FBI Promises Continued Crackdown on US Journalists, Dissidents

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.

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.

“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.

“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.”

“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.

“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.”