Hal Turner Hate Speech: Turner Says He was FBI Confidential Informant and 'The Feds Made Me Do It!'

[Emit]

Testifying at his federal “Death-Threat Trial,” Internet shock jock and FBI confidential informant Hal Turner said federal agents — while asking his help in identifying a white supremacist killer — told him to “ratchet up the rhetoric.”

Turner, on trial for threatening the life of three federal judges who issued rulings supporting gun control, claims he followed the agents’ suggestion immediately, posting a picture of Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow of Federal District Court in Chicago on his blog below the headline “Gotcha!” and later appearing on television to declare the judge “worthy of death.” In exchange, Turner said, he was paid by the F.B.I.

In his five hours on the witness stand, Turner detailed his ascent as a shock jock, as well as his relationship with the F.B.I. , which he says encouraged his seemingly racist rants over the years. Turner’s first trial ended with a deadlocked jury last year, with prosecutors admitting then that he was an F.B.I. informant.

In that trial, Michael A. Orozco, one of Turner’s lawyers, offered as a defense that his client is “nothing but a shock jock.” Turner has long been notorious for making anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, white supremacist remarks and encouraging violence on his Internet radio show and companion Web site. Last June, for example, he posted this message: “The government — especially these three judges — are cunning, ruthless, untrustworthy, disloyal, unpatriotic, deceitful scum.”

Offering that opinion was certainly Turner’s right — but going on to say, “These judges deserve to be killed” may not be. “That is not just political rhetoric,” said the prosecutor, assistant United States attorney William R. Hogan. “It is not O.K. — very definitely not O.K. — for him to call for their execution and their murder.”

That’s when Orozco chimed in. Not only was Turner just a “shock jock” offering constitutionally-protected “opinion,” he was also speaking and acting in accordance with guidelines the F.B.I. had set out for him as a confidential informer, Orozco noted. In fact, he added, the F.B.I. had even requested that Turner turn up the heat and the volume of his remarks to impress — and perhaps infiltrate — certain shadowy groups the Bureau was looking into. Turner’s “hand was guided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Orozco said. “He was providing a service. This is betrayal.”

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http://www.roryoconnor.org/blog/2010/03/05/hal-turner-hate-speech-the-feds-made-me-do-it/

Excerpt rom the first embedded link above:

At Death-Threat Trial, Internet Radio Host Says F.B.I. Encouraged Rants
By A. G. SULZBERGER
Published: March 3, 2010


The family of a federal judge had just been brutally murdered. And as Harold C. Turner remembered it, it seemed an opportune time for the F.B.I. to make use of his secret role as a confidential informant.

Sitting together at a New Jersey diner, the F.B.I. agents told Mr. Turner, an Internet radio host and provocateur, that they wanted his help identifying a killer, whom they believed to be a member of a white supremacist organization, Mr. Turner testified on Wednesday in United States District Court in Brooklyn.

Mr. Turner enjoyed a devoted following among such groups because of the racist and inflammatory views he espoused on his program. The F.B.I.’s request, Mr. Turner said, came with a suggestion: “Ratchet up the rhetoric.”

Mr. Turner said he immediately obliged. That afternoon he posted a picture of the judge, Joan Humphrey Lefkow of Federal District Court in Chicago, on his blog below the headline “Gotcha!” He later appeared on television twice to discuss the case — for which he said he was paid by the F.B.I. — both times declaring Judge Lefkow “worthy of death.”

This description of the meeting in 2005 was presented on Wednesday during Mr. Turner’s testimony in his trial for threatening the life of three other federal judges in Illinois...

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/nyregion/04hal.html?ref=nyregion

edit to clarify OP title