An explosive new report in the intercept details how the FBI hired
a convicted felon to infiltrate Black Lives matter demonstrations in Denver,
and basically serve as an informant on behalf of the FBI.
Now Mickey Windecker is the name of the informant they used.
And he even tried to entrap some of these demonstrators by goading
them to commit acts of violence.
Luckily they were not at all swayed by his calls to violence, luckily.
And it did not work.
But it is worth learning more about what the FBI was up to
as protests broke out in response to the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
So, let's give you the details here.
A few important excerpts from the piece.
Windecker offered to give the FBI information about protesters.
In an internal report, the FBI claim that Windecker's motivation for
becoming an informant was to fight terrorists, and
that he believed people who participate in violent civil unrest are terrorists.
Now, it's important to note that he himself had a violent past, and
terrorized many people, we'll get to the details on that in just a moment.
But it is telling that he was trying to goad them into violent acts.
They refused to engage in that, yet he thought they were terrorists and
they were violent.
>> Yeah, so that is really interesting components to it.
First of all, by his own definition he's a terrorist, cuz as you're gonna see later
in the story, he's the one that goads them into violence in those actual protests.
So that's not my definition, that's his definition, and
he definitely falls into that category.
Okay, second of all, look at the informant the FBI sending in, a guy who is so
racist that he thinks any protest of the police is a bunch of terrorists who
are gonna be violent.
And then he constantly tries to goad them and
goad them into that violence that he claims to be so worried about.
So that's the deeply racist informing the FBI used in that case,
let alone god knows how many other cases, let
alone how he tries to create dissension in the group and destroy the group.
It's an amazing story.
>> Know what was really incredible, and I think this should be a cautionary tale for
everyone, but especially the left, okay?
Once he infiltrated the group of demonstrators,
he started accusing others within the group of being feds or informants.
And so that led to distrust, it led to fracturing within the group.
It's just really fascinating how he kind of implemented these
strategies to destroy the group of demonstrators here.
Now, FBI payment receipt records signed by Windecker showed that he was
paid more than $20,000 for his work during the summer of 2020,
when the FBI aggressively pursued racial justice and
left wing activists based on nothing more than First Amendment protected activities.
Now, the story of the bureau's infiltration of racial justice activist
groups is particularly relevant right now because House Republicans of course,
want to launch an investigation.
They have this new committee.
We talked about it a little bit yesterday.
It's chaired by Jim Jordan, and it seems to exclusively focus
on the FBI's alleged targeting of the right wing.
But clearly there's evidence here that the FBI was targeting left wing groups,
especially as it pertains to the protests that broke out in the summer of 2020.
>> So the FBI is a deep, deep history of targeting the left,
targeting black groups, ethnic groups, etcetera.
And this seems to fit in perfectly.
And it is incredibly disheartening that in in 2020 as late as that,
they're still doing this stuff, let alone if they're still doing it now.
But guys, it's also cautionary tale for the right wing and
how we treat each other.
So do they sometimes use the same tactics in the right?
Well, we've covered stories where FBI informants have gone
into right wing groups that are much more prone to violence, but
still they go and they go to them and they go, hey, would you like weapons?
In the case of the left they're, would you like a pea shooter?
And the left is, I don't know, in the case of the right wing, you like,
you want missile launchers, shoulder fired missile launches, right etc.
But entrapment is entrapment, okay?
So whether you're on the left or right, for God's sake be objective about this.
Sometimes they get the right guys, sometimes they get the wrong people and
they target them for the wrong reasons.
>> So here's one example of what Windecker specifically did on behalf of the FBI.
So there was this one rainy summer afternoon after he had already become
a paid informant, he met with his FBI handler, special agent Scott Dahlstrom,
okay, the federal agent clicked on a hidden camera device.
They meet meet together, federal agent clicks on the camera device.
And then he says into the camera, okay,
it is August 28th 2020 at approximately 4:02PM.
Special Agent Scott Dahlstrom said into the FBI recorder before
handing it to Windecker.
The video is part of more than a dozen hours of FBI recordings I obtained,
meeting the reporter here, Trevor Aaronson,
documenting Windecker's work investigating racial justice activists.
The FBI agent Dahlstrom asked whether, or asked Windecker if he remembered
his tasking orders which involved enticing a Black racial justice
activists into committing a felony, which by the way is entrapment.
And he said, yep, I got it.
Windecker said, thanks, mom, thanks, dad.
>> So I wanna give a shout out right now to Trevor Aaronson, I mean wow,
what an investigative piece.
He's got the tapes on this guy.
He's got every kind of evidence and receipts on what the FBI did,
it looks to be an impeccable report and
with great detail as to how exactly the FBI tries to entrap people.
And by the way, there's tons of dangerous groups in America.
Yes, tons of extremist right wing groups, we're talking about government tyranny,
and how you got to use your second amend rights, etcetera.
It's important that the FBI do good work in actually infiltrating those groups,
but not goad them into violence.
Number one, we don't want the violence.
Number two, that's entrapment.
I don't care how much I disagree with the right wing, or how extreme they are.
If they're going to do the violence, great, then catch them, right?
But if they're not going to do the violence, don't egg them on like this.
Now in the case of the left wing, they had no intention of doing any violence, and
he keeps putting trays of guns in front of them going, you don't want it?
>> Yeah, so let me give you a few examples, right?
So there was one activist who was mentioned quite a bit in this piece.
Windecker reported that one local activist, Zebb Hall used incendiary
rhetoric in conversations with other demonstrators claiming that Hall said,
quote, we need to burn this mother effort down.
Windecker also secretly recorded a conversation in which Hall spoke vaguely,
a violent revolution and a desire to train for combat.
Windecker encouraged Hall with fantastical claims of training antifascists
activists in Iraq and Syria as part of what he called the Red Star Brigade, okay?
Now, Zebb Hall didn't fall for it, luckily, the only unfortunate thing
that Zebb Hall did was, he purchased a gun for Windecker, which he knew he
shouldn't have done because Windecker had a criminal past, he was a convicted felon.
He did not have the legal ability to buy a gun on his own.
He was eventually arrested as a result of purchasing that gun on
behalf of Windecker.
But in terms of actually carrying out acts of violence, Zebb Hall never did, and
he was never arrested for carrying out acts of violence.
>> In fact, let me give you two more facts about Hall so you know.
Because in the beginning you got the revolutionary kind of talk, I'd be saying,
hey, wait a minute,
let's track this guy because he says he might do violence, right?
So it turned out that when he actually tried to goad him into doing a specific
act against the government official, Hall was, no, no,
no, I don't want it, I don't want it and he backed away, okay?
And at the point when he bought the gun, the only reason he gave it to him was cuz
he was afraid that if he didn't, that Windecker had so many weapons, and
kept talking about how he's gonna use some for violence against his opponents and
enemies.
And he's, I took his money, and I had already bought the gun, by the way,
the authorities arrested him three years later, as a kind of a cover
your ass operation, cuz when Windecker eventually got caught by the activist,
they figured out he was the informant, right?
And at that point, just so that they're not humiliated, the FBI was, yeah, yeah.
A couple of years later, Hall was dangerous.
He was so dangerous.
Even though he little I would not do the act of violence that Windecker pushed
him to do.
>> Now I think it's important to understand what the FBI's, and
remember this is still under Trump's administration, but
I don't think it matters, right?
I mean, Christopher Wray is still the head of the FBI.
So same same folks within this government agency.
It's important to understand how they themselves viewed the demonstrators,
and they were incredibly vicious.
The FBI second in command for instance,
David Bowdich compared the demonstrators to the 9/11 attacks.
When 9/11 occurred, our folks did not quibble about whether there was danger
ahead for them, Bowdich wrote in a memo.
They ran head on into peril, Bowdich described the racial justice
demonstrators throughout the country as quote, a national crisis and
quote, who's violent protesters were highly organized.
Agents suspected these demonstrators could fit into a domestic terrorism
ideology the bureau had defined during the first year of the Trump administration as
Black Identity Extremism, a controversial, widely criticized catchall label for
any domestic extremist ideology that drew a Black following.
>> There are no black groups that call themselves Black extremist
identity folks, or whatever that made up title is.
And there are no groups that fall under that bracket.
They just made it up, the FBI.
Whereas if you go to right wing's treason, there's dozens and
dozens of groups that say that, hey violence against the government is
justified, violence against government officials is justified.
To my knowledge, there aren't any Black groups that fall under that category.
And then eventually the category was so made up, and they pushed so
hard to get them to do violence and they wouldn't,
that they had to put it under a broader umbrella that included White supremacist
extremists etc, which is in reality almost 100% of that category.
>> Yeah, they started referring to it as racially motivated violent extremism.
Because let's also keep in mind that while the protests are taking place,
one of the other issues that the country is dealing with
is violent act carried out by Neo Nazis and White supremacists.
So to have this hyper focus on demonstrators who were justified in their
outrage over the murder of George Floyd, while not really focusing
much on the White supremacist issue we have in the country,
a bit of a problem, bit of a problem.
So they again eventually changed their phrasing to racially motivated violent
extremism.
Now, let's get to Windecker himself, right,
I had referenced that he had a criminal past, which is definitely true here.
So according to the reporting in the intercept,
he was a bit of a scumbag for the following reasons.
So he has prior arrests in multiple states, Colorado, Nevada,
Texas and Florida for crimes including sexual assault.
When he was 20 years old, he had a sexual relationship with a 14 year old,
he met at a roller skating rink.
>> So shocking.
This guy, really?
>> Yeah, he claimed he didn't know the girl was underage, she was 14, okay?
So he pleaded the case down to a misdemeanor and
was sentenced to 180 days in jail.
In another case for felony menacing with a weapon in 2001, he stuck
a gun in a woman's face and claimed to be a police officer looking for a suspect.
That incident resulted in a felony conviction and Windecker served two years.
In addition to criminal charges Windecker has had four protection
orders filed against him in Colorado, the most recent in 2021.
In a petition for a protection order filed in 2016, a friend
of Windecker's alleged that Windecker had presented a fake police badge and
threatened to kill him and his family.
>> Yeah, and so his main mo is that he was a snitch.
And as always, of course when challenged, he would say very aggressively.
There's three things I'm not, I ain't a punk,
I ain't a bitch, and I ain't a snitch, turns out he was all three, okay.
And so he would use the prison papers from his arrest as street cred,
I'm not a fed, I'm not an informant.
You see, I was in prison.
Yeah, that's where he started snitching for the authorities.
And one of the times he threatened a woman that he used to date,
and she was scared for her life.
He looks like he got out of prison by doing more snitching.
So they're, okay, you might have maybe hurt that woman really badly, but
you're free to go because you gave us evidence on someone else.
>> I gotta say one other thing.
And then we got to wrap this up cuz we have an interview.
But look guys, the most important thing that you should take
from this story is that clearly the feds try to discredit
important movements by goading them into violence.
Because once you engage in violence, it's real easy to discredit you and
what you're trying to accomplish in the country, right?
And so keep that in mind.
Obviously when you see something as horrific as someone getting basically
strangled to death before your very eyes, you get angry, and that anger,
that passion could lead you to wanna do, don't engage in that stuff though.
Don't engage in any violence whatsoever.
Don't let anyone goad you into it because chances are someone might be doing so
to either entrap you or discredit the movement.
>> All right, my last things there, look, first of all, if there are extremists of
violent groups within the left, I want them routed out immediately.
We go to those protests.
I don't want anybody getting hurt at those protests.
That's insane.
We would also get hurt.
That makes no sense at all.
And if you're progressive, you should never do violence, surrender.
It is saying my ideas cannot win.
So I have to be a moron and go to violence instead.
The minute you pick up that weapon you've said,
I'm too stupid to engage in exchange of ideas, okay?
That's mainly for the right wing, it's not for the left wing, and
if your left, when you're tempted into that stuff know that likely the person
you're talking to is an informant, it's very, very likely.
So, if you'd like to go to prison for a long time, go ahead and
have that conversation, as far as the FBI is concerned, who are they?
The right wing now says, defund them and they're monsters.
And the left wing says this and that,
know the reality is they are a group of people that are different.
They're not all monolith, okay?
So, my guess is that a lot of the agents at the FBI are right wing,
some of them are probably moderate, or left wing, right?
And so some of them do great work and
actually catch bad guys before they blow up buildings.
And they have done that with several right wing groups, and
those were actually real, right?
And some of them do terrible stuff like this.
To me, the worst part of the story was that high level FBI agent talking
about American citizens engaging in First Amendment rights, who are not
at all violent, and the racist, awful assumptions he had about them.
And then he goes out of his way to try to ruin their lives, right?
So are there people still like that at the FBI?
Of course, of course there are.
And mainly they wanna catch people whether they did it or they didn't do it for
notches on their belt, so that their career is enhanced, and they move up.
So be careful, do not engage in any violence, and
be careful about these guys trying to destroy your groups from within.