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no bull, and the aftermath.

Hello, and welcome to the LawFair podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittis. In this episode,

sting operations encounter terrorism. Is the FBI creating the crimes prosecutors are charging

defendants with? LawFair's Alan Rosenstein talks with Miriam Conrad, federal defender for

the districts of Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, and attorney for one fellow convicted

in such a sting, Reswan Ferdos. She argues that the bureau is creating conspiracies where there

would otherwise be only anger and ideation, and creating would-be terrorists out of

near-do-wells and incompetence. I was hoping to start by having you give a little background

on the Ferdos case. So, Mr. Ferdos was arrested late September of 2011, and it was the result

of an investigation that began in probably January of 2011. And the background to this was that

the FBI sent an informant into a mosque in Worcester that Mr. Ferdos attended, sort of with the

marching orders to befriend him or to target him. Of course, we didn't learn too much about the

details of that, and the first meeting was not recorded. The first time the informant met with

him was in December of 2010. The first recorded meeting or conversation was in January of 2011.

This came after an incident in October of 2010 when the FBI or the police got a call from a

gun shop owner in the Worcester area who reported that someone who appeared to be Muslim had been in

his gun store taking photographs. And the gun shop owner provided a license plate number which

turned out to belong to Mr. Ferdos' father, and they went and interviewed Mr. Ferdos who acknowledged

that he had driven someone to the gun shop, that he had not gone into the gun shop, but he refused

...