Report: FBI, Secret Service Sought to Strip Gun Rights

The FBI, Secret Service, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement worked together between 2011 and 2019 to get at least 60 U.S. citizens to sign a form stripping them of their gun rights, the Washington Examiner is reporting.

Records obtained by the Examiner show that in one case, the government worked out a plea agreement with a defendant stipulating they sign the secret form that removed their rights to buy, own, or use firearms.

The form was not authorized through Congress and has been called "unconstitutional" by some Republican lawmakers.

A June 10, 2019, letter written by a lawyer to a Secret Service agent in West Palm Beach, Florida, reads: "Dear Agent [redacted], "You will find enclosed the NICS firearm form which has been signed by my client and his doctor. This is being provided in compliance with [redacted] plea agreement. Yours sincerely."

The Examiner noted it is unclear what the defendant was being charged with and why the FBI and Secret Service were involved. Also unclear was why the government used the form in this particular case. The form registers people into the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System and asks those who sign it to identify as a "danger" to themselves or others or also lacking the "mental capacity adequately to contract" their lives, according to the Examiner.

The person who signed the agreement was evidently not prohibited from owning guns until voluntarily signing the form, the Examiner said.

"There's a bit of a contradiction," Gilbert Ambler, a constitutional attorney who specializes in firearms law, told the news outlet. "They're having you agree you're incompetent. If you're incompetent, how is that a binding agreement?"

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and other Republicans have demanded the FBI and Justice Department verify that they have removed records of people who secretly signed forms waiving their rights to own, buy, or use firearms.

Gun Owners of America, a firearms rights group, has called upon the DOJ and the FBI to remove the records relating to the forms.