REUTERS
The first priority of the Trump administration’s new attorney general and FBI director will be to dismantle the ideological weaponization of the DOJ and FBI that has crushed the best people, forced the rest into silence and betrayed the American people.
There are few better examples of how this malign machine works than the case of senior FBI Supervisory Agent Zach Schoffstall, who was forced out of the FBI after 16 years of exemplary service because he refused to go along with a trumped-up domestic-terrorism prosecution.
“I brought embarrassment to the bureau. I refused to take a knee to the machine,” he says.
The story begins in the small town of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, on June 11, 2022, where local police got a tip off that a “little army” of masked men was in a U-Haul truck en route to disrupt the annual Pride parade.
They pulled the truck over and arrested 31 young men from the white nationalist group Patriot Front, dressed near-identically in navy tops, chinos and COVID masks, and carrying flagpoles and flags.
The men, including the group’s 25-year-old founder, Thomas Rousseau, were charged with conspiracy to riot, a misdemeanor, and thrown in jail overnight to cool off.
There was no violence that day but cops were on edge and the FBI was on site because Idaho is an open-carry state and there were several competing events along the Coeur d’Alene lakefront that day, including a local motorcycle-club event to which people were encouraged to bring guns, a Catholic group praying the rosary, and Antifa members ready to do battle.
One Antifa operative was arrested.
The Patriot Front arrest was international news because it fit perfectly into the Biden administration’s new push to elevate “white supremacy” as the biggest terrorist threat to America, based on a false characterization of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot as a white supremacist domestic terror attack, worse than 9/11.
Attorney General Merrick Garland had unveiled the “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism” exactly a year earlier, saying “the top domestic-violence extremist threat comes from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocated for the superiority of the white race.”
The administration was setting a trap for Donald Trump supporters, as President Biden increasingly railed against “semi-fascist” “ultra-MAGA,” culminating in this year’s presidential campaign in which Trump was accused of being Hitler.
The entire federal law-enforcement apparatus was retooled to respond to this supposedly dire threat of white supremacy.
The problem was that there were no crimes to find.
Pressure from DC
Schoffstall was the FBI’s supervisory senior resident agent at the time — in other words, the boss of the FBI in northern Idaho.
He recalls pressure from Washington to find domestic terrorism in his region because of its sordid history with neo-Nazis such as the Aryan Nations group that had set up a compound near Coeur d’Alene two decades ago.
The local community is still very sensitive to accusations of white supremacy, but the FBI couldn’t just make up crimes that didn’t exist.
At least that’s what Schoffstall believed, as he worked on actual crimes like murders, child abuse and drug trafficking.
But when the Patriot Front turned up in Coeur d’Alene that cloudy Saturday, Garland’s henchmen and women at the DOJ seized on the golden opportunity to turn the case into proof of the domestic terrorism threat they had been itching to prosecute.
What ensued was a farce that would be comical if it had not destroyed so many lives.
Prosecutors wrote elaborate search warrants for the Patriot Front members’ phones, citing the J6 “insurrection,” and alluding to random neo-Nazi atrocities.
But the local FBI agents refused to sign the warrants, says Schoffstall, because they deemed that there was no evidence that the Patriot Front guys were planning to riot and no justification for the over-the-top allegations in the search warrant since the 31 men had no guns, were not violent, had nothing to do with J6 and were a “lawful group formed for a legitimate activity.”
The agents’ boss, Schoffstall, examined the evidence and backed his agents.
“Agents should not be forced to lie under oath — that’s our bread and butter,” he says.
“I would never bend the truth or make up evidence to get to the desired end. But I failed to read the room that this was going to happen whether I liked it or not.”
While he says Patriot Front members are “idiots” and finds their racist rhetoric abhorrent, that’s not a crime.
Lawfully formed group
Schoffstall also says that in the days following the arrests, the FBI counterterrorism headquarters told him, the Idaho US Attorney’s Office and the DOJ that “the Patriot Front and its leader Thomas Rousseau had been thoroughly investigated in the years prior to their arrest in Coeur d’Alene. Those investigations concluded that the Patriot Front was not a criminal organization but a group lawfully formed for First Amendment-protected activities and known to transport its members in box trucks and other vehicles with the same regalia they were arrested with to peacefully protest and/or counterprotest. Rousseau was known to suspend or kick out members who tried to advocate acts of violence . . .
“The DOJ and US Attorney would not accept these conclusions and instead characterized them as a violent right-wing extremist group whose intent, like other right-wing extremist groups on Jan 6th and in Charlottesville was to commit acts of violence.”
Schoffstall and his agents’ conflict with the DOJ escalated to Washington.
Schoffstall stuck to his guns and was transferred, demoted, and finally fired.
During his “removal interview,” he was told that “my failure to force a more aggressive investigation of the Patriot Front was extremely poor judgment that they viewed as equivalent to gross misconduct. Hence my dismissal.”
Despite glowing performance reviews and dozens of character references that poured in from local law enforcement and FBI agents he had worked with attesting to his integrity, he was thrown out of the job he loved.
But what was it all for?
The supposed “domestic terror” event in Coeur d’Alene fizzled out to nothing.
The search warrant was signed and 37 devices from the Patriot Front were handed over to the FBI by the police department but no incriminating evidence of violent intent was found.
Seven Patriot Front members were convicted of conspiracy to riot and sentenced to a few days in jail.
Twenty accepted plea deals and were fined for participating in a parade without a permit.
In other cases, judges castigated prosecutors and said police lacked “probable cause” for the arrests.
Despite an order from the Idaho District Court, the FBI refused to hand back the phones — or the federal warrant used to search them — to defense attorneys who claimed there was exculpatory evidence that showed their clients did not intend to commit violence.
“It’s mind-blowing to me [the prosecutors] were so obstinate about it,” says attorney Chris Schwartz, who acted for defendant Richard Jessop, whose case, along with Rousseau’s, was dismissed last year.
One judge called it a “a crappy case.”
Another judge said the trial court had “no confidence the State ha[d] even yet complied with its discovery obligations.”
The DOJ and the FBI ended up providing us with a textbook example all right — but only of how they have perverted justice in pursuit of politics.