INFORMANT’S AGENTS WERE READING OTHER REPORTS, SOME BIASED, SOME CLEAR ENTRAPMENT, WHICH SKEWED THE RESULTS OF THE OVERALL ACCURACY OF THE DATA
An Insider’s View on INFORMANTS
Terri Linnell is known as “Mama Bear” to the Patriot community. She has been an activist since 2008, when her sleeping giant started to awaken. Terri has been to Washington DC three times for redress of grievances, and participated in the Bundy Ranch Standoff in Nevada.
She is known as “Betsy Ross” to the FBI community. She was given that name by the FBI when she agreed to be an informant at the Malheur Wildlife Protest in Burns, Oregon, during January 2016. Linnell later testified for the defense, stating clearly it was just a protest, protected under the first amendment.
Terri’s time as an informant was under 6 months, yet she will give you some insight to the inner workings of the FBI, and their handling of “Confidential Human Sources” and how the government is absolutely watching citizens.
In a Redoubt News exclusive series, Linnell has agreed to go on record recounting her experiences, combining her time protesting with her knowledge of the subtleties of the games being played against the people of our great country.
Informants: A Necessary Evil Or Illegal Act?
By Terri Linnell
After being in the Oregon Standoff Trial it’s been pretty easy to see the role of the 9 informants who were inside the refuge, and the 6 more informants outside the refuge. 15 total informants to tell the FBI what they couldn’t gather with their license plate scanners, aerial surveillance and tape recordings, drone surveillance, and other technology.
But the question is: how useful were these informants in the end? Did they show a non-biased view of what was going on? Did they avoid the pitfalls of agents trained to avoid entrapment? Well, in order to know these answers, we must examine the data.
Mark McConnell
was clearly biased against the protesters. He also led a militia group in his home state, where the group was well-known. This leadership role in Arizona gave him automatic control of protesters who were volunteer security.
Furthermore, it was McConnell who led the organizers to their arrest, and the death of LaVoy Finicum in the most un-routine “routine traffic stop” the FBI has ever claimed to conduct.
Wolf, aka Allen Varner, ran one of the three security teams, as a co-leader with two others. This clearly created entrapment, since he was in the decision making process for the security volunteers who were arrested. The two other co-leaders were also arrested for crimes, yet how much influence did this informant have in decision making? A great deal.
Marshal Smith pretended to be a real US Marshal for ‘Judge Bruce’ who everyone believed to be a real judge, there to insure the protest didn’t break any laws. Impersonating a police officer gave credibility to the protesters that what they were doing was perfectly legal. Over the top? Absolutely. We are supposed to trust police.
Fabio Minoggio
showed up for a brief period and had the security do drills and even some target practice down at the boat docks. The prosecuting attorney paraded the spent rounds from the target practice in front of the jury to show how dangerous these protesters were. Entrapment once again.
This is 4/9 informants inside the refuge creating entrapment and undue influence. That’s 44%, 11% each. A pretty big number, but let’s see how it’s really even higher.
I was another informant, and I volunteered as a kitchen cook. Although I did not create entrapment, the agent contacted read these other reports while I was at the refuge. Some of the data in the reports was not my data, but information the agent read in other reports, specific information duplicated from Marshal’s report. This was evidenced while I testified, as I had to deny time and again the prosecutor’s questions about ‘my’ reports since I did not report those facts at all.
This now puts 55% of the reports in jeopardy of either entrapment or poor data gathering techniques. Does anyone really believe the other 45% of the reports were done any better? Or should all the reports be thrown out?
Well, we can go one step further on informant reports. Informants gather their information through hearsay.
A statement made out of court that is offered in court as evidence to prove the truth of the matter asserted.
It is the job of the judge or jury in a court proceeding to determine whether evidence offered as proof is credible. Three evidentiary rules help the judge or jury make this determination:
- Before being allowed to testify, a witness generally must swear or affirm that his or her testimony will be truthful.
- The witness must be personally present at the trial or proceeding in order to allow the judge or jury to observe the testimony firsthand.
- The witness is subject to cross-examination at the option of any party who did not call the witness to testify.
In keeping with the three evidentiary requirements, the Hearsay Rule, as outlined in the Federal Rules of Evidence, prohibits most statements made outside a courtroom from being used as evidence in court.
Hearsay is gathered through informants, placed into evidence as fact, and a defendant cannot face his accuser. Therefore one can easily argue the removal of the informant program as a whole.
Please realize the informants have no legal training or required education, yet their testimony is heavily protected in court. Furthermore, none of the informants knew who the other informants were. None of the informants saw their own reports for final approval for accuracy.
Informant’s agents were reading other reports, some biased, some clear entrapment, which skewed the results of the overall accuracy of the data in a manner well over 50%. This is called good police work? Not in any sense of the word could it be considered ‘good’.
To top it all off, the journalist who researched these ‘sealed’ reports, and exposed the entrapment, Gary Hunt, is now sitting in jail. How dare he get a hold of public hearing evidence and dig for the truth! How dare Gary get a hold of redacted reports, where mass data is blocked out to hide the informant’s identity, in a public… let me repeat, PUBLIC trial, where the redacted reports remained sealed from the public even after the trial!
It’s amazing to me that we even have a Bill of Rights with all this constant hiding of evidence. I say how dare the government even think this is acceptable in America.
