On Wednesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) searched the upstate New York home of Scott Ritter, a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer and United Nations weapons inspector. Ritter’s cars were also searched.
Outside his Delmar residence, Ritter told reporters that the FBI and New York State Police had served him with an arrest warrant related to a possible violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
Spectrum News of Central New York reported and published a photo showing FBI agents stealing several boxes of materials from Ritter’s home. The contents of the stolen materials were not disclosed.
From his front yard, Ritter said:
I am being targeted because I have worked to improve relations between the United States and Russia, to bring about arms control, and to build peace.
Ritter continued:
The idea that you have a right to free speech in America is an intimidating factor when you exercise that right in a way that the U.S. government finds disruptive and issues a search warrant.
Ritter is a vocal opponent of the US and NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. In early June, the US State Department confiscated Ritter’s passport at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York as he prepared to board a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul to attend a conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Under the provisions of FARA, passed in 1938, “foreign agents,” meaning individuals or organizations that lobby or represent a foreign government domestically, must register as such with the U.S. Department of Justice and disclose their relationships, activities and financial compensation.
FARA evolved from Section 951 of the Espionage Act of 1917, which was designed to suppress opposition to the United States’ entry into World War I on the grounds that opponents of the war were foreign agents. FARA was passed in the run-up to World War II, ostensibly to counter Nazi propaganda in the United States.
After the end of World War II in 1945, FARA prosecutions dropped dramatically. There were only two prosecutions between 1945 and 1955, followed by nine “failure to report” prosecutions between 1955 and 1962.
In the words of John Demers, a U.S. Department of Justice official, the application of the FARA system underwent a “major shift” as U.S. intelligence agencies and the Democratic Party increasingly raised allegations of Russian “election interference” in the wake of Republican Donald Trump’s victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
An FBI spokeswoman confirmed to the New York Post on Wednesday that the raid on Ritter’s home was part of a federal investigation, but she declined to comment on details, citing ongoing investigations.
The raid came a day after Ritter was photographed with U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was in the area to attend a hearing in Albany about whether he would appear on the ballot for the November presidential election in New York, according to the Times Union.
Ritter posted the photo with Kennedy, taken at a sports bar at the Hilton Garden Inn in Albany, and captioned it, “Burgers with Bobby!”
Two days before the FBI raid, Ritter appeared on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s YouTube show “Judging Freedom” and said, “Israel has literally become the worst incarnation of what we could have imagined Nazi Germany to be at the time.”
Ritter then referred to the recent Zionist atrocity, saying: “Today they blew up a school with students inside. The students were in the school and burned.” He added: “This kind of thing happens every day.”
Ritter served as a Marine Corps intelligence officer during the George HW Bush administration and Operation Desert Storm in 1991. In 1992, he published a New York Times In an opinion article, he publicly disputed General Norman Schwarzkopf’s claim that U.S. forces destroyed a large portion of Iraq’s Scud missiles during the first Gulf War in Iraq.
Ritter then worked between 1991 and 1998 for the United Nations Special Commission, the body tasked with searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the war. He was chief inspector on 14 of the more than 30 UN inspection missions in Iraq.
In the early 2000s, Ritter publicly argued that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. In 2002, Ritter was a staunch opponent of the George W. Bush administration’s claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction stockpiles or production capabilities. Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Ritter stated that the U.S. and British governments used the alleged presence of weapons of mass destruction as a political pretext for attacking the country.
In April 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ritter posted a tweet blaming the Ukrainian National Police for the Bucha massacre and calling US President Joe Biden a “war criminal” for “trying to shift the blame for the Bucha killings” onto Russia. The US and NATO claimed that Russian forces were responsible for the killing of hundreds of civilians and prisoners of war in the Ukrainian city.
Ritter was banned from Twitter for violating its “harassment and abuse” policy, but his account was restored the following day.
Ritter has been the subject of several law enforcement sting operations involving alleged sex offenses involving underage girls. The first case occurred in 2001 when he was charged with a minor crime. The case was eventually dismissed and the file sealed after he served six months of probation.
In November 2009, he was arrested a second time for communicating with a police decoy he met through an Internet chat site. In the second case, Ritter refused a plea deal and was found guilty of a series of sex offenses in a Monroe County, Pennsylvania courtroom on April 14, 2011. He was later sentenced to one and a half to five and a half years in prison and served time at Laurel Highlands State Prison in Somerset County, Pennsylvania from March 2012 to September 2014.
