Josh First's Blog

Should individual federal agents be held accountable?

Should individual FBI/DOJ/ATF/DHS agents be held personally accountable for the federal government’s Gestapo war of terror inflicted on innocent Americans over the past four years?

This question has been on my mind daily, for the past four years, because I was a law-abiding J6 peaceful protestor who was nonetheless visited and then interviewed by FBI agents, with all that that portends. These FBI visits and interviews with people like me, who they said up front had done nothing criminal, had committed no crime, were done for the sole purpose of political intimidation, with the intimation that a violent early morning FBI SWAT raid through your front door could be the next outcome (as was done to hundreds of innocent Americans).

Now this question of individual federal agents has become a ripe policy subject, because on Friday the acting DOJ secretary demanded a list of all FBI agents and DOJ staff who “worked” on prosecuting January 6th victims.

Yes, I am using a lot of language here that is probably unfamiliar to a lot of Americans, including people who consider themselves politically involved or at least politically educated on both sides of the spectrum. So here are some important facts that will guide your understanding of where people who share my thinking are coming from:

• January 6th, 2021, was overwhelmingly a peaceful protest that I personally participated in, peacefully, non-violently, non-destructively.
• January 6th’s peaceful protest was eventually marred by some violence that was aggressively instigated by the police, Antifa, and a lot of now known federal agents who have been videotaped and identified.
• Using video footage solely from the West Plaza and a couple doorways, January 6th as a whole, as an entire day start to finish, has been purposefully mis-described by the Democrat Party-owned mainstream media, Wikipedia, YouTube, Google, and other Leftist-aligned information outlets and social media companies. The purpose of their deliberate misinformation and censorship of rebuttals was to create a political narrative they could and did use against their political adversaries.
• This false narrative about J6 served as a sort of “Reichstag Fire” moment that the incoming Biden Administration siezed upon to justify its unconstitutional draconian assault on anyone and everyone who was remotely involved with protesting at J6. Including peaceful people like me, who simply happens to hold non-Leftist views about government, governance, etc.
• Much of the DOJ/FBI/DHS/ATF draconian abuse of their American political adversaries involved hyper-violent early morning no-knock raids on families in their homes. These outrageous raids have been widely reported in the non-legacy media, and almost completely censored in the establishment press.
• Over a thousand non-violent Americans were violently scooped up in these dragnets, where dozens of heavily armed federal agents from FBI, DHS, ATF and DOJ would conduct military-style home invasions backed by armored cars and helicopters. Small children, pregnant wives, the targeted husband, grandmas, grandpas, were all handcuffed, taken outside in freezing winter conditions in their pajamas, abused, homes destroyed in unnecessary searches, etc. Families and homes and businesses were turned inside out because some protestor maybe committed a trespass violation.
• The legal justification and basis for literally every one of these cases was one gigantic procedural violation and deprivation of constitutional due process after another after another. Illegal judge shopping, false affidavits, blank search warrants, false accusations, planted evidence, home security cameras turned off… if there was a potential violation of individual rights, the Biden DOJ/ FBI committed it almost as a signal of their lawless impunity and unaccountability.
• Hundreds of innocent J6 political prisoners have languished in prisons and solitary confinement as a result of this lawlessness, including the lawlessness of corrupt federal prosecutors conspiring with political activist judges to deprive these victims of their due process rights.

It is in this context that I ask the question if all of the federal agents who engaged in these violent home invasions should be personally held accountable. After all, they must have known that they were not searching for some drug dealer or violent criminal. And yet they inflicted unbelievable and wildly unconstitutional harm on innocent American citizens.

As we learned at the end of World War Two, the whiny excuse “I was just following orders” doesn’t cut it, doesn’t excuse uniformed police and soldiers from their personal responsibility when committing crimes against unarmed civilians. And I believe there should be no excuse for the many federal agents who carried out these patently illegal raids.

Yesterday I emailed the FBI agent who came to my house in 2022, asking him who at FBI or DOJ had directed him to target me (screen shot of our email chain and his picture at our front door are below). His name, as he represents it on his business card, is Patrick Armor. Patrick and another FBI agent subsequently interviewed me in an attorney’s office. Despite stating up front that they believed I had done nothing criminal on J6, they quickly went for the jugular, trying to get me to say anything or give them pictures or photos that would incriminate me.

It was clear they were trying to get me to say anything they could later purposefully misconstrue as “lying to a federal agent.” Even though I had nothing to lie about and therefore would not lie. It was simply a procedural ruse to catch an innocent person on a “process crime.”

All in support of the establishment’s false J6 political narrative, to help them implement a full takedown of America.

These FBI agents were willfully, knowingly, aggressively trying to entrap innocent Americans like myself, so they could deprive us of our liberty, and then take away much, much more from us. Over the past four years many other FBI agents around America raided bank deposit boxes and private precious metals caches, pocketed the valuables, and rode off into the sunset, with no accountability. These public employees have been the tip of the spear aimed at destroying America’s democratic institutions and norms, our rule of law.

For four years thousands of Americans like myself sat waiting for our front door to be blasted open in the middle of the night, our homes to be violently raided, over at most a trespassing charge.

This unchecked lawlessness is pure evil, and it must be held to account. The people who both enabled and implemented this evil must be held accountable. Every single federal agent who was involved in hunting down J6 protestors must be investigated, prosecuted, and held accountable through the criminal law process. Same for their bosses and the judges who signed off on dubious warrants.

America has just endured four years of a sort of Rwanda, albeit I grant you not yet involving the outright mass butchery and genocide that the full Rwanda experience involved. But America was being set up for that to happen next, because the political enemies of the Democrat Party – concerned parents of school children, conservative Latin Mass-only Catholics, critics of transgender ideology, conservative Christians, political conservatives and constitutionalists and patriots and US military veterans…were all deemed to be “deplorable” and demonized and targeted.

So that our eventual liquidation would be acceptable and normal to everyone else.

In August 2022 I wrote here that America was going to need a truth and reconciliation commission. Well, we are hopefully about to begin that process. Holding the lawless and violent individual federal agents fully accountable will be just the beginning.

And one final thought: Every American should reject the Gestapo fascism that was being inflicted upon at least half of the country these past four years. While America’s borders were being purposefully left wide open and an illegal invasion was under way. And billions of taxpayer dollars were granted to American organizations aggressively and treasonsously trying to destroy America from within. If you are not mad about this, then you either are not paying attention, or you are part of the problem.

FBI Agent Patrick Armor speaking with my wife and daughter, at our home’s front door, June 2022