Scott Ritter issued a 12-minute video on Aug. 8 regarding what happened during the FBI raid on his house on Wednesday, Aug. 7, and then used his regular two-hour Friday interview ("Ask the Inspector") with Jeff Norman to explain the matter in depth. He revealed that he was “doxxed” when the FBI exposed his street address and other data on his residence, and “swatted” when the FBI was told there was a “shooter” in his house, that “someone in my household was threatening to carry out a mass shooting,” which provoked a SWAT team, armed and ready, to enter the home. That was neutralized because he knew the local police and spoke with them, so the SWAT team was withdrawn and had no part in the raid. There have been numerous cases reported of such “swatting” (submitting false reports of a life-and-death emergency at a given location), which have resulted in fatalities when law enforcement has entered with guns blazing.
Ritter added that the FBI took his Iraq WMD document files, which are outside the scope of the warrant (which refers only to electronic files). The FBI said they were just checking to make sure there were no classified documents. Ritter explained that his files came to him as a UN employee, which only receives non-classified documents from the U.S. government.
Ritter insisted that the government will learn nothing from his seized electronic devices that they did not already have, because there is no truth to any of the charges regarding the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) charge—that he had failed to register as a “foreign agent” of Russia. He went through the fact of being a journalist, who wrote articles for RT that had no influence on the content of what he wrote, and was paid only for the articles as a journalist. There are no crimes charged other than not signing the FARA documents as a foreign agent, which he did not have to do because he is not one, and would not become one. If it comes to a court case over FARA, he said he would win it on the facts.
He said he believes the Ukrainian government and its Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), with its notorious “hit list,” are behind the raid, and that they issued instructions or a request to the FBI to raid his house. He said “the State Department has funded the CCD,” and that he is on the top of the hit list as a “Russian propagandist.” They have “published hit lists threatening to kill me and other Americans for the crime of publishing information that the Ukrainian government finds offensive.” He asserted that the FBI is acting like a “witting or unwitting” tool of the Ukrainian government in this.
Ritter explained that he will not hire a lawyer, since there was no crime, and he has (as yet) not been charged with a crime. If he is charged he will get a lawyer, but he has had experience with lawyers who took his money (to the point of bankrupting him) while doing nothing to actually defend him. He said that lawyers typically tell you to “shut up” in such cases, and he has no intention of shutting up. This is a “frontal assault on the Constitution of the United States,” he stated, and it reflects “a pattern of intimidation that’s taking place at the behest of the U.S. government, using the FBI as a tool.… This isn’t what the Founding Fathers wanted.” He insisted: “I’m a journalist, not an agent of the Russian government.”
