FBI Is Not Your Friend.....

The FBI.......Don't talk to them.

They pretend they are your friend. They pretend they are nice people. They pretend you are really not in that much trouble.

Next thing you know (because you talked to them) you are in an orange jump suit with chains on your hands..... wrapped around your back...... and more chains on your feet. They do that before you go away to jail for 10 years.

They made jokes about the cold weather — the transcript is interspersed with parenthetical descriptions of laughter

“You’re trying to get information from somebody, so being confrontational, bellicose, threatening — for the most part is counterproductive,” notes Jeffrey Danik, a retired FBI agent who spent nearly three decades investigating white-collar crimes, violent crimes, and terrorism. “You can’t let them start thinking that this is some kind of confrontational, confinement-ending interview.”

The feigned friendliness of FBI agents is not just a matter of getting people to loosen up. One of the government’s briefs in the Winner case argues that by being “exceedingly friendly” and always keeping their voices at a “conversational level” and carrying “no visible weapons,” the agents acted in a way that created a noncustodial environment.

It’s a law enforcement twofer: By acting polite, law enforcement agents persuade people to talk and lift from themselves the obligation to inform people of their right not to talk. In a way, FBI interrogations are akin to con games, with the mark played by ordinary citizens whose interests are not actually served by chatting with law enforcement agents pretending they’d just like to clear up a minor misunderstanding.

“Good interviewers have an instinct to find some connection with the person you are interviewing and try to make them comfortable,” said Mike German, a retired FBI agent who is now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. “You want to have the person you’re interviewing in a cooperative mood. People tend to cooperate with people they have some positive feeling for. The ability to make a personal connection in a short period of time is a valuable talent.”

“He was asked questions that were, for all intents and purposes, a setup,” Lowell told me for the 2015 story. “The government already knew that Stephen had had a conversation with the media. They already knew that he had had access to the information that they believed to have been classified. They were basically setting him up.”

an old adage about criminal defense attorneys. “Many of them have a fish that they mount on the wall,” he said. “These lawyers put a plaque under the fish, and in words or effect that plaque will say, ‘If I hadn’t opened my mouth, I wouldn’t be hanging here today.’”

It might seem there is no harm done when FBI agents persuade or cajole people to confess to crimes. But there is a long record of law enforcement officers coaxing false confessions out of people. A study of exonerations in the United States between 1989 and 2004 found that 15 percent of the people who were exonerated had confessed to crimes they did not actually commit. And there is an equally long and disreputable record of the government incarcerating people for a far longer time than their confessions would justify.

Contrary to what the FBI told Winner, she was facing an enormous amount of trouble. The irony and unfairness is that FBI agents are not prosecuted for making false or misleading statements to the unaware citizens they interrogate.

https://theintercept.com/2017/12/28/how-the-interrogation-of-reality-winner-reveals-the-deceptive-tactics-of-exceedingly-friendly-fbi-agents/