Another FBI Scandal That Did Not Get Nearly the Attention It Deserved

by Chris Black

In 2018, a limousine crash caused the deaths of 20 people, mostly white.

The crash was caused by the limo’s brake system failing due to lack of maintenance.

The FBI is at fault due to the fact that the limo company was owned by Nauman Hussain, a long time federal “counter-terrorism” informant.

Hussain’s vehicles previously failed safety inspections and he was deemed unfit to run this company. He used his connections in the Bureau to bypass the rules which led to one of deadliest traffic accidents in modern history.

In other words, the feds empower and enable real threats to the public in order to frame innocent people in bogus and sensationalist terror plots.

13,000 Pounds at 118 Miles Per Hour 

It was the deadliest wreck in years. And the man behind it was one of the FBI’s most notorious informants.

…”The Schoharie tragedy was the deadliest transportation disaster in the U.S. in almost a decade, including plane crashes. It was one of the worst single-car wrecks in the history of the automobile, comparable only to accidents involving buses or trucks that caught fire, sank, or fell off cliffs. But the story would likely have faded from awareness, as car crashes invariably do, if not for one factor: Nauman Hussain’s father, Shahed, the owner of Prestige Limousine, was a longtime confidential informant for the FBI and one of the most notorious operatives in the agency’s history. In upstate New York, where a pair of federal terrorism investigations had left Muslim communities seething and in despair, many people gasped when they saw his name connected with the Schoharie crash.

“It’s this feeling that we’re cursed,” says Steve Downs, an Albany lawyer and political activist. “Each time his name comes up, you say, ‘This is it. We finally got to the end.’ But it just keeps coming back — this guy.”

Shahed Hussain undercover in 2003. Photo: FBI / Department of Justice

The impact of Hussain’s FBI cases was not confined to the region. They were legal landmarks in the War on Terror, helping establish the legitimacy of secret evidence, warrantless wiretapping, and the government’s practice of inventing terror plots to entrap ordinary Americans with no prior connection to violent Islamic groups. For this, the Hussain family received hundreds of thousands of dollars, which helped them open and operate several businesses around Albany. Prestige and the others racked up safety violations, some of them egregious, yet were never shut down by regulators.

“The FBI enabled Shahed Hussain to feel that he could get away with anything,” says Kathy Manley, an Albany attorney who has represented men still serving multi-decade prison terms because of Hussain’s undercover activities and who sees a connection between his anti-terror work and the 20 dead in Schoharie. “He clearly didn’t care about the limousine being unsafe, and apparently neither did his son.” The larger unanswered question is whether anyone in government had helped the Hussains when their businesses ran into trouble over the years. If they had, it would make the government complicit in an unspeakable catastrophe. Few in power are willing to discuss Shahed and Nauman Hussain. One of the sources who did, when I began to call around last winter, speculated that the family belongs to a class beyond the reach of law enforcement — whose leverage confers something close to impunity.”…