By: Donald V. Watkins
Copyrighted and Published on November 14, 2021
An Editorial Opinion
I knew that whoever had organized the multi-year, multi-federal agency Blitzkrieg against me had to be a powerful figure on the Washington political scene. It had to be someone who could orchestrate a modern-day lynching of a well-known social justice advocate by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), two divisions of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Reserve Board (FRB), the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Internal Revenue Department (IRS), federal courts in Alabama and Atlanta, and the Pentagon -- all with no questions asked.
The one thing all of these federal agencies had in common was their annual pilgrimage to Capitol Hill for agency funding from the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee. Any one of these agencies would do the political bidding of a powerful U.S. Senator on the Senate Appropriations Committee. This is particularly true if a request to Blitzkrieg an innocent U.S. citizen is made by the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. In such a case, the Senator's political enemy becomes their enemy -- with no questions asked.
The Blitzkrieg is Used To Destroy Civil Rights Activists and Political Dissidents
A Blitzkrieg is a coordinated assault on a targeted victim by multiple government agencies that is designed to bring down the full weight of the federal government on the victim, all at one time. A Blitzkrieg is intended to break the victim, psychologically, physically, and financially. In some cases, a Blitzkrieg causes the victim to commit suicide.
U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) caused the government to Blitzkrieg innocent citizens during his highly publicized witch-hunt for communists in America in 1954. McCarthy's Blitzkrieg destroyed the lives of scores of innocent Americans in Hollywood and other parts of the United States.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover took the Blitzkrieg to a more sinister place during the reign of his infamous COINTELPRO program (1956 to 1971) to discredit and destroy Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and thousands of other civil rights activists. As part of Hoover's Blitzkrieg, the FBI tried unsuccessfully to force Dr. King to commit suicide in 1963 before King accepted his Nobel Peace Prize.
Hoover succeeded with Jean Seberg, a pregnant white actress who was the victim of a vicious FBI "whisper campaign" that spread a false rumor in Hollywood that the child she was carrying was fathered by a Black Panther Party leader. After her child died at birth, an emotionally distraught Seberg killed herself in Paris with an overdose of barbiturates.
The White House and Pentagon have also participated in Blitzkrieg campaigns when they thought it was necessary to cover-up illegal activity that left top officials exposed to criminal prosecutions. This happened with the military's cover-up of the Army's massacre of up to 504 unarmed men, women, and children on March 16, 1968 in My Lai, Vietnam. The brave officers who reported the massacre were subjected to an intense Blitzkrieg campaign orchestrated by the Pentagon.
Three years later, President Richard Nixon and his top White House aides engaged in a host of "dirty tricks" against Daniel Ellsberg from 1971 to 1973 over his release of the Pentagon Papers. They also had Ellsberg criminally prosecuted for leaking the Pentagon Papers. The Nixon White House even approved of a plot by CIA operatives to "neutralize" Ellsberg.
Smoking Out Shelby
It did not take long to smoke out Sen. Richard Shelby as the culprit who organized the Blitzkrieg against me. He has been a member of the U.S. Senate since 1987. Shelby is now the longest-serving U.S. Senator from Alabama and one of the longest serving Senators in U.S. history. He has chaired and/or served on the Senate Appropriations Committee and chaired the Subcommittee on Defense Appropriations. As such, Shelby held the purse strings to every federal agency that participated in the Blitzkrieg against me.
Shelby decides who will serve as U.S. Attorneys in Alabama, who will serve as U.S. District Court judges in Alabama, and who will serve as judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. Additionally, Shelby has substantial influence on who will serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
With his clout in Washington, Shelby can put a targeted victim on the receiving end of a Blitzkrieg by merely whispering in the ear of the heads of federal agencies during or after Appropriations Committee meetings.
In Congress, Shelby's personal interests, and not politics, frequently drive his decision-making in public office. Like Bill and Hillary Clinton, Shelby came to Washington with a modest net worth, but he is leaving the Senate filthy rich by Wall Street standards. Shelby has never publicly explained how he became rich off of a Congress member's salary.
Shelby's Potential Culpability for Criminal Actions?
When Shelby retires from the Senate in January 2023, he will leave a trail of shady dealings that may expose him to culpability for several federal crimes. One area of culpability centers around Shelby's key involvement in the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) highly suspect, truncated, and rushed certification of Boeing's fatally flawed 737 MAX aircrafts. This flying deathtrap killed 346 passengers and crew members in fatal crashes in 2017 and 2018.
Plenty of campaign money changed hands between political action committees affiliated with Boeing executives and Richard Shelby's senatorial campaign as a result of the FAA's certification of this aircraft. This money exchange appears to be a fumigated version of "pay-to-play."
Shelby is also implicated in the Pentagon's cover-up of the July 2005 murder of 19-year-old black Army Private LaVena Johnson on a military base in Ballad, Iraq. Private Johnson was murdered by Kevin P. Byrnes, a popular white four-star general who was carrying on a torrid extramarital affair on the base, in contravention of a direct order from the Army's Chief of Staff. Byrnes murdered Private Johnson after she inadvertently discovered him engaged in the heat of passion with his forbidden lover. After the murder, Byrnes staged the crime scene to make it appear as though Private Johnson had committed suicide.
Byrnes was kicked out of the Army about two weeks after he murdered Private Johnson, but he was never prosecuted for her murder. The Pentagon's file on Private Johnson's murder is classified as "Top Secret" and remains sealed to this day.
After Gen. Byrnes was fired from the Army, Senator Shelby secured a high-paying executive position for him with defense contractor Raytheon in Huntsville, Alabama.
Shelby Participated in the FBI's COINTELPRO Program from 1963 to 1971
Richard Shelby was born on May 6, 1934 in Birmingham, Alabama. Shelby received his undergraduate degree in 1957 and law degree in 1963 from the all-white University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. After graduating from law school, Shelby lived and worked in Tuscaloosa as a prosecutor for the city (from 1963 to 1971) and a U.S. magistrate for the Northern District of Alabama (from 1966 to 1971). In his law enforcement capacities, Shelby was a direct and willing participant in the FBI's COINTELPRO program in the Northern District of Alabama. Between 1963 and 1971, Shelby aggressively used his law enforcement positions to railroad thousands of blacks in judicial proceedings conducted by all-white, like-minded trial judges in Tuscaloosa city's and the Northern District's criminal justice systems.
What is more, Shelby worked in Tuscaloosa at a time when fellow Tuscaloosa native Robert M. Shelton rose to national prominence and reigned supreme as the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, Inc. (UKA) from 1961 to 1987. In 1965, Shelton's UKA was the largest Ku Klux Klan group in the U.S. with 30,000 members. As a Tuscaloosa city prosecutor, Shelby never brought a single case against Shelton or the UKA for the KKK's widespread violence against blacks in Tuscaloosa.
Because of his "Old South" value system and COINTELPRO background, Shelby has never been comfortable with black people who did not subjugate themselves to an "Uncle Tom" role in his life. Today, Shelby is an old-school racist whose exterior veneer has been buffed out over the last 43 years with Washington's high-gloss PR polish.
Back-Channeling a Directive for My Judicial Lynching?
Richard Shelby has a close association with two Tuscaloosa natives: Scott Coogler, the Chief U.S. District Court Judge for the Northern District of Alabama, and Joe Perkins, a longtime "dirty tricks" operator on Alabama's political scene. These men are Shelby's hunting buddies.
Coogler, who has been a federal judge since 2003, reportedly handles backchannel messaging for Shelby within the Birmingham federal courthouse. As a federal judge, Coogler enjoys the freedom to chitchat with fellow judges and U.S. magistrates in the courthouse about specific cases. Questions have arisen about whether Coogler shares with his colleagues inside the courthouse what views Shelby holds regarding particular cases of interest to the Senator. Shelby's views carry great weight with sitting judges because he is politically responsible for all of the judges who have been appointed to the federal bench in Alabama in the last 43 years.
Shelby's political enemies are lynched inside Alabama's federal courthouses whenever he wants to enjoy a good, old-fashioned hanging. Former Alabama governor Don Siegelman's 2006 judicial lynching is a case in point.
Joe Perkins handles political "dirty tricks" for Sen. Shelby much like G. Gordon Libby and E. Howard Hunt handled them for President Richard Nixon. Unlike Libby and Hunt, Perkins escaped criminal prosecution by the DOJ in 1988 for making illegal campaign contributions to the 1985 Congressional campaign of Roy Johnson solely because the three-year statute of limitations on this crime had expired.
Joe Perkins' played a prominent role in my lynching, which is detailed in 12 pages of his own handwritten notes. [Click here to read Perkins' notes.] It is highly unlikely that Perkins would have engaged in "dirty tricks" that border on witness tampering and obstruction of justice in my case without the blessing of his political "Godfather" and hunting buddy -- Sen. Richard Shelby. After all, Shelby has ironclad control over the federal law enforcement apparatus in Alabama and can thwart any federal criminal investigation of his minions that arises within the state.
Matrix, LLC, Joe Perkins' political consulting and crisis management firm, is currently embroiled in a red hot crisis of its own. On September 2, 2021, Jeff Pitts, Matrix's former chief executive officer, sued Perkins in Florida and alleged that Matrix engaged in: (a) a pattern and practice of criminal racketeering activities, (b) extortion, and (c) abuse of the Alabama judicial process. More recently, Matrix has come under scrutiny for drawing $15,000 per month since September 2019 from Auburn University for what appears to be "no show" work.
Epilogue
I survived Richard Shelby's Blitzkrieg and a courthouse lynching in Birmingham. Remarkably, two law enforcement agencies refused to participate in this coordinated lawlessness. The first agency is the U.S. Attorney's Office for New Jersey. In 2015, New Jersey U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman and his Economic Crimes Division chief, Mr. Andrew Kogan, reviewed the evidence of "investor fraud" that Shelby's Birmingham political hacks would later use as a pretext to lynch me. In 2016, Fishman and Kogan cleared me of all allegations of wrongdoing.
The second agency that declined to participate in the lynching is the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, whose director (Spencer Collier) refused a direct order from Gov. Robert Bentley in 2016 to open a criminal investigation of me without probable cause for doing so. Bentley promptly fired Collier for disobeying his order.
Today, I feel a lot like Jed Cooper, the fictional character/innocent man who survived a lynching in Clint Eastwood's 1968 classic Western film, "Hang 'Em High." After my lynching, I was able to untangle the web of lies and deceit that Shelby and his minions peddled in the courts of public opinion and law.
Now that I know who and what I am fighting, I know how to fight and win. Like Jed Cooper, I am determined to bring everybody who participated in my lynching to justice using all lawful means necessary to achieve this goal.
