Georgia State Trooper Stanley Kent claimed under oath that it was just a routine traffic violation.¹ That Erick Hendricks was following too closely to the car ahead of him or rolling through stop signs. But what was covered up during the first US government prosecution of a homegrown ISIS combatant was the BOLO.

A BOLO is a “Be On the Lookout Order”. It’s an order from the federal police that tells local police that they have to locate someone. It pulls a cop’s eyes from behind the wheel on the trooper car over to the little laptop welded in the dashboard of the vehicle. It screams, Wake up! The May 15^th 2015 FBI BOLO used in Hendricks case stated that police should “make your own case, if possible” to stop and search him, then call the FBI for instructions.² It said he was “Armed and Dangerous” in big red letters. His wife was included in the same BOLO, her photo plastered directly below his.

And here is the catch. When Trooper Kent pulled Hendricks over in late May 2015 he didn’t just hand him a ticket, he searched the car. He found a notebook with an email address. He took photos of it. As it turned out, Hendricks was less armed or dangerous than anticipated, because the trooper let him go on his way after the stop. But the trooper still had the pictures. Those pictures transformed into significant evidence a year later when Hendricks was arrested and charged with terrorist conspiracy. He was accused of masterminding the first ISIS Terror plot in the American homeland, the Garland Texas terror attack. On March 20^th 2018 he was found guilty of conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, and guilty of attempt in providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization.³ He is currently serving a 15 year sentence.

In Hendrick’s case the prosecution even issued a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) notice, a controversial admission that the fully domestic terror case used secret information obtained from Foreign Intelligence spying.⁴ With the FISA Section 702 amendment act currently up for renewal in Congress, this type of cover up is reviving a debate about this widely used prosecution tactic that significantly undermines basic rights of defendants.⁵

While Congress debates reauthorizing FISA, the Hendricks case shows how the power to hide the origination of evidence seriously undermines the right to be free from warrant-less police searches and impacts the right to discovery of defendant-friendly evidence (which allows defendants access to evidence in the prosecution’s possession that could be helpful to the defense).⁶ These are both core constitutional rights that conservative justices on the supreme court have recently made arguments about overturning.⁷

The fact that evidence laundering tactics like Parallel Construction are used in such high profile trials when the government already has the power of FISA to obscure evidence, significantly upsets US justice system’s claim to offer free and fair trails. It is critical that Americans across the political spectrum understand the abuses facilitated by the use of these sorts of evidence laundering tactics.

Hendrick is not a sympathetic figure, but his case involves a clear illegal cover up. Allowing the use of such covert evidence laundering tactics in any case radically expands the power of the US spy agencies and military apparatus. Experts say it may be happening daily and impacting thousands of cases across the country. However, this type of parallel construction has been almost impossible to prove without documents from inside the FBI.⁸ Now newly accessible hacked documents from the 296 gigabyte Blueleaks archive covering FBI and Fusion center data spanning from 1996 to 2020 have begun to fill in some keys gaps in the use of this type of prosecutorial tactic.⁹

Eric Hendricks and the Garland Texas Terror Attack

The Government claimed that Hendricks planned the Garland Texas terror attack, the first ISIS attack on US soil. But prosecutors never said Hendricks ever set foot in Texas or had anything direct to do with the violence of that May day.

On May 3^rd 2015 Elton Simpson and Nadir Hamid Soofi drove up to the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas. At a security checkpoint, hundreds of feet from the building, both Simpson and Soofi got out of their car and started firing M-16s at police sitting in a cruiser.¹⁰ A police officer and a security guard, Bruce Joiner, returned fire and both Simpson and Soofi were killed. The security guard, Joiner, was shot in the leg.

The attack was carried out against an anti-Islamic event happening in the Culwell Center, the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest, where people competed to “Draw the Prophet Muhammad”. The event was put on by an alt-right group, the Stop Islamization of America organization led by Pamela Geller, a far-right anti-Muslim provocateur. Drawing an image of Muhammad is considered sacrilegious to many Muslims and it seems like Simpson and Soofi felt that they were standing up for Muslims by shooting at the event’s security guards.

Before they started shooting, but while they were communicating with a government informant, Simpson allegedly tweeted that he was taking part in the attack for ISIS. A couple of tweets made by accounts who alleged to be speaking for ISIS then claimed they supported Simpson and Soofi in their attack.¹¹ Hendricks was in communication with Simpson and Soofi. The government claimed he texted them coordination details right before the attack, then wrote a manifesto posted online that claimed the attack for ISIS and said future attacks would be forthcoming.¹²

Hendricks is a US born Black American from Cleveland, Ohio, who converted to Islam as a young man. Hendricks is a devout Muslim who taught others to follow the Koran faithfully. And Hendricks was a snitch. He ratted out other Muslims, selling information to the FBI about the activities of fellow Muslims for at least four years before the Texas attacks.¹³

At trial Hendrick’s lawyer argued that he was just in it for the money. His defense attorney claimed Hendricks was messaging ISIS accounts and writing manifestos associated with ISIS because Hendricks truly believed in helping the FBI catch other bad Muslims. He must have also truly figured that he could make himself some good money in the process.

The Government painted him as a super-spy. They said that Hendricks was trying to build a guerrilla army for ISIS inside the US.¹⁴ The prosecution had 3 people testify, all of whom were paid informants or turned against Hendricks for a plea deal. They claimed he was learning to live off the grid. They claimed he always slept with a M-16 ready. That he was buying a compound to train sleeper cells.

After the May 3^rd 2015 Attack, all State Troopers connected to fusion centers had been sent a FBI BOLO on May 15^th saying that Hendricks was “armed and dangerous”. But when State Trooper Stanley Kent pulled Hendricks over, in what the government claimed at trial was “a routine traffic stop”, toward the end of May, 2015, Kent didn’t arrest him. The BOLO stated explicitly that “the FBI currently has NO outstanding arrest warrants for Erick Hendricks” and to call the FBI when contact with Hendricks was made. Instead, Kent took detailed pictures of the inside of Hendrick’s car and then left him and his wife to walk free for another 14 months before the Government arrested him for conspiracy, using those photos as a key piece of evidence. The crucial fact of that targeted, warrantless search facilitated by the BOLO doesn’t fit with the FBI picture and was excluded from trial. That is because it calls in to question the FBI narrative as well as the federal government’s tactics.

The Dark Side of Law Enforcement: Explaining Evidence Laundering

The evidence laundering tactics used in Hendricks case are not unique but replicated in many cases across the country in a pattern experts believe is happening daily.¹⁵ It is something Fusion Center agents train on specifically. Fusion Centers bring together agents from many different federal organizations. One the most aggressive agencies in using these types of evidence laundering is the DEA, with hundreds of agents in its $150 million Special Operation Division, that focus exclusively on what they call “the dark side” of law enforcement. DEA trainings instruct agents on how to combine Dept. of Homeland Security and Military (which law enforcement refers to as the “intelligence community”) surveillance so that it can be used secretly in US courts. Heavily redacted DEA trainings released by Muckrock as part of a FOIA requests state that “highly classified IC (Intelligence Community) information is being used to assist LEAs (Law Enforcement Agents) in their investigative activities” and that “In many areas the IC and LEAs work together with the understanding that one of their common objectives is to prosecute wrongdoers.” ¹⁶

These tactics are so extreme that even the veteran DEA instructors reflect in the training material on how much more power it gives them stating that “the world has changed allot since I’ve been with the DEA, in the old days classified material was poison” ¹⁷. On one training slide they ask “What is the problem with combining IC collection efforts and Law Enforcement Agencies investigations in US courtrooms?”. Two of the correct answers are “Constitutionally protected liberty interests” and “Americans don’t like it!” (emphasis in the original).¹⁸ They regularly use classified material in prosecutions even though it violates the rights of Americans. Because Americans don’t like it, these facts must be carefully hidden, and FISA is a key method to facilitate this violation.

Along with Parallel Construction, FISA is one of the main methods outlined in DEA trainings “to combine IC & LEA collection efforts in the trial of the defendant”. FISA is set to expire by the end of 2023.It puts all defendants at risk and is something that in the words of the DEA’s own trainers “Americans Don’t Like It!”. Only organized people acting together can pressure Congress to force FISA Section 702 to sunset at the end of 2023. Exposing evidence laundering and ending FISA will help us bring one of the most poisonous legal abuses of the post 9/11 war on terror hysteria to a close.

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Appreciation to Calyx Institute Microgrants program for supporting the initial investigation into Fusion Centers, and to constitutionalcommunications.org @con_comms.