Always respond to a cheap shot

On August 16, Law Enforcement Today.com (LET) published an editorial that attacked me as a person and as a former FBI agent because I had the audacity to ask LET’s owner, Robert Greenberg, and its current Executive Director, Kyle Reyes, to reveal the identity of “Jim Patrick.” Jim Patrick is a fake name used by an allegedly retired police chief with 30 years in law enforcement.

My first instinct was to respond in kind to this nonsense and I had already drafted a lengthy and pretty harsh response. But then just this morning, as I reread some of the comments that many of you posted following LET’s editorial about me, I thought—nah, not going to do it. I wrote this instead.

?How did all this begin?

After the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, Reyes posted a particularly disturbing meme on his Facebook page with the caption “The FBI has officially sold out America.” One of his FB followers then posted a comment wondering how many FBI agents disagree with that search yet remain quiet because they need the job to put food on the table.

I replied to that person, “Don’t believe everything you see on this site or LET” and added a link to a piece I wrote about LET previously on LinkedIn.

That generated this reply from Reyes:

“Dear Frank- you’re still desperately searching for attention in your “retirement”, eh? Some of your coworkers have shared stories with us about your liberal extremism and how your partisanship impacted your ability to do your job.

“Here’s our recommendation. Perhaps do something productive with whatever days you have left. Because these desperate pleas for relevancy aren’t becoming of you and just bring shame to your family and whatever shred of a “legacy” you thought you had.

“You aren’t “law enforcement”. You are the definition of what desperately needs to be rooted out of law enforcement. You are a shining example of the corruption seeking to undermine our Constitution. And you’ve become the laughingstock of the community.” (I added the emphasis).

What better example of the lies that regularly appear on LET than what Reyes wrote about me? And it went downhill from there if you care to review the entire thread linked in the fourth paragraph above.

So, who actually wrote the LET editorial about me? It carries the byline “Sgt. A. Merica” which is a cute creation of LET to allow “…those in the community…to remain anonymous to protect their positions in departments across America. We publish these stories under the name Sgt. A. Merica.”

Regardless of byline, the similarity in language, tone, and style between Sgt. A. Merica and Kyle Reyes is more than obvious. But then, I could be wrong. One way to know for sure is for the author to identify himself.

Neither I nor the FBI need any defending from the kind of nonsense that regularly populates LET. However, my purpose in challenging their garbage is to, hopefully, reach a few of their followers who still have the capacity to discern fact from fiction—or at least take a breath before swallowing LET’s bile.

And just since Reyes and I had our FB duel, it appears that at least two of his followers have taken that breath. That’s a start. And that’s how all of us can contribute to clearing the fog that envelops a lot of social media and internet discussions--by inserting a few moments of clarity.

We all must be alert to the sublime attempts that organizations like LET and individuals like Reyes employ when they trash entire swaths of the population, politicians and even the FBI.

They write the most caustic and often untrue things (usually purloined from obscure sources) about, for example, the FBI and then when challenged on it, they rationalize their behavior by saying something meant to be soothing like this, “To be clear, our criticism of the FBI is not intended for the 99% of personnel who do their jobs and do them very well. We are directing our ire at the 1% of FBI personnel who have used their position to launch and participate in partisan attacks against political opponents of the ‘ruling class.’”

Or when I call out LET’s cowardly unidentified writers who compare the FBI to the Gestapo, the response from LET is, “Scafidi held his tail firmly between his legs when back in 2020 Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi, Ilhan Omar, and others referred to federal law enforcement officers as “Gestapo,” “Storm Troopers,” and “occupying armies.”

Sorry, but that’s just deflecting the fire from your nose to someone else’s. It’s called “whataboutism.” When you paint the FBI in such demeaning and disgusting terms, you are tainting everyone who works for the FBI. You can’t later claim later that you didn’t mean what you said. ??

Sgt. A. Merica even uses that technique in response to my criticism of “Jim Patrick.” In his hit piece on me he wrote, “Could Jim [Patrick] be a little bit more ‘diplomatic?’ Perhaps. But if one looks at the tactics employed by the agency over the past 5-6 years, the comparison between the Stasi and the FBI is pretty close, minus the killings.”

So in excusing "Patrick's" use of Gestapo, "A. Merica" compares the FBI to Stasi—in something LET published only four days ago! No thanks, I’m not buying. Go sell that crap to One America News, or Newsmax, or Dan Bongino, or Tucker Carlson, they’ll gladly have you on their shows.

I don’t expect politicians to behave honestly. But I do expect that from sworn law enforcement officers and their supporters. So, when a former anonymous cop (allegedly) compares the FBI to the Gestapo, or Stasi, well, that crosses a line and there’s nothing else to say but an apology.

"Sgt. A. Merica" ends his rant with this: “The fact of the matter is, people such as Frankie Scafidi, the alleged former FBI agent, don’t bother us. We love to engage with the haters.

“It would just be nice if some of them had the intestinal fortitude to engage with us in person, mano a mano so to speak. C’mon Frankie. Take up Kyle on his offer to debate you…it won’t cost you a thing…except your man card.”

I’ve come to realize that there will always be people who see things differently and that’s OK. I’m not so full of myself that I can’t accept or respect someone else’s differing opinion. And I can ignore the personal attacks because, frankly, when someone has no game, that’s always a common fallback tactic.

I would encourage you to watch this video, produced by LET, featuring Kyle Reyes and Marjorie Taylor Greene at an “America First” rally in Plainfield, CT in October of last year. And after you watch that one, scroll down to the video featuring Kyle Reyes and retired Gen. Michael Flynn.

I will continue to call out things from LET and Kyle Reyes or “Jim Patrick” or anyone else who talks trash about the FBI or compares it to the Gestapo or Stasi, particularly as they cozy up to others who actively undermine the very institutions that exist to protect democracy and those who serve in them. ?