Brandon Darby, Texas activist-turned-FBI informant for RNC, pleads his case

He only discusses the accused, while ignoring how he came to be an invasive presence on everyone he interacted with. The reports and the recordings aren’t turned on just for a few targeted individuals. Every offhanded comment, every personal discussion, all these things are recorded and saved and can be used by the FBI because of an informant. If someone was to take your life and edit it to select the most damning pieces, how would that look? If you were always worried someone among you was going to do that, how would that make you feel? In anger and while feeling excited, sometimes people say extreme things. Saying things and doing things is different. THERE IS NO MATERIAL EVIDENCE OF ANY INTENT TO DO ANYTHING VIOLENT. In this Texas case and in the RNC 8 case, all the evidence is from informants. The conclusion a reasonable person would make is: people talk shit but that’s not how they were going to act when the time actually came. This is hardly surprising.

What Brandon Darby helped do is to criminalize talking shit in private. What he has helped do is to make every activist more afraid. He probably had good intentions, but he was completely wrong. There will be absolutely no positive effects from what he has done.

Traitor

this creep was down in New Orleans right after the hurricane. I was living in NoLa before and after Katrina, and I can tell you that nearly everyone had a problem with him personally and some worried that his white guilt routine was f-ing up our ability to get things done well. H

He was totally waving his own red flags and seemed to be having a break down. I have, unfortunately, been around many people who turned out to be informants..and most of them where total jerks, odd or seemed off in some way. I usually just kept them far away from me, but wish I knew a way to handle them better…like removing them like cancer!

The best line was by Ian: “What Brandon Darby helped do is to criminalize talking shit in private.”

As with the RNC 8 case, it hangs on stretches of logic by informants. From what I recall of this case, one of the informants (there were more than one) actually DROVE them to Home Depot to purchase some of the stuff for the molotovs.

http://rnc08report.org

[...] Brandon Darby, who helped organize the RNC protests, details in an open letter why he became an FBI informant. [...]

What is the source of this letter by Darby?

RoB,

According to news reports, Darby sent the letter as open email, to a large number of people as I understood it. The linked source of the text quoted here is Indymedia.

Here’s an interview with an AP reporter where Brandon talks about being an informant. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/6191246.html

Ican tell you from personal experience that Brandon Darby lied to the AP reporter who wrote this story. I worked under Brandon Darby at Common Ground. Back then Brandon was the one who was advocating violence. He was constantly antagonizing the police and seemed to be begging to go to jail. We all thought he was crazy, but if you spoke out against him you would be kicked out of the organization.

This quote from him particularly upsets me: “Common Ground had over 22,000 volunteers, and the vast majority of those were average working-class Americans who just wanted to help,” he said. “But what happens is, different political groups or people with ideologies show up and their focus is on their agenda. … There was a lot of that going on.”

Brandon embodied the crazy egotistical and dangerous “people with ideologies” that he speaks of. And he turned the organization into a disaster. We were the volunteers who “just wanted to help,” and he was the one who wanted to play revolutionary.

My guess is that he was either already working for the FBI at the time (although I doubt it, he seemed sincerely insane back then, but not devious), or more likely, while he was in New Orleans, or shortly after, he got picked up for something and realized that he really really really didn’t want to go to jail as much as he thought he did, so he cut a deal.

Either way, there is no way that he turned informant voluntarily. Knowing him, it just doesn’t make any sense.

commongrounder, thanks for your comment. I don’t have any special knowledge about Darby but the quote you mention caught my eye too. The AP story you link to by the way is based on the St. Paul Pioneer Press story today by David Hanners that I linked to at the top of the post.

Oh fuck, struggling for peace? collaborating with FBI as “nonviolence”? colaborating with the state responsible for murdering millions of innocent people around the globe is a non-violent act?
traitor! RUST in peace Darby!

Brandon is a 32 year old man who seduced two impressionable young men ten years younger than him with revolutionary rhetoric, instigated, facilitated and may even have planned to carry out the attack in question. Is it OK for the FBI to create criminals and then arrest them? It’s probably easier than preventing or investigating real crimes. But I think it is called entrapment.

It should also be noted that the violent crime in question was a thought crime. It never actually happened or even started to happen and was directed against property not people. One of the defendants, Brad Crowder, could never have carried out the crime as allegedly planned since he was already in jail with 800 other people for their role in non-violent street protests. The other defendant, David Mackay, was in bed when arrested and had a flight home booked that morning. Again, sounds like a couple of people arrested (as someone said) for “talking shit in private”. on the word of a paid informant, with a history of violent rhetoric. Who’s next?

Did he get paid to be an informant?

Money, the root of all evil.

darby is a scumbag of the highest possible magnitude.

let’s also please stop attributing “darby’s” statement to him alone. he’s working with the FBI; the FBI is controlling what he does and does not say. it reeks of COINTELPRO – his viewpoint is miniscule within the activist community, but the FBI wants to create the illusion otherwise.

if protesters at the RNC really did believe in the violence alleged by the now 6 informants by my count, it’s a wonder any of those informants are still walking. they have got to be more hated than the riot cops right now and deservedly so.

Where, exactly, is the ‘open dialogue’ Darby claims to want supposed to happen? And who would talk frankly to him ever again?

I find this fascinating for a number of reasons. None of them have to do with the persuasiveness of his argument.

bks, as far as where the open dialogue is supposed to take place, I should have mentioned that Darby’s statement, as reprinted at the Indy Media link, included an email address for him.

None of this is new in the history of provocateurs – they always seem to be disturbed, and pushing people into higher levels of violence than they’d otherwise support. Whether the person is on left or right or whatever, there is nothing virtuous about being a snitch. Trying to stop an act of violence might sometimes be necessary, but acting as a police/FBI plant from the beginning is always unethical and immoral. The only new element with Brandon is that an activist exposed as an undercover agent chooses to argue that he is ethical and working for social change. What a crock.

In a statement written to justify his activities as an FBI informant Brandon Darby opined, “It is very dangerous when a few individuals engage in or act on a belief system in which they feel they know the real truth and that all others are ignorant and therefore have no right to meet and express their political views.” Yet this is the exact activity in which Darby engaged. Through his actions, Darby helped to create a narrative by police that activists/protesters are dangerous. That narrative allowed police to justify obscene expenditures on weaponry, touched off pre-emptive raids and detentions of people who had committed no crimes, and unleashed vicious assaults on people attempting to exercise our First Amendment rights during the RNC. Rather than “protecting the movement” as he implies in his statement, Darby brought down the wrath of the cops on thousands of activists and on the movement as a whole.

By a number of accounts, Darby instigated and encouraged conversations about illegal activities. Perhaps he will try to justify this as “smoking out ‘bad’ activists” but he is, in fact, an agent provocateur whose actions manufacture crimes where none exist. Further, he seems incapable of understanding the difference between hyperbolic expressions of bravado (“smack talk”) and actions taken on such talk. His own actions are self-serving, delusional and depraved. His claimed alliances with social justice movements are farcical. Darby stopped being “one of us” the day he strapped on a microphone. He turned himself into just another cop wannabe posing as an activist.

Darby’s level of self-deception is evident in his ignorance of the historical role of the FBI in this country. The FBI has long acted to destroy social justice movements. The FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which operated from 1956 to 1971, used everything from psychological dirty tricks to murder to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of many social justice and liberation groups and individuals including the Black Panther Party, American Indian Movement, various women’s rights organizations, NAACP, National Lawyers Guild, Dr. Martin Luther King and others. For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO Further, it was an FBI informant who arranged and helped to perpetrate the massacre of five anti-racist union activists in Greensboro, NC in 1979. But one need not dig that far back into history to find FBI interference in social justice movements. Darby’s own activities are but one example of recent FBI spying on anti-war activists and others who dare to challenge this government. If he is as concerned about violence as he claims, Darby should have steered clear of the FBI.

Darby expresses great concern about the conversations of activists yet he raises no similar concerns about the actual lawlessness and mass death and destruction wrought by the Bush regime. Despite ample proof that BushCo illegally spied on Americans, lied to bring us into the war in Iraq, engaged in torture, and committed a whole host of crimes against humanity, Darby focuses his energies on a few young activists whose only “crime” is loose talk. If Darby was sincerely concerned about proposed actions by some activists, he should have raised this with those individuals and within the group. The social justice movement is surprisingly good at self policing, but he never gave it that chance.

Brandon Darby betrayed the movement and the movement must reject his attempts to justify his actions and the tremendous damage they have caused. We must redouble our efforts to defend those who face the brunt of this legal system as a result of Darby’s irresponsible and outrageous conduct.

Michelle Gross, President
Communities United Against Police Brutality

I too worked with Brandon Darby at Common Ground and witnessed the power politics, the silencing of dissent, the brutual inefficiency, the love affair with violence and force, the lack of planning and frustrating waste of money, time, goodwill and energy. I watched Common Ground devolve from a group led communal effort into a patriarchal, police brutality focused organization that was being torn apart by power struggles with people kicked out left, right and centre.

I spent quite a bit of time with him and watched the paranoia, the egotism of his private cause, police brutality, being the most important that our organization should deal with, the lavish mishandling of money, the unchecked arrogance of purging our organization of people (including many of my friends) who would ‘hurt Common Ground’ because they had different ways of doing or seeing things, unfold and grow while he was in charge.

It’s funny cause he was so paranoid of his phone being tapped by the police or being followed and he was sure that the authorities were out to get him. And he turns out to be one of them. Nice.
Ahh this makes me soo angry, How many of my kindred in N.O are now tapped as troublemakers? How many of my friends now have files at the FBI due to this incompetent SOB?

I think its sad that he justifies his actions by saying it “ma[de] life more “stable.” I decided that the way I was going about things was not the right way to do it,” he said. “While it may have satisfied part of me, it really wasn’t changing anything.”

What an ass…
Jailing kids for potentially decades because it makes things more “stable”, informing on amazing, dedicated lifelong activists because they were changing things and you were too unstable and disorganized to create any change.. Bleh.

Are you afraid of what Brandon knows about you? It sure sounds like it!
Good Luck…you might need it!

Ridiculous! There is a lot more to the situation than any of you know! Way to go Brandon!! Way to go! You are admired by most people…just the select few uneducated people are grumpy! You did something good….people can assume all they want and continue to look like idiots while doing so!!
Way to go Brandon!!

Anyone who feels the need to criticize Brandon Darby and his work when in NOLA, I wonder how you would have done in his shoes? How you would have been able to juggle it all? All of these comments reek of sour grapes, in my mind.

I witnessed his testimony this morning in Minneapolis. Seems everything hinges on whether he encouraged McKay and Crowder to make molotovs. The fact is, talking shit was criminalized several years ago, and Darby didn’t have anything to do with that. If he encouraged M & C to make explosives, the entrapment defense makes sense. He claims he did not, and honestly the defense did not do a very good job showing or even implying otherwise.

Weren’t molotovs discovered in the hotel room? In which case it’s not a question of intent to create weapons but rather of intent to use. But making them in the first place is a felony, so the defense is in a pretty difficult place.

You can question Darby’s motivations, loyalties, sanity, all that kind of thing, but I don’t see a way to impugn his decision to notify the authorities that Crowder and McKay intended to create or had created bombs.

In the trial, the defense called up a story where Darby was a passenger in a van being driven by McKay. Darby and others wanted McKay to stop the van so they could go to the bathroom and smoke, but McKay refused. It got heated between McKay and a number of passengers, including Darby, as McKay refused to pull over. The defense intended to suggest a motive for getting McKay to do something that would result in his arrest. They didn’t succeed in persuading the jury, I would say, but the prosecutor scored a very good point by turning the story around: If Darby couldn’t even persuade McKay to stop driving so he and others could go to the bathroom, how likely was it that he could stop him from making and using bombs?

[...] Michael Darby, an FBI informant who reported on the anti-RNC activists, released a statement to the public. He essentially says that he feels good about sending people to prison because they [...]

I was a Common Grounder also and a native of New Orleans. What I saw was a bunch of wanna be activist coming into my community offering help but really all they were trying to do is further their own agenda. They came into my community trying to tell the community what they need, not asking what the community wanted. Stuff like bio-remediation. Who cares if the soil is contaminated. If you go to any metropolitan area the soil will be contaminated. The people in New Orleans needed a home, a roof over their head. Yes Brandon was running Common Ground for a while and I had never heard him advocate violence. Maybe a protest but not violence. Yes you had different groups coming to common ground with different ideas to do things and Brandon was pretty adament not to change due to the groups coming in would be there for 2 weeks and wanted to change to a better system. Every group coming in wanted to change things.One group of vegans came in pushing to have all meals served to the community should be vegan due to any other food is harming the community, are you people crazy, coming into my community and telling us what we need, change your own community. Well if you changed things every 2 days nothing would ever get done, the only thing getting done would be changing things. All they cared about is their own agenda. Forget the real reason we are supposed to be in New Orleans helping the people. That is the one thing I haven’t heard from any of you guys “helping the people” all I hear is your agenda. Tell you what if there is another Katrina do us a favor and stay home. Don’t come to “help” we don’t want you. Fix your own community leave mine alone. Brandon did a good job in New Orleans considering he had all these wanna be activist trying to make it happen their way. Brandon took charge and got things done for the community. Brandon did the right thing regarding the Austin 2 Violence is the last resort of the ignorant. Also, I see all the activist community is basically burning Brandon at the stake, once again it is about the agenda not what this is really about. These people were going to hurt people. I see no comments on this. I guess it is ok to do those types of things, once again the word agenda is creeping thru.

Common Grounder 2; Your not by any chance Andrew Dart the other FBI mole from the RNC 8 are you? You sound like a crying towel for the company to me. Darby and every other traitor to the real Americans makes me sick. This globalist New World Order crap needs to go. The bad people the bad people. Yea you sound like a company alphabet shill to me.

1. I disagree with his position on my party, but a lawful, peaceful (even noisy) protest is ok with me. -he is not a traitor.
2. The terrorists that had the bombs are not viable participants in our system, they are no different than the KKK, Bill Ayers, Eric Rudolph, the Unibomber, Robert Matthews, the Weather Undeground or any other participant in “direct action,” including abortion clinic bombers.
3. Good for this citizen for protecting his rights and the rights of those that he opposed.

I tried to work with common ground, then went back with the folks who later became Emergency Communities. A Snitch is a snitch is a snitch. no excuse. no justification. if you have a problem with someone’s tactic’s handle it face to face, not lure them to the jake’s. Once a snitch always a snitch.

I just got wind of this guy tonight on the radio. After reading so many posts on this site (and having spent ten years in Universities earning my Ph.D. then three more as a postdoc), I can see the minds of many young students, a couple idealistic professors, and many others who REALLY want change for the good of society and the uplifting of the poor out of poverty. Your motives are saintly, but the means you propose (i.e. Marxism) are the source of the greatest misery, genocide, and suffering the wold has EVER known. Hitler had 6,000,000 Jews and other “undesirables” killed under his socialistic central planning scheme. That was a true Holocaust!!! Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the other Marxists killed at least 100,000,000 people in order to bring about their Marxist socialist utopias visions. In every case, those that survived suffered WORSE than if they were left alone.

LEAVE US ALONE!!!

I’m sorry Superdave, but you are a dumb ass. To compare what Anarchists are trying to accomplish to National Socialism is an insult. Anarchists strive for an anti-authoritarian, autonomous, stateless, classless society organized without coercion or domination, but rather in cooperation. National Socialism is disgusting, fascist, and the complete opposite of what these guys are trying to accomplish.

I heard he(Darby) was paid $12,000… not much considering the dangerous nature of his activities.
NPR aired an interesting interview with him last week – Nov 27 or 28, ’09.

Darby is a courageous hero, who took the right course of action. As a Democratic I am disgusted at the lowlife pond scum who would deny AMERICAN citizens their rights to free speech and assembly, rights enshrined in the Constitution.

As a Boston Born Democratic I support, hell, I APPLAUD Darby and THANK HIM PROFUSELY.

The pond scum here who insult Darby and who PRETEND to be democrats and pretend to espouse the ‘democratic’ ideals of ‘free speech’ would be calling for the heads of McKay and Crowder had they been REPUBLICANS who were plotting the same actions at the Democratic Convention in Colorado.

You call yourselves “liberal” but you either have NO idea what that means or you nothing more are hypocrites, wrapped in arrogance, smothered in stupidity.

You have allowed your ignorance and hatred to consume you and you have become exactly WHO you claim not to be: REPUBLICANS.You have become the “enemy” you wish to silence and eradicate. Congrats, asshole!

“True heroism consists in being superior to the ills of life, in whatever shape they may challenge us to combat.”

Darby proved himself to be superior to the ills of life that you liars and hypocrites have become.

Darby’s decision to take the course of action he took exemplifies true heroism. He is the true liberal,the true activist, the true democrat, the true enlightened being you deluded morons foolishly believe yourselves to be.

The man is a hero.

[...] vegan potlucks, and much more serious cases involving an informant named “Anna,” Brandon Darby, and Jacob Ferguson, among [...]