likely to die on the job than is a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

With World War I over, the decade prior to my birth was universally recognized as the “Roaring Twenties.” Many rejoiced, with mostly young, wealthy people indulging in wine, women and song. Promiscuous sexual behavior and the social use of alcohol became normal to the liberal thinkers who gathered in the bohemian sections of the world’s leading cities. Although political unrest still existed, most people enjoyed the peaceful years that followed the horror of World War I. The United States, however, has always been a more structured, puritanical and religious country. From the time of the Pilgrims, spirituality and moderation has prevailed. In the United States, the concept of abstinence was advanced by the American Temperance Society, also known as the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance. This activist group was established on February 13, 1826, in Boston, Massachusetts, and considered the concept of outlawing alcohol to be progressive. The United States Senate first proposed the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, with the intent of banning the use of alcohol. After passage by the House and Senate, on December 18, 1917, the proposed amendment was submitted to the states for ratification. On January 16, 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, with an effective date one year later on January 17, 1920. The Volstead Act, passed on October 28, 1919, specified the details for the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment. A total of 1,520 Federal Prohibition agents, having police powers, were assigned to enforce this unpopular law. Many people, ignoring this new law, partied at the many renowned illegal speakeasies, many of which were run by the Mafia. This ban on alcohol proved to be contentious, difficult to enforce, and an infringement on people’s personal rights. Still, due to political pressure, it continued until March 22, 1933, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed an amendment to the Constitution, known as the Cullen-Harrison Act, which allowed for the manufacture and sale of watery 3.2% beer. It took over a decade from its inception before the Eighteenth Amendment was finally repealed on December 5, 1933, when the Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution was adopted.

It took Fitzgerald three years of litigation to get to a place where he charged, tried, and convicted Libby of making false statements in a federal investigation, perjury, and obstruction of justice. Republican loyalists howled that he was persecuting Libby because prosecutors could never prove the underlying crime—the intentional leaking of a covert agent’s name with prior knowledge of its illegality. Of course, these were the same Republicans who passionately believed that President Bill Clinton’s lies under oath over an affair with an intern simply had to be pursued, because obstruction of justice and perjury strike at the core of our system. Meanwhile, Democrats, who six years earlier attacked the case against Bill Clinton as a silly lie about sex, had discovered in the Libby case that they cared deeply about obstruction of justice crimes—when the obstructers were Republicans.

What’s happening in our country? The First Amendment clearly states that “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.” But it was recently abridged anyway. It wasn’t covered much in the media but a new bill, HR 347, was recently passed by Congress and quietly signed into law by President Obama that gives federal agents sweeping powers and now makes it a felony offense for the crime of standing and protesting, determined at the discretion of the Secret Service. As Judge Andrew Napolitano put it, “it is a part of American history since Day One that we have a right to speak freely to, about and against those in the government.” But we no longer have it.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated . . . In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.62

there were many contacts during the campaign and the transition between Trump associates and Russians—in person, on the phone, and via text and email. Many of these interactions were with Ambassador Kislyak, who was thought to help oversee Russian intelligence operations in the United States, but they included other Russian officials and agents as well. For example, Roger Stone, the longtime Trump political advisor who claimed that he was in touch with Julian Assange, suggested in August 2016 that information about John Podesta was going to come out. In October, Stone hinted Assange and WikiLeaks were going to release material that would be damaging to my campaign, and later admitted to also exchanging direct messages over Twitter with Guccifer 2.0, the front for Russian intelligence, after some of those messages were published by the website The Smoking Gun. We also know now that in December 2016, Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, met with Sergey Gorkov, the head of a Kremlin-controlled bank that is under U.S. sanctions and tied closely to Russian intelligence. The Washington Post caused a sensation with its report that Russian officials were discussing a proposal by Kushner to use Russian diplomatic facilities in America to communicate secretly with Moscow. The New York Times reported that Russian intelligence attempted to recruit Carter Page, the Trump foreign policy advisor, as a spy back in 2013 (according to the report, the FBI believed Page did not know that the man who approached him was a spy). And according to Yahoo News, U.S. officials received intelligence reports that Carter Page met with a top Putin aide involved with intelligence. Some Trump advisors failed to disclose or lied about their contacts with the Russians, including on applications for security clearances, which could be a federal crime. Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied to Congress about his contacts and later recused himself from the investigation. Michael Flynn lied about being in contact with Kislyak and then changed his story about whether they discussed dropping U.S. sanctions. Reporting since the election has made clear that Trump and his top advisors have little or no interest in learning about the Russian covert operation against American democracy.

In the summer of 2016, according to the Washington Post, the FBI convinced a special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there was probable cause to believe that Trump advisor Carter Page was acting as a Russian agent, and they received a warrant to monitor his communications. The FBI also began investigating a dossier prepared by a well-respected former British spy that contained explosive and salacious allegations about compromising information the Russians had on Trump. The Intelligence Community took the dossier seriously enough that it briefed both President Obama and President Elect Trump on its contents before the inauguration. By the spring of 2017, a federal grand jury was issuing subpoenas to business associates of Michael Flynn, who resigned as Trump’s national security advisor after lying about his Russian contacts. We’ve also learned a lot about how various parts of the U.S. government reacted differently to the intelligence coming in over the course of 2016 about ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. The CIA seems to have been most alarmed and was also convinced that the Russian goal was to help Trump and hurt me. As early as August 2016, CIA Director John Brennan called his counterpart in Moscow and warned him to stop interfering in the election. Brennan also individually briefed the “gang of eight” congressional leaders and shared his concerns.

back, change into something formal. I’m taking you out to the most famous restaurant in all of Paris,’ he said proudly. She giggled. Listening to him make every effort to be the romantic tickled her to bits. Though she was a seasoned and toughened law enforcement agent, she still wasn’t beyond feeling giddy when it came to Pope’s courting efforts. For their long overdue holiday, a honeymoon-before-the-wedding kind of thing, Pope splashed out. The sky was the limit. Five months ago, when he asked her where she wanted to go, she had said Paris. So, Paris it had to be. There were no ifs or buts. And they were going to do it in style. He booked them a room at the Banke Hôtel for the entire duration of their stay. Luckily, he got it at a special rate, otherwise a Federal employee like him wouldn’t have been able to stretch the budget that far. Housed in a former bank, the Baroque revival hotel had an ornate columned façade. The interior was grand in scale and lavishly decorated. The room didn’t disappoint. Charming period detailing had been retained; in their

Your committee is satisfied from the proofs submitted ... that there is an established and well defined identity and community of interest between a few leaders of finance ... which has resulted in great and rapidly growing concentration of the control of money and credit in the hands of these few men.... Under our system of issuing and distributing corporate securities the investing public does not buy directly from the corporation. The securities travel from the issuing house through middlemen to the investor. It is only the great banks or bankers with access to the mainsprings of the concentrated resources made up of other people's money, in the banks, trust companies, and life insurance companies, and with control of the machinery for creating markets and distributing securities, who have had the power to underwrite or guarantee the sale of large-scale security issues. The men who through their control over the funds of our railroad and industrial companies are able to direct where such funds shall be kept, and thus to create these great reservoirs of the people's money are the ones who are in a position to tap those reservoirs for the ventures in which they are interested and to prevent their being tapped for purposes which they do not approve.... When we consider, also, in this connection that into these reservoirs of money and credit there flow a large part of the reserves of the banks of the country, that they are also the agents and correspondents of the out-of-town banks in the loaning of their surplus funds in the only public money market of the country, and that a small group of men and their partners and associates have now further strengthened their hold upon the resources of these institutions by acquiring large stock holdings therein, by representation on their boards and through valuable patronage, we begin to realize something of the extent to which this practical and effective domination and control over our greatest financial, railroad and industrial corporations has developed, largely within the past five years, and that it is fraught with peril to the welfare of the country.3 Such was the nature of the wealth and power represented by those six men who gathered in secret that night and travelled in the luxury of Senator Aldrich's private car.

He and his subordinates have instituted a policy whereby American immigration agents assist human traffickers in assisting aliens with relatives in the United States to enter the United States illegally. A federal district judge in Texas has issued a court order noting “the apparent policy of the Department of Homeland Security of completing the criminal mission of individuals who are violating the border security of the United States.”7

In the spring of 2004, the FBI arrested Mohammed Junaid Babar, an al Qaeda agent, as he returned to the U.S. from a terrorist planning meeting in Pakistan (CNN News – August 11, 2004). Facing the potential of a 70 year federal prison sentence, Babar confessed that al Qaeda “was planning a spectacular attack on American soil–a nuclear 9/11 that will occur simultaneously in major metropolitan areas throughout the country.” His testimony was confirmed by another al Qaeda participant at the same Pakistani planning session, Sharif al-Masri (The Day of Islam).

Imported narcotics on CIA planes and otherwise serve three purposes important to the federal government. It is good business, exceeding war profits. Drug dealers work with the intelligence and military sectors. Profits gained from drug traffic help support covert projects, including assassinations. Second, provocateurs and police agents purposely push narcotics into the ghettos to control minorities. According to Louis Tackwood, the LAPD distributed drugs, as do other police agencies. Third, the necessary violence and crime in the streets caused by supporting drug habits requires more police, local helicopters, surveillance, arrests without warrants, framing selected patsies by planting evidence, and makes the law enforcement agent the protector of our life and property. Planted marijuana in the binoculars of John Lennon was the excuse to deport him. In spite of the cultural advancements that he and Yoko Ono have made, their outspoken criticism of war, genocide and political imprisonment make them eligible for the “enemies list.

Roosevelt secured passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), which levied a new tax on agricultural processors and used the revenue to supervise the wholesale destruction of valuable crops and cattle. Federal agents oversaw the ugly spectacle of perfectly good fields of cotton, wheat, and corn being plowed under. Healthy cattle, sheep, and pigs by the millions were slaughtered and buried in mass graves. Even if the AAA had helped farmers by curtailing supplies and raising prices, it could have done so only by hurting millions of others who had to pay those prices or make do with less to eat. Perhaps

I lost my case, federal agents were harassing me, my husband fell in love with a stripper, my children damn near hate their daddy, and I had no REAL friends or family. I felt so empty.

On May 4, 1932 (...) the New York Times featured side-by-side front page stories on the world's two most infamous criminals. First, the paper reported that, late the previous evening, a police squad car had whisked Alphonse "Scarface" Capone from the Cook County Jail to the Dearborn Street station, where he and several government agents had boarded the Dixie Flyer, headed for Atlanta and the federal penitentiary there. The adjacent story described the first day of hearings before the federal referee overseeing the bankruptcy of International Match. "Glad to start, he says", was the tagline for the Capone column. the one about Ivar said "Trusted Him Implicitly".

Darrow and I are federal agents. We had been sent here from Atlanta to build a case against Thug Inc. All attempts in the past by other federal jurisdictions had failed to come up with anything solid to get them convicted. Their case was put on our desk and immediately it became personal for Darro.

From the perspective of what became the Second Amendment, the most important essay was The Federalist No. 46, written by Madison and first published in the New York Packet on January 29, 1788. It clearly distinguished between the people and the two governments: “The Federal and State governments are in fact but different agents and trustees of the people, constituted with different powers, and designed for different purposes.” Further, “the ultimate authority ... resides in the people alone,” not in “the different governments.”69 As for the argument that the federal government would raise a standing army to oppress the people, Madison replied: To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it. Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.70 A militia of “half a million of citizens with arms in their hands” would have been virtually all able-bodied male citizens out of the American population of three million. The “citizens” constituted the militia, and they had “arms in their hands.” The success of this armed citizenry had been demonstrated in the American Revolution. Unlike other peoples, the Americans were armed, and the resistance of the state governments would bar a federal tyranny. By contrast, the European monarchies were “afraid to trust the people with arms.” In short, the keeping and bearing of arms by the citizens would preserve the republic and protect liberty.

The government wants to know why you’re not preventing people from bypassing the TSA checkpoints. That’s illegal you know,” “I want to know why DHS thinks they can come on a sovereign nation’s land and demand such things,” “Because I gave them permission, Sheriff. Now please answer his question,” stated the Tribal Chairman, Pete Yazzie, as he appeared from Jonathon’s office. “I figure nobody ever ordered me not to stop people from bypassing the interstates, so why should I stop them? Besides, there are too many roads and not enough of my people to stop everyone,” “You could’ve called on Homeland Security. We would’ve sent agents to help out,” “And have the federal government oppress the Diné some more? No thanks, we’ve already tried that,” “I don’t like your attitude, Sheriff. Things are changing, and you better get behind the change, otherwise, you’ll find yourself somewhere you don’t want to be,” “Is that a threat?” “No, just a warning. Now, I have some questions about some people

Tribal Chairman Yazzie look horrified. “Are you crazy? What do you think you’re doing, Sheriff?” “Nope, not crazy, just getting rid of some potential problems,” “You can’t do that! Do you know what’ll happen when the federal government sends more federal agents out here to look for these agents? They’ll tear our towns apart looking for them. I can’t have that,” “What do you care more about, Chairman, money from the government or helping out people who are trying to remain free?” “I…. but…. but you can’t do this!” stammered Yazzie. “I am doing this, because it’s more important to protect whatever freedoms our fellow Americans have left than to lick the boot heel of our potential oppressors. Have you not learned from Native history?” “Fine, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’ll stay out of your way for now, but if the federal government demands someone’s head, they’ll be directed to you. Got it?” “I hear you.” Tribal Chairman Yazzie walked out of the station and drove away.

Now you’ve brought him in for a burglary that, unless I’m mistaken, didn’t actually take place.” “He was in the process of breaking into the building,” she said. “We caught him in the act.” Somehow, his smile grew even broader. “Really? He was in the building? Was he even in the parking lot? One of your colleagues says he wasn’t.” “How did you—” “Did my client have any burglary tools in his possession? Lockpicks? A crowbar hidden up his sleeve, perhaps?” “No, but—” “So he had no way of accessing the property he was supposedly there to burglarize, and he wasn’t even apprehended on said property. Very disappointing, Agent Black. A rookie police officer on his first beat wouldn’t make that arrest, and you know it. Your zeal to imprison my client speaks to the prejudicial nature of your so-called ‘task force.’ This isn’t a lawful inquiry; it’s a witch hunt.” I could almost hear Harmony’s teeth grating. “You have two choices.” Perkins ticked them off on his fingers. “One, release my client at once, and we can pretend this never happened. Two, you can proceed with this travesty, I’ll have the case dismissed before you can say ‘wrongful arrest,’ and my next call will be to your deputy assistant director to discuss a lawsuit against you, her, and the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Harmony leaned against the table with one hand. Her shoulders sagged. “You want him?” she said. “Fine. Take him and leave.” Perkins opened the door, ushering me toward it with a grand sweep of his arm like he was rolling out a red carpet.

Many federal agents have been seduced by the lure of the world they’re sworn to prosecute.

Say you're watching a TV show. Say it's 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, the angst-ridden lone-wolf federal agent who protects America from terrorism by sooner or later causing the violent death of pretty much everybody he meets. If you study this show carefully, you will notice something curious: Jack Bauer never goes to the bathroom. That's why he's so ridden with angst.