Anonymous Goes To The Movies! Informant w/ Brandon Darby

Anonymous Goes To The Movies!

"Informant" directed by Jamie Metzler, featuring Brandon Darby




We caught the documentary “Informant” starring none other than Brandon Darby, someone who proudly proclaims to have worked for the FBI, and the subsequent debate between he and David McKay, the 2008 RNC protester whom he entrapped making molotov cocktails. As you can imagine, the debate devolved into Brandon and David hurling accusations at one another an audience members calling him a snitch, and one disrespectful buffoon had to be escorted out after he wouldn't shut up, yelling VIVA CHAVEZ for no apparently good reason and taking up the time for other audience members to ask questions.

The documentary details Brandon's mercurial journey starting as a supposedly self-identifying left wing or anarchist activist helping with Hurricane Katrina disaster relief in New Orleans at the Common Ground Collective. Brandon was disaffected enough by the government's response to the disaster that he hypothesized on camera that he might take up arms against it. He was labeled anti-government by the local police but was able to find common ground (lol) in their fight to survive and rebuild. Brandon, still dismayed at the inaction, decided to reach out to the Venezuelan government for aid, to which they accepted and brought him to visit, while insinuating an underlying motive to embarrass the US government asking for aid from a foreign nation.

In Venezuela, the story appears to become muddled. Brandon enjoyed the revolutionary spirit of the country, but when he agrees to go visit Colombia with the Venezuelan state oil company to meet FARC rebels, Brandon's views seemed to take on a whole new trajectory. We felt we didn't get a complete accounting of what happened, other than a nebulous story involving him being accused of being CIA and needing bodyguards, all being interspliced with director Jaime Metzler's staging of re-enactments, which didn't answer much at all about Brandon's experience but seemed like a self-serving distraction. Brandon later returned back to New Orleans, dismayed and in a dark place. We felt we were missing key parts of the story.

Brandon eventually left New Orleans and goes back home to Austin, where he found himself again immersed in an activist scene. From the network of friends he met in New Orleans that included former Black Panthers, he met other Black Panthers in Austin, whom wanted to take him for a ride and bring them into their world. He's surprised to find out that rather than going through with an initiation that involved violent acts that they started pimping a multi-level marketing scheme to him, which was undoubtedly the funniest moment in the film. He also became friends with a local Lebanese Palestinian freedom activist named Riad Hamad, with whom he shared in similar revolutionary interests.

It's interesting to note that the differences from which the movie narrative and his own reported narrative begin to diverge. Brandon, according to his writings, was going to go to with Riad to Gaza to act as human shields against the IDF, while assisting an NGO called the Palestinian Children's Welfare Fund (PCWF), but then supposedly got embroiled with Riad supposedly wanting to plot terrorist attacks against Israel using medics and ambulances as suicide bombers. In the movie, that narrative backtracks as Brandon only seems to note that Riad wanted him to send money using debit cards to Palestine, and this is what aroused suspicion of him when Riad asked others to do so, and that this is what we the filmviewers are lead to believe that this was the reason which spurred his decision to go to the FBI and become an informant against Riad. A federal raid was launched on Riad's property, not under suspicion of terrorism but of fraud, and the casual viewer of this film is supposed to believe that Riad was so distraught by being investigated by the FBI that he took his own life by bounding and gagging himself with duct tape and throwing himself in a lake to drown to give the appearance that he was murdered. Brandon makes it seem like he felt bad about what happened, even though he's made contradicting public statements. He pre-emptively denied that he was a Mossad hitman or that they could have been responsible during the Q&A without being asked. Jamie did not present any of Riad's friends or family for their accounts in the film.

Brandon is then given intel by his FBI handlers saying there's a group of anarchists in Austin going up to Minneapolis for the 2008 Republican National Convention, dubbed the RNC Welcoming Committee, whom included David McKay and Bradley Crowder. Their group's videos on Youtube were of obviously satirical black bloc tactics, but was apparently enough to have gotten the FBI's attention. Brandon was tasked with infiltrating the group and to perform surveillance, essentially hijacking the crew, who was bringing their own custom defense shields. As Brandon was performing surveillance on their crew, whom were allegedly throwing stuff off of an Interstate overpass which he reported to the FBI, they secretly raided the custom defense shields. Livid at the action, but not yet knowing that Brandon was an informant, David and Brad in a day long fit of rage bought the supplies for and created eight molotov cocktails.

The rest of what happened seems completely up for interpretation based on who you hear it from, but despite the fact the convention was over, and despite David and Brad backing off of their plans to throw the molotovs at vacant cop cars, Brandon was still being pushed by his handlers at the FBI to get them in the act so it looked like their work at the RNC wasn't a total wash, wearing a wire as he did so. Brandon induced a statement that proved dubious intent to use the molotovs, the FBI raided the place they were staying the next morning at the earliest raid time of 6am, apparently unable to convince a judge for an earlier time. The FBI and the US Attorney's office would then make the case the molotov cocktails were unregistered, illegally manufactured firearms without serial numbers to make the case against David and Brad, as opposed to domestic terrorism or even for allegedly throwing debris onto a federal highway. Brandon could have chosen to remain a confidential informant and not testify but they would have to take plea deals to lesser charges, and Brandon decided that he wanted to make them pay for their actions. Brad would take a two year plea deal and David would be sentenced to four years after a second trial.

Out as an informant, Brandon was scorned by many of his former Common Ground partners, including Scott Crow and Lisa Fithian. However, seeing a political opportunity against supposed left-wingers to exploit for his personal and political agenda, notorious asshat Andrew Breitbart hailed Brandon as a hero and took him under his wing. Brandon had now gone full circle, standing on a supposed right-wing soapbox to make accusations and spout rhetoric on tours around the country for the pro-corporate personhood Citizens United and the Tea Party, bashing his former comrades along with organizations like Occupy Wall Street he perceived to be left-wing or anarchist. The movie then closes out with Brandon showing how he sleeps at night - with a shotgun and a home alarm system.

One crowdmember in attendance called Brandon a prostitute. Others called him a sociopath, patriarchical, amongst other things. It is hard for us to describe him without resorting to derogatory name calling, since we get self-serving narratives, glaring omissions, rewrites, gloating, and distortions all the time from him. He mentioned in his debate that he sees things from a left-right perspective, giving away that he sees political conflict in a binary paradigm where he believes whatever others around him believe, and those who don't are simply the rest. He then ranted about how the left-wing, liberal, anarchist and peace & justice movements aren't able to police themselves, using the crux of this single incident at the RNC to justify his point even though he could have more forcefully intervened. What this movie definitely should have been named, as opposed to “Informant” should have been “Brandon Darby Tells A Story” since it was clearly a movie all about him and his choices from his perspective, rather than a documentary examining and critiquing the phenomenon of the use of informants by police in America.  That is a movie we hope to eventually see.

As for this “Informant” we give the film a 3/10.