George Hill is a military veteran and a former analyst for the NSA who has retired from the FBI’s Boston field office. Hill recently talked to the House Judiciary Committee about the FBI’s probe of the events surrounding the January 6 riot at the nation’s Capitol. He also talked with Just the News Wednesday night about his concerns surrounding the agency’s activities.
According to Hill, agents at the Boston field office were pressured to open criminal cases against people who had done nothing wrong. Originally, agents were told to open cases against seven people who raised red flags during a sweep of records from the Bank of America. Then, the scope increased to include people who had merely taken a bus to the Trump rally. Hill said that the act of getting on a bus was not enough to merit criminal probes, and the Boston office refused to conduct the investigations. This greatly displeased the Washington field office. The issue moved up the chain of command in an effort to paint J6 participants as domestic terrorists, but the Boston office held its ground.
Hill told the committee that the FBI analyzed bank records without evidence of any crimes with the intent to discover who went to Washington around the time of the incident and to look for any records that might indicate gun ownership. Hill said that the banks voluntarily offered up the data on the people under investigation.
Further, Hill said he got pushback from the agency to see video from the incident to determine if any of the 140 people in question were present. He told the committee:
When you ask for footage, what they’ll come back with is ‘Tell us the exact place and time where you think the subject of your investigation was?’ To which the standard reply is, ‘Well, we don’t know because we can’t see the footage.’ And the comeback then is ‘There may be identities within that footage that we need to protect. So one can make inferences regarding that, who those identities were they were looking to protect, but that probably wasn’t their grandparents or their aunts and uncles.
As this information comes to light, National Review reports that an internal memo was issued at the FBI’s Richmond field office in January. This time the cause for concern was radical traditionalist Catholic ideology, which “almost certainly presents new mitigation opportunities.” This information came from Kyle Seraphin, who had served as an agent for six years and was suspended without pay in June 2020. He published the document called “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities,” on the website UncoverDC.com. You can access it here.
Radical Traditional Catholics, or as the document calls them RTCs, are characterized as rejecting the Second Vatican Council, preferring the Latin Mass, and holding views about other religions that equate to “anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ and white supremacist ideology.” But the writer of the memo also says that there is a difference between the people who hold radical views and those who simply prefer pre-Vatican II policies and the Latin Mass.
According to the piece released by Seraphin, the memo uses information from the Southern Poverty Law Center as a source. National Review points out that SPLC has included Alliance Defending Freedom and the American College of Pediatricians on its list of hate groups. Seraphin told The Daily Signal that when he was in training at Quantico, SPLC was not considered legitimate. the memo also cites articles from Salon and The Atlantic, hardly neutral publications.
Each one of these stories on its own would be unsettling enough. Now add to them Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s (D-Texas) proposed Leading Against White Supremacy Act of 2023. As Robert Spencer pointed out:
The bill is designed to “prevent and prosecute white supremacy inspired hate crime and conspiracy to commit white supremacy inspired hate crime and to amend title 18, United States Code, to expand the scope of hate crimes.” The framers of the bill were thoughtful enough to provide a helpful explanation: “A person engages in a white supremacy inspired hate crime when white supremacy ideology has motivated the planning, development, preparation, or perpetration of actions that constituted a crime or were undertaken in furtherance of activity that, if effectuated, would have constituted a crime.
All right. But how is it going to be determined whether or not “white supremacy ideology” motivated someone? We have been told repeatedly that “white supremacists,” also known as “domestic violent extremists,” are the biggest terror threat the nation faces today. Old Joe Biden, Gestapo chief Merrick Garland, and the FBI have all said this, and none of them would lie to us, now, would they? But with the Biden administration so eager to portray white supremacists as this massive threat, how can we be sure that administration officials won’t be shoehorning cases into this paradigm in order to justify their claims?
The LAWS Act (Get it? Get it?) is vague, perhaps intentionally so, on what could justify a hate crime or what could inspire one. This of course would have the effect of chilling free speech or dissent out of fear of being prosecuted for a hate crime. And I am sure that the Left is licking its collective chops over that. Should such a law ever pass, the Left will take every opportunity to use it. Do you want a preview? Consider Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent rant against Libs of TikTok:
National Review is now reporting that the FBI has retracted the Richmond memo. It told the publication in a statement, “While our standard practice is to not comment on specific intelligence products, this particular field office product — disseminated only within the FBI — regarding racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism does not meet the exacting standards of the FBI. Upon learning of the document, FBI Headquarters quickly began taking action to remove the document from FBI systems and conduct a review of the basis for the document.”
The government is no longer willing just to go after people who commit actual crimes. Now it appears that the government wants to create new crimes and find or even create new criminals to match them. And it also appears to be willing to go to great lengths to do so. Just ask Mark Houck.
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