Vin Suprynowicz

On July 30, the web site Conservative Treehouse posted a report headlined “Lous Dobbs Interviews Former Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker” at . . . https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/07/30/lou-dobbs-interviews-former-acting-ag-matt-whitaker/#more-167215 .

I weighed in with a comment:

So Mr. Whitaker cheerfully foresees “restoring people’s belief in the integrity of the DOJ and the FBI” because “the rank and file are solid and trying to do the right thing”?

Remember when the Washington Post — back when they OCCASIONALLY reported the truth — found “The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period”?

“Flawed testimony”? Oh, please. They made crap up, and they did it in a way that helped prosecutors 95 PERCENT OF THE TIME, leading to one of the biggest waves of “conviction reviews” in our history.

( https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/04/fbis-flawed-forensics-expert-testimony-hair-analysis-bite-marks-fingerprints-arson.html .)

The “solid rank and file”?

How about Reason magazine reporting, in 2015, BEFORE any of their spying on Trump came out, “The FBI Used to Have Integrity. Now Agents Lie, Cheat, and Break the Law” to wiretap without warrants? (See . . . https://reason.com/2015/04/23/not-your-grandfathers-fbi/ .)

And of course we wouldn’t want to go back to an FBI sniper wrapping up a bush-league ATF entrapment scheme by murdering the unarmed and pregnant Vicky Weaver by shooting her through the throat as she stood in her kitchen (how much did the taxpayers pay to settle that one?) or the FBI pumping tear gas suspended in a flammable propellant into the church building at Waco, setting it afire with their ferret rounds, and then holding the fire engines a mile away while they waited for all the women and children to burn to death.

Did those “solid” rank and file FBI agents admit to murder and resign in disgust . . . or did they all happily accept medals and promotions?

And that’s BEFORE they decided to block the election of Donald Trump — because he was an obvious threat to their pals in the Deep State, especially the big bribe-takers and the industrial-scale pedophiles (Isn’t the FBI supposed to CATCH those guys?) — and when that failed, decided to conspire to overthrow a duly elected government of the United States.

Where are the FBI whistle-blowers? They didn’t even object when the fact that Andy McCabe’s conference table cost $70,000 was redacted to “protect national security.”

Look up the widowed innkeeper Mary Surratt, convicted on circumstantial evidence that she may have offered food or shelter to John Wilkes Booth BEFORE HE COMMITTED ANY CRIME. She was tried by a military tribunal; marshals attempting to serve a writ of habeas corpus on the day of her execution were turned away at the gate, and — protesting her innocence to the end — the widow Surratt was hanged by the neck until dead on July 7, 1865, less than three months after Lincoln was shot.

In contrast, how does Chris Wray handle a coup d’etat staged in his own bureau — starting not three months but more than THREE YEARS ago? Welllll, . . . no need to be haaasty. No need to go ooooverboard. We’ll just schedule another Thursday afternoon seminar on how “We really have to follow proper procedures, guys,” and Mr. Whitaker assures us it’s all OK now, nothing to worry about, because the plotters have all supposedly been “rotated out.”

The Constitution provides for no such office as a “Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The FBI is dead. You really think knowledgeable American jurors are ever again going to convict anyone based on the testimony of an FBI agent? Knowing that even their “field notes” get massaged and edited and rewritten by scum like Comey and McCabe? That Martha Stewart and General Flynn can go to prison for “lying to the FBI” in one of Andrew Weissmann’s “perjury traps” while Hillary walks free after tens of millions of dollars worth of “pay for play,” after admitting to destroying thousands of emails that were under subpoena? Remember the headline The New York Post used when it turned out Hillary had been emailing “Top Secret” documents home so her maid could print them out? “Mop Secret.”

Who were those sad sacks waiting at Dulles to bust Papadopoulos, who then panicked and couldn’t figure out what to do when it turned out he hadn’t brought along the $10,000 in marked bills that had been planted on him so he could be framed on a currency/FARA violation in hopes he’d “snitch” on Donald Trump? ? Oh no . . . don’t tell us . . . not “solid rank and file” FBI agents?”

They’re two years too late. The American version of the KGB is dead. Give them an hour to pack their cardboard boxes, and then see if the GSA can rent out the Hoover building (an appropriately ugly Stalinist pile) to new tenants. Pouring more perfume over the corpse is not going to “restore” anything.

— V.S.

‘DO YOURSELF A BIG FAVOR AND REFRAIN FROM USING RUBY RIDGE, WACO, THE BUNDY STANDOFF IN NEVADA . . . AS EXAMPLES OF GOVERNMENT EXCESS’

There were some positive replies. “Margarite1” wrote on July 31:

“Outstanding post!!! This needs to be repeated over and over and over!! It’s too easy to forget the horrific actions of our government. And I had never heard about the fire engines kept away from the Waco fire. What they did was unthinkable and I believe Hillary’s prints were on that horrible day.”

“Eagledriver50” wrote:

“Vin Suprynowicz you have EXPRESSLY condensed into so many words as to WHY the American People will NEVER, EVER TRUST the FBI again. There will ALWAYS be doubt in their minds concerning their affinity for the truth. Will we as Americans REALLY hear the truth or will we hear some made-up nonsense?. I go with the latter. . . .

“Once the TRUST is GONE it is VERY HARD to get it back . . . NO MATTER what is said or done to improve the FBI. . . . It is lost. . . .I t is now a “dead” appendage!!!”, Eagledriver51 concluded.

But then, of course, someone identifying himself only as “Mac” had to predictably weigh in as follows:

“Pretty good post. However, I have to take exception with your portrayal of both Ruby Ridge and Waco.

“The popular ant-government meme is that Vicki Weaver was intentionally shot by the FBI sniper. This incorrect, whe was inadvertantly hit by a round whiich passed through Harris, who was armed and running into the cabin,” “Mac” wrote. “Her death was unintentional collateral damage. Also, these same story tellers never seem to mention that Weaver was a federal fugitive for a year. That he knew he was a fugitive, as he had been negotiating with the Marhsal’s Service in the past. And, everyone in the Ruby Ridge compound knew that he was a fugitive.

“Just a couplle of weeks previous to Vicki Weaver’s death, Weaver’s son was killed in a shootout between he, Harris and Deputy Marshals, on a trail below the compound, which left a Deputy marshal dead. All, Weaver had to do id walk down off the mountain and no one would have been hurt. He had a year to do so and he refused.

“Then we had the Branch Davidians,” “Mac” continued. “The Davidians DID have illegal fully automatic weapons. They had been warned that the ATF was enroute to their compound. They violently and illegally resisted the serving of that warrant. They then had several weeks to surrender to authorities. Some did, but many did not. A number of women and children did, in fact, leave the compound prior to the final assault. And, none of the deceased were trapped inside the compound by the authorities. The assault began on one side of the compound and slowly worked its way to the other. Those inside were able to leave the buildings on the side not under attack. They did not.

“Were fire engines held back? Yes. Why? Because the Davidians had shown themselves to be willing to kill government agents and we have seen firefighters come under fire in riots on several occasions. Autopsies revealed the most, if not all, of the children did not succumb to smoke inhalation of from burns.

“In both these cases, you have the government involved in lawful law enforcement functions. In both cases, the suspects refused to surrender. So, the question them became, how long does the government have to wait before it uses force to take these people into custody? In both cases, deadly force had been used against federal agents who had been killed.

“Do yourself a big favor and refrain from using Ruby Ridge, Waco, the Bundy standoff in Nevada and the Malheur standoff in Oregon as example of government excess. In all these cases, the citizens involved engaged in criminal acts and the government agents showed remarkable patience,” “Mac” concluded.

STILL PEDDLING THE OLD LIES

Well, well, well. I responded:

Poor “Mac” has apparently been drinking the government Kool-Ade.

“The Davidians DID have illegal fully automatic weapons”? No, they did not. After our proud G-men had murdered everyone in the church building, they said they’d bring out the “fully automatic weapons” they’d been after, and show them to the public. What they finally produced for a follow-up TV documentary were a couple of single-shot, turn-bolt .50-caliber rifles — fully legal without any Class 3 license, but described in a way designed to mislead the uninformed into believing they were some kind of exotic weapons of mass destruction. In each case they explained each rifle was recovered with one expended round in the chamber — those rounds having “cooked off” in the fire.

Evidence — like spent rounds — that the G-men had been taken under fire with either of these .50-caliber rifles? None.

Please name the manufacturer and model of a single one of the “fully automatic weapons” found in the ruins at Waco, “Mac.” Please post photos. You can’t. There weren’t any. What David Koresh was “suspected of” selling — at gun shows — were joke, inoperable, empty grenade shells attached to wooden stands with little placards that read “Complaint Department — pull pin and wait.” A few months earlier the local sheriff had knocked on the door of that church building and asked to be allowed to inspect all the Branch Davidians’ firearms,. Koresh and the others gladly complied. The sheriff found nothing illegal.

Why couldn’t a couple of ATF agents have simply knocked on the door and asked to peacefully examine the gun room, as the sheriff had? For that matter, if Koresh was “wanted” for child abuse or polygamy (He wasn’t, and do those offenses fall under the ATF’s enforcement powers, anyway?) why not simply arrest him when he was out jogging alone, as he did frequently?

I suspect “Mac” knows perfectly well that that ATF raid was planned — at the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City — because the ATF faced a threatened cut-off in their “SWAT raid” funds and needed a quick demonstration project to show how much those funds were needed . . . even though the residents of the Mount Carmel church community near Waco owned fewer weapons per capita than was the Texas average, none of those weapons illegal.

Do we really need to hear about the treacherous “Branch Davidian ambush,” yet again? If it was an ambush, why didn’t Koresh position shooters in flanking positions outside the building? How did the government forces manage to get “ambushed” when they had armed National Guard helicopters hovering behind the building, firing in through the ceiling, killing nursing mother of four Jaydean Wendel as her baby crawled on the floor of an upstairs bedroom? (When Koresh attorney Dick DeGuerin entered the building — before the fire — he saw bullet holes in the ceiling. DeGuerin, a combat veteran, testified he could tell from the splinter patterns in the wood those bullets had come from outside and above.)

I suspect “Mac” also knows when the ATF agents came storming off their cattle trailers, the first thing they did — AS PLANNED — was to open fire, killing the dog and her puppies in their pen in front of the building. When Koresh opened the front Dutch door, unarmed, to yell for his assailants to cease fire, ATF agents then shot at him, missing him but hitting his father-in-law behind him. (Koresh was also on the phone to 9-1-1, pleading for the operator to ask his assailants to cease fire, to remind them “There are women and children here.” Typical behavior for the mastermind of a fiendish “ambush”?)

Autopsy results on the ATF agents who tried climbing onto the roof with ladders (SUCH a smart move) were promised, but then never released. Most likely reason? If they were killed with semi-jacketed 9 mm. “Hydra-Shock” rounds, that would indicate “Friendly Fire.” As we’ve all seen photos of the ATF agents squatting behind parked cars, holding their rifles over their heads and firing at such targets as “a moving curtain” (without using their sights), this wouldn’t be unlikely. Rounds from the helicopters in the rear also doubtless over-penetrated the wooden walls.

“None of the deceased were trapped inside the compound by the authorities”? “Mac” is really unaware that his pal Lon Horiuchi, of Ruby Ridge fame, was at Waco, picking off anyone who showed themselves? And that the FBI boys then ran over the corpses of Lon’s victims, back and forth, crushing them into the mud, with their tanks and other tracked vehicles? (Where is Lon, “Mac”? Have you got his address?)

And if a loving, grief-stricken parent puts a bullet into the head of an infant shrieking in agony as he or she burns to death, as that lovely innocent, trapped in the bunker by an FBI assault WITH TANKS, which COLLAPSED STAIRCASES, is being quickly converted into a Crispy Critter, that’s OK, since then the autopsy will no longer report “death by fire caused by the FBI”?

Pretty clever, “Mac”! Were you taught argumentation by the Jesuits?

Which ATF agent had the warrant they claim they were trying to serve at the church at Mount Carmel that day, “Mac”? Come on. Give us the name of the ATF agent who carried the piece of paper called “the warrant” and tried to serve it on David Koresh et al. on Feb. 28, 1993. There could have been nothing legal about that murderous attack if they didn’t actually have a warrant with them, right? I’ve been researching this for 25 years. I’ve written books and scores of nationally syndicated newspaper columns about it. And no one has ever been willing to name for me any ATF agent who they will even CLAIM was carrying a warrant that day.

Has “Mac” read “A Place Called Waco: A Survivor’s Story,” by David Thibodeau? Has he interviewed David Thibodeau at length? I have. Has Mac read MY book, “Send in the Waco Killers”? As it happens, I’ve spoken with Randy Weaver and his daughter Sara at length, as well. It’s now OK for an FBI sniper to kill innocent, unarmed women in their own kitchens because he “missed his shot”? How many days into training are we taught “Always know what’s behind your target; don’t take the shot if you’re not sure where that over-penetrating round might go”? Wasn’t that on the FIRST DAY?

But “Mac” is going to advise me to “Do yourself a big favor and refrain from using Ruby Ridge, Waco, the Bundy standoff in Nevada and the Malheur standoff in Oregon as example of government excess.”

Really? These violent, planned attacks are just examples of how our federal government was meant to function? Was it really “the government agents” who “showed remarkable patience,” “Mac”? Or is it the unorganized militia that’s so far shown remarkable patience?

Didn’t Founder Alex Hamilton promise is, in Federalist No. 29, that “If circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens”?

How can a “Bureau of Firearms” exist under such a government as the Founders promised us, “Mac,” with any purpose other than to hand out to the adult general public free assault weapons “of military usefulness, little if at all inferior” to those possessed by the federals, in order to make sure we’ve always got them outgunned, as promised?

Didn’t Tench Coxe, delegate for Pennsylvania to the Continental Congress of 1788-1789, write in the Pennsylvania Gazette of Feb. 20, 1788, “The power of the sword, say the minority . . . is in the hands of Congress. My friends and countrymen, it is not so, for the powers of the sword are in the hands of the yeomanry of America from sixteen to sixty. The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? . . . Congress has no power to disarm the militia. Their swords and every terrible implement of the soldier are the birthright of Americans”?

“Every terrible implement of the soldier,” “Mac.” That was the promise — in addition to the assurance that the minimal new central government would deal mostly with foreign affairs, that the average American was unlikely to encounter a federal officer from one year to the next . . . if we would only ratify their kind and gentle little Constitution.

So what the hell were the ATF attackers doing, swarming and firing into a church full of women and children, later whining it was because they (wrongly) assumed there might be “weapons of military usefulness” there — while of course engaging in every brand of character assassination of the dead?

You do know all the charges against my friend Cliven Bundy — a fine man who tried to work with the government agents who were trying to put him out of business for DECADES (supposedly to protect desert tortoises who actually do much BETTER on land grazed by cattle) — were thrown out due to prosecutorial misconduct, right? That the federals invaded land which is NOT owned by the federal government (never having been “purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings,” as required by Article I, Section 8, Clause 17) –- land for which the Bundy family holds exclusive grazing rights as adjudicated by the State of Nevada (the federal government having no authority in the matter) . . . right?

You do know that the BLM rustled the Bundy family’s cattle in the SPRING, causing the death of many new calves (I watched one dying in the Bundys’ front yard), and then found no other Nevada rancher would sell them feed for those cattle, and that attempting to ship them to Utah and sell them without the brand-owner’s permission would be a violation of both Nevada and Utah law . . . right?

How did Randy Weaver become a “federal fugitive”? The ATF wanted him to spy on his neighbor, so they got an undercover agent to hire him to cut short the barrels on two shotguns, claimed they were then 1/4-inch “too short,” and told him he’d be charged unless he “cooperated.” He went to court to fight that blackmail scheme, but he’d been given the wrong court date.

If Randy Weaver was such a “dangerous federal fugitive” why was he never put on trial for the monstrous federal crime of cutting off two shotgun barrels after being asked to do so by an undercover ATF agent? How come the government ended up paying him (which really means taxpayers including you and me ended up paying him) $100,000, and his surviving daughters $1 million apiece?

When Deputy U.S. Marshal William Degan was killed in a gunfight with the Weaver family on their property — which he started by shooting and killing 14-year-old Sammy’s dog, Striker — did he have an arrest warrant with him which he was trying to serve — an arrest warrant which would have justified his being on that private property? I don’t think so.

But Mac tells us the “government agents” — who in each case SET UP THESE CONFRONTATIONS ON PURPOSE, and then SHOT FIRST — “showed remarkable patience” in these bloodbaths.

Come on, “Mac,” fess up. Are you the G-man, or was it you dad? Did he get a medal?

— V.S.