It has emerged that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) deliberately withheld details of assassination plot on the leaders of the Occupy Houston Movement to save informants.
The Courthouse News reported that “a heavily-redacted FBI document first revealed a Houston plot to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups and obtain photographs, then kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles.”
The revelation of the FBI’s handling of the issue came to light after a federal judge ruled that the FBI was right to withhold records about an alleged murder plot targeting the leaders of the Occupy Houston Movement to protect those who leaked the assassination plot to the FBI.
The Occupy Houston Movement is said to be a subsidiary group of a movement that started in New York City in 2011 which supported the widening of income gap between America’s richest and poorest people.
This made the leaders of the group soft targets and some planned to assassinate them but the plot was leaked to the FBI.
Ryan Noah Shapiro- a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is said to have sent the FBI three Freedom of Information Act requests in 2013, asking for records about “a potential plan to gather intelligence against the leaders of [Occupy Wall Street-related protests in Houston] and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership [of the protests] via suppressed sniper rifles.”
But Shapiro has denied such allegation, saying he wanted the records for his doctorate work and he intended to only release urgent information about Occupy Houston to the public.
The FBI turned his request down and he quickly filed a complaint in a Federal court in April 2013 in Washington, D.C., after which the FBI gave him 17 pages of the records excluding the names of the informants.
But Shapiro challenged the FBI’s withholding of the names of the informants, claiming there is no privacy expectation for people who could be called to testify as trial witnesses. He went back to court again.
District Judge, Rosemary Collyer ruled last year that the FBI had properly withheld some records, but took issue with its use of Exemption 7 under the FOIA, which protects from disclosure “records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes.”
However, judge Collyer has now realized after further particulars from the FBI that the agency correctly invoked FOIA exemption 7(c), which shields law enforcement records from disclosure if they could constitute an invasion of personal privacy. She therefore dismissed the lawsuit after reviewing the documents in her chambers.
Shapiro is defiant and has vowed to keep fighting until he gets the full records of the documents he wanted from the FBI.
“I’m of course disappointed in, and disagree with, the judge’s ruling. I’m now conferring with my attorney to determine next steps. The FBI even flatly asserted in a separate FOIA lawsuit of mine that, it had never opened an investigation on the Occupy movement, yet, in the course of my FOIA lawsuit against the FBI for records about the sniper plot against Occupy Houston, the FBI contradicted its own position.”
Shapiro added that with recently released FBI documents about Occupy Chicago, “We are coming ever closer to finally forcing the FBI to concede it actually possesses a large volume of documents about this FBI-coordinated nationwide investigation of political protesters as supposed terroristic threats to national security.”
