A U.S. District Court judge says the FBI’s reasons for withholding information on assassination plots against Occupy movement leaders in several U.S. cities aren’t good enough.
It was quietly reported last June that the FBI was aware that an organization — possibly a law enforcement agency — had plans to assassinate leaders of the Occupy movement, and the bureau did nothing about it. Now a U.S. District Court judge says the FBI has some explaining to do.
Not only did the FBI not intervene at all, but it didn’t even alert or notify the leaders of Occupy movements in several cities whose lives were threatened. Their inaction goes against the bureau’s practice of informing potential victims of violent threats made against them.
The public and Occupy leaders only learned about the assassination plans after documents containing the information were obtained by the human and civil rights advocacy group, Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Though the documents largely detailed how the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, U.S. military and private corporations had flagged Occupy Wall Street protesters as “domestic terrorists” and “criminals” in order to spy on them, there was one paragraph on page 61 that caught the group’s attention.
