According to Foreign Policy, the FBI became interested in Daniels in 2015 from a video of him participating in a police brutality protest, which was posted on the right-wing conspiracy theory website InfoWars. Alex Jones, the Austin, Texas-based radio and TV show host who runs InfoWars, is a “valuable asset” to the Trump administration. Trump uses the conspiracy theorist as a news source, reportedly called Jones three times in recent months, and has praised Jones and his “amazing” reputation. Jones has claimed the Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooting and the Boston Marathon bombing were inside jobs and hoaxes, that President Obama was not born in the United States, and the government is making people gay. Jones was the source of Trump’s claim that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election. “I talk to the CIA, FBI connections, Army intelligence connections, former technical head of the NSA and a bunch of other people that talk to the president,” said Jones on his TV program. “I’m gonna leave it at that.”
FBI surveillance of Daniels and other activists extended to Detroit and South Carolina. The FBI claims Daniels “openly and publicly advocates violence toward law enforcement” on his Facebook profile, and posted words of admiration for Micah X. Johnson, who killed five Dallas police officers in 2016, and Tremaine Wilbourn, who is accused of killing a cop in Memphis, Tennessee.
That the FBI learned of Daniels through the right-wing propaganda outlet such as InfoWars is instructive, demonstrating that the bureau is politicized, but not in the manner in which Trump and his supporters believe it is. Trump loyalists such as Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) attack the FBI for its alleged surveillance abuses in the Russia investigation only because the agency poses a danger to an authoritarian president who disrespects the rule of law and the system of checks and balances, and is concerned with little more than his own power and ego. Rather, the FBI is responding to pressure from the right, monitoring for two years a Black activist with an 11-year-old misdemeanor conviction to prosecute him for a federal gun charge. This targeting of Daniels reflects the inherent racial biases of the FBI organizational culture — a culture that also finds virtually all shootings by federal agents justified and classifies all victims of justified homicide by police officers as felons. If convicted, Daniels could face up to 10 years in prison.
In case you’re not paying attention:
Immigrant Americans criticizing law enforcement = “illegals”
Black Americans criticizing law enforcement = “identity extremists”
But white Republicans *actively undermining* law enforcement investigation of Trump campaign = “patriots”
In August 2017, the FBI published an intelligence report called “Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated To Target Law Enforcement Officers.” In the report, the FBI said “it is very likely Black Identity Extremist (BIE) perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as justification for such violence.” The report claims this increase in “ideologically motivated” incidents began with the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent failure of a grand jury to indict the police officers responsible for his death. “The FBI assesses it is very likely incidents of alleged police abuse against African Americans since then have continued to feed the resurgence in ideologically motivated, violent criminal activity within the BIE movement. The FBI assesses it is very likely some BIEs are influenced by a mix of anti-authoritarian, Moorish sovereign citizen ideology, and BIE ideology.”
Black leaders, lawmakers and activists have expressed concern over the new BIE designation, and according to the Center for Democracy and Technology, civil rights and civil liberties advocates have accused the FBI of taking several distinct incidents and poorly manufacturing a movement from them. In November, the Congressional Black Caucus met with FBI Director Christopher Wray, concerned about the bureau’s “troubling history” of targeting Black organizations, and that Black activists such as Black Lives Matter will only be criminalized and branded as terrorists and extremists for protesting against police brutality.