A day after the FBI conducted an unprecedented raid on former President Donald Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida, Representative Scott Perry (R-Pa.) reported that the same federal police agency seized his cellphone while the congressman was on vacation with his family.
Perry, a close ally of Trump, reported that three FBI agents approached him with a warrant and took his personal cellphone. Perry could not say why the FBI wanted the phone, but he registered his outrage in a statement.
“They made no attempt to contact my lawyer, who would have made arrangements for them to have my phone if that was their wish. I’m outraged — though not surprised — that the FBI under the direction of Merrick Garland’s DOJ, would seize the phone of a sitting Member of Congress,” Perry said. “My phone contains info about my legislative and political activities, and personal/private discussions with my wife, family, constituents, and friends. None of this is the government’s business.”
Perry decried the FBI’s actions against Trump and himself as “banana republic tactics.”
“As with President Trump last night, DOJ chose this unnecessary and aggressive action instead of simply contacting my attorneys. These kinds of banana republic tactics should concern every Citizen — especially considering the decision before Congress this week to hire 87,000 new IRS agents to further persecute law-abiding Citizens.”
Perry, a five-term congressman and retired brigadier general, has been a loyal supporter of Trump and has promoted the idea that the 2020 election was corrupt. He currently sits as the chair of the House Freedom Caucus.
Perry was subpoenaed to testify by the so-called January 6th Committee in May, but, along with many other GOP members of Congress, refused to attend the show trial.
“That this illegitimate body leaked their latest charade to the media ahead of contacting targeted Members is proof positive once again that this political witch hunt is about fabricating headlines and distracting Americans from their abysmal record of running America into the ground,” Perry said of the committee’s request.
Although the FBI claims that the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound was all about the handling of White House documents, this new attack against a Trump supporter has all the earmarks of the January 6 Committee.
CNN reports that Perry was in close contact with former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the lead-up to the January 6 unrest. Reportedly, Perry had requested that their conversations take place on Signal, an app that encrypts phone calls. If that had occurred, the FBI may be kicking a dead horse as the Signal app doesn’t keep any user data, which makes it almost impossible to determine whether such conversations even took place.
(Or maybe the wizards at the FBI crime lab can still find whatever they’re looking for.)
Another reason that the Deep State appears to be out to get Perry might be that in October of 2021, he submitted H. Res. 743, articles of impeachment against Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Those impeachment articles were quite damning to Garland, of course. Perry accused the attorney general (AG) of presiding “over a reckless and corrosive politicization of the Department of Justice at the expense of our Nation’s children.”
Perry also called out Garland’s targeting of First Amendment activities that the AG felt contradicted “the teaching of ‘equity’, ‘inclusion’, and ‘critical race theory’ concepts in public school districts.”
The New American has been warning of the politicization and weaponization of the federal bureaucracy for quite a while now. Never has that concept been so apparent (and so brazen) as in the attacks the FBI has engaged in in the past two days.
It’s enraging and, worse, fear-inducing. It appears that here in America we now have a federal law-enforcement agency grinding a political ax at the point of a gun. What’s coming next? Gulags for the dissidents?
