(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Colorado man Zebb Hall, who was targeted by the FBI during the tumultuous summer of 2020, seeks to overturn his conviction for buying a gun for a felon, after it was revealed earlier this year that the felon was an unscrupulous FBI informant seeking to provoke protestors to violence.
The story of the FBI informant, Mickey Windecker, was reported in February by investigative reporter Trevor Aaronson in his podcast, Alphabet Boys.
According to Aaronson, Windecker infiltrated the Black Lives Matter movement to try to encourage activists engage in violent conspiracies such as the assassination of Colorado’s attorney general.
As Headline USA exclusively reported in March, at least one undercover FBI agent involved in the Colorado assassination plot was also likely involved in the bureau’s operation to provoke right-wing militias into conspiring to kidnap Michigan’s governor.
In Halls case, he resisted the FBI’s attempts to engage in any assassination or other violent plots.
However, Windecker, a convicted felon, did convince Hall to purchase him a firearm. Hall said he was intimidated by Windecker, who presented himself as an ex-special forces operator with combat experience in the Middle East.
“I was just afraid of him,” Hall told Aaronson. “I was fucking terrified of this guy.”
About a year later, Hall was arrested for purchasing the weapon for Windecker—in other words, as Aaronson noted, for buying a gun, with the government’s money, for the government’s informant. He took a plea deal and received three years of probation.
But in a petition filed in federal court by Hall in June, he said he would never have accepted the plea deal had he known about Windecker’s violent history.
“My prior attorney failed to thoroughly investigate and research on the government’s informant, Michael Windecker, recently exposed in the press, as a violent criminal used and weaponized by the FBI to infiltrate and disrupt the BLM movement in which I was a participant,” he said.
“Mr. Windecker was specifically chosen due to his intimidation tactics.”
The U.S. government responded to Hall’s appeal last month, arguing that the conviction against him should stand. Prosecutors noted that Hall allegedly already knew Windecker was a felon at the time he purchased the informant a weapon.
Prosecutors also contested Hall’s claim that he was afraid of Windecker.
“Hall told [Aaronson] that he was ‘afraid’ of the informant and bought the firearm because he thought the informant ‘would come after him if he refused.’ That fear appears to have been based on the facts that the informant drove around in a hearse filled with guns, boasted about his foreign-military experience, and generally seemed like a ‘badass,’” prosecutors said.
“Hall offers no evidence that the informant ever expressly or implicitly threatened him or otherwise induced him to commit the offense.”
Hall has until Oct. 25 to reply to the government’s response. A hearing date for his petition has yet to be scheduled.
Hall told Headline USA that he believes the FBI poses a threat to all Americans, regardless of skin color or ideology.
“I’m not a [Trump] supporter at all. But I cannot trust the FBI or other agencies investigating anyone at this point,” he said.
“This isn’t a threat to left, right, black, white, man, or woman. It’s a threat to every single American in this country,” he added.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
