JOE BIDEN'S FASCIST REGIME
Aretha Franklin was just the start. If the FBI could surveil her, the feds can and will surveil anyone and everyone. Even you. The FBI, in the midst of this corrupt and authoritarian administration, has definitively lost any claim it may once have had to R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
Aretha Franklin Reveals Why the FBI Deserves No R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Has any government agency burned its reputation with the American people more quickly?
Has any government agency burned its reputation with the American people more quickly than the FBI? It wasn’t all that long ago that the vast majority of Americans assumed it to be an unimpeachable group of selfless and patriotic law enforcement officials who had dedicated their lives to protecting the American people from all enemies, foreign and domestic. But Rasmussen Reports revealed in August that “a majority (53%) of voters now agree” with Roger Stone’s statement that “we have a group of politicized thugs at the top of the FBI who are using the FBI…as Joe Biden‘s personal Gestapo.” And we do. But maybe we always have, and just weren’t as aware of it as we are now. It turns out that the FBI that we thought was ramrod straight and incorruptible, the FBI of Eliot Ness and Efrem Zimbalist Jr., was using your taxpayer money to track none other than Aretha Franklin. Not exactly a dangerous criminal. And that’s the problem.
Kids, Aretha Franklin was and is known as the Queen of Soul, and for good reason. She was the extraordinary singer who gave us the unforgettable “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” “I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You),” “You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman,” “Until You Come Back to Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do),” and a host of others. Unlike today’s crop of songstresses, few of whom (if any) could tie Ms. Franklin’s shoes, she was a singer first and foremost, not a lecturer or political commentator. Nonetheless, the New York Post reported on Tuesday that she was “tracked by the FBI for 40 years as the agency repeatedly sought — but ultimately failed — to tie the Queen of Soul to ‘extremists’ and ‘radicals,’” as has been revealed in documents that have just been declassified.
Rolling Stone magazine obtained Franklin’s FBI file and found in it a record of “false phone calls, surveillance, infiltration and highly-placed sources” that the feds inflicted upon Franklin between 1967 and 2007. The file is full of references to “black extremists,” “pro-communist,” “hate America,” “radical,” “racial violence” and “militant black power.” It opines that Martin Luther King’s funeral, where Franklin sang, could turn into a “radical situation,” adding that “Sammy Davis Jr., Aretha Franklin… of this group, some have supported militant Black power concept.” Accordingly, King’s funeral could “provide emotional spark which could ignite racial disturbance in this area.”
Forty years of this surveillance, forty years of taxpayer money wasted, and the feds found nothing, absolutely nothing, that they could use against Aretha Franklin. Her son, Kecalf Franklin, says: “I’m not really sure if my mother was aware that she was being targeted by the FBI and followed. I do know that she had absolutely nothing to hide though. It does make me feel a certain way knowing the FBI had her targeted and wanted to know her every move. But at the same time knowing my mother and the way she ran her business I know she had nothing to hide so they wouldn’t have found anything and were wasting their time. As you see… they found nothing at all.”
Indeed. But it’s bad enough that the effort was made. Why was the FBI wasting valuable resources tracking someone who was quite obviously not a criminal? Was there some dearth of actual criminals in the United States between 1967 and 2007 so that the feds could afford to burn through taxpayer money keeping tabs on an innocent person? Or was the agency’s need to justify its budget paramount above all other considerations to the extent that it opened up investigations of people who had done nothing wrong precisely because these investigations would burn through money and resources, and maybe even justify asking for a budget increase the following year?
Nowadays, when the FBI has been implicated in the Russian Collusion hoax, and has steadfastly refused to do anything about the manifest indications of illegal activity on Hunter Biden’s laptop, these questions become all the more urgent. Nowadays, surveillance is a great deal easier and cheaper than it was in the 1960s and 1970s, and when the Biden regime is engaged in an effort to portray its principal political opponents as representing “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” the fact that there are decades of precedent for it abusing its power by placing innocent people under surveillance is nothing less than chilling.
Aretha Franklin was just the start. If the FBI could surveil her, the feds can and will surveil anyone and everyone. Even you. The FBI, in the midst of this corrupt and authoritarian administration, has definitively lost any claim it may once have had to R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
Robert Spencer
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 26 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest books are The Critical Qur'an and Who Lost Afghanistan?. Follow him on Twitter here, and like him on Facebook here
FBI Offered Steele $1M for Anti-Trump Materials
"Steele didn’t give the FBI anything during that meeting that corroborated the claims in his explosive dossier."
The FBI and the DOJ continued to work with Steele even though they had every reason to believe that his claims were highly suspected and motivated by partisan agendas.
Despite that, they were willing to throw $1 million in taxpayer dollars at him for some anti-Trump materials.
Shortly before the 2016 election, the FBI offered retired British spy Christopher Steele “up to $1 million” to prove the explosive allegations in his dossier about Donald Trump, a senior FBI analyst testified Tuesday.
The cash offer was made during an overseas October 2016 meeting between Steele and several top FBI officials who were trying to corroborate Steele’s claims that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia to win the election.
FBI supervisory analyst Brian Auten testified that Steele never got the money because he could not “prove the allegations.”
Auten also said Steele refused to provide the names of any of his sources during that meeting, and that Steele didn’t give the FBI anything during that meeting that corroborated the claims in his explosive dossier.
The funny thing here is that the FBI was trying to “verify” materials made-to-order by the Clinton campaign, likely relying on sources linked to Putin’s own intel establishment, and one hand had no idea what the other hand was doing. The FBI was trying to verify garbage manufactured to fit a Clinton campaign narrative. It couldn’t be verified because Steele was sloppy. And his sources were apparently even sloppier. The dossier wasn’t supposed to be published (the media still hates Buzzfeed for doing it) because it was so laughably bad.
Clinton’s people at the DOJ presumably understood that the dossier was garbage, but it’s possible that they didn’t. Partisan bias has a way of getting people to believe in the nonsense that they want to believe in. And instead of realizing that it was a cynical ploy to justify Watergate 2.0, they instead had people at the FBI chasing their tails trying to “prove” it was real.
Not exactly a new phenomenon in American politics, but still kind of amusing when it involves top FBI figures being dispatched to prove that stuff made up by Clinton’s smear artists was true because most of the political machine was no longer capable of even understanding that it was in the business of promoting lies and had come to believe the lies it was promoting.
Keilty said in opening statements that the trial would cover the FBI’s “troubling conduct” regarding the Page surveillance. He said the bureau “should have uncovered” Danchenko’s alleged lies, “but never did.”
Any functioning adult should have. But the FBI was in the business of delivering results for its bosses, who were in the business of delivering results for their political bosses. They still are.
Durham highlighted how the FBI kept using information from the Steele dossier to bolster its case for probable cause to secure the warrants – even after the FBI came up empty in its efforts to corroborate Steele’s claims.
Like Mulder’s poster, they wanted to believe. And they were being motivated to believe. Careers and political agendas were on the line. No need to ask why Steele would turn down $1M to prove his claims. There’s always a rationale. When you want to believe.
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
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