FBI DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER WRAY: ‘We Don’t Monitor Protests’

And when we say “don’t,” certain exceptions do apply: The FBI Was Monitoring Student Protests Against Ben Shapiro.

The ongoing student protests over Israel and Palestine have become the center of a national controversy, with members of Congress calling for National Guard deployments and terrorism financing investigations against the protesters. But a few years ago, the federal government was interested in a very different sort of campus controversy: whether right-wing journalist Ben Shapiro should be allowed to speak.

In October 2017, the FBI prepared a “tactical intelligence report” on Shapiro’s upcoming speaker event at the University of California, Los Angeles. The bulletin was released last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for FBI documents on the Black Lives Matter movement, and posted to the public records platform MuckRock by journalist Jordan Lassiter.

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“We have on-going demonstrations with ANTIFA/Black Bloc people, which have repeatedly shown a propensity of violence. We are expecting large scale, violent demonstrations” against speeches by Shapiro and the right-wing pundit Milo Yiannopoulos, said the memo, which Reason obtained from BlueLeaks, a trove of leaked fusion center documents.

Berkeley police weren’t wrong to expect violence. A previous speech by Yiannopoulos had been canceled in February 2017 due to a riot by left-wing protesters. Then, in April, both far-left and far-right activists showed up in Berkeley to fight.

The September event at Berkeley with Shapiro, however, went smoothly. Under heavy police presence and protected by over half a million dollars in security measures, Shapiro spoke to hundreds of audience members while hundreds of protesters gathered off campus. A few demonstrators were arrested for carrying a banned weapon or assaulting a police officer.

As Iowahawk quipped at the time: