This article was originally published by James Bovard at The Mises Institute.
On Saturday, federal agents in Minneapolis killed protester Alex Pretti, shooting him in the back 10 times after they had taken away the pistol he legally carried. White House Deputy Chief Stephen Miller quickly settled the issue: “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement, and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.”
A few hours after Pretti was killed, I commented on Twitter/X: “How many of the Trump supporters cheering the killing of the Minneapolis demonstrator today would also cheer for the FBI sniper killing Vicki Weaver in her cabin door at Ruby Ridge in 1992?”
This outraged plenty of Trump supporters, but the parallels between the federal killings in 1992 and on Saturday are striking.
The Ruby Ridge case—a landmark case for civil liberties and gun rights—involved the entrapment of Randy Weaver on firearms charges by an informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). On August 21, 1992, three US marshals dressed in ninja outfits with face masks illegally intruded on Weaver’s Idaho land and ambushed Weaver’s 14-year-old son, Sammy, and 25-year-old family friend Kevin Harris, firing submachine guns at them as they came down a road in the woods, and killing the boy’s dog. A firefight ensued that left one marshal dead. As the boy was running back home towards the family’s shack, a marshal shot him in the back and killed him.
The next day, FBI snipers arrived and, within an hour of taking position, every adult in the cabin was either dead or severely wounded—even though they had not fired a shot at the FBI, and even though the FBI never called out for them to surrender. FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot Randy Weaver in the back as he stood outside his shack, and then fired a shot that killed Vicki Weaver as she stood by the cabin door.
The FBI initially claimed that the killing of Vicki Weaver was justified because she had been in the front yard aiming at an FBI helicopter. After that ludicrous claim collapsed, the FBI said its sniper didn’t intend to kill her.
Trump supporters insisted there was no comparison between Pretti’s death and Vicki Weaver because Weaver was unarmed. But Vicki Weaver had a .380 pistol on her side under her sweater when the FBI sniper blew her head off as she was holding her 10-month old baby. Neither she nor Pretti was brandishing before getting shot to death by the feds.
Trump officials justified killing Pretti because he had a pistol—even though vast numbers of conservatives have brought pistols and rifles to protests in recent years. Similarly, the Rule of Engagement for FBI snipers was “any armed male adult observed in the vicinity of the Weaver cabin could and should be killed.” In a federal appeals court ruling, Judge Alex Kozinski denounced that rule as a new James Bond “007 standard for the use of deadly force” against American citizens.
After Pretti was shot more than ten times, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said he was a “domestic terrorist” who sought “to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.” Noem announced that Pretti “approached Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol. The officers attempted to disarm this individual but the suspect reacted violently.” Videos of the killing show that Pretti had a cell phone in his hand, not a gun, before federal agents knocked him down and began beating and pistol-whipping him. Trump’s DHS considers videotaping federal agents to be the equivalent of a hostile attack that justifies a violent federal response.
A similar threat-inflation paved the way to federal killings in Idaho. At a January 6, 1995 press conference, FBI chief Louis Freeh effectively exonerated all FBI officials involved with Ruby Ridge. Freeh declared that the Randy Weaver “crisis was one of the most dangerous and potentially violent situations to which FBI agents have ever been assigned.” This was peculiar, considering that camouflaged FBI snipers had been hiding in the woods 200 yards away when the Weavers were shot. As Judge Kozinski scoffed, “A group of FBI agents formulated rules of engagement that permitted their colleagues to hide in the bushes and gun down men who posed no immediate threat. Such wartime rules are patently unconstitutional for a police action.”
Some Trump supporters declared that Pretti deserved his fate because he intentionally chose to place himself in deadly peril by purportedly assaulting federal agents. At the 1993 trial, federal prosecutors asserted that Randy Weaver long conspired to have an armed confrontation with the government. Bizarrely, the feds claimed that his moving from Iowa to Ruby Ridge near the Canadian border in 1983 was part of that plot.
In both the Minneapolis and Ruby Ridge cases, federal officials claimed a right to preemptively kill their targets and then cover-up the killings.
After killing Pretti, DHS officials seized cell phones of bystanders and blocked Minnesota state law enforcement officials from conducting any investigation at the crime scene. DHS’s apparent cover-up was so brazen that a Trump-nominated federal judge issued an emergency order on Saturday, near midnight, ordering DHS not to destroy further evidence. It remains to be seen how much honest evidence will be permitted to be disclosed. Unlike most police departments, most ICE and Border Patrol agents don’t wear body cameras to videotape their shootings. Congressional Republicans, following the Trump White House’s lead, blocked efforts by Democrats to require those federal agents to wear body cams.
Similar shenanigans happened in the Weaver case. After an Idaho jury found Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris not guilty on key charges, Federal Judge Edward Lodge condemned the FBI for showing “a callous disregard for the rights of the defendants and the interests of justice.” Judge Lodge issued a lengthy list detailing the Justice Department’s misconduct and fabrication of evidence. Two years later, the director of the FBI’s Violent Crimes and Major Offenders Section pled guilty and was sent to prison for shredding the FBI after-action report on Ruby Ridge—one of the biggest FBI disgraces since the FBI chief L. Patrick Gray was forced to resign for destroying evidence in the Nixon Watergate scandal.
Many Trump supporters would vigorously condemn the FBI’s killing of Vicki Weaver nowadays. But the issue is not how many people disapprove of her killing after the cover-up collapsed. I helped crack that cover-up with pieces in the American Spectator, Playboy, and Wall Street Journal—an article which FBI chief Freeh publicly condemned. A heroic Idaho jury that refused to kowtow to Justice Department flimflams helped shatter the official storyline. The issue is how many people supported the FBI killing in 1992 because they mindlessly swallowed outlandish federal claims and the vilification of the Weaver family.
Trump officials are already dropping a cloak of sanctimony over the latest federal shooting in Minneapolis. According to Border Patrol boss Gregory Bovino, Pretti was only there to kill people, and it was a “good job for our law enforcement in taking him down before he was able to do that.” This standard would preemptively justify killing any individual who the feds label as a threat after shooting him. Will we ever learn the Rules of Engagement that DHS agents are now using to shoot American civilians? Will we ever see the possibly panicked texts and emails from DHS bosses in Minnesota to the Trump White House about another bloody public relations fiasco? Will we ever see the evidence that federal agents seized after Pretti was perforated?
How can anyone who is paying attention approve of Pretti’s killing despite all the false and far-fetched federal claims regarding his demise? How can freedom survive if so many Americans blindly believe any proclamation by government officials and political hacks?
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