In 2016, Flaviu Georgescu was found guilty and sentenced of attempting to traffic weapons to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, an insurgent group on the U.S. terror list. But when he was arrested by Drug Enforcement Administration agents, he told the officials he was working for the CIA. The majority of defendants in post-9/11 terrorist cases had no actual ties to terrorism or to terrorist organizations. Many were caught in FBI stings, where informants posed as terrorists often crossing the line into encouraging and even facilitating crimes that would otherwise not have occurred. As the war on terror has waned, the DOJ has shifted its focus, with its agencies including the DEA " now targeting people for similar sting operations on allegations of involvement in so-called "narcoterrorism." The FBI ... would identify someone who was espousing views that might be sympathetic to those organizations, or even an attack, and they would encourage that person to get involved. Some of the targets of investigations were very financially desperate. The FBI, through the informant, would dangle the opportunity to make money. In those cases, the vast majority of people have no connections to real terrorist groups, they have no access to weapons. And the FBI provides everything. A bomb, grenades, automatic rifles ... guns that would be very difficult to obtain, even by sophisticated criminals. When the defendant goes about to use the weapon, they're arrested, and they're charged, and announced to the public as a terrorist who was about to get involved in this very deadly plot were it not foiled by the FBI. The Intercept [documents] these cases through Trial and Terror. We've seen hundreds of these cases involving sting operations since 9/11. What this has done ... in the post-9/11 era, was really exaggerate the threat of terrorism from within Muslim communities in the United States. And, on the news, it really made the public think that the threat of terrorism within the United States from these communities was much, much greater than it really was.