Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/2/22 Trevor Aaronson Gives a Window Into FBI Entrapment Schemes

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

Scott interviews journalist and author Trevor Aaronson about an article he recently published for the Intercept. Aaronson has been one of the best reporters exposing how the FBI uses paid informants to manipulate people into agreeing to carry out violent attacks and other crimes so the agency can swoop in and pretend it’s taking dangerous terrorists off the street. His Intercept article examines one such case from about a decade ago. Scott and Aaronson dig into what happened. They then shift to a broader discussion of FBI entrapment schemes against both right and left-wing dissidents as well as financial criminals. Last, they reflect on the current political environment to question if there will ever be accountability for the FBI.  Discussed on the show: “The ‘Terrorist’, the Rapist, and Me” (The Intercept) “U.S. Government Quietly Declassifies Post-9/11 Interview With Bush and Cheney” (The Intercept) American ISIS Podcast Series Aaronson’s TED Talk The Terror Factory by Trevor Aaronson Trevor Aaronson is a contributing writer for The Intercept and executive director of the nonprofit Florida Center for Investigative Reporting. He is the author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism. Find him on Twitter @trevoraaronson. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i've got the great journalist trevor erinson you know years ago he wrote this piece for mother jones called the terror factory that later became a book

and it's all about something that we'd already been writing about i've been writing about i've been blogging about at anti-war.com for a while, which was all these entrapment cases against basically big talking idiots set up by the FBI and paraded on TV as props in the terror war. And there's just so many of them. But this one is great. It's new at the intercept. It's called the terrorist, the rapist, and me. A little bit of a personal tie into this entrapment case unusually. here, very interesting. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing, Trevor? Hey, I'm great. Thanks for having me, Scott. Not that you were in on it or whatever. It's after the fact, but yeah. Good to talk to you, good. And great stuff, as always, of course, here.

So we're talking, this is Washington State here, Seattle, FBI set up job. Can you give us the official story here real quick? What year are we talking about? Who did what, supposedly? Yeah, so this story takes us back. So in 2011, the FBI and the Justice Department, announced the arrest of two men. Abu Khalid Abdul Latif was the main defendant and his co-defendant was Mali Mujahid. And what they alleged was that working with an informant who had come forward and said that Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif was interested in attacking Fort Lewis, a big military installation in Tacoma. And so the FBI signed this man up as an informant, and they led these two men in a sting operation in which they allegedly were conspiring to attack a military entrance processing

station, you know, the place where if you're a new witness deed, the military, you show up. And so, you know, the two men involved, you know, both had histories of mental illness, and then neither had much many financial resources and neither had any sort of weapons. And so, as you know, as is typical in a lot of these sting operations, the FBI provided everything, the, you know, the assault rifles, the grenades, the ammunition. And then when the two men took possession of the weapons, the FBI stormed in, arrested them, and portrayed this case as, you know, a terror plot that was foiled by federal agents with the help of this informant named Robert Childs, who was then later heralded as the unlikely hero of this story,

because in large part, Robert Childs himself had a pretty problematic background in that he was a previous sex offender. But the case was very much portrayed to the public as two very dangerous people, the two defendants, Public Lead Abdul Latif and his friend Wally, and an informant who then brought this to the authority's attention and allowed this case to be thwarted. And then the two men ultimately pleaded guilty. And Wally, is serving 17 years in prison and Abu Khalid al-Dalatif is serving 18 years in prison. All right. Now, I guess sort of the background to all of this is that entrapment as commonly used, you know, in just regular terminology by people, is quite different than what the courts will consider entrapment, right?

In other words, the cops can go a very long way into setting someone up and not even lie about it, right? And just say, yeah, we set him up. And the judge says, that's fine. If he's set up a bull, that's his fault. And entrapment is essentially legalized. Exactly. You know, I think what most people think of as entrapment is very different from what's considered the legal definition of entrapment. And so in this particular case, you know, entrapment from a legal perspective,

requires defense lawyers to be able to articulate to a jury that their client was, had their, had their free will overwhelmed, that they, you know, that they committed this crime because basically they were forced to commit it by federal agents. And then they also must prove that there was no, what's termed predisposition, which means that, you know, they, before the entrance of federal informants or law enforcement agents, this person, you know, did something to suggest they wanted to commit this crime. So they, let's say, for example, it's a conspiracy to rob a bank. If that person was Googling how to rob a bank, you could argue that's evidence of predisposition, that they wanted to commit this type of crime prior to the entrance of a federal

agent. What's particularly problematic in these post-9-11 terrorism sting cases is that what can be considered predisposition is very broad. You know, if you're watching an Anwar Al-Auliki video, the the al-Qaeda propagandist, you know, the government would argue that's predisposition. You know, you are interested in terrorism. Never mind the fact that I've watched those videos, and probably you and many of your listeners have watched these videos, doesn't make you a terrorist, right? But just that simple act coupled with the FBI sting is what they're able to use to get over entrapment claims.

And so, you know, to date, no one has been successful in these particular cases of arguing entrapment. And so there's a near perfect record of conviction, you know, comment. compounding this, obviously, is that we still live very much in an era of post-9-11 hysteria and Islamophobia. And so I think it's, you know, entrapment defenses are difficult no matter who the person is and what the case is. I think they're doubly difficult when it's a Muslim-facing terrorism charges today. Yeah. And, you know, by the way, I guess this does feel like old news even to me now, even though I know it ain't. And we're still at war over in the Middle East, among other places.

but I think it's important to note and in fact this was covered also at the intercept by Jeremy Scaill that they finally released the transcript of W. Bush and Dick Cheney's debriefing by the September 11th commission and there's a quote in there of W. Bush admitting that yeah

they were angry about the bases in Saudi Arabia being used to blockade and bomb Iraq the sanctions regime. Yeah there was a lot of resentment and he even specified it was useful propaganda for their recruitment, he said. In other words, radical Islam ain't got a damn thing to do with it. And W. Bush himself acknowledged that in, what, 2002, 2003 at the latest.

While they lied to all of us for another until Trump came along and replaced bin Laden as the devil or whatever, they lied to us until, and even Trump carried. this through, right? In his campaign against Hillary Clinton, why won't she say radical Islam? Radical Islam, radical Islam, this whole time when what it really was was George Bush's father and Bill Clinton were mass murdering people in Iraq, starving them to death and bombing them to little pieces from bases on the Holy Arabian Peninsula. As Bush acknowledged, just like bin Laden said the whole time, it was radical politics, not radical Islam. that attack on the United States. But then this is all so relevant.

It's not my little hobby horse. The point is here, as you have demonstrated, better than anyone else. They have to keep entrapping these idiots, not just so the FBI agents can stay paid without having to get a real job, but so they can make it look like there's this Islamist juggernaut headed this way, infiltrating our society, waiting to lone wolf attack us at any time. And there have been some real ones. Zazi in Denver and San Bernardino and, of course, Orlando and a few others, but they pale in

numbers to the entrapment and the entrapments. And the narrative, especially through the Bush and Obama years, was built largely upon these fake cases that you have documented here. For sure, yeah, you know, since 9-11, there's been more than 350 defendants who have been caught up in these kind of counterterrorism sting cases. You know, the, number of cases of, you know, real attackers, you know, is less than a couple of dozen in the 20 or so years. And so there's a really stark disparity between the two. And, you know, what this is, and we've talked about this in the past is this is, in my view, very much kind of a bureaucratic evil. You know, the Congress sets the budget of the FBI. That budget is then

separated into areas like counterterrorism and organized crime. And counterterrorism has been, and it continues to be the largest, you know, largest funded portion of the FBI's budget. And, you know, the FBI can't say, you know, hey, give us billions of dollars and we'll fight terrorism and then come back to Congress every year and be like, hey, we didn't find any of those terrorists, right? These sting operations are a very effective way for the FBI to say, like, hey, we're spending all your money, we're catching the bad guys. Here's an example of the bad guys. But the problem is that, you know, these sting operations. end up not finding truly dangerous terrorists, but people who can be easily manipulated.

And it creates incentive structures throughout the system to find these people from, you know, the management at the FBI who are under pressure to, you know, justify these large counterterrorism budgets, that pressure that gets filtered down to local agents who are under pressure to find terrorists. So they then go to their informants and say, we got lots of money to pay if you can bring us big cases. And so there's an informant, incentivized by money, you know, end up finding these people. And that's what happened in this particular case. And, you know,

in this, in this particular case, Robert Childs, the informant, had a relationship with the one defendant, Abu Khalid Abdu Lateef. In the past, he had sold him a cleaning business. And both men ended up, you know, having a disagreement over, over it. They both led to that they were cheated for different reasons. And so they'd been estranged. And they reconciled in 2011. And after dinner one night, Abu Khalid Abdul-Kalib had Robert Childs over for dinner. And Abu Khalid, Abdul-Ateef makes a very over-the-top statement about how they could use Robert Childs as big SUV and ram the gates of this military base. You know, whether he was serious about this, whether it was, you know, why he said it, all of those are unknowns. But what happened is that

Robert Childs knew another man who was working as a Seattle police informant, making lots and lots of money. And that man said, hey, if you take that information to the police, they'll pay you a lot of money. And Robert Childs told his friend, like, look, the dude isn't serious. He just said this for reasons. I don't know, but he's not serious. And the guy's like, well, if you want to make some money, you make it sound serious. You make it sound like you were scared for your life. And Robert Child says that he then took that information to the Seattle police, who introduced him to the FBI. And they then signed him up as an informant because they'd been trying, they'd been investigating, this Abu Khalid al-Latif guy for some time at that point and had been unable to build a case.

And so over the course of just a couple of months, the FBI paid Robert Child's $90,000 to set Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif and his friend up in this sting operation. I mean, that should be all you need to know right there, right? Like, if you hadn't named the number yet, and I just like asked somebody's innocent old cop show watching mom, how much you think they paid this informant, I don't know, a couple of grand, right, two or three grand? they paid him $90,000, $90,000 to set a guy up. I mean, come on.

What would a bum like this do for $90,000? Well, he'd set up an innocent man, obviously. That's a lot of money. He might not do that for three or four or five. Exactly, yeah. I mean, that's the important context here, which is, you know, $90,000 is a lot of money to anybody. But to someone like Rob a Childs, a convicted sex offender, someone who has a criminal record, someone whose employment prospects are not great, $90,000 is a ton, right?

And so, you know, the question is, like, what is he willing to do for $90,000? In this particular case, and what Childs has now come forward to confess to, which is the thrust of my article, is that he was willing to basically set up his friend and send him to prison in exchange for $90,000. And by the way, I didn't mean that. That's all you need to know. That was just figure speech. I still want to hear everything. Go ahead. No, no, I know.

I get it. No, it's true. But the aspect of that is true. This is what I highlight to people as much as I can, which is that, you know, when you are paying informants this much money, you know, you have to wonder what they're doing to, you know, earn that money. Because, you know, the FBI doesn't pay informants who don't bring cases. So there's a direct financial incentive for informants to incentivize crime, to create circumstances

for people to commit crimes or they otherwise wouldn't, you know, that's baked into the system. In this particular case, you know, after Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif and Robert and his friend were arrested following Robert Childs's lead sting, Robert Childs and his police handler at the Seattle Police Department of man named Samuel de Hesus, who was working with the FBI, they both deleted their text messages. And, you know, a big part of Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif's case, prior to his agreement to take a plea was a push toward like what why were these text messages deleted was the evidence exculpatory you know what was the purpose of this and you know according to the official account from 2011 and and a couple years afterwards as they were as they were litigating

this you know Samuel de Jesus said that that was part of Seattle Police Department's policy and he'd forgotten that the FBI had told him to retain the messages. Robert Childs alleged that that he was, because he was a convicted sex offender, he could not possess pornography based on his release terms. And so he claimed that he had a bunch of pornography on his phone and had deleted it and wiped his phone so that he wouldn't get in trouble for it and that there were no text messages that were exculpatory or could have worked in Abu Khalid Abdulte's favor. And that had been the story for years and years.

And, you know, what ended up happening in the story that I document is that Robert Childs, he got hired as an informant to investigate Abu Khalid al-Dol-Lativ, what apparently no one knew was that there was an untested rape kit on the shelf in Seattle that he had raped a 12-year-old girl back in 2006. And, you know, for whatever reason, Seattle police never tested the rape kit. And so as this rape kit sits on a shelf in Seattle nearby Robert Child is hired and does the sting operation, deletes all his text messages afterward and years past. a decade passes. And then finally, in 2019, as a result of a Justice Department grant,

Washington State tests a bunch of rape kits, some dating back to the 1980s. One of those is a match for Robert Childs. And the evidence showed that he had raped this 12-year-old girl back in 2006. At the time of the rape kit being tested, Robert Childs is living in Florida. He gets extradited back to Washington State, where he's ultimately convicted. And earlier this year was sentenced to life in prison as a result of the rape conviction. And as soon as he was convicted, he sent a letter to Abdel-Latif, and he also called me, because I had this, I'd been talking to him over the years about this case. And, you know, he suddenly basically says, well, look, now that I no longer fear any retribution

from the Justice Department of the FBI, because what can they do to me now, I'm serving life in prison, you know, let me tell you the truth. And what he said is the truth is that he had sent a bunch of text messages. to his handler at the Seattle Police Department, who was working with the FBI, in which he expressed, you know, that Abdul Latif was not a danger, basically expressed that they were entrapping him, and that they deleted those messages in order to build, you know, a prosecutable case against Abdul Latif. And, you know, what this has done now is, has reopened the case. Abdu Latif has been appointed a new lawyer to investigate this, possibly file an appeal or habeas motion, and Childs is now willing to testify. about what he did and what he did for the FBI. You know, the challenge, of course, is this all happened 10 years ago,

and the primary witness to this is a man who's been convicted, you know, of three sex offenses and is now serving a life prison sentence for rape. And obviously, as a result, it's not the most credible witness. Right, they're going to turn that around. You're a confessed liar. Why should we believe you that he didn't do it when they're relying on his accusations in the first place? Exactly. I mean, I, you know, if I, you know, not that I'm a lawyer, not that anyone is asking me, but if for legal advice, but, you know, if I was representing Abdul Latif, I think the argument would be, you know, yes, he's not the most credible person, obviously. He's a convicted, recidivist sex defender. But the FBI obviously thought he was credible enough in 2011, right? So if he's credible enough for the FBI, I think what he's saying now should at least be, you know, taken with equal credibility. But, you know, the heart of this case really is that, you know, you know, know, it gets at the kind of, you know, the moral rot at the center of a lot of these sting operations,

which is that, you know, in public, the FBI and the Justice Department are saying, look, that we caught a, we caught a dangerous terrorist and we took them off the street as a result of these aggressive sting tactics. And there have always been these questions that, you know, could these people have committed these crimes, were it not for the FBI enabling everything? And what Robert Childs is showing here is, like, in this case, no. They knew that he wasn't dangerous. They knew he was setting him, they were setting him up for numbers, and they knew they were just looking to get a conviction that they could parade out as terrorism, even though this really wasn't a terrorist case. Well, and this is the real wrinkling thing, if I understand it, though, right?

There was something of a terrorist case here where they were investigating somebody involved in the Islamic State overseas, and that guy had talked to this guy on the phone or something, but they were trying to, it looks like. parallel construction. They were trying to figure out another pretext. And so that was how they recruited this guy, Childs, to come up with something on him. Is that right? Yeah. And so that, you know, you mentioned earlier that the title of the piece was the terrorist, the rapist, and me. And I don't normally write in first person, but the reason it was appropriate here was that this story, I'd followed this story for, you know, about eight years. But it also intersected into a lot of other reporting that I did. And it's kind of one of these weird cases where, you know, everything kind of came together. And And in this particular case, you know, going back a few years, I was communicating with an

American who joined the Islamic State in Syria. His name was Russell Dennis. And I ended up doing a podcast series for Audible called American ISIS that was about his story. I communicated with him secretly for about six months while he was in Syria fighting for the Islamic State. And one of the things that came out of this was that prior to his leaving the United States, the FBI had essentially used him as basically a bug light. anyone he was he was in contact with they were investigating right they were monitoring his phone

calls and his email and whoever he was in contact with got the FBI's attention because in the FBI's view you know this was you know an extremist and so he would know other extremists and so for counterterrorism purposes they would investigate anyone around him and what we know is that in uh long before Robert Childs went to the FBI and the Seattle Police with information about Abu Khalid al-Dol-Latif the person who would become an American ISIS fighter had met Abdul Latif through YouTube. They both were frequent posters of Dawa videos, which are basically religious videos for Islam that they're supposed to call people to Islam. So it's like, you know, it's praising Islam and why you should, you know, become a Muslim yourself. And so Russell and Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif met this

way. They had a single phone call. And what we know from the FBI records is that within a few weeks of that phone call, that is when the physical surveillance of Abdul Latif starts. And so the FBI was basically investigating him based on his having a conversation one time with another man that they suspected was involved in extremism. And they never could get him to do anything. They were surveilling him, monitoring, and they could not find any evidence of a crime. I was also able to substantiate that they sent another informant to a woman to meet with Abdul Latif, and she was unable to get him to do anything

that would move any sort of criminal case forward. So this was someone that the FBI suspected was involved in crimes or extremism, but they had no proof. The only thing they had was this one phone call. And so instead of giving up the case, they continue to try to move it forward. And so when Robert Childs comes to them and says,

hey, my friend, Abdul Latif told me this in the parking lot, that he wanted to take my SUV and ram it through the gates at Fort Lewis, it wasn't, al-Latif wasn't a stranger to the FBI. They'd been trying to build a case against him. And so Robert Childs gave them that way. And so, you know, what's also interesting in what we reveal in this story is that, you know, the FBI had portrayed this case as like, hey, we didn't know about this Al-Latif guy

until this guy Robert Childs came and said, hey, he's a possible terrorist. And that's what launched the case. But in reality, they'd known about him for some time and had been unable to build a case against him had been unable to find any evidence of terrorism or extremism. And, you know, so it certainly raises questions about the truthfulness of the genesis of the case from the FBI and the Justice Department's perspective, but then also why they would have chosen, you know, to keep going after this guy, Abdul Latif. Hang on just one second.

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And, you know, these little things make it certainly make it sound like he's not a very sympathetic character. You know, but of course, as you said, anybody can watch in a Lockheed video. It doesn't mean that he endorsed every word the guy said or anything like that. might have just been interested in the thing. Yeah, and definitely the challenge in these cases, as this one, as with others, is that you're right, like the defendant who is ultimately caught up in these sting operations says or does pretty despicable things that make them hard to sympathize with. And those things aren't always illegal, right?

Like saying despicable things, you know, isn't an illegal thing. But saying, hey, man, you could drive your suburban through that gate. That doesn't amount to a damn thing. I mean, I can see it as a predicate to pretend to investigate a thing to start something, but it's, come on, for sure, it's nothing. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I mean, that's not something you or I would likely say, but it doesn't mean that someone who says it is going to do that. And that's the big difference. And the other thing I try to emphasize with these cases, and we're seeing this more, is that, you know, these types of tactics really were used most prolifically against Muslims and Muslim converts in the United States post-9-11. So, you know, stupid people, right?

Like they, I remember the kid, the Brooklyn Bridge, they just found the dumbest kid down at the bookstore. No offense, kid. I hope he's out now. But he was just, he was the slowest kid they could find to put the words in his mouth and make him repeat it. And in this case, you introduced both of these guys as mentally ill. I think one of them, especially you kind of imply in here, was less intelligent than his friend who was entrapped and then leading him along on. this stupid thing. Yeah, if you look at the, you know, the kind of the canon of people who have been caught up

in these sting operations, it's very common for mental illness to be a previous diagnosis. In other cases, the people who are caught up in these sting operations are easily manipulated. You know, either they're not the brightest individuals or in the case of Islamic extremism, they are recent converts to Islam and can be manipulated by saying, you know, this is what Muhammad said, or this is what's in the Quran, even though that might not be the case, but they wouldn't know the difference. And so FBI informants are able to kind of manipulate people in that way. The other thing, you know, I was going to mention too, is that, you know, as I'm sure you and your listeners know, we've seen a pretty rapid expansion in recent years of these types of tactics outside of the kind of context of Muslim extremism, right? Like we're beginning to see, you know, these types of sting operations used against people for other types of terrorism, you know, the Whitmer kidnapping plot being an example.

but also like on left wing investigations of left wing activists too as well as you know financial crimes there have been more recent cases of you know the FBI setting people up and say like money laundering charges even though you know they've never laundered money in the past right and so so these types of tactics you know and this is something I've been I was worrying about back when I wrote my book a decade ago which is that to say like you know this is happening to an unsympathetic group of people people who got involved in some sort of extremism but it's a it's likely not going to stay confined to that group if the government is successful in using these tactics. And they have been successful. And what we're seeing is, you know, the use of these very aggressive, abusive tactics against other people now, too. And, you know, and to some extent, you know, the FBI continues, or to most extent, I should say, the FBI continues to get very little pushback on, on this as an overall tactic of investigation. All right. Now, and can you tell us a little bit more about the main and trapeze, sidekick here who also got in trouble?

Yeah, Wally Mujahid had Schizoaffective disorder, and he'd been diagnosed with this in years past. And Schizoaffective disorder, as it happens, is a more common diagnosis of mental illness among, you know, the cohort of 350 or so defendants who've been caught up in these terrorism sting operations. And why that's significant is that schizoaffective disorder basically causes an unmooring from reality. So, so, you know, people who suffer from it and people suffer from it

by degrees, so some are worse than others. But, you know, basically day to day have trouble distinguishing between things that really happened in their life and things as they imagined them to happen. And so as you can, as you can imagine, you know, someone who is suffering from an inability to separate reality from fantasy is going to be very easily manipulated into doing something. And that's what we saw in this case where Wally had kind of gone along with what Alda Lateef and Robert Childs were putting forward. You know, and the question, you know, of his ability to, you know, make a sound decision that he was getting involved in something is questionable, right, given his own mental illness. And, you know, that commonly is a way that

the FBI is able to kind of manipulate people caught up in these sting operations is that they they truly suffer from significant mental illness. You know, this isn't, you know, we've seen, you know, since the 80s, or if it's not the 60s, I think, we've seen a steady decline in public health for mental illness in general, right? Like the, the quote unquote, insane asylums of the past are long gone. And so we're kind of moving, we've steadily moved over decades and decades, and this is a much larger problem, obviously, of people who suffer from mental illness committing crimes and their treatment being more traditional prison than any kind of mental, you know, mental treatment. And that's, you know, that's another wrinkle of what's happening here is that a lot of people caught up in these stings are, you know, facing severe, in some cases, severe mental illness

that, you know, it's quite possible that had they received the right treatment, may not have found themselves in the position that the FBI put them in. And now, you're writing here that this guy was pressured, essentially, you know, it's not like an episode of Matlock or something, this criminal justice system. He essentially felt like he had no choice but to plead guilty. intake, what, 18, 19 years, 18 years for this thing, just because they had him, even though he didn't really do it. And then by it, though, I guess he did do it, right? They did convince him to show up at a place where they were going to get some rifles. Did he really know they were

supposed to get some rifles there? Yeah, so they knew they were supposed to get rifles. There is video of them holding the rifles, but they don't have any kind of specific evidence that they were going to commit it beyond then, right? What the government would say would be like... And I think you're right that they didn't even know the first thing. about how to use the weapons. Yeah, that was one thing Robert Childe, the informant mentioned, which is that, you know, as he put it, like, Abdul Latif didn't even know how to work the breach, meaning that he didn't know how to load the rifle.

And so, you know, this is a case where they were ultimately convicted of a conspiracy to use these rifles to kill U.S. military personnel, but according to the informant who was involved, these men didn't even know how to use the rifle, right? And so, you know, you could argue that guns are fairly simple things to use and they would have eventually figured it out. But just from a basic level, you know, it does show that the capacity of these defendants to commit crimes was quite questionable, right? That said, you know, they did something that probably you and I wouldn't do, which is to kind of go to this car shop shop that was an FBI front, you know, hold the rifles and talk about a plot. Would they have committed that?

Would they have gone forward with it? Like, we'll never really know. Robert Childs, the informant, says now that it was all talk, that that he pushed forward with getting them to do this and that, they were never really serious about it. And that's been Abdul Latif's contention as well, that he just got caught up in the moment, was talking to Robert Childs about all this, but never really intended to move forward. And, you know, the way these sting operations work, we don't know with any certainty whether they would have moved forward or not because the arrest happens.

The conspiracy law in the United States is very broad. And so it's difficult to argue against a conspiracy charge. And then finally, as you said, I mean, one thing that is really important, to understand about the federal criminal justice system is that it's really designed to get plea deals. I think more than 97% of all convictions at the federal level are a result of plea agreements. And that's because there is a very difficult or very horrible risk-reward calculus if you're facing, you know, any sort of federal charge in that, like, it's very quite, it's quite likely that your sentence will be draconian. In Al-Bul-Latif's case, he faced a life sentence if he took it to trial and were convicted. And the federal government, the Justice Department, came to him and said, if you plead guilty to this, we'll give you or recommend 18 years.

18 years is still a hell of a long time to serve in prison, but it's a lot better than life in prison. And so, you know, people in his position are really caught in this very difficult situation where it's like, I could fight this and chances are I'm going to lose and sort of, you know, potentially a life sentence. or I could cut my losses here, plead guilty, and do my 18 years and still have, you know, some time on the outside. And that's the, that's, that's, that's what he chose. And that's, that's what happens in a lot of these cases. Well, and by the way, it's a side issue in your article that comes up that you did a TED talk on all of this, which I saw back years ago, I guess. And, but so, and the point being, I mean, your book, I don't know, it made the biggest splash in the world but it was also not like you know covert action quarterly or anything either right like a thing got

out there and it helped to establish a narrative in the mainstream i think you probably made it easier for even the post and the times to talk about these things in a little bit more realistic way and that kind of thing i mean that i give you credit for that i think but the point being that in other words though everybody knows right just like everybody knows all the bad things about rape and racism gangs and whatever things in prison. Everybody knows that court-appointed lawyers don't have the resources to do their clients a good service, and everybody knows all these things. Everybody knows that these are a bunch of fake entrapments, the Liberty City 7, and the Fort Dix pizza plot, and the JFK Airport Fuel Terminal, and the Pentagon Paper Airplane, and the Portland

Christmas Tree, and poor Hamid Hyatt down there in Lodi, California. Did they ever let that kid out of prison? I mean, this whole thing, but then my point is, sorry that, but then they still go on, right? It's not that it didn't happen that the truth came out. Good journalists, led by Aronson, explained to the democracy how things are not working right, and then we adapted and fixed it, and the entrapped got set free, and then the FBI had to change their guidelines and stopped doing it this way. That never happened. Here we, it's 10 years later.

it's you know 20 years into this scheme and it just rolls on right yeah i mean exactly yeah i think we all we all kind of realize that you know this is this is what happens in these cases and there hasn't been a whole lot of accountability in large part because you know this is just an institutional failure i mean congress is the one that traditionally is supposed to keep the fbi in check and that hasn't been happening the other possible check are is the courts and you know the level of deference that most federal judges give the Justice Department and the FBI in national security cases is in my opinion gross at times. You know, I think there is a question now. I mean, I think, you know, the way, you know, the narrative that the FBI has been setting people up has been so firmly established, I think.

You know, my work is a part of that, but certainly other people have covered this. But it's so firmly established that we now have kind of conspiracy theories related to it, right? Like, you know, there is the ongoing conspiracy theory among, you know, right-wingers that January 6 was nothing more than like a big FBI sting operation. I think that's still just a matter of unproven speculation. I don't know that that's a conspiracy theory quite yet. Were there informants in there? Yeah, we know that. But the idea that the FBI could have, you know, engineered January 6 as if they do these sting operations, I think it's just, you know. Well, now, I mean, you got to break these things down a little bit, right? Like the question would be.

be the most militarist groups are the three percenters and the proud boys and this and that and those so-called, you know, seemingly on video there are these teams of guys who are leading the charge. The guy who's up on the scaffold telling

everyone, press forward and all these things. If those guys were working for the FBI as opposed to just being a gang of right wing cooks who had an agreement with each other, then that would make the difference. You know, that's not the same It's just saying if there happened to be some informants in the crowd but weren't really doing

anything other than shuffing along like everybody else or something, you know. Yeah, yeah. No, and, you know, this is definitely a case of we don't know what we don't know yet, right? And, you know, what were the exact roles of that? And, I mean, as you mentioned in the, previously about the thing in Michigan, I mean, that was to an overwhelming degree concocted by the FBI in that same sort of way. So that's the kind of thing that if you suspect, that, but that proof hadn't come out yet.

TV would call that a conspiracy theory. The Democrats would call that a conspiracy theory, but then it turns out that, no, that's exactly right. That's what your book is about is how the FBI conspires against innocent people all the time. Yeah, with them and their well-paid informants. Yeah, I mean, which is the, which is the point I wanted to make in this, is that, you know, obviously, you know, that, you know, the, the Michigan case and then the questions around January 6th, that, you know, in many cases, I would view a conspiracy

theory as a conspiracy theory, but like, you know, that this is something that's kind of firmly rooted in the current Republican firmament at the moment. And so the question is, I think, you know, will, you know, we see in the next Congress in the Republican-controlled House, you know, a greater accountability for the FBI, given, you know, the Republicans, you know, kind of more fervent interest in this FBI practices, right? In the past, we have not seen the FBI kind of called to account, you know, explain these types of tactics. And I think, It's possible now, you know, given that there is, you know, this outrage by, as a result of the Michigan case, that we'll see more of that. I don't know. But it's certainly like, you know, it certainly seems like there's a window for that. There was a spirit of that in the 1990s, really, you know, after Waco, but before Oklahoma. But there was, and even after that, though, like with the, I don't know if you remember the scandal about the know-your customer regulations where the banks have to now turn over everything on everybody to the FBI. Right, right. And it was like the Wall Street.

journals that led the charge against that, along with a lot of very mainstream Republicans, like I think Grassley and a few others tried to stop it, maybe. Yeah, I mean, there's always been Grassley. There's always been Lynch in Massachusetts who have been advocating for, you know, greater accountability. Just on the whole, we're not seeing hearings that are aggressive in FBI tactics. And I guess I just wonder out loud if, you know, in the next Congress we might, that we might see a change to that.

Yeah. Well, I think for right-wingers listening, let your congressman know the narrative area. is who set Donald Trump up on the Russian gate thing in the first place? Who's the FBI, counterintelligence division, going against the major party, you know, essentially framing a major party candidate for president, and then pressing that thing on for literally three years after that? I mean, talk about a vendetta. You don't have to like Trump to figure that, geez, well, he's the one who won the election,

not the FBI and CIA, who aren't even described in the Constitution anywhere, and, you know, seem to think they have the power to spy on the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee when she's investigating their torture and seem to think that they have the right to entrap a candidate for treason. Like, I don't know. I've seen, as you're saying, there is a spirit there on the right where people are saying, you know, maybe we just abolish the FBI and replace it with a different thing or maybe nothing. But that is within the power of Congress to just say, actually, you don't exist anymore at all, FBI. We're going to hire some different lawyers to run a different agency in the place of what you guys have been failing to do. And they could do that. They could do that in a

week. And they could override the president's veto if that was what the American people demanded. And that's the fact of the matter. And I'm not saying it'd be easy, but there's 350 million of us. So if we just had enough consensus, it would be unstoppable. And every liberal ought to already agree with that. just because they tried to get MLK to shoot himself in the head, right? Like, we shouldn't have any backsliding on the left at all. We're just hoping that the right wing can catch up with where the left wing has always been on this, right? Trevor.

This has been kind of the interesting part of this, right? Where the political realignment, where you know, Democrats who in the past had been more critical of the FBI have shifted post-Trump and the opposite happened with Republicans. And I would say that I do think, you know, one of the things I fear is that, you know, if there is any kind of accountability efforts made by Republicans who are mad about the Michigan case or mad about the FBI's investigation of Trump, that they will limit it to those cases and not really get at the larger issues at play, right? When people talk about some of the abuses of the Trump campaign investigation, you know, such as sending a very attractive young woman at George

Papadopoulos, right? And everyone thought that was like, here's like another example of political bias. In many cases, what happened in the Trump investigation is not unique that the FBI has been using these types of tactics against all sorts of people in investigations. And so, you know, if the FBI does, or if the Republican House does pursue, you know, accountability related to the Trump investigation or related to Michigan, you know, my hope, although it's not great, my hope would be that they don't limit it to those cases, but kind of see that as kind of more standard practice for the FBI. and what it means not only for, you know, in the case of the Michigan entrapment case or in, you know, the case of the Trump's, the Trump investigation,

that this is kind of more a systemic problem than it is one of kind of specific political bias in the FBI. Yep. And you know what, too? This is one of those, it's like with civil forfeiture or torture or aggressive war or something. It's one of these where you're either free society or you ain't. And you can't just have your national police force. running around absolutely lawless and roughshod and simply conspiring to persecute and, you know, bully innocent people and trap innocent people, mostly for headlines and for PR, for their own good at the expense of, you know, this country. It's just simple as that. It's like the old Bill Hicks joke about, geez, they still won't tell us the truth about what happened to the dead president, but we're going to go on and just pretend.

like, okay, yeah, this is a democracy and the people are in charge, even though it seems like you'd kind of have to resolve that one before you move on, you know? Yeah, I mean, I think this is kind of a very classical liberal view, right, that we have to keep our, you know, eye on who's watching us, right? Who's watching the guards? And, you know, I think it's important for people to realize that the enormous power that the FBI has is not just in prosecuting you, but in just investigating you at all. It can kind of upend your life, ruin it. And, you know, the post-9-11, the FBI doesn't even really need a criminal predicate, a reasonable suspicion that you're committing a crime to launch an investigation.

You know, if they were just like, hey, Scott Horton, we think that guy's a terrorist, they could do all sorts of intrusive searches and really disrupt if not ruin your life. And so this is, you know, an enormous unchecked power that the FBI has. And I think it's something that, you know, should be used incredibly judiciously. But the truth is that it's not, and that there isn't enough accountability to get them to kind of change their ways. And I think that's really kind of the accountability piece of this, which is just that we need more kind of investigations of how the FBI is ultimately investigating Americans. Yeah, man. All right, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate the fact that you are still on this beat and doing such a great job at it, Trevor.

Great stuff, as always, man. Yeah, thanks for having me on, Scott. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. All right, you guys, that's Trevor Aronson. And this is, well, it's got a couple titles. An FBI informant set up his friend. Now he's trying to make amends, a.k.a. the terrorist, the rapist, and me.

And that's at the Intercept. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.