FBI Moonlighting as Television Writers

The FBI arrested six men for allegedly plotting the kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

I know nothing about the details of this specific plot. But nowadays anytime I hear about the FBI busting yet another dramatic plot, I ignore it. Whether it's Muslims or Boogaloo-adjacent people, FBI informants have a long history of being the primary instigators and fabricators of these plots. There is an intense pressure for the bureau to crack down on terrorism, and sometimes this involves creating it.

The typical narrative is an informant is paid $10k/month to infiltrate a "terrorist cell". They hang around local mosques, openly talk about how America is the devil and needs to be destroyed, then find hapless losers with no prospects to sign on. Sometimes the losers are homeless, sometimes they have developmental disabilities, sometimes they have clear mental illness. The informant then befriends the losers, gives them money, promises them fame and fortune, promises them recognition, suggests building a bomb, gives them instructions on how to build a bomb, drives them to the store to buy bomb parts, instructs them on how to detonate the (now fake) bomb, then the FBI swoops in and makes a dramatic arrest that the local US Attorney office can slobber all over.

Here is just one example from this depressingly routine tactic:

After recording this video in a rundown Days Inn in Tampa, Florida, Osmakac prepared to deliver what he thought was a car bomb to a popular Irish bar. According to the government, Osmakac was a dangerous, lone-wolf terrorist who would have bombed the Tampa bar, then headed to a local casino where he would have taken hostages, before finally detonating his suicide vest once police arrived.

But if Osmakac was a terrorist, he was only one in his troubled mind and in the minds of ambitious federal agents. The government could not provide any evidence that he had connections to international terrorists. He didn’t have his own weapons. He didn’t even have enough money to replace the dead battery in his beat-up, green 1994 Honda Accord.

Osmakac was the target of an elaborately orchestrated FBI sting that involved a paid informant, as well as FBI agents and support staff working on the setup for more than three months. The FBI provided all of the weapons seen in Osmakac’s martyrdom video. The bureau also gave Osmakac the car bomb he allegedly planned to detonate, and even money for a taxi so he could get to where the FBI needed him to go. Osmakac was a deeply disturbed young man, according to several of the psychiatrists and psychologists who examined him before trial. He became a “terrorist” only after the FBI provided the means, opportunity and final prodding necessary to make him one.

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In other recorded conservations, Richard Worms, the FBI squad supervisor, describes Osmakac as a “retarded fool” who doesn’t have “a pot to piss in.” The agents talk about the prosecutors’ eagerness for a “Hollywood ending” for their sting. They refer to Osmakac’s targets as “wishy-washy,” and his terrorist ambitions as a “pipe-dream scenario.” The transcripts show FBI agents struggled to put $500 in Osmakac’s hands so he could make a down payment on the weapons — something the Justice Department insisted on to demonstrate Osmakac’s capacity for and commitment to terrorism.

“The money represents he’s willing to do it, because if we can’t show him killing, we can show him giving money,” FBI Special Agent Taylor Reed explains in one conversation.