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Jan. 6 Defense Ditches Witness After Judge Forbids Bringing Up Her Work as an FBI Informant: Reports

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A Jan. 6 defendant’s team ultimately chose not to call a previously intended witness at trial Monday after the judge decided her history as an FBI informant could not be raised, according to multiple reports.

As former Proud Boys National Chairman Enrique Tarrio and members Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl, Joseph Biggs and Dominic Pezzola continued their federal trial for allegedly conspiring to oppose the January 2021 transfer of presidential power, the government revealed Wednesday that a woman Tarrio’s lawyers wanted to call as a witness had been an official FBI confidential human source from April 2021 to January 2023. The woman, identified by The New York Times as Jen Loh, had reportedly given the FBI information beginning in fall 2019, but presiding Judge Timothy Kelly indicated Monday that her relationship with the bureau was irrelevant to the case, Lawfare’s Robert Parloff reported.

Tarrio’s attorney Sabino Jauregui subsequently said he would agree to free Loh from subpoena without calling her to testify Monday, according to Parloff. Loh told the FBI around Jan. 9 that she had been subpoenaed in the case and participated in a deposition, the DOJ admitted Thursday, and FBI San Antonio Special Agent Kristina Spindel said her source relationship with the bureau ended around Jan. 18.

During her time as an FBI source, Loh had communicated with one or more defense lawyers, participated in prayer meetings with one or more defendants’ families and talked with one of the defendant’s family members about replacing one of the defense counsel, Rehl’s lawyer Carmen Hernandez said in a Wednesday motion. The motion called for the release of any FBI or DOJ reports, recordings and memoranda about “reporting on and recordings of the defense team,” but the DOJ replied that no such records existed.

(Read more from “Jan. 6 Defense Ditches Witness After Judge Forbids Bringing Up Her Work as an FBI Informant: Reports” HERE)

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Sharpton Pushes Back on Report He was Mob Informant

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Photo Credit: REUTERS

Photo Credit: REUTERS

Al Sharpton on Monday dismissed a report portraying him as a one-time mob informant for the FBI, calling the claims old news and a “crazy” attempt to discredit him.

“I don’t see this as news,” Sharpton told FoxNews.com. “This has been brought up three or four times now. I don’t understand. It’s crazy.”

TheSmokingGun.com story describes in detail how Sharpton in the mid-1980s secretly recorded Mafia bosses and other underworld figures for an FBI-NYPD crime task force.

The 12,196-word story — in which he is referred to as CI-7, short for confidential informant #7 — says investigators got Sharpton to “flip” after getting him close enough to agreeing to broker a drug deal connected to boxing promoter Don King that they could threaten him with charges.

Though the task force took a “shotgun” approach in giving Sharpton a variety of snitching assignments, they ultimately wanted inroads into the corrupt New York music industry and realized he had the connections, according to the story.

Read more from this story HERE.

FBI Informants Given Green Light to Break the Law

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Photo Credit: GOP USAThe FBI gave informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in one year, according to newly disclosed documents that show how often the nation’s top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime.

The Justice Department ordered the FBI to begin tracking crimes by its informants more than a decade ago, after the agency admitted that it had allowed Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger to operate a brutal crime ring in exchange for information about the Mafia. The FBI submits that tally to top Justice Department officials each year but has never before made it public.

Agents authorized 15 crimes a day on average — from drug sales to bribery and plotting robberies. FBI officials have said that permitting informants, who are often criminals, to break the law is an indispensable part of investigating criminal organizations.

“It sounds like a lot, but you have to keep it in context,” said Shawn Henry, who supervised criminal investigations for the FBI until he retired last year. “It’s not taken lightly.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Man who armed Black Panthers turns out to have been FBI informant

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The man who gave the Black Panther Party some of its first firearms and weapons training – which preceded fatal shootouts with Oakland police in the turbulent 1960s – was an undercover FBI informer, according to a former bureau agent and an FBI report. Read more from this story HERE.