FBI Boss Robert Mueller Conned America to Ravage Our Rights
by James Bovard
Former FBI director Robert Mueller was a twenty-first century version of J. Edgar Hoover, trampling the Constitution and seizing new power on any pretext. When Mueller died in March, the New York Times eulogized him as a “button-down, lockjawed, rock-ribbed exemplar of a vanishing caste.” Media tributes poured in as if Mueller was the law-enforcement version of Mother Theresa.
Mueller’s abuse of power goes way back
But tell that to the Liberty City Seven, victims in a landmark case in the war on terror that should have defined Mueller’s legacy far more than his photo ops at congressional hearings. The FBI completely fabricated the Liberty City plot in Miami. But Mueller lied, telling America that the arrestees — mostly Haitian-Americans — a “homegrown terrorist cell … self-recruited, self-trained, and self-executing.” The FBI lavished money on an informant who suggested the idea of blowing up government buildings and then tape-recorded the subsequent discussions to incriminate his targets. The plotters were so knuckle-headed that they asked the FBI informant for terrorist uniforms and wanted to conduct a parade in their low-rent neighborhood. At one point, the lead plotter talked about blowing up the Sears Tower in Chicago, the nation’s tallest building, “so that it would fall into Lake Michigan and create a tsunami” — thereby allowing the plotters to free all the Muslims detained in Chicago jails. The informant coached the men into reciting a goofily-worded pledge of allegiance to al Qaeda, which was secretly videotaped.
The FBI gave the plotters a digital video camera and rented them a car so they could visit downtown Miami and photograph the FBI building and other federal targets they were encouraged to attack. The videotape was one of the few pieces of concrete evidence offered at the subsequent trial.
One of the informants kept dangling the prospect of giving $50,000 to the plotters if they moved forward with their scheme. When the feds raided the warehouse that the government provided for the plotters’ headquarters (complete with a fully stocked refrigerator), they found no weapons or plans for attacks. After the arrests were announced, a local activist told Democracy Now: “Everyone in Liberty City is joking that the guys were going to kick down the FBI building with their new boots, because they didn’t have any devices which could have been used to explode” the target. One commentator suggested that the “Liberty City Seven” would be incapable of robbing a 7-Eleven, much less overthrowing the U.S. government.
The prosecution of the highest-profile domestic terrorist plot went awry from the start. The first jury refused to convict, deadlocking on charges except for one defendant found not guilty. The Justice Department claimed the verdict entitled the feds to try again, but a second jury also deadlocked. In a shameless abuse of power, the feds tried the accused again and finally got a conviction in 2009 for five of the six accused. The feds spent up to $10 million prosecuting the case. The feds happily destroyed a half-dozen lives to give a booster shot of fear for the war on terror.
After the 9/11 attacks occurred and the Bush administration worked to maximize Americans’ fears, entrapment became the easiest way for the FBI to score triumphal headlines. Trevor Aaronson, the author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, estimated that only about 1 percent of the 500 people charged with international terrorism offenses in the decade after 9/11 were bona fide terrorists. Thirty times as many were induced by FBI informants to behave in ways that prompted their arrest. In one high-profile case, a judge concluded that the government “came up with the crime, provided the means, and removed all relevant obstacles,” making a terrorist out of a man “whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope” and who was involved in a “fantasy terror operation.”
The 9/11 deceit
Mueller took over the FBI one week before the 9/11 attacks and began brazenly deceiving America even before the smoke had cleared from the World Trade Center wreckage. On Sept. 14, 2011, Mueller declared, “The fact that there were a number of individuals that happened to have received training at flight schools here is news, quite obviously. If we had understood that to be the case, we would have — perhaps one could have averted this.” Three days later, Mueller announced: “There were no warning signs that I’m aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country.” His protestations of bureaucratic innocence helped the Bush administration railroad the Patriot Act through Congress, vastly expanding the FBI’s prerogatives to spy on average Americans.
Deceit helped legitimize those intrusive new prerogatives. The Bush administration suppressed until the news that FBI agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis had warned FBI headquarters of suspicious Arabs in flight training programs prior to 9/11. A House-Senate Joint Intelligence Committee analysis concluded that FBI incompetence and negligence “contributed to the United States becoming, in effect, a sanctuary for radical terrorists.” FBI agent Coleen Rowley publicly complained to Mueller, “I think your statements demonstrate a rush to judgment to protect the FBI at all costs.” FBI blundering spurred the Wall Street Journal to call for Mueller’s resignation, while a New York Times headline warned: “Lawmakers Say Misstatements Cloud F.B.I. Chief’s Credibility.”
Mueller bolstered his popularity with the Bush administration by ramping up arrests. FBI agent Rowley complained to Mueller, “After 9/11, [FBI] Headquarters encouraged more and more detentions for what seem to be essentially PR purposes. Field offices were required to report daily the number of detentions in order to supply grist for statements on our progress in fighting terrorism.”
NSL tyranny
Thanks to the Patriot Act, the FBI increased by a hundredfold — up to 50,000 a year — the number of National Security Letters (NSLs) it issued to citizens, business, and nonprofit organizations, and recipients were prohibited from disclosing that their data had been raided. NSLs entitle the FBI to seize records that reveal “where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work,” the Washington Post noted. The FBI can lasso thousands of people’s records with a single NSL — regardless of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable warrantless searches.
The FBI greatly understated the number of NSLs it was issuing and denied that abuses had occurred, thereby helping sway Congress to renew the Patriot Act in 2006. The following year, an Inspector General report revealed that FBI agents may have recklessly issued thousands of illegal NSLs. Shortly after that report was released, federal judge Victor Marrero denounced the NSL process as “the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values.”
Rather than arresting FBI agents who broke the law, Mueller created a new FBI Office of Integrity and Compliance. The Electronic Freedom Foundation, after winning lawsuits to garner FBI reports to a federal oversight board, concluded that the FBI may have committed “tens of thousands” of violations of federal law, regulations, or Executive Orders between 2001 and 2008.
President Bush, scorning a unanimous 1972 Supreme Court ruling, decided he was entitled to impose warrantless wiretaps on Americans. At an Senate hearing, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) asked Mueller: “Can the National Security Agency, the great electronic snooper, spy on the American people?” Mueller replied: “I would say generally, they are not allowed to spy or to gather information on American citizens.”
Like hell. Nearly nine months later, the New York Times revealed that Bush had unleashed NSA to illegally wiretap up to 500 people within the United States at any given time and peruse millions of other Americans’ emails. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales responded to the uproar by asserting that “the president has the inherent authority” to order such wiretaps. Mueller had no trouble with that dictatorial doctrine — even though the same claim spurred one of the articles of impeachment crafted against President Nixon.
Secret surveillance
Mueller’s biggest coup against privacy occurred with Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which entitles the FBI to demand “business records” that are “relevant” to a terrorism or espionage investigation. In 2011 testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mueller “suggested the FBI interpreted (Section 215) narrowly and used it sparingly,” the ACLU noted. But Mueller was the point man for the Bush administration’s bizarre 2006 decision (perpetuated by Obama) that all Americans’ telephone records were “relevant” to terrorism investigations. Several times a year, Mueller signed orders to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, swaying it to continually renew its order compelling telephone companies to deliver all their calling records (including time, duration, and location of calls) to the National Security Agency.
On , 2013, leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden blew the lid off this surveillance regime. Federal judge Richard Leon slammed that records roundup as “almost Orwellian…. I cannot imagine a more indiscriminate and arbitrary invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval.”
Mueller sought to dampen the Snowden uproar by testifying to Congress that the feds could not listen to Americans’ calls without a warrant for that “particular phone and that particular individual.” But that was another lie. NSA employees had broad discretion to vacuum up Americans’ info without warrants, and NSA’s definition of terrorist suspect was so ludicrously broad that it includes “someone searching the web for suspicious stuff.”
The Robert Mueller investigation
Mueller was replaced at the FBI by James Comey. After Comey was fired in by President Trump, Comey leaked official memos with confidential information to a lawyer who delivered them to the New York Times. Comey’s leak triggered the appointment of Mueller as Special Counsel to investigate Trump. Mueller’s investigation generated endless leaks, allegations, and controversies and helped Democrats capture control of the House of Representatives in 2018. In , after two years of media frenzies, Mueller finally admitted he found no evidence to prosecute Trump or his campaign officials for colluding with Russia in the 2016 campaign. In , Mueller testified to Congress on his investigation, and the nation was shocked to see Mueller looking mentally clueless time and again under questioning.
Actually, the Mueller report was a greater disgrace than recognized at that time. Mueller overlooked the FBI’s brazen bias in the 2016 presidential campaign to assist Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The Clinton Foundation raked in hundreds of millions of dollars of squirrely foreign contributions while she was secretary of state and revving up her presidential campaign. The Durham report found that “senior FBI and Department officials placed restrictions on how [the Clinton Foundation investigation was] handled such that essentially no investigative activities occurred for months leading up to the election.” On top of that dereliction, “the FBI appears to have made no effort to investigate … the Clinton campaign’s purported acceptance of a [illegal] campaign contribution that was made by the FBI’s own long-term [confidential human source] on behalf of Insider-I and, ultimately, Foreign Government.”
Top FBI officials also saved Hillary Clinton by scorning the federal statute book and treating her pervasive, perpetual violations of federal laws on classified documents as a harmless, unintentional error. On top of that, the Durham report found, “Clinton allegedly approved a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to tie Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” CIA chief John Brennan briefed President Barack Obama and other top officials on “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on , 2016 of a proposal … to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services,” according to the report. Mueller ignored those smoking guns of FBI election interference.
In 1945, President Harry Truman wrote in his diary: “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction.” Mueller took the bureau far down that dark road. Whitewashing Mueller’s sordid record will simply invite more FBI depredations of Americans’ rights and liberties.
James Bovard is a policy advisor to The Future of Freedom Foundation and is the author of the ebook Freedom Frauds: Hard Lessons in American Liberty, published by FFF, his new book, Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty, and nine other books.
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