Thread by @JMichaelWaller

FBI under Biden DOJ sets precedent for raiding private homes of investigative journalists. This is a constitutional issue on First Amendment grounds. theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbri…

When's the last time we heard of the @FBI raiding the home of a Washington Post journalist who for years has been illegally given classified information from FBI and CIA sources?

Let's dissect this. James O'Keefe isn't part of the media cabal that routinely is illegally fed highly classified material from FBI and CIA sources. He is kicked off Twitter. He is now busted by the FBI. Nobody in the MSM is standing up for him on First Amendment grounds. 🤔

Has anybody in the FBI or CIA been arrested - ever - for committing the felony of leaking Top Secret information to the Washington Post or New York Times?

If I've forgotten that anyone from those agencies has been arrested for such a crime, I'd appreciate a reminder.

.@SenatorLeahy doesn't count. He was kicked off the Senate Intelligence Committee for leaking top secret information to the Washington Post, but he wasn't arrested. And that was long ago. A fellow Democrat, Senator David Boren, set up Leahy to get busted.

The FBI raid on James O'Keefe is the second big attack this year on the First Amendment. Earlier, federal Judge Lewis J. Liman, Southern District of New York, ruled that researchers for investigative media projects have to get licensed by the state.

At first I thought that it was over the top to compare the FBI going after James O’Keefe with the KGB. However, when I worked in the USSR/Russia with anti-regime journalists 30 years ago, the KGB by that time had stopped raiding and arresting them. So the comparison is fair.

That was in the last months of Gorbachev’s USSR and the first couple of years of Yeltsin in the Russian Federation. The former KGB was even dialoguing with its opponents at public conferences by 1992 or 1993. FBI doesn’t do that. An 🍎 to 🍊 comparison, but useful data points.

I did a lot of scholarly work in Moscow on the KGB back then, and participated in a lot of anti-KGB hearings and conferences. Here’s some of that work. jmichaelwaller.com/scholarly-pape…

That window soon shut. The Clinton administration, with Strobe Talbott in charge of Russian affairs, refused to support the Russians who tried to uproot the KGB system, enabling the rise of Putin. Then several of my Russian anti-KGB friends started getting murdered.

So it was no surprise to see Strobe Talbott’s acolyte from @BrookingsInst, Fiona Hill, do what she did on Trump’s NSC. I was appalled when Trump hired her.

The closest to the FBI going after James O’Keefe/Project Veritas is when New York Times reporter Judith Miller was held in criminal contempt for refusing to betray her source after outing Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. But that was a national security case under court order.