THE FBI has raided former UN weapons inspector and intelligence official Scott Ritter’s New York home, apparently only 24 hours after he made online comments about the Israeli Defence Forces jail rape scandal that has rocked the country.
An FBI spokeswoman has told media that agents conducted a raid on the Delmar home “as part of a federal investigation” but declined to comment further, citing the continuing investigations.
Ritter told reporters outside his home that he was told by agents that they had concerns about possible violations of the Foreign Agents’ Registration Act, but he emphatically denied he had done anything in violation of the Act.
Ritter has also been a strong critic of the Ukrainian-Russia war and said he believed he had been targeted because he has attempted to improve relations between Russia and the US. Ritter recently had his passport seized by the US Department of State when he tried to fly to Russia for a conference, which he said was a spiteful move against his pro-Russia stances.
The raid also came a day after Ritter joined Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in an Albany (New York) courtroom for a hearing over whether Kennedy, an independent presidential candidate, should be on New York’s November ballot.
Ritter, who is undoubtedly a thorn in the side of the Washington establishment, was found guilty in 2011 of having an explicit online chat with a detective who pretended to be a 15-year-old girl. He spent about two and a half years in prison.
He was also twice accused in 2001 of having indecent contact with teenage girls, including arranging a sex rendezvous at Burger King with someone he believed was a 16-year-old girl. The charges related to this were dismissed.
Ritter was a weapons inspector in Iraq during the 1990s as part of an international effort to disarm Saddam Hussein’s regime. But in 1998 he resigned in protest and became a vocal critic of US foreign policy in the run up to the Iraq War.
In 2022 Ritter’s Twitter account was suspended after he claimed Ukrainian police, not Russian forces, killed hundreds of people in the Kiev suburb of Bucha.
