It was a shocking sight last November: The cameras were rolling when the FBI slapped Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner into handcuffs and charged him with taking a bribe. The Boston media took the FBI’s word for it: Turner had been caught red-handed. They had him on tape.

Boston talk show host Emily Rooney assured her listeners that “The pictures are damning” and that it was “highly doubtful” that they were fake. She then led her panel in a discussion emphasizing that the evidence against Turner was very “strong, very solid”. A follow-up story on her website drove home the point with the title “Incriminating pictures of Chuck Turner say a thousand words”.

Rooney was not the only one anxious to rush to judgment. The day after Turner’s arrest, the Boston Globe ran an editorial stressing the importance of removing bad apples like Turner from our political life. In a column practically dripping with racist sentiments, Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen ridiculed any idea that Turner should be presumed innocent: “Now, while Chuck doesn't think much of the Constitution, given that it was written by a bunch of white guys who owned slaves, it does afford him certain rights, such as the presumption of innocence. Of course, that presumption became pretty meaningless when the FBI released the grainy video showing Chuck taking a wad of cash from their informant.” The Globe rushed out another editorial assuring its readers that “Stings are not entrapment”, and news stories characterized Turner’s claims of innocence as a “PR initiative”.

But to those who knew Chuck Turner best, something in the FBI charges just didn’t add up. Turner began to get strong support from his 7th District constituents, from the Green-Rainbow Party, and from respected community leaders. They cited Turner’s 42-year history of integrity. They pointed out that on many occasions, when other politicians were taking campaign checks from big donors and selling out their community, it was only Chuck Turner who stood on the side of the people. They noted that Turner was one local leader who consistently spurned the party invitations from the City’s well-heeled powerbrokers and spent his evenings meeting with his low income constituents in church basements and in his storefront district office. To many of his black and Latino constituents, Chuck was the only honest politician they had ever seen. He was the only one they could trust. They had a hard time reconciling the FBI accusations with the person they had known for years.

The press seemed willing to condemn Turner without carefully reading the 11-page FBI affidavit submitted to justify Turner’s arrest. That document, far from documenting Turner’s guilt, casts serious doubt upon the FBI’s credibility and motives. The most striking aspect of the affidavit is that it shows that Turner never solicited any money from the FBI’s informant. Nor did Turner promise to do anything for the informant based on an offer of money. Basically, the FBI informant just started his hidden camera and shoved a wad of unsolicited bill’s into Turner’s hands. That act fails to meet the definition of bribery, which requires that the public official solicit money in exchange for performing an official act.

The FBI did not catch Chuck Turner committing a crime, as the Boston media so consistently reported. In fact, the FBI staged a picture in which their informant handed Chuck Turner a wad of unsolicited bills for no clear reason. This is not a crime. In fact, every politician on Beacon Hill has probably been handed some cash by a constituent who wishes to show support for their reelection campaign. Donations up to $50 are perfectly legal. Donations more than this have to be made by check to facilitate reporting. If the donation is more than $50, as the FBI claims, then the usual practice is to return all except $50 and request that a check be written. No one has ever been threatened with 20 years in prison for accepting cash donations - until now.

Then there is the tape that the FBI did NOT release to the media. The affidavit states that on September 12 Wilburn came to Turner’s City Hall office in a second attempt to get Turner to commit an offense. According to the affidavit "The CW was unable to discretely provide the cash to TURNER while TURNER's assistant stood nearby.” But if Turner were really on the take, why didn't Turner ask the assistant to leave or invite Wilburn to meet privately in his office, or suggest a place to rendezvous later? It appears that Turner’s assistant, and Turner himself, were not interested in facilitating a cash transfer from the witness. This certainly runs counter to the FBI’s assertion that Turner was engaged in hot pursuit of illegal cash.

When shorn of speculation and innuendo, the FBI affidavit is a decidedly unconvincing document. The crime it claims to have observed was entirely orchestrated by the FBI without any encouragement or active participation from Chuck Turner. But if Chuck Turner is really a remarkably honest public figure, and is clearly reluctant to do anything illegal, why would the FBI go after him? To understand that, we have to

understand an important aspect of the story that has never been mentioned in the Boston Globe. For several years Turner has been one of the most visible and highly placed critics of FBI infringements upon civil liberties. In addition to his criticism of police powers granted under the Patriot Act, Turner has been a speaker at rallies calling for the release of Leonard Peltier, a leader of the American Indian Movement who was convicted in the 1977 killings of two FBI agents at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Turner agrees with those who say that Peltier’s trail was tainted and that the FBI may have targeted him in order to make an Indian Movement leader pay for the deaths of their agents. (In questioning the Peltier conviction, Turner is in the company of Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, and Amnesty International.) The FBI has been quite active in exerting both legal and political pressure to keep Peltier behind bars. When it appeared in 2000 that President Clinton was considering pardoning Peltier, the FBI Agents Association organized a 500-agent protest at the White House and FBI director Louis Freeh sent a letter opposing the pardon. Anyone like Turner, who speaks at pro-Peltier rallies, surely has been identified by the FBI as a supporter of groups targeted by the FBI.

Then in 2005, an FBI sniper killed Puerto Rican separatist leader Ojeda Rios by shooting him through his kitchen window after an aborted attempt to storm his house. Because they let Rios lay on his kitchen floor without medical help for 18 hours, there was widespread anger in Puerto Rico by people who believed that the FBI had deliberately sought his death. A rally was held outside the FBI’s Boston offices to demand an investigation into the shooting. Two Boston City Councilors spoke at the rally. One was Felix Arroyo. The other was Chuck Turner. It would be quite naive to assume that the FBI did not have undercover agents at that rally carefully recording the names of all speakers.

Citing the lack of legitimate law enforcement motivation in the Turner case, the Green-Rainbow Party asked the Department of Justice to investigate the FBI motives in staging the arrest of Turner. Rather than launching their own independent investigation, the DoJ referred the case to the FBI. And within a week the FBI, citing no evidence, issued the conclusion that they had done nothing wrong. According to Green-Rainbow co-chair Eli Beckerman” The refusal to take seriously the possible violation of civil rights in the Turner case is disturbing. If the FBI is free to manufacture criminal charges against public officials who question possible FBI abuses, it silences those who would speak up in defense of our civil rights.”