Sunday, March 4, 2012

FBI Visits a Greensboro Reporter Asking About Trouble Makers at Charlotte's DNC 2012

Greensboro News and Record reporter Mark Brinker received a call from his wife the other day, it was one of those calls that would make you go Huh???



"So the wife calls me this afternoon and says, “Hey, an FBI agent stopped by to see you today. I told her you weren’t home.” Well, I wasn’t. So what did the agent want, I asked.

“Something about the Democratic convention in Charlotte,” the wife said. She added that it sounded like they wanted to know if you know anyone who was going to cause trouble or disruption there.


Cedar Posts ran through 3 dozen on Brinker's latest blog posts - news stories and couldn't find anything that would suggest the Brinker was tight with nationally known anarchists or internationally known terrorist sleeper cells.

Brinker adds:

My first thought, “This can’t be for real.” Someone, I thought, was either running a scam or playing a very elaborate joke on me.

But after a couple of calls to the FBI Charlotte field office I was convinced that special agent Gayla Warrener was for real.

So I got her on the phone and she may be the nicest law enforcement type I’ve ever talked to. She explained that she was doing outreach, particularly in advance of the big national convention coming here.

She said I should feel free to let her know about anything that concerned me.

I asked what sort of thing would concern me that I would call her about.

“That would be your determination, not mine,” she said.

We ended the conversation a short time later. I thought after we hung up, “Hey, does having an FBI agent show up on my doorstep count as one of those things I should be concerned about?”

Cedar's Take: We certainly live in strange times. I haven't had a knock at my front door yet but just for the record, I don't know anyone with occupy Charlotte and I don't know any Muslim fanatics though I do follow tweets from al Jazeera and a couple of blogs from Egypt and Syria. I swear if its going to cause the FBI to show up at my front door I'll unfollow and unfriend them today.

Read Mark Brinker's entire blog post here.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Another homicide, Cedar!!

Anonymous said...

From what I read someone who is fearing the FBI must be paranoid or guily of something. What should be feared is the Secret Service showing up at your door. What a bunch of wimps.

Anonymous said...

they should go door to door until they find that guy from the Lynx Station they never talk about instead of harassing writers.

or maybe that guy was working on a story about government corruption/DNC related police issues.

Anonymous said...

I have a long list of things I'm very concerned about the FBI should check on. They can try to find that guy that was in the Lynx line. They can raise hell about what procedure allowed that to occur, and fix it.

They can clean house at CMPD all top people that aren't qualified to be there, start assessing charges, publish all the crime statistics our lawyers are being paid to hide, stop any officials in Charlotte/CMPD from abusing finances for personal advantage, determine what happened to 500 "missing" police records and 50 "missing" police cars. Evaluate all federal money that may have been spent improperly. Open all the records that are being improperly kept secret from the public, especially in the areas of crime statistics and spending public money.

After that, please ask again. There will be more. Thanks, FBI.

Glad to know you're bored enough to drive a couple of hours to harass a guy who's actually paying attention to what is going on instead of doing inane reports about nothing.

Jeff A. Taylor said...

When I read Binker's post the other day I got chills and was very thankful to be out of CLT.

Either FBI SA Gayla Warrener is a totally incompetent cowboy far, far off script or the feds have absolute no meaningful intelligence on DNC 2012 agitators.

My bet is on the latter.

Normally, the feds would vacuum up local intelligence resources and sift them, then follow up in spots. But given the state of CMPD, how far do you think that got before hitting zero? RoMo thinks DNC 2012 is all about $$$ and landing back in DC as top cop, not security.

Instead we have SAs cold-calling reporters across the state looking for leads. Aside: Why is Binker the only reporter to come forward and report the FBI's probing? And even he does not seem to understand the import of what it means for the August DNC party in CLT.

I wish Binker had gotten more details from Warrener as it appears that she -- and one must assume other -- agents have been tasked to CLT from other FBI offices, in her case from KC.

Think about that -- an all hands on deck press by the FBI to turn up ANYTHING on DNC threats.

Anonymous said...

Jeff that is interesting that the FBI is bringing field agents in from out of state.

Any idea how many and from where?