FBI Operated Domestic Terrorism Investigation Within CHAZ/CHOP In 2020 Prior To Shootings
New details concerning the use of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Seattle Police Department (SPD) informants have been revealed as part of an internal accountability investigation at SPD. They show that the FBI was engaged in a “domestic terrorism” investigation within the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP), also known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), around the SPD’s East Precinct and that the timing of that FBI investigation occurred prior to numerous shootings in and around the CHOP.
The presence of an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) investigation potentially could have had contractual implications for the SPD and how the city engaged or disengaged in law enforcement operations around the East Precinct.
SPD and the FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the fallout of the 2020 protests, thousands of complaints against the SPD were filed with Seattle’s Office of Police Accountability (OPA). While investigating one of those complaints, on October 23, 2020, the OPA interviewed Lieutenant Grant Ballingham who led SPD’s intelligence unit during the 2020 protests. Ballingham was asked directly, “did you use any covert human intelligence sources” during the protests?
“No” Ballingham answered.
“None at all?” then-OPA Assistant Director Gráinne Perkins asked again.
“No” Ballingham replied.
Within a torrent of disinformation spread by the SPD during the 2020 protests, HardPressed felt the public is deserving of truth and that Ballingham’s answer necessitated accountability. HardPressed then filed an OPA complaint (2025OPA-0112) against Ballingham directly in March 2025, alleging he was dishonest in his answer.
The use of informants within law enforcement investigations has increasingly come under public scrutiny. A previous informant used by the FBI Seattle in 2011 told The Intercept that he'd help to engineer a terrorism plot with the FBI while the SPD left a rape kit with the informant's DNA sit untested for 13 years. That case also involved scores of destroyed text messages.
In May and November 2025, Real Change reported definitively that informants were, in fact, used during the 2020 protests.
However, almost a year later, the OPA has not closed HardPressed’s complaint against Ballingham, nor issued any findings of fact. Frustrated by OPA’s lack of action, HardPressed requested the case documentation held by OPA in October 2025 and yesterday the OPA released records responsive to that request.
The internal case files show that the OPA conducted a new interview in September 2025 of SPD Detective Jonathan Huber, who serves as a task force officer assigned to the FBI Seattle Safe Streets Task Force (SSTF) which operated informants during the protests.
Within his interview, Huber revealed that the FBI “contacted me, because I have a lot of informants, and asked me if I had anyone that would be willing to go in [to the CHOP/CHAZ]. Most of my informants, they’re signed up with SPD and are a majority of them are also signed up with the FBI as well.”
While Huber and an OPA investigator reviewed an email showing the use of an informant on June 13 2020, Huber said that “Just so you know that that operation, like SPD, had no involvement in that whatsoever. I was actually out of town, and so the agent from the FBI, she ran that informant, like I said, he was signed up at the time with SPD and FBI. So it was like complete FBI operation like SPD had no involvement in sending someone in, and so I don't know how Lieutenant Bellingham would have had any knowledge that it was a that this person had any ties to SPD, that he had dual, you know… deputization to be an informant.”
Huber was asked if he had sent any other intelligence briefings to his sergeant during the 2020 protests. “If I did send anything,” Huber said, “it would have come from informants. It wouldn’t have been from me going in there.”
“The people that are my confidential sources,” Huber told the OPA, “I talk to them every single day, either, you know, in person, phone, text, some of them less frequently, but there’s a number of them that, yeah, I talked to them on a very consistent basis.”
“Generally, in my experience at FBI, I will have an SPD informant and after a certain period of time where they've proven valuable, provided good information, intelligence that's led to potential arrests and things like that, and I think that they could be valuable for federal cases. Then I run it by my FBI counterparts, and we talk about it, and they check them out and see if they could be a good fit for the for the FBI as well. And then they would go through the similar process that they go through with SPD, where we check their criminal history, interview them, have them sign a contract and all that,” Huber told the OPA.
Asked who within the SPD was aware that Huber was operating informants, he said, “I mean, certainly my direct supervisors in the in the gang unit, or [Gun Violence Reduction Unit] and, I mean, I don't know who else would wouldn't would know. I mean, it's not something necessarily we want to advertise, because it's a very sensitive issue with that type of thing, because, you know, there's potential always for these informants to get outed, and then there could be potentially threatened or, you know, harmed or even killed.”
Huber recounted that “I could go into all kinds of details about different sources that have been threatened, assaulted, had property damaged over the years, and we even had a guy in 2018 that was murdered. He was not a source, but everybody else on the case got booked that day, but we were so swamped, we didn’t book him, and everybody thought out on the streets that he was cooperating with the police. Later that summer, he got murdered.”
At SPD, “there's very few units that that run informants. We do, narcotics does, and I think to a certain extent extent Intel [intelligence unit] does, but my people that I run, they met certain criteria that we believe that will allow them to get into the CHOP-CHAZ and not be challenged as being law enforcement or assisting law enforcement,” Huber told the OPA.
“Is there any sort of de-conflict, like if the intelligence unit is running the source and you are in the same area, is there any sort of de-confliction going on?” the OPA asked Huber.
“I would say that was a very unique situation, one that I'd never seen before in my career, the CHOP-CHAZ situation,” Huber responded. “And sometimes we would like de-conflict things. I don't but if it's an outside agency like FBI is running it like I don't, they wouldn't necessarily notify SPD that they were doing anything.”
Looking at the email about the use of an informant on June 13 2020, Huber said he “wasn't quite sure what the FBI was going to utilize with this information, because after it was given to me, it went to another squad that deals with domestic terrorism, because that's what the FBI was looking at.”