‘A nation in distress’: How the FBI’s war on ‘domestic extremism’ threatens liberty

Determined to employ the unrestrained force of the federal government against Donald Trump supporters who were at the Capitol during the unrest on January 6, 2021, FBI Director Christopher Wray wanted to assure Americans that his agency “had deployed every single tool at its disposal and its full arsenal of investigative resources” to target their families, friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens who exercised their right to free speech and free assembly.

“This ideologically motivated violence,” Wray told a Senate committee, “underscores the symbolic nature of the National Capital Region and the willingness of domestic violent extremists to travel to events in this area and violently engage law enforcement and their perceived adversaries.”

What Wray called 'domestic violent extremism' is a fiction contrived to frame the political right as terrorists and increase FBI budgets.

The FBI’s post-January 6 operations were intended to terrorize the opposition into silence. Dissidents would continue to be prosecuted, and anyone foolish enough to organize in the “National Capital Region” — that is, Barack Obama’s center of operations — would have their lives ruined, just like January 6 defendants. Here, the political effort to shatter the opposition intersected with the professional ambitions of Washington’s permanent bureaucracy.

As the U.S. had begun to downsize its presence in the Middle East, national security bureaucrats and their parasitical private sector partners saw that the industry that had made them rich was now at risk. Counterterrorism is a multibillion-dollar Beltway business, filling a trough that feeds Republican and Democratic constituencies including the State Department, the FBI, and other spy services, as well as defense contractors, NGOs, and think tanks.

The “insurrection” reinvigorated the industry, which easily adapted to the new model with counterterror experts plugging in the same keywords — radicalization, self-radicalization, lone wolves, etc. — for what is essentially the same enterprise, except that instead of fighting dangerous terrorists abroad, they are targeting Trump supporters. What Wray called “domestic violent extremism” is a fiction contrived to frame the political right as terrorists and increase FBI budgets.

“In our office in Daytona, for instance, there were no legitimate domestic terror threats,” says former FBI agent Stephen Friend. “There were no active cases that were any good. My first day in Daytona they gave me this case with these guys that just lived in the backwoods. They hadn’t done anything. A tip came that these guys might be domestic terrorists, but there was nothing to it. And I wanted to close it, and then supervisors were insisting, ‘No, we should get an undercover or an informant to go bump these guys and see if they’ll sell us a weapon and then we could charge them with a gun crime.’ And I said, ‘That’s entrapment, and I’m not interested in doing that.’”

‘You do what you’re told’

For the FBI, January 6 was a bonanza. It let Wray and FBI leadership boost the nearly nonexistent numbers of domestic terrorists to thousands in order to please their political masters and strengthen their hand in bureaucratic battles. With a live-action example of domestic violent extremism in the nation’s capital playing out on broadcast media around the world, FBI leadership had what it needed to press Congress to cough up more money.

“January 6 happens in Washington D.C., so the Washington field office would have responsibility for that case,” Friend said. “And then typically that office would open one case. And you investigate the subjects you want to investigate, and if they don’t live in Washington D.C., as most of the Jan. 6 people didn’t, it wouldn’t make sense to hop on a plane to go interview them. You would cut a lead, and an agent in the office where the subject is located would go do the interview.”

But that is not what happened with the January 6 cases, Friend explained. “They stood up a task force in Washington, D.C., which was doing the investigative actions. So these tips would come in by the hundreds and the thousands with the directive to field offices to open a case on these people. And we did it for every single person.”

By making the field offices open separate cases, the FBI turned January 6 into thousands of cases, one opened for every investigative subject. Spreading those cases around the country is how the FBI cooked its books so it could pronounce right-wing extremism as the No. 1 threat to U.S. national security. The fact is that most of the January 6 cases were not even domestic terrorism cases.

“All the January 6 cases are either one of two things,” Friend said. “They’re either 266, which means domestic terrorism, but the lion’s share of them are 176, which is a criminal charge, parading and rioting. But those riot charges are being investigated by joint terrorism task forces, and they’re being called domestic terrorist cases for statistical reasons. They’re juking the numbers. But people don’t know that. They think, ‘January 6, oh, that’s domestic terrorism.’ They’re not, not even by the way the FBI treated it.”

When Friend pointed out to his supervisors that they were violating FBI procedures, they turned on him.

What had once been the world’s premier law enforcement agency had become a homegrown version of a Soviet-style internal security service, an American Stasi.

“They said that I was a simp for January 6,” Friend recalled, “but I said, ‘You have righteous cases here if somebody was engaging in violence, but as a matter of disclosure, you have to turn over Brady material [information favorable to the defendant] that you departed from your own rules. If the defense finds out about that, that’s a bad black eye for us. What if the guy is a really bad dude and now you lost because you were so hell-bent on hitting your numbers that you violated your own protocols and now he walks?' And they said to me, ‘Well, Steve, we’re not losing any of the cases.’”

And indeed, that was true. The Justice Department has won convictions against nearly every January 6 defendant who has come before a Washington, D.C. jury. And that is another reason why federal law enforcement made all its cases out of a jurisdiction that votes overwhelmingly Democratic. It is still unclear, however, when citizens on the left first resolved to punish fellow Americans for voting differently.

Friend’s misgivings started to grow. When he was assigned to transport a January 6 suspect, he spoke out. “They were going to send a SWAT team, arrest him, and then my job was to take him from where we arrested him to court and drop him off. I said, ‘This isn’t fair, and this is dangerous. We’re sending SWAT teams to guys’ houses that said they’d cooperate. The guy said 18 months ago that he would cooperate, and you have no contact with him for a year and a half, and now you send a SWAT team to his house? He has no expectation that you’re coming. There’s lots of different ways you can bring him into custody. You guys are a hammer looking for a nail.’”

Friend’s superiors couldn’t understand why it mattered to him. “I said, ‘You gave me training on identifying if I think that we’re doing things the wrong way, and I’m throwing the flag,’ and they said, ‘Yeah, you have an oath of office, you have training, but your real duty is to the FBI, and you follow orders and do what you’re told. What’s your problem with it?' And I just said we’re supposed to be part of something bigger than that.”

That was it for Friend. In 2022, he became an FBI whistleblower after making protected disclosures to Congress about the FBI’s manipulative investigations of January 6 protesters.

What had once been the world’s premier law enforcement agency had become an arm of the ruling party, a homegrown version of a Soviet-style internal security service, an American Stasi serving not the people it was sworn to protect but the regime that funded and armed it. Thousands of Americans were swept up in the nationwide January 6 dragnet, detained for months, then years, their charges being bulked out with years-long sentencing enhancements.

Caught in a nightmare

Many were broken by it, like Matthew Perna, a 37-year-old from Sharpsville, Pennsylvania.

“Matt decided to go to the Stop the Steal rally because he wanted to be part of what he thought was going to be a historic celebration,” said his aunt, Geri Perna. “He did not believe that the election results were going to be certified. And he felt that by joining this huge crowd, they would be heard, and something unprecedented would take place. And actually, something unprecedented did take place, and Matt got caught up in it.”

Videotape shows that Perna walked into the Capitol through open doors past five Capitol Police officers. He held his cell phone aloft to record the events. He walked around for less than 15 minutes, then left through a different door.

“He went back to his hotel room and did a live Facebook feed where he talked about the day,” his aunt said. “He was upset that Pence certified the vote and Biden was named president. He said it’s not over yet. He meant that there will be investigations and that the truth will eventually come out.”

Geri Perna told me she was at home in Florida a week or so after and saw a Facebook post saying the FBI was looking for people who had attended the rally. “I clicked on the link, and I was shocked to see my nephew’s picture as one of the people that was wanted,” she says. “And I let my family know. My brother visited Matt at 6:00 that morning and Matt already knew about it. He honestly didn’t think he did anything wrong. He didn’t hurt anybody, didn’t steal anything, he didn’t break anything.”

Perna told his attorney that he wanted it to end as quickly as possible. The attorney told him that the quickest way to make it end would be to plead guilty.

He called the local FBI field office and explained who he was. The FBI made an appointment to visit him the following day. “Two officers showed up to question him about what happened,” Geri Perna told me. “He told them everything. Matt did not have an attorney because he thought this was just a mistake. And the FBI left that day giving Matt the impression that they had everything they needed.”

When she heard about the meeting with the FBI, she got on a plane to Pennsylvania to see Matt. “We got an attorney,” she says. “The FBI called, and they said they had a few more questions, and they showed up with five more officers and that’s when they arrested Matt. They searched his home, confiscated his laptop and all his phones. They took him to the local office in New Castle, and they booked him, then released him three hours later. They took the sweatshirt that he was wearing that day that said ‘Make America Great Again’ as evidence, and that was when the nightmare began.”

Perna’s attorney told him that he had nothing to worry about. He had no record, and all they would do was give him a slap on the wrist. “About 10 days later,” Geri Perna told me, “they added the obstruction charge to over 200 of the defendants at the time, and Matt was one of them. And that’s when everything got ugly. And this just began a series of postponements and delays.”

“And Matt was constantly worried, what were they going to find?” Perna said. “And every time there was a hearing, it got canceled and then postponed indefinitely. Matt’s mental state began to deteriorate. He saw how many more people were being arrested and charged with very serious crimes and taken to the D.C. jail. Matt had guilty feelings because he was not in jail and other people were. Time was wearing on, the cases kept mounting, Christmas was approaching, and Matt had become a recluse in his home. He was always a healthy eater. He was now eating destructively. He just didn’t care any more.”

Perna told his attorney that he wanted it to end as quickly as possible. The attorney told him that the quickest way to make it end would be to plead guilty.

“They weren’t offering to drop any of the charges,” Geri Perna explained. “The lawyer told them that he was looking at a six- to 12-month federal prison camp, with minimum security. Matt agreed to this. His late father suffered from Parkinson’s disease, and they were going to use the fact that Matt was his caregiver to maybe get the sentence reduced to house arrest. That’s what they were hoping.”

Driven to despair

On December 17, 2021, Perna pleaded guilty to obstruction of Congress, a felony, and three related misdemeanor charges.

“His sentencing hearing was scheduled for March 3 and a week before he called his attorney, and he said, ‘I have a very bad feeling about my sentencing hearing being on March 3,’” she said. “That is the day his mother died. And honestly, I don’t believe any of these dates are coincidental. They are playing with these people’s minds. They are torturing them mentally, and Matt just did not want to have the hearing on that date.”

His attorney told him that his hearing was postponed, but the prosecution was planning to ask the judge to add a sentencing enhancement, which could increase the sentence by many years.

“We later learned that Matt told his friend that he was looking at nine years. That just broke, Matt,” his aunt said. “He called me sobbing on the phone. I could barely understand him. He could barely put a sentence together. He was stuttering. He was sobbing and he was apologizing over and over to me about how this impacted my friendships and how much guilt this poor kid felt for bringing our name into the newspapers. I kept telling him, ‘Don’t worry, Matt. We’re going to tackle this. And you have to have faith.’ I think they had at this point convinced him that he deserved whatever they gave him. That Friday afternoon, early evening, my brother called me and told me to book a plane ticket because Matt had just hanged himself in his garage.”

Matthew Perna’s funeral was held March 2, 2022 in Hermitage, Pennsylvania. “We had an honor guard that requested to be there for the viewing the night before and then for the funeral,” his aunt said. “They did a flag-folding ceremony, and they handed my brother a flag, and my brother was confused and he said, ‘I don’t understand. Matt wasn’t in the military. Aren’t these funerals normally reserved for veterans?’ And they told him, ‘In our eyes, Matt was a bigger patriot than most of the veterans we’ve ever stood guard over.’”

The partisans in the FBI had driven a patriot, a good man, to despair. “We found out after he died about all of these amazing random acts of kindness that he did for people,” she says. “People showed up at the funeral and told us about all the things he did. There was a family with a bunch of kids who’d been in a restaurant one day and Matt picked up the bill for them.

“I made a phone call when I was going through Matt’s paperwork from his case. There was a phone number and a name in there for the prosecutor on Matt’s case, the one that was going to try to push this sentencing enhancement. I called the number and got the prosecutor, and I said, ‘I want to know why the sentencing enhancement.’ And he says, ‘Let me start off by saying that if Matthew just could have waited another month, I don’t think the sentencing enhancement would have stuck with the judge anyway.’ And I said, ‘Do you realize the threat of that enhancement and the jail time that went with it is the reason my nephew took his life?’ And he says, ‘Well, there are many people in our department who felt very bad that Matt took his life.’ And I said, ‘You and the many people in your department are responsible for Matt taking his life.’”

Geri Perna advocates on behalf of January 6 defendants and speaks with the families constantly. “I don’t know how many people have committed suicide over J6,” she told me. “You’re never going to know. I’ve had three people reach out to me to tell me about friends or neighbors who killed themselves after they saw their picture on there. And you’ve never heard about them because they never got that far. But what it did to our family has changed us all. The direction this country has taken is unbelievable. And it doesn’t seem to have a light at the end of the tunnel. We are a nation in distress.”

Editor’s note: This article is adapted from “Disappearing the President: Trump, Truth Social, and the Fight for the Republic,” by Lee Smith (Encounter Books).