HOWIE CARR:

Hill continued: “BOA took it upon themselves to data-mine their customer base — bank credit cards, debit cards, and to see whether they had bought anything in D.C., or purchased a plane ticket to D.C. around Jan. 6. If you showed up on either of those lists, and if you had ever purchased a firearm with one of their credit cards, whenever, then you went to the top of the list. There were no allegations of any crimes committed, only that the person was just using a legally-purchased product that they owned….”

But the Washington Field Office runs wide open, KGB-style, doing whatever must be done to advance the fundamental transformation of America. So the FBI comrades sorted the names by region and sent out directives to the outlying field offices.

Boston handles four states — Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine and Rhode Island. Seven BOA customers here had purchases that identified them to the American Gestapo as enemies of the state.

The Boston field office was instructed to open an investigation into the BOA Seven.

The Boston guys, God bless ‘em, pushed back. What exactly were the “predicate acts?” The Democrats in D.C. didn’t care about no stinkin’ rights. Just ask the owners of Betsy Ross flags, or Catholics who attend Latin Masses. They too have been deemed subversives by the FBI.

The briefers in Washington said, in effect, just open the cases and we’ll find out if they did anything.

Or as they used to say in the old Soviet Union, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

Hill says the bureaucratic struggle first raged at the GS-14 level, supervisory special agents. Then it moved up to the assistant special agent in charge, a GS-15, who in Boston was a former F-18 pilot and U.S. Naval Academy grad.

Finally the boss in Boston put his foot down. Since the local FBI won’t comment, I won’t name him, but dammit Joe, we’re all proud of you.

“I still don’t know if Washington got some other field office to do the investigations,” Hill says.

Then there were those 140 bus passengers. These were the people on the Super Happy Fun America trip out of Natick. Through the discovery process during the prosecution of the organizer, the feds had obtained the bus manifest — the passenger list.

So they did what any secret police anywhere in the Third World would do — they decided to go after everybody who’d gotten on the bus.

“Washington wanted us to open up 140 ‘preliminary investigations,’” Hill said. “These weren’t people who were loading ammo and body armor onto the bus — they were taking a ride to Washington.”

When the feds identify a real Public Enemy — say, a Steve Bannon or Peter Navarro — they deploy search warrants, Title III wiretap authorizations, PEN registers on phones, pole cameras, etc. The Natick 140 didn’t rise to quite that level.

“These were supposed to be preliminary investigations, where you use the least intrusive measures. Search criminal history by name, social media, blog posts, that sort of thing.”

The Boston FBI office asked if they could see some of the Capitol surveillance video to determine if any of the Natick 140 warranted probes. The response was chilling:

“There may be some people in that footage whose identities that we need to protect.”

Can someone say, agents provocateur? The more you learn, the more it appears that Jan. 6 is being used by the Democrats the way the equally murky Reichstag fire in 1933 was used by the Nazis — as a pretense to suspend civil liberties under the guise of national security.

Hill is retired now. Some reporters are calling him, but no one from state-run media, obviously.

Yep. I’m so old I can remember when busloads of protesters going to our nation’s capital were what democracy looks like.

But, but, election denial is bad for democracy!

Yeah, about that: