The FBI reportedly groomed a 16-year-old “intellectually handicapped” boy who suffered from “brain development issues” into sending small amounts of money to fake “terrorists” overseas in order to bust him as soon as he turned 18.
LAST WEEK, the Department of Justice announced the arrest of a teenager in Massachusetts on allegations of providing financial support to the Islamic State group.
A flurry of reports picked up on the arrest of Mateo Ventura, an 18-year-old resident of the sleepy town of Wakefield, echoing government claims that an international terrorist financier and ISIS supporter had just been busted in the United States. The Department of Justice’s own press release on the case likewise trumpeted Ventura’s arrest for “knowingly concealing the source of material support or resources that he intended to go to a foreign terrorist organization.”
The only problem with the case and how it has been described, however, is that according to the government’s own criminal complaint, Ventura had never actually funded any terrorist group. The only “terrorist” he is accused of ever being in contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him online as a 16-year-old, solicited small cash donations in the form of gift cards, and directed him not to tell anyone else about their intimate online relationship, including his family.
The arrest has shaken his family, who denied allegations that their son was a terrorist and said that he had been manipulated by the FBI. Ventura’s father, Paul Ventura, told The Intercept that Mateo suffered from childhood developmental issues and had been forced to leave his school due to bullying from other students.
“He was born prematurely, he had brain development issues. I had the school do a neurosurgery evaluation on him and they said his brain was underdeveloped,” Ventura said. “He was suffering endless bullying at school with other kids taking food off his plate, tripping him in the hallway, humiliating him, laughing at him.”
Contrary to the sensational narrative fed to the news media of terrorist financing in the U.S., the charging documents show that Ventura gave an undercover FBI agent gift cards for pitifully small amounts of cash, sometimes in $25 increments. In his initial bid to travel to the Islamic State, the teenager balked — making up an excuse, by the FBI’s own account, to explain why he did not want to go. When another opportunity to travel abroad arose, Ventura balked again, staying home on the evening of his supposed flight instead of traveling to the airport. By the time the investigation was winding down, he appeared ready to turn in his purported ISIS contact — an FBI agent — to the FBI.
This case is especially ironic considering the US government supported ISIS and ISIS was only destroyed after Trump got into office and shut down a CIA program that was arming ISIS-aligned terrorists in Syria to fight a proxy war against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
FBI whistleblowers came forward last year to reveal that the FBI was “pressuring” agents to reclassify cases as “domestic violent extremism” — regardless of the facts of the case — in order to bolster the Biden regime’s narrative that white extremists are the “greatest threat” our country faces.
Ventura’s case reminds me of a similar story from a while back where an undercover cop befriended/groomed an autistic student into buying him small amounts of drugs just so he could bust him. The kids’ mother said how the agent was her son’s best/only friend and he was more hurt by his one “friend” betraying him than being faced with prison.
Grooming the mentally ill and disabled is par for the course for this corrupt regime.