Sep. 27, 2024: The FBI and Jan. 6

Israel targets Nasrallah, fate unclear; 'Say hello to the cruise missile'; Appeals court skeptical of Trump fraud verdict

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The Big Story

At the end of yesterday’s edition of The Scroll (read it here), we noted that transcripts recently released by the House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight significantly complicate the popular narrative of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot. Trump, of course, bears responsibility for his half-baked scheme to challenge the results of what was admittedly a chaotic and razor-thin election, but the transcripts showed that Trump did, in the days before the rally, instruct various senior Pentagon officials to deploy at least 10,000 National Guard troops ahead of the rally to keep it “safe.” Those officials ignored him. 

A congressional hearing this week raised a related question about the riot: How many federal assets were present in and around the Capitol on Jan. 6, and what role did they play in the disorder? 

On Wednesday, the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held a hearing on FBI retaliation against whistleblowers who raised red flags about the bureau’s role in the Capitol riot. The star witness was former FBI Staff Operations Specialist Marcus Allen, a former Employee of the Year who was investigated, had his security clearance revoked, and was then suspended without pay for 27 months after he was deemed an “insider threat” who “did not profess allegiance to the United States.” His crime? Citing “extremist propaganda” in a letter he forwarded to superiors expressing concerns that FBI Director Christopher Wray had not been “forthright” with the public when he testified that FBI confidential human sources—“assets” or “feds,” in the common parlance—played no role in instigating the riot. The “extremist propaganda,” it turned out, was reporting from The New York Times and the website RealClearPolitics. As additional evidence of Allen’s potential “hostility to the United States,” bureau investigators cited skeptical comments Allen had made about the federal government’s vaccine mandate. 

Department of Justice Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz, whose office is currently reviewing the DOJ’s Jan. 6 actions, also testified on Wednesday. During questioning from Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY), Horowitz indirectly admitted to the presence of FBI informants at the Capitol, including some that the DOJ paid to travel to D.C. from elsewhere in the country. Asked by Massie how many confidential human sources were at the Capitol, Horowitz did not deny their presence but said merely that “our report will include information in that regard.” Asked how many were reimbursed for travel, Horowitz replied, “As I sit here, I don’t recall the number.” Horowitz also refused to say whether there were more or less than 100 agents and informants at the protest. Those hoping for clarity before the election, however, are likely to be disappointed. Despite the IG’s office announcing that it would begin the review in 2021, Horowitz testified that the report would not be ready for another “couple of months”—and almost certainly not before Nov. 5. 

We, of course, have no way of knowing for sure what role the Feds might have played at the riot, but previous whistleblower disclosures and testimony have been suggestive. In July 2023, for instance, an FBI whistleblower alleged that then Acting Deputy Director Paul Abbate had instructed his subordinates to conceal information from the public about “at least 25” confidential informants whose existence would be too “problematic or embarrassing” for the bureau to publicly acknowledge. Last May, another FBI whistleblower testified to Congress that agents from the bureau’s D.C. office had refused to share hours of footage from the riot with other FBI offices because it could compromise informants or undercover officers. Another testified that there were so many present that the bureau itself lost track. Others have described a politicized and repressive atmosphere within the bureau, with senior leadership punishing, and threatening to punish, any employees deemed politically suspect (i.e. conservative) or who raised questions about the FBI’s role in the protest or its misleading public statements on that role. 

We’d love to give the FBI the benefit of the doubt, but for context, five of the 14 people charged in the 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer—another high-profile example of “far-right” extremism, which Whitmer explicitly blamed on Trump in the run-up to the 2020 election—were acquitted after juries judged they had been entrapped by FBI informants and undercover agents, who pushed the plot forward. In March, The Intercept published excerpts of a recorded conversation (never allowed into evidence) between Stephen Robeson, a violent career criminal and paid FBI informant who several of the Whitmer defendants believed was the architect of the kidnapping plot, and his FBI handlers, in which the handlers attempted to threaten Robeson into silence in order to hide his role in the plot, which threatened, if revealed, to unravel the case. As The Intercept wrote:

The FBI agents asked Robeson to sign a nondisclosure agreement and proceeded to coach and threaten him to shape his story and ensure that he would never testify before a jury. Their coercion of Robeson undermines the Justice Department’s claim, in court records, that Robeson was a “double agent” whose actions weren’t under the government’s control. The agents also made it clear that they had leverage: They knew Robeson had committed crimes while working for the FBI.

So, you know, don’t take the FBI’s word for it. 

One more interesting connection here: One of the FBI agents involved in the retaliation against Allen was Special Agent in Charge Jeffrey Veltri, who, according to whistleblowers, oversaw the purge of conservatives and others from the bureau using pretextual security clearance revocations, including via the distribution of the so-called Trump questionnaire, which flagged agents as potential threats if they were heard by colleagues to “vocalize support for President Trump.” When another FBI investigator looked into Allen’s case and judged that the suspension was unwarranted, Veltri retaliated against him, for which he was later investigated, ultimately leading to his reassignment. 

So where, you might ask, is Biden administration hitman Jeffrey Veltri now? In the FBI’s Miami Field Office, overseeing the investigation into the second Trump assassination. 

Read The Intercept’s expose on the Whitmer plot here: https://theintercept.com/2024/03/06/gretchen-whitmer-kidnapping-informant/ 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Liel Leibovitz on why the Jews should stand with Eric Adams

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The Rest

→Watch this:

Those are Israeli strikes on what has been identified as Hezbollah’s main headquarters in the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh on Friday, which commenced shortly after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finished his speech at the United Nations in New York. Israeli and U.S. officials have said that the strike targeted Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah. The latest assessment from the IDF, as of the time of our writing, is that Nasrallah was killed.

→Quote of the Day: 

This phenomenon of putting ballistic missiles inside an apartment, it’s crazy. Cruise missiles in the living room. Every morning you say hello to your wife, hello to the cruise missile.

That’s some comic relief from an Israeli security official quoted today in The Times of Israel on Hezbollah’s storage of weapons in civilian homes. The same official said, of any potential ground operation in Lebanon, “We will try to do it as short as we can.” 

→The success of Israel’s operations against Hezbollah stands in stark contrast to the intelligence failure of Oct. 7. Why? Because this is the sort of operation Israel has spent two decades preparing for, several Israeli officials and analysts tell The Wall Street Journal. “The core of Israeli security doctrine is to bring the war to the enemy,” Avner Golov, former senior director of Israel’s National Security Council, told the paper. “With Gaza, it was totally different. We were surprised, so it was a failure.”

→At a Thursday hearing on the $454 million fine leveled against Donald Trump in his New York civil fraud case, a five-justice appeals court seemed skeptical that the former president deserved a half-billion-dollar fine for allegedly misstating the value of his real estate holdings in a transaction in which no one lost money. Justice Peter Moulton, according to reporting from CNN, stated that “the immense penalty in this case is troubling,” while Justice David Friedman questioned whether New York Attorney General Letitia James, who campaigned for office on a promise to go after the former president’s real estate dealings, even had authority to prosecute Trump in the case, given that “you have two sophisticated players”—Trump and Deutsche Bank—“in which no one lost money.” “There has to be some limitation in what the attorney general can do,” Friedman went on, “in interfering in these private transactions … where people don’t claim harm.”

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TODAY IN TABLET:

Jewish Sex Therapists Battle Their Professional Association, by Flora Tsapovsky

‘This field is supposed to be a safe place,’ says one therapist who resigned over the group’s stances on Israel and antisemitism. ‘This wouldn’t have happened with any other minority group.’

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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The Jews Should Stand With Eric Adams

Jewish New Yorkers have an obligation to stand up against a corrupt Democratic Party lawfare campaign that is targeting the mayor who stood up for us

By Liel Leibovitz

We don’t yet know the precise nature of the allegations against New York City’s mayor, Eric L. Adams, who was indicted last night by the federal government in an unprecedented step. Here’s what we do know: New York is a big city with a colorful history of machine politics corruption, dating back to the days of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. Not even Ed Koch, the city’s larger-than-life, three-term mayor who lived like a monk in a tiny $475 per month rent-controlled apartment in Greenwich Village, was immune to large-scale corruption charges that eventually destroyed his administration.

That’s because being the mayor of a city as big and wealthy and fractious as New York City, which is the second home of pretty much every nationality and subnational group of people on earth, requires that you have working connections to the city’s neighborhoods. The city’s neighborhoods are run by people who get stuff done, which means that being mayor requires at least the pretense of doing favors for the people who do favors for you. The mayor of New York may be a flamboyant bon vivant like Jimmy Walker in the 1920s, or a tool of the city’s crime syndicates, like William O’Dwyer, or a monk like Ed Koch, who never took a dime from anyone. But even if the mayor himself is a monastic innocent, you can bet that at least some of the people around him are not—and better not be, or else the city would cease to function. The alternative to this crude political math is to elect billionaires like Michael Bloomberg who are rich enough to bribe the city’s clashing interest groups into submission with their own personal funds. (Bloomberg is estimated to have donated over one billion personal philanthropic dollars to city interest groups during his mayoralty.) The problem there is that you wind up with a city that is built to please billionaires, and which the common folk can’t afford to live in.

Prosecuting New York City mayors for their proximity to one form or another of local corruption is like prosecuting bartenders for their proximity to gin. Of course, for all I know, Eric Adams has actually done something seriously criminal to deserve the public spectacle of a federal indictment complete with armed SWAT teams. Perhaps Adams has been using his public office to solicit multi-million-dollar bribes from Ukrainian gas magnates and Chinese spies, or has been making millions by regularly trading on insider information gleaned from his legislative activities, or has been building a billion-dollar fortune through sweetheart contracts with America’s enemies while employing foreign spies in his office. If he has done any of these things, he surely deserves to be locked away.

I don’t think so, though—since those are all crimes that federal prosecutors decline to prosecute, on the grounds that they are too politically sensitive. What is not politically sensitive, though, is to string up New York City’s Black mayor on charges of minor graft, while letting the big fish swim free. That’s not justice. It’s lawfare—meaning, the weaponization of the law to serve a political agenda.

And whose political agenda would that be? Well, the same people who see Eric Adams’ refusal to welcome unlimited numbers of migrants to New York at the cost of collapsing city services as a moral and political embarrassment, rather than as basic common sense. The same people who can’t stand the sight of a Black ex-cop who knows that the police protect the people far more often than they abuse their powers. The same people who think that preventing “Zionist Jews” from walking across campus or using the library at publicly funded universities like Columbia and NYU is a form of social justice work.

That’s why every Jew in New York City, and there are quite a few of them among Tablet’s readers, should stand up, right now, and support our mayor loudly, passionately, and unreservedly. He protected us, in some part, when no one else in city government—or the federal government—bothered to lift a finger on our behalf. Now it’s our turn to support him.

But wait a minute, you may say—what if the accusations are true? What if Hizzoner did receive campaign funds from people close to the Turkish government in return for approving the Turkish Consulate in Manhattan, and illicitly accepted other contributions from people close to foreign governments?

You’re right. I don’t know. But here’s what I do know:

I know that Hunter Biden’s laptop—the one 51 intelligence officials, including several former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency, argued was a fictitious story that “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”—turned out to be very true, and that though it raised very real allegations about the then-vice president’s involvement in his son’s lucrative business dealings with Ukrainian oligarchs, no serious investigation ever targeted Joe Biden.

I know that earlier this year Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, sold 2,000 shares of Visa, worth between $500,000 and $1 million, just weeks before the credit card behemoth was hit with federal antitrust charges. Paul seems to be a very lucky guy, because last November, he purchased call options in Nvidia and made a cool $4 million in one transaction, or about 20 times his wife’s annual salary as a public servant.

I know that Dianne Feinstein was an avid defender of the Chinese Communist Party; as mayor of San Francisco, she became the first sitting American mayor to visit China. She also enthusiastically supported granting China a most favored nation trading status in 2000, significantly relaxing trade limitations and benefiting the government in Beijing. And while the senator was busy saying that the Communist Party had the right to commit flagrant human rights violations—she even downplayed the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown by comparing it to the 1993 shootout in Waco, Texas—her husband, Richard Blum, made a killing by dealing with the Chinese. When Feinstein entered the Senate, in 1992, Blum’s financial interests in China, according to the senator’s own filings, amounted to one project worth less than $500,000. That soon changed, with a $23 million investment in a steel company owned by the Chinese government, the acquisition of a major Chinese manufacturer of soybean milk and candy, and other projects. Which made it sort of awkward when the senator’s chauffeur turned out to be a bona fide Chinese spy, an unfortunate event that was quickly silenced without much consequence.

I can go on like this for a very long time. Bill and Hillary Clinton became wildly wealthy by offering high level access to the U.S. government to every corrupt uranium trader on the planet. Barack Obama, the most politically active retired president in U.S. history is the proud owner of a stately portfolio of uber-luxury properties around the country. Who knows what a raid on those properties might turn up? The iron-clad ties between the NGO-industrial complex and the Democratic Party are why, just earlier this week, we saw Democratic vice presidential hopeful Tim Walz huddling with Alex Soros, the son of billionaire George Soros, whose extensive philanthropy has been instrumental in electing radically progressive law enforcement officials across the nation. Yet no one ever investigates how these links allow both radical billionaires and the Democratic Party to gut limits on political expenditures.

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So should we care about the allegations against Adams if they turn out to be true? In theory, sure! The law is the law and it should favor no one! But all available evidence suggests that it does. And all available evidence suggests that Mayor Adams is now the victim of a lawfare campaign, in which deliberately loose legislation is weaponized as a tool for settling scores with political foes. This, if you’ve paid any attention, is precisely what New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg, another Soros protege, did to Donald Trump, inventing out of whole cloth a bafflingly unconstitutional theory of criminal liability and instructing the jury in such fuzzy ways that a conviction was all but guaranteed. And now, it’s Eric Adams’ turn.

What did the mayor do to make the powers that be so upset? Take your pick! He criticized the Biden White House for secretly flying tens of thousands of illegal migrants to New York City, a move that has cost the city upward of $5 billion to date and threatens to smother an already overtaxed system of social services like shelters and schools. “We need to mobilize,” the mayor stated as early as December, urging New Yorkers to march on Washington, D.C., and tell the president that they’ll have none of his insane and reckless opening of our borders and flooding our cities with people we can neither vet nor support.

Adams also struggled to fight crime as his party increasingly deemed the very act of policing inherently racist, and he stood for New York’s Jews as his party increasingly snuggled up to their pogromists. The federal government, which has the power to uphold laws and deport foreign students who support terrorism, say, or withdraw funding for universities that coddle antisemitic mobs, many of which appear to have direct links to the foreign terrorist organizations they support, did nothing. Mayor Adams, on the other hand, sprung to action as soon as he could, breaking down the Tentifada encampment at Columbia and repeatedly advocating a zero-tolerance approach to the Hamasniks in our streets.

But even if you don’t or can’t see the workings of a machinery of power that has corrupted the foundations of our legal, political, and cultural systems in these examples, and even if you don’t find it peculiar that the one city official who stood up for law and order and safety and decency and the Jews is now being targeted, you should still support Eric Adams with gusto, because his party-line successor, whoever that may be, is guaranteed to make the city considerably less safe for New Yorkers in general (bienvenidos, Venezuelan gangs!) and Jews in particular (ahlan wa sahlan, Hezbollah enthusiasts!). On that question, I have zero doubt.

Adams may also be the canary in a very deep and very dark coal mine. For here is where the logic of this indictment is leading: Small-scale donations by disfavored political players—like Turks in Queens, or Zionist Jews who support AIPAC, the ADL, or Bnai Brith, let alone those who have a nephew studying in a yeshiva in the West Bank—will be criminalized, with every donation subject to suspicion of a violation of the fuzzy laws governing interactions with foreign governments, followed by federal prosecutors (remember when that term was a synonym for apolitical application of the law?) and SWAT teams. One might reasonably suspect that the sequel to the Adams horror show will be an investigation of a major Jewish organization for “bribing” legislators with fact-finding trips to Israel, and thereby acting as arms of the Israeli government—which will make anything connected to the “Jewish lobby” politically radioactive. At the same time, the giant sewer of corruption will continue to flood the Democratic Party with cash and pay for more violent migrants, less law enforcement officers, and other insane policies that have no impact on George Soros and his son, but have a very large and continuing impact on normal Americans.

So because I don’t want to see the weapons of lawfare turned against the Jews; because I don’t want to live in a third-world swamp that prosecutes political enemies and rewards flunkies with impunity; and because I don’t want gangs targeting my wife in Central Park or on the subway or savages chanting “from the river to the sea” outside my children’s day school or my favorite kosher restaurant; because of all that and more, I stand with Mayor Eric L. Adams, a hero to Jews and New Yorkers. When he is reelected, thanks in part to the support of our community, and of all sane New Yorkers, I will proudly pass out squares of Turkish delight.