In short, Comey’s FBI did some terrible things.
In an effort to stop terrorist attacks before they happen, Comey expanded the practice instituted by his predecessor, Robert Mueller, to use undercover agents and informants to catch would-be attackers in sting operations. These stings never caught terrorists on the eve of their attack. Notably, the FBI twice investigated Omar Mateen, the Orlando nightclub shooter who killed 49 people and wounded 53 others while claiming allegiance to ISIS in a 911 call, but
did not deem him a threat. At the same time, Comey’s FBI agents aided in the prosecution of Sami Osmakac, a Florida man caught in a sting operation, despite having called him in private conversations a “
retarded fool.” They also busted penniless, mentally ill homeless men who claimed to be associating with ISIS. In one of those cases, an informant even gave a
homeless man $40 so he could purchase the machete and knives he needed for his supposed plot. To catch a lonely Michigan man, the FBI used two female informants
to set up a honeypot, in which the FBI informants claimed to be in love with the target so as to manipulate him. The target, in turn, claimed to have an AK-47 and to have attempted to travel to Syria. But it turned out he was just saying all that
to impress the ladies.
When the FBI busted the dark web child-porn site Playpen, agents did not shut down the enterprise, going against previous FBI policy. In investigations of child pornography under Mueller, the FBI shut down child-porn websites immediately, believing that allowing distribution of the images and videos would further victimize the children who had been exploited. Comey’s FBI
continued to operate Playpen for nearly two weeks in an effort to surreptitiously install tracking software on the computers of its users; child pornography was available from FBI servers during this period of time.
Just days before his firing, Comey testified before Congress that one-half of all smartphone and computer devices analyzed by the FBI can’t be examined “with any technique” due to encryption. During his tenure, Comey worked aggressively to give the FBI access to encrypted devices. Notably, Comey battled in court with Apple over the tech company’s unwillingness to help unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. The FBI later paid a hacker
somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 million to help unlock the phone. At the time, Comey told a House committee: “There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America.”
Other examples of problems under Comey’s watch include the following:
- An FBI translator, Daniela Green, traveled to Syria in 2014 and married Denis Cuspert, an ISIS operative and former German hip-hop artist. The FBI employee wasn’t undercover when this happened. She was in love. When she returned to the United States, Green received favorable treatment by becoming a cooperating witness — just two years in prison for making false statements — despite dozens of FBI cases in which ISIS sympathizers do far less and receive significantly harsher sentences.
- More than a year after two men attacked a convention center near Dallas where Pamela Geller had organized the “First Annual Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest,” the FBI admitted in a court filing that it had an undercover agent embedded close to the two attackers, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi. After one of the attackers posted a link to the “Draw Muhammad” event, the undercover agent wrote: “Tear Up Texas.” The undercover agent was on site during the attack but fled when the shooting started. In April, after CBS’s “60 Minutes” covered the story, Sen. Charles Grassley, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to Comey asking, among other questions: “Did the FBI suspect that Simpson and Soofi planned an attack at the drawing contest? Did the FBI have any formal or informal operational plan to intervene to stop Simpson and Soofi from carrying out an attack?”
- The FBI expanded its authority to investigate people in the United States even when they are not suspected of being involved in criminal activity. This is commonly done in the service of recruiting informants, of which the FBI has more than 15,000. According to a classified FBI manual on the handling of informants that was updated under Comey, FBI agents are encouraged to build files on possible informants, may use undercover identities to recruit informants, and with proper clearances may recruit minors as well as journalists, clergy, and lawyers. The FBI under Comey also codified a policy of using immigration as leverage to recruit informants and the threat of removal to keep coerced informants productive.
https://theintercept.com/2017/05/17...y-the-fbi-did-some-terrible-things-under-him/
