This article appears in the May 5, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Fake Indictment a Precursor to
Full-Blown Suppression of American Dissent?
[Print version of this article]
April 21—“This is a war on free speech. It’s a war on freedom of association as well. It’s a war on independent politics, and it’s a straight-up war with Russia, being justified and encouraged at home with these phony indictments like the kind we saw in the War on Terror.” This was the characterization by Max Blumenthal, co-founder of The Grayzone, of the recent FBI indictment of three Russians and four Americans in Florida, as publicized in a media release Tuesday, April 18, on the Department of Justice website, “U.S. Citizens and Russian Intelligence Officers Charged with Conspiring to Use U.S. Citizens as Illegal Agents of the Russian Government—Defendants Sought To Sow Discord, Spread Pro-Russia Propaganda and Interfere in Elections Within the United States.” Blumenthal made his observations on an episode of The Jimmy Dore Show titled “FBI Actually Arrested Black Socialists Over Russiagate Garbage.”
About the indictment, Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division said:
Russia’s foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights—freedoms Russia denies its own citizens—to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States…. The department will not hesitate to expose and prosecute those who sow discord and corrupt U.S. elections in service of hostile foreign interests, regardless of whether the culprits are U.S. citizens or foreign individuals abroad.
The actual nature of what is going on here, demands investigation, especially in light of FBI infiltration and probable direction of 2020’s various Black Lives Matter demonstrations, as well as the January 6, 2021 “insurrection.”
Infiltration of, and assaults by, the FBI on African-American organizations is no news. Exactly 100 years ago, the young J. Edgar Hoover began his career with the judicial lynching of Marcus Garvey, head of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and acknowledged founder of 20th-Century “black nationalism.” Infamously, Hoover’s FBI later played a still largely unacknowledged role in the assassination of Martin Luther King, better viewed today from the FBI’s now acknowledged role in the Chicago murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton in 1969. Writers James Baldwin, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes; civil rights figures Fannie Lou Hamer and Amelia Boynton Robinson; lawyer/singer/actor Paul Robeson; Congressman Adam Clayton Powell; and many others, including nearly every African-American elected official in America during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, under “Operation Frühmenschen” were vigorously and enthusiastically prosecuted by the FBI, which made no secret of its racist bent.
The St. Petersburg, Florida case, however, is intended to establish another precedent. It is intended to inaugurate the summary suppression of all political dissent in the United States, and not only regarding the increasingly undeniable, abject fiasco of the Ukraine war—which can, increasingly, not be hidden, even from the semi-comatose American public. The combination of an impending provocation of military confrontation against China, on whatever pretext, and an impending suppression of any popular proposal to end the bankruptcy of the United States, through the adoption of global Glass-Steagall measures, will not be allowed. A return of the trans-Atlantic economies, and particularly the United States, to an energy-intensive, advanced-technologies-driven production orientation, is considered a casus belli by British intelligence, the City of London, and the American “Junior Establishment partners” on Wall Street.
The African People’s Socialist Party, and its derived organization, Uhuru (Freedom) House, are selected by the FBI, not only because they are the least likely to be defended, but because they dwell in an area of American politics completely controlled by the FBI for the past five decades, since the early 1970s. In its coverage of “the matters of the case,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on April 18 recounted the story of one of the accused:
Augustus C. Romain, Jr., is charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States and is accused of accepting money and other assistance from Alexandr Viktorovich Ionov, a Russian national with connections to the FSB, Russia’s intelligence service, according to an indictment unsealed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Tampa, Fla…. According to the new federal indictment, Romain (also known as Gazi Kodzo) allegedly conspired in 2022 with Ionov to stage pro-Russian demonstrations at the Georgia State Capitol and at the San Francisco headquarters of Meta, the parent company of Facebook.
Author Chris Joyner continues:
Romain and several members of the Black Hammer Party traveled to San Francisco in March 2022 to protest Facebook’s decision to censor pro-Russian posts regarding the invasion of Ukraine. Romain live-streamed the protest on their social media channels. Federal authorities allege that Ionov orchestrated the protest, sending Romain $6,500 to cover costs, and suggested designs for posters. Ionov allegedly reported the plan back to his FSB handler and assisted Romain in getting the protest covered by Russian-language news services…. Romain allegedly worked with Ionov to stage other protests in Atlanta, including a May 8 rally for Russian Victory Day and June 23 protest at the state capitol. Federal prosecutors claim the actions amount to Romain acting as an unregistered agent for Russia.
This report, on a former member of the Uhuru organization who then founded another organization, Black Hammer, markedly contrasts with the statements made by the founder and chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), Omali Yeshitela, who spoke at a press conference April 10, where he predicted his then impending indictment.
As reported by the Tampa Press, “Yeshitela adamantly denied accepting any money from Ionov while speaking at the Uhuru House in St. Petersburg on Monday. He said Ionov had no role in the Uhuru candidates’ campaigns in the 2017 and 2019 St. Petersburg elections.” Yeshitela said that he had met Ionov at a conference, but “I ain’t ever worked for a Russian. Never ever ever ever. They know I have never worked for Russia. Their problem is, I’ve never worked for them,” meaning, of course, the FBI. One need only recall the role of the acknowledged FBI infiltrator William O’Neal in the assassination of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton in 1969 to understand Yeshitela’s reference.
According to coverage by Spectrum News April 18, of the April 10 press conference, Yeshitela spoke about the FBI raid of the group’s offices and homes in July of 2022:
Yeshitela said his talks about racism in America, unfair elections and white supremacy are nothing new and emphasized that he didn’t need the Russians to tell him how and when to speak out about racism.
The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal expressed a similar judgment:
What they’re essentially saying is that this shady FSB asset told these Black Americans what to say and how to say it, in order to convince other Black people, or people who are disaffected with the system, to rise up and rebel. And they’re playing on the fears of Establishment-minded liberals that were fomented during the Russiagate hysteria that began in 2016–2017, and convinced millions and millions of Americans that Facebook ads, $125,000 worth of Facebook ads, somehow switched the results of the November 2016 election.
Blumenthal also asserted that “no evidence has so far been provided that I can see that he [Ionov] is an FSB agent—that’s just their assertion”—or that Ionov had convinced Uhuru and its leader “to say things they already believed, that they had been out there saying for years and years and years.” [Box: 15+ Million Watch Jose Vega ‘Strip-Roast’ Editors of NY Times, Reuters, et al.]
Yeshitela, now 85 years old, founded the APSP in 1972, a half-century ago. The Uhuru movement was founded in the 1990s. Yeshitela presided over the 2015 funeral service for APSP founding member Connie Tucker, well known to LaRouche members for her role in opposing LaRouche during the 1990s. Despite differences with the LaRouche movement, Yeshitela may very well not be what the far more questionable (and possibly more gullible) Gazi Kodzo is—and the FBI may very well know that.
According to Spectrum News,
This isn’t Yeshitela’s first run-in with the law. He was sentenced to five years in prison in 1966. Yeshitela, formerly known as Joe Waller, went inside St. Pete’s City Hall and ripped down a canvas that portrayed black minstrels with exaggerated features entertaining white beach-goers.
Whatever the individuals involved may turn out to be, writer Caitlin Johnstone usefully points out in a piece from April 20 in Consortium News:
It’s important to note that this should not matter. Under the First Amendment the government is forbidden to abridge anyone’s freedom to speak however they want and associate with whomever they please, which necessarily includes being as vocally pro-Russia as they like and promoting whatever political agendas they see fit, whether that happens to advance the interests of the Russian government or not….
There’s also the brazen hypocrisy of it all. The U.S. government is constantly engaging in foreign influence operations with outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up to help foment coups and color revolutions and advance U.S. information interests overtly in ways the CIA used to do covertly.
The LaRouche Organization, which originally exposed the machinations of Project Democracy in the early and mid-1980s, particularly as it also interfaced the birth and growth of the “Continuity of Government” apparatus of “drug super-kingpin” and former CIA Director George H.W. Bush—the first head of the post-World War Two-established intelligence agencies to become President of the United States—has been “Public Enemy #1” to this apparatus. As such, it will continue to investigate and report this story to assist in unravelling Anglo-American intelligence agencies’ plans for the suppression of the American people’s support for the successful ending of the Ukraine war, and for the adoption of economic policies that would reverse Wall Street’s “banker’s CIA” lethal domination of the American political landscape through the fictitious “two-party system.”
15+ Million Watch Jose Vega ‘Strip-Roast’ Editors of NY Times, Reuters, et al.
April 27—The intervention by the LaRouche Organization’s Jose Vega on April 25, exposing the lying hypocrisy of leading news editors—including editors of Reuters, MSNBC, the Guardian, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post, and the New York Times’executive editor Joe Kahn—has gone viral on multiple websites. In less than 48 hours (by midday April 27), more than 15 million people around the world had viewed Vega’s three-minute exposure of censorship and misreporting of news by these supposed news leaders at the Columbia University Journalism School’s two-day conference on “Policy and the Press” under the rubric, “Faultlines: Democracy.” The posting of the video on Dan Bongino’s conservative site, alone, had 4 million views. Jose Vega has had round-the-clock interviews internationally since his intervention.
Sy Hersh, when being interviewed by Aaron Maté April 26, was asked about Vega’s intervention. Vega had begun his intervention by asking why Sy Hersh was not on the platform, since his bombshell on how U.S. military personnel bombed the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines in September 2022 was the “news story of the year.” Hersh told Maté that he didn’t know what was going on at the New York Times, nor why they now won’t touch his articles.
Kanchan Gupta, a senior advisor to the Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, called on viewers to watch the video, in which, he said,
The editors who gathered to lecture on democracy and government got brutally strip-roasted alive.
The video was translated with subtitles at least into Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, and Russian. Interviews of Vega on April 26 included RT, Stew Peters, Shannon Joy, and the Revolutionary Blackout Network. The interviews continued April 27 with Radio Sputnik’s ‘Fault Lines’ podcast, Tara Reade, and Judge Andrew Napolitano, with One America News (OAN) on the schedule.
The intervention can be viewed here.
