The FBI Knocked On My Door

The powerful federal agency tries to edit me

Last Friday, a young special agent from my local FBI office arrived at my Madison, Wisconsin home to read me a statement prepared in Washington. The Bureau told me that I had been the target of a foreign influence operation with regard to a news article I had written, a clear reference to my publication of the JD Vance Dossier.

No subpoena, no search warrant, no prior announcement, no claim of illegality. America’s most powerful law enforcement agency wants me to know that it was displeased. It is delivering what many would consider a chilling message: we know where you live, we know what you’ve done, we are watching.

This is how out of control the disinformation and foreign influence hysteria has become.

When I chose to publish the J.D. Vance dossier, I knew and acknowledged in the story that it had probably come from Tehran. This placed me at odds with the entirety of major media, which in an extraordinary act of self-censorship declined to publish the dossier. When is the last time that many people were able to agree on anything — much less reporters, who are supposed to be an unruly bunch? How did this even happen?

The FBI visit provides a clue. Powerful organizations like Twitter, Meta, Google, and now the FBI have appointed themselves arbiters over the news you get to consume. They decry “threats” to democracy in the form of foreign interference, influence, disinformation, misinformation, and even conspiracies. That ultimately undermines the most powerful engine of our democracy, which is freedom of speech and expression.

The special agent, a blonde haired man so young he looked like he might have tripped over his umbilical cord on the way over, looked stumped when I asked what was the point of his visit, given that I had been careful in my article on the Vance Dossier to stress that Iran had likely hacked it. He confessed that he hadn’t even seen my article, asking when I had published it. About two weeks ago, I replied, adding: “What took you guys so long?”

“Two weeks is pretty fast for the federal government!” he said.

The special agent flashed his badge to identify himself but would not let me photograph it. He declined to provide me with a business card. I asked if I could take a picture of the statement that he was told to read. He said no. When I pushed, the special agent said that he would ask his superiors if he could send it to my email, which I then gave him. I then contacted the FBI’s national public affairs office in Washington asking about the visit and whether any other members of the news media had been contacted by the FBI.

“The FBI has no comment,” a representative of the FBI National Press Office responded via email. Whoever wrote that email, they did not identify themself by name.

The FBI is fond of saying that it does not investigate or interfere in First Amendment protected speech. But if you look closely, there’s fine print that provides a carveout for foreign influence operations. Consider the statement issued by FBI’s Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Portland Field Office, George Chamberlin: 

“At the top of the FBI’s list of core values is protection of everyone’s rights under the U.S. Constitution including the rights granted under the First Amendment. Fake news, for instance, is not necessarily illegal, and the FBI cannot initiate an investigation based on First Amendment-protected speech. We will take action, though, when the activity crosses the line into criminal behavior. Specifically, influence operations run by foreign groups or governments can fall into that category.”

The frenzy over foreign influence operations is a moral panic that lacks any rational justification. There’s no evidence that these operations have meaningfully influenced an election. FBI Director Christopher Wray has said that “Americans can and should have confidence in our election system” because “none of the election interference efforts that we’ve seen over the cycles … have put at jeopardy the integrity of the vote count in any material way.”

So let’s walk our way through this: suppose that Iran, or Russia, or China, or North Korea, or Cuba (all of whom have been accused of election interference) hacks something that is truly monumental — massive corruption, evidence of criminal behavior, tax avoidance — on some candidate, and the mainstream news media is supposed to refuse to publish it. But that is already the known behavior of Donald Trump and the “knowing” of it by the American people influences some and means nothing to others. That’s the country we live in. The news is the news, like it or not. You can’t control it, nor can you control what people think.

The FBI, in its subtle way, and the mainstream news media, wants to stop that. That’s the reason why the news media is one of the most despised institutions in America. It is constantly putting its thumbs on the scales of a free flow of information, deciding what’s news, slanting coverage, ignoring what they find objectionable or too ugly or too difficult or too boring. 

Now apply that to the Vance dossier. The federal government (and subsequently the news media) don’t want you to see it. Not because it isn’t authentic. Not because it isn’t newsworthy. It is because they ultimately want to decide what you should and should not see and read.

The FBI and the federal government has now successfully enlisted the mainstream news media into being some kind of adjunct national security agency. That is the major threat to our democracy. Not some foreign government’s hijinks.

I was visited by the FBI. I don’t feel intimidated, or silenced, especially because my editor has experienced this numerous times over decades. But I do feel a little wary, asking myself how deeply they looked into my background, my taxes, etc. And the message is indeed chilling, even if it is laughable at the same time.

— Edited by William M. Arkin