(Ken Silva, Headline USA) In 2007, Orlando residents were furious to discover that an FBI informant had organized a neo-Nazi rally through one of the city’s mostly black neighborhoods a year earlier.
“To come into a predominantly black community, which could have resulted in great harm to the black community? I would hate to be part of a game,” Orlando City Councilwoman Daisy Lynum said at the time, calling for a “full-scale investigation” into the matter.
However, an FBI agent testified that his informant participated in the event, but didn’t organize it. The city’s uproar passed without a public investigation, full-scale or otherwise—until now.
Thanks to a trove of previously unpublicized law enforcement records and interviews with several players involved, Headline USA can reveal that the Orlando neo-Nazi rally was indeed organized by the FBI. The Orlando event also seems to have been part of a larger program to hold Nazi rallies across the country. And according to FBI records, the bureau sponsored those events despite knowing they led to an increase in the number of card-carrying Nazis in America.
Moreover, the FBI’s Nazi rallies led to a much larger operation to target right-wing groups. Dubbed “Primitive Affliction,” the operation featured a motorcycle front group, rogue undercover agents, Outlaw bikers, Satanists, bomb-makers and a fugitive on the lam in Mexico.
To top it off, the FBI’s Nazi operation was briefed to the highest levels of the bureau, including to then-Director Robert Mueller, according to at least one record unearthed by this publication.
Little has been written about Primitive Affliction outside of the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center—biased groups that trained agents in the case, according to the newly revealed records.
But despite the lack of publicity, Primitive Affliction covers a crucial time in right-wing extremist history. It began where the FBI’s 1990s-era cases against the Aryan Nations trailed off, and it helped shape the neo-Nazi groups that would march at the 2017 deadly Charlottesville Unite the Right rally—an event that inspired Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential candidacy.
Along with big-picture history, the records from Primitive Affliction reveal malfeasance by FBI agents and officers who today hold higher positions at the bureau.
The FBI declined to comment. Mueller didn’t respond to an email about Primitive Affliction.
Fabricating Fascists
About a year after the 2006 Orlando neo-Nazi rally, the FBI source who organized the event, David Gletty, had his cover blown in open court. When the Orlando Sentinel reported that Gletty organized the march, his handler reportedly denied the accusation—saying that the informant marched, but didn’t lead the rally.
But Gletty told this publication a different story. He said the FBI instructed him to organize the rally for two main purposes: to raise Gletty’s profile in the neo-Nazi movement, and to allow the FBI to conduct surveillance of the Nazis who attended the rally.
In fact, Gletty told this publication the FBI was staging Nazi rallies across the country with the similar goals in mind: to raise the profiles of their own informants while building a database of Nazis to track.
“At the time, the FBI just before that was having me put on Nazi protests, and there were Nazi protests that were handled by the FBI, and operatives like myself,” he said.
Gletty’s statement is a bold one, and shouldn’t be taken at face value. An undercover operative and private investigator, he said the FBI trained him to lie professionally.
But in this case, Gletty’s allegation is borne out by the evidence.
For starters, there’s the fact that the group that Gletty marched with in Orlando, the National Socialist Movement, or NSM, was founded in the 1970s by an FBI informant—a fact revealed by Headline USA last September. That FBI informant, Robert Brannen, was active during the bureau’s COINTELPRO era, and he chaired the NSM for nearly a decade.
The Daily News from the Art of Liberty Foundation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Upgrade to paid
Other former NSM members have also accused the FBI of staging the mid-2000s rallies. For instance, according to former NSM member and current prison inmate Bill White, the FBI sponsored the 2005 Toledo rally, which would be one of the most violent racial protests until 2017 Charlottesville.
“In October 2005, FBI [confidential human source] Jeff Schoep asked me to go to Toledo, Ohio, to help organize a ‘March Against Black Crime’ by what were supposed to be ‘local residents,’ but were really federal CHSs,” White said in an October 2020 sworn declaration, referring to Schoep, who led the NSM from the 1990s until shortly after the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.
While there’s no smoking-gun evidence that Schoep was an FBI informant when he led the NSM, numerous other neo-Nazis have accused him of being one. There are also FBI records from the early 2000s showing he at least spoke to agents once, and perhaps the strongest evidence is that he now works openly as a “reformed Nazi” with groups sponsored by the DHS, FBI and other law enforcement organizations.
Along with his accusations that Schoep was a fed, White also described the Toledo rally as being similar to what would happen in Charlottesville 12 years later—with the local cops and FBI allowing the neo-Nazis to clash with the left-wing counter-protestors.
“On the day of the march, the Toledo Police and the FBI occupied [a nearby parking lot] and ordered myself and the NSM to use [another] parking lot. I and a small team from the NSM arrived before the Communists to secure the location; no police were present at this time …,” White said.
“About an hour later, police began to deploy, and, directed NSM members to enter [their parking lot] by driving through the mob. This started problems … After the police line formed, the mob then attacked the police, not us.”
I looked for Part 2. Cannot find. But, this ‘Stacker is a must-follow!
@EmilyTVProducer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
It’s all about making it look like they are actually doing something