[Libertarian Institute] From the early 1990s onward, I was exposing FBI crimes, lies, and cover-ups. FBI director Louis Freeh publicly denounced me after I wrote a Wall Street Journal piece on the FBI’s killing of an innocent mother holding her baby at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. I continued hammering FBI abuses in the Journal, Playboy, American Spectator, and other publications.One of the FBI’s biggest blunders occurred when it falsely accused a hapless security guard of masterminding an explosion at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Richard Jewell heroically saved lives by detecting and removing a pipe bomb before it exploded. But the FBI decided that Jewell had actually planted the bomb and leaked that charge to the media, which proceeded to drag Jewell’s life through the dirt for eighty-eight days. The FBI did nothing to curb the media harassment long after it recognized Jewell was innocent. I flogged the FBI’s vilification of Jewell in my 2000 book, Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years.
In August 2001, I took a brief vacation in the mountains of western North Carolina. My then spouse was leafing through a tourist guidebook and swooned over a chalet inn she saw that was far off the beaten path. Alas, the directions to that hideaway were not worth a plug nickel. After futilely roving that zip code for an hour, I pulled up in front of a hardware store in Whittier, a one-stoplight hamlet, to cuss and recheck the map.
I stepped out of my car and fired up a cheap cigar as I leaned against the front hood of my Ford. Ninety seconds later, a big ol’ bald guy wearing bib overalls came bounding out of the hardware store and asked in a booming voice: "What part of Maryland you from?"
"Rockville," I replied.