![]() That prompted the bureau to recruit a young Colorado Springs Police detective, April Rogers, to infiltrate the activist community there. ![]() While investigating racial justice demonstrators in Denver, Windecker provided information about a protester who was active in both Denver and Colorado Springs, according to FBI records. Both are now under scrutiny in federal court.Īpril Rogers, left, a police officer who went undercover for the FBI in the Colorado Springs activist community, participating in a 2021 housing rights march during which several activists were arrested. Windecker’s work for the FBI resulted in at least two investigations: one in Colorado Springs, led by a young female detective, and the other in Denver, led by Windecker himself. Nevertheless, the FBI paid Windecker more than $20,000 for his work during the summer of 2020. The FBI also knew that Windecker had a long history of working the system as an informant, going back as far as two decades earlier, when he’d been a jailhouse snitch in a murder-for-hire case. The FBI, in its reports, stated Windecker had come forward voluntarily out of some sort of duty to protect the United States, but the bureau’s documented knowledge of Windecker complicated that claim: The FBI was aware that Windecker had prior arrests in at least four states and had been convicted of misdemeanor sexual assault and felony menacing with a weapon. ![]() ![]() As an example, Windecker claimed one Black activist, Zebbodios “Zebb” Hall, said of the city of Denver: “We need to burn this motherfucker down.”īased on statements he claimed to have overheard and a recording he secretly made of Hall speaking vaguely about training and revolution, the FBI enlisted Windecker as a paid informant and asked him to pose as a racial justice demonstrator. But Windecker’s tips, according to initial FBI reports, were entirely about speech. Windecker then approached the FBI, claiming to have unique information about racial justice protesters. Internal FBI reports showed that Windecker, a tattooed, cigar-smoking white man who drove a silver hearse, first attended racial justice demonstrations in the Denver area in May 2020. While being paid by the FBI, Windecker accused movement leaders of being informants themselves encouraged violence at protests and tried unsuccessfully to entrap two Black activists in a plot to assassinate the state’s attorney general. ![]() During the summer of 2020, the FBI secretly hired an informant, Michael “Mickey” Windecker, to infiltrate the racial justice movement in Denver. That filing - the government’s first public response to revelations that the FBI infiltrated the racial justice movement in Denver using a violent felon as a paid informant - claimed that the “violent nature” of the activists’ statements “made them a legitimate subject of investigation.” In a separate federal case in Denver, the Justice Department last week did not deny that the government’s initial investigation of racial justice activists was prompted by speech. The FBI’s targeting of racial justice activists was revealed in February by The Intercept and the podcast series “ Alphabet Boys.” The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, accuses the FBI, the Colorado Springs Police Department, and local police officers of overstepping their authority in infiltrating, surveilling, and requesting search warrants aimed at Colorado Springs activists. The FBI’s secret infiltration and subversion of the racial justice movement in Colorado was challenged Tuesday in a lawsuit alleging that federal and local law enforcement officials abused their powers when they targeted left-wing activists in the summer of 2020. ![]()
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