The US Federal Bureau of Investigation reportedly plans to continue its “crackdown” on journalists and other dissidents connected to foreign news organizations, with criminal charges under consideration.
The agency’s plans were revealed by anonymous officials cited Wednesday in The New York Times.
“This month, F.B.I. agents searched the homes of two prominent figures with connections to Russian state media: Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector and critic of American foreign policy, and Dimitri K. Simes, an adviser to former President Donald J. Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016,” the controversial newspaper reported.
“More searches are expected soon, some of the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss investigations. Criminal charges are also possible, they said.”
Electronic equipment was reportedly seized from Ritter, while Simes claimed agents removed artwork from his home in Virginia and froze multiple bank accounts. Both men are American citizens.
Attorney and independent journalist John Jackman joined Sputnik’s The Final Countdown program Thursday to discuss the development.
“The reach of the deep state – the FBI, CIA – they're looking at all of us right now,” said Jackman. “They're really looking to just chill free speech. That's really what it is at the core of all of this.”
“And they're using all of these different legal justifications – FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act – to justify coming after a dissident,” he claimed. “That's really what it is.”
Originally passed in 1938, the Foreign Agents Registration Act was initially conceived as a response to Nazi propaganda during the runup to World War II. The law was revised during the Cold War era to target people engaging in alleged political lobbying, but a handful of prosecutions under the act before 2015 resulted in no criminal convictions.
FARA has been enforced more frequently in recent years, however, chiefly against figures associated with Trump.
“The First Amendment should be being screamed from the rafters by the ACLU,” said host Steve Gill in response to the apparent acts of political intimidation. “Why aren’t they defending Scott Ritter? You know, when you've got the Democrats having their convention, why aren't they screaming, in addition to democracy, First Amendment?”
“These are politically motivated at the end of the day,” agreed Jackman. “It's just really what they are. And, they can give all of these different excuses for why they're targeting certain individuals, but it's facially obvious.”
“We're heading to another election cycle here in just a couple of months. And so we're going to start hearing ‘Russia, Russia, Russia.’ Russia is going to be in the paintings, they're in the walls. They're everywhere.”
“What you're seeing is not people who are actually, in most cases, even in direct coordination with any legitimate institutions that are based in Russia,” he added. “But it's people who, on their own accord, are speaking what they feel is the truth, right? … It's because they're looking at the world, they're determining that our media is lying to us at every turn. Our government, especially on issues of foreign policy, has lied to us repeatedly, the Ukraine war [and] the conflicts between Israel and Palestine being some of the latest examples.”
Ritter has been paid small amounts of money for contributing articles to the website for the Russian television network RT, according to the former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, with Ritter retaining ultimate control over the content of his writing.
The former UN weapons inspector’s career suffered after he prominently rejected US officials’ claims of alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction during the runup to the United States’ catastrophic war on the Middle Eastern country in the early 2000s. Ritter has offered his analysis to Russian radio and television programs along with other prominent dissidents such as John Kiriakou, a former CIA intelligence officer who was sentenced to prison after revealing the agency’s secret torture program.
“There's some conflation; I think they're starting with Russia because if that works then they can move on to, you know, sort of the Martin Niemöller [dynamic],” said host Ted Rall, referring to the German pastor’s famous poem. “First they came for RT, then they came for etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
“We're in an environment, in a geopolitical environment that we haven't been in in a long time,” Jackman observed. “This really does remind me quite a bit of McCarthyism, but I think that this might even be a level beyond that. Because today we're in a situation where the fundamental dynamics of the elites, the ruling class in this country, are shifting in such a way that their reality is kind of being pulled out from underneath them.”
“It's ironic because they talk about media manipulation, they talk about false narratives, they talk about misinformation and so on and so forth… It's not that they are scared of misinformation, it's that they're scared of the truth.”