You Know That Dear Family Friend Who Prayed With You For Your Mother? She Works For The Stasi.

The photo above is of a real Stasi informant taken from German press stories, but she may as well have been sent by Central Casting, so I'll use her for this post. Yesterday I linked to a story about the Proud Boys trial, in which on Wednesday the prosecution revealed at the last minute that a witness (so far unidentified) whom the defense planned to call as part of its case was an FBI informant. Yet again, this brought the trial to a screeching halt when the defense moved for a mistrial, and Judge Kelly scheduled a hearing for yesterday afternoon.

I followed the story with great interest yesterday, but although the hearing yesterday afternoon was public, there's been little reporting. The best story I could find was this one:

As revelations that a defense witness was also an FBI informant roil the already contentious Capitol riot trial of members of the far-right Proud Boys group, prosecutors said Thursday that the informant was never told to gather information about the defendants or their lawyers.

The FBI ended its relationship with the informant this past January after it learned that the person had received a subpoena to testify, an agent said in an affidavit filed in court.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly said there's no clear evidence of wrongdoing by the government and allowed the trial to continue Friday, but is also set to hear additional arguments about how deeply enmeshed the informant was with the case.

There's a PDF of the government's filing with the testimony of the informant's handler here. The informant, identified as "CHS-SA", according to the FBI handler, had been employed to gather information on two of the defendants since 2019, but it didn't relate to this particular case. Although CHS-SA had been spying on two of the defendants, it was for something else, not their conduct on January 6, and the FBI never asked the informant about their relationship to January 6.

However, CHS-SA had been spying on two of the defendants over something right up until January 9 of this year, when she notified the FBI that the defense planned to call her as a witness. The FBI then terminated their relationship with the informant, but the prosecution didn't notify the defense that she'd been an FBI informant until just before they called her as a witness during the trial.

So it's all just pure as the driven snow, at least according to Judge Kelly. Now, I suppose he sees this as a narrow legal question, and he's the one competent to rule on this, at least for now. But I have problems that won't go away. According to the story from Wednesday that I linked above,

The informant, who was not identified in the court filing, also participated in prayer meetings with members of one or more of the defendants’ families and engaged in conversations with one of the defendant’s family members about replacing one of the defense counsel, the attorney added.

According to the PDF, CHS-SA had been working for the FBI to spy on two of the defendants and their families, apparently including in prayer meetings, since 2019, but not about their involvement in January 6. What on earth was she spying about, then? Whatever it was, there've been no indictments or arrests on whatever that case, or those cases, may have been. It's just pure coincidence that defendant Rehl had been on the FBI's radar since 2019 for something else that never quite jelled, but now they've got him on something else that CHS-SA wasn't working on.

How many spies like this are out there? I think about our own dear family friends, and I suddenly recognize that there's no reason any of those couldn't be FBI informants. Let's recall that just last month, we had this story:

The FBI says it is retracting a leaked document published on the internet Feb. 8 that appears to reveal that the bureau’s Richmond division launched an investigation into “radical traditionalist” Catholics and their possible ties to “the far-right white nationalist movement.”

In response to an inquiry from CNA, the FBI said it will remove the document because “it does not meet our exacting standards.”

Given this is the FBI, I'm suddenly suspicious that they say they've removed a document, but, er, have they stopped paying any informants who've been spying on Catholics suspected of attending Latin masses? They said nothing about that in their annoucement, but given that by their own admission, they had some nice lady spying on defendant Rehl's family prayer meetings without result, how do we know one or more of our own dear family friends isn't an FBI informant?

After all, we might go to a Latin mass -- or, heaven forbid, our own novus ordo parish even prays now and then in Latin. Shouldn't the FBI be made aware of that? I surely think so, whether or not they've withdrawn one or another document that says they're interested.

Let's say one or another House Republican takes it upon himself to ask the FBI if they have informants among Catholics, whether or not they've withdrawn some document or other. You know the standard answer will be, "Congressman, we don't comment on ongoing investigations."

At this point, I no longer think abolishing the FBI is a far-out idea.