In early February 2020, just a few days before his release from federal prison, Davis says he was summoned to a meeting with an investigator from the FBI.
He was already looking forward to a different life, reconnecting with his family and friends, maybe even returning to the acting career he had left behind. But the FBI wanted to talk first.
It was a kind of exit interview. As a convicted domestic terrorist, Davis had spent most of the last decade assuming everything he did, said and wrote was being monitored and logged somewhere.
The FBI, he says now, "wanted to feel me out, to check my temperature."
"We had a pretty good discussion," he says of the meeting with the agent. "We talked about psychology, the tactics they use to get me on."
At one point, he distinctly remembers the agent remarking that the bureau was interested in checking in on him one last time, and then adding, "We just want to make sure you're not going to get out and start a revolution."
While Davis says he was flattered — "I was really kind of shocked at how much they think of me" — it was a later question that truly caught him off guard: The agent had turned the interview around, asking for Davis' advice: "What could we have done to prevent you from going down this path of violence?"
Davis says he challenged the question. After all, weeks before his arrest in 2014, the FBI's confidential informants, both with felonies on their records, had given Davis the cash to purchase several pistols on their behalf — a federal crime of "straw buying" in its own right.
The FBI could have arrested him at any time after that, long before he was approached with an opportunity to buy explosives.
"But they didn't do that, they continued to bring me along, until I broke," Davis says now. "I told him that. My exact words were, 'You were wicked for that.' You could have stopped all of it, there wouldn't have been terrorism; there wouldn't have been bomb charges. I wouldn't have been in prison all this time. But you all did that."
