Did Clinton's FBI Frame Pro-life Activist James Kopp?

Did Bill Clinton's use of the FBI for his pro-abortion political agenda include the possible framing of James Kopp?

To many it once seemed incredible that the former president could corrupt the FBI, but according to the New York Post, a watchdog group, Judicial Watch, found FBI documents showing such corruption.

The July 2, 2000, New York Post reported that Judicial Watch, using FBI documents, alleged that the FBI collected information on, as well as monitored, peaceful pro-life groups and individuals, including the late John Cardinal O'Connor and the conservative pro-life Catholic bishops, after being pressured by the Janet Reno Justice Department.

When a Post FBI source was asked if these allegations were true, the person said: "What do you think? This is a highly political, highly corrupt administration."

The Post said, "According to sources and published reports, numerous FBI agents felt that abortion-rights supporters in the attorney general's office crossed an ethical line out of eagerness to damage the pro-life movement. ... Judicial Watch's [Tom] Fitton, who, having seen how the Clintons used the FBI to pursue its political goals in Travelgate and Filegate, puts nothing past them."

So, one question is while the FBI was monitoring Mother Teresa's friend Cardinal O'Connor, was the agency also wasting its time framing an innocent pro-life activist?

The investigation of a former Texas assistant district attorney makes a strong case that Clinton's FBI framed James Kopp.

Kopp, renowned in the San Francisco Bay Area for his support of pro-life causes since the mid-1980s, is now known nationally as the accused murderer of abortion doctor Barnett Slepian. The fifty-two-year-old Slepian was killed in his Amherst home near Buffalo, N.Y., on Oct. 23, 1998.

The accused Kopp disappeared 11 days after the killing. CBS sources said he escaped to Mexico. According to the FBI, Kopp had been living in northwest France for several months, with plans to leave the country, when he was arrested March 29, 2001.

He is now in a Buffalo jail facing a state charge of second-degree murder after being extradited from France in June. Kopp, who claims innocence, is not scheduled to go to trial for another five months.

One organization believes there is a strong case that Kopp is being framed for the murder. The staff of Life Dynamics of Denton, Texas, and Ed Zielinski – former assistant district attorney in Cook County, Texas – have been investigating the case for Kopp's defense since April 2001.

Using extradition documents, affidavits and interviews with witnesses, Life Dynamics president Mark Crutcher believes Kopp is being framed for killing Slepian and has published his findings. According to Crutcher, "There are a lot of discrepancies in the evidence against him, a lot of inconsistencies and a lot of bizarre things."

One inconsistency was Kopp's nonviolent philosophy and his activities in California. He helped found a crisis pregnancy center called the Free Pregnancy Center in San Francisco in 1985; the center gave free pregnancy tests, educated women on the dangers of abortion and assisted pregnant women.

Others know him from his participation, from 1985 to the early 1990s, in the Good Friday pro-life procession that went nine miles from St. Martin Church in San Jose to Our Lady of Peace in Santa Clara.

In the 1990s Kopp was involved with Operation Rescue. Operation Rescue modeled itself on Gandhi's and Martin Luther King's nonviolent civil disobedience protests. Kopp was involved in abortion clinic sit-ins and chainings to abortion machinery. In some of these protests he was handled violently by police and offered no resistance.

Crutcher's report said that Kopp "has consistently and vehemently decried the use of such violence. Without exception, every person we interviewed in preparing this document insisted that he had always made his feelings on this issue crystal clear. ... Kopp's philosophical aversion to violence is tied directly to his Catholic beliefs about salvation. Among the many people we talked to who were close to Kopp, each told us that, even though he is strongly pro-life, he believes that abortion is a lesser tragedy than someone dying in an unrepentant state."

This is important because without exception every other person who killed abortionists in the past had two characteristics. The report said, "To begin with, all had a history of openly saying that the use of force, even deadly force, is morally and theologically permissible in order to stop abortion."

Life Dynamics compiled a comprehensive document of other problems with the case. (This can be accessed in part on the Life Dynamics Web site, http://www.ldi.org.)

"There were serious improprieties and possibly even criminal acts by the FBI and/or the Amherst Police Department," Crutcher said.

"The bottom line is that we don't know if James Kopp is guilty or innocent. What our report makes clear beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the FBI planted evidence, committed perjury in their grand jury testimony and manufactured the case against James Kopp."

The Life Dynamics report says that discrepancies between what the Amherst Police said in their extradition documents and what the FBI said in theirs is the reason any information has come to light.

According to the report, "If Kopp had been apprehended in the United States, there would have been no extradition documents, these discrepancies would have been secretly 'worked out' before trial, and Kopp would be awaiting lethal injection right now."

The report found many serious questions on the improprieties in the FBI and/or the Amherst Police Department (APD) investigations. Only a few of the improprieties are presented here.

For example, how could James Kopp be the James Milton who bought the SKS rifle in Nashville, Tenn., if on the day it was purchased he was actually in Pittsburgh, Pa? Life Dynamics has several sworn affidavits from eyewitness that Kopp was in Pittsburgh on July 16, 1998, the day the FBI says the gun was purchased, supposedly by him, in Nashville.

Another question: Why was the FBI confiscating Kopp's personal belongings less than 24 hours after the crime, when it had no evidence that Kopp might have been involved – and when murder is not automatically a federal crime?

According to the FBI 's own documents, it had no evidence that any other federal crime was committed. Some have speculated that these actions by the FBI were the reason Kopp fled, fearing he was being set up.

Did Kopp suspect he was being framed from the get-go? Bay Area Pro-life Activist Anthony Ryan said, "Yes, he definitely felt that he was being framed. How does one person stand against the FBI and the pro-abortion industry when they are both corrupt and trying to nail an innocent man?"

In fact, the FBI and the APD had to return to the scene of the crime on two occasions, five months apart, to find their key evidence against Kopp.

The Life Dynamics report said, "It is totally illogical to believe that an exhaustive inch-by-inch search of this area was not conducted at the time of the crime. Nowhere in the FBI/APD extradition affidavits do they explain what allowed them to find these items during this subsequent search when they didn't find them during the initial search."

The items – personal belongings and especially the rifle – should have been easy to find. The report said, "If you're looking for a gun, it's one of the easiest things to use a metal detector to find."

The owner of a California company that distributes metal detectors, Sean Rabbani, was quoted as saying that even a conventional-quality unit could have found this rifle. He went on to say that a properly adjusted metal detector can be "unfailingly accurate" and that he "could have found the gun within eight hours even if it had been buried in an area as large as two acres."

Indeed, the FBI never explained why Kopp would take off his watch, ear muffs, fanny pack and cap, put them in a plastic bag, then deposit the bag in a hole on top of a trowel, along with his flashlight and binoculars. Nor why he buried his rifle at the crime scene.

Was he trying to safeguard them for the FBI? That is another question asked by Life Dynamics.

The report said it "makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for a sniper to bury his weapon at the scene of the crime, especially if it could be traced to him. In a New York Times article of April 14, 1999, Erie County District Attorney Frank Clark stated that 'I've been in this business 27 years and worked directly or indirectly on thousands of homicides, and in not one did the perpetrator bury the gun at or near the scene.' "

These problems are even more suspicious, according to the report, because the Amherst Police Department's inventory of items found at the scene of the crime differs from the FBI's inventory of items. For example, the APD didn't include a black, belted storage bag that was on the FBI list.

Life Dynamics next asked: If the rifle found in Slepian's backyard five months after the crime is indeed the murder weapon, why don't ballistic tests match the bullet that killed Slepian? The FBI asserted that "the bullets didn't match because the barrels of high-powered rifles change with every shot."

Crutcher's report said, "That is utterly preposterous. ... [I]f this assertion were true, then the whole concept of ballistics testing is a fraud. American law enforcement will never be able to use it in court again, and our judicial system is going to have to grant new trials to every person ever convicted of a crime in which high-powered rifles were used and ballistics testing was introduced into evidence."

Finally, the Life Dynamics report asks why the FBI circulated a photograph of Kopp that so poorly resembles him that even his friends couldn't identify him in the photo.

According to the report, "The FBI wasn't using the photo in an effort to catch Kopp and the media wasn't interested in accuracy. Both used it for one reason only: It projected an image of Kopp they wanted the public to have."

Many of Kopp's Bay Area pro-life friends say that not only does the photo not look like him, but it also makes him look like a criminal.

Pro-lifer insider Anthony Ryan – a friend of Kopp – believes he is not capable of the crime. Ryan said, "People like James, who devote their whole life to starting crisis pregnancy centers and saving babies and helping mothers, don't shoot abortionists."

According to the January 1999 Culture Wars magazine, a pro-life insider like Kopp would have been a person with the least motive to kill Slepian. The magazine said that reporter Paul Likoudis, a writer for The Wanderer newspaper, interviewed Bob Behn, a sidewalk counselor who knew Dr. Slepian well.

According to Behn, the doctor was considering converting to Catholicism. Culture Wars said Slepian "... was scheduled to address a pro-life clergy on October 24, the day after he was gunned down. Perhaps, Likoudis suggested, there were some that didn't want to hear what he might have said, who have no use for another Norma McCorvey, Bernard Nathanson, or Carol Everett."

These three people were well-known pro-abortionists who converted to the pro-life side. Culture Wars magazine suggested that abortionist insiders were the ones who had the motive to kill Dr. Slepian.

The really scary thing is that it is believable that Clinton's FBI... and now Bush's FBI... DID indeed frame Kopp.

Either Kopp is the stupidest sniper assassin in history, or the evidence was planted.

The clintons slimed and corrupted every and anything they have ever touched. It was hitlery not billybob that is the true zealot. The f.b.i., the i.r.s. the f.a.t.f the office of the presidency. These became clintons tools to harm or blackmail conservatives and anyone or anything that went against them. Billybob just wants to eat and get sex from adulators. Hitlery wants to rule the world.
Trent Lott, and his allies in the republican party have been in fear since Hitlery got ahold of the f.b.i. files. You know he has been a unick ever since as well as others.
The once great and proud serial govt agencies are nothing more then scum thugs at this point. Ain't that right Mr. Whoreiuchi?

The FBI has already been accused of lying to grand juries 75 times. The FBI has already been proven to have framed others in Boston, I believe. Their credibility is very low right now, and the inconsistencies lead more towards the FBI being guilty of something than this guy.

But, we shall see as this story unfolds, if the media have the guts to report it fairly.

-PJ

The real scary thing is how out of control all of Americas governments have become.From the smallest hamlet to the largest cities in America our government manipulates its citizens.We have more government workers in powerful places that are beholden to certain politicians and they carry big sticks and use them.

"But, we shall see as this story unfolds, if the media have the guts to report it fairly."

Yeah, that'll happen. Right. < /sarcasm >

When pigs fly.

"Or he is simply guilty of murder and got caught."

If your only souce of news is the Buffalo edition of Pravda (a.k.a the BUFFALO NEWS) then Kopp HAS BEEN already tried, CONVICTED, and should be SHOT. (Of course, they normally don't believe in the death penalty. Except for unborn babies.)

The articles from Pravda I've seen lately are pretty good. The Buffalo News, however, is owned by population control freak Warren Buffett, which explains a good deal of their overt bias.

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