DHS Issues A Domestic Terrorist Threat Warning For The First Time

Warning that the deadly rampage of the Capitol this month may not have been an isolated episode, the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday said publicly for the first time that the United States faced a growing threat from “violent domestic extremists” emboldened by the attack. The New York Times reports, Extremists Emboldened by Capitol Attack Pose Rising Threat, Homeland Security Says:

The department’s national terrorism alert bulletin did not name specific groups that might be behind any future attacks, but it made clear that their motivation would include anger over “the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives,” a clear reference to the accusations made by President Donald J. Trump and echoed by right-wing groups that the 2020 election was stolen.

“D.H.S. is concerned these same drivers to violence will remain through early 2021,” the department said.

In other words, “we’re watching you Trump/QAnon cult members sharing your civil war cosplay fantasies on social media about completing your seditious violent insurrection and overthrow of the lawful government of the United States to install your fascist “Dear Leader” as America’s first dictator.”

Maybe this batshit crazy civil war cosplay fantasies on social media is what this national terrorism alert bulletin is referencing. Vice reports, QAnon Thinks Trump Will Become President Again on March 4:

Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 19th president of the United States on March 4, 2021.

This is the latest conspiracy that QAnon followers have embraced in the wake of President Joe Biden’s inauguration last week, and extremist experts are worried that it highlights the way QAnon adherents are beginning to merge their beliefs — about the world being run by an elite cabal of cannibalistic satanist pedophiles —with even more extreme ideologies.

The latest claims being made by QAnon supporters echo those of the sovereign citizen movement, a group of people who believe they are not governed by the same laws as everyone else. That belief has led to violent confrontations with law enforcement have viewed them among the top domestic extremist threats facing the country.

“There was some crossover between QAnon and the sovereign citizen movement before, but I’ve seen sovereign citizen ideas about the United States being a ‘corporation’ become more popular within QAnon and beyond in January,” Travis View, a conspiracy theory researcher, told VICE News.

“It’s concerning because it means QAnon is borrowing ideas from more-established extremism movements.”

Sovereign citizens believe that a law enacted in 1871 secretly turned the U.S. into a corporation and did away with the American government of the founding fathers. The group also believes that President Franklin D. Roosevelt sold U.S. citizens out in 1933 when he ended the gold standard and replaced it by offering citizens as collateral to a group of shadowy foreign investors.

Sovereigns use indecipherable legal filings based on arcane texts to separate themselves from the legal entities the government has supposedly created in their name in order to sell to investors.

Boy, don’t I know it! I dealt with one of these crazy fuckers back in the 1990s. It took me almost two years before judges finally stopped humoring him and put an end to his frivolous litigation and abuse of process. I hope that judges are now much more aware of this problem than they were back then.

When that doesn’t work, followers of the sovereign citizen movement have reacted violently. In May 2010, for example, a father-son team of sovereigns murdered two police officers with an assault rifle when they were pulled over on the interstate while traveling through Arkansas.

Now, QAnon followers have latched on to the theory and adapted it to suit their needs.

Over the weekend, QAnon groups on Gab and Telegram, where most QAnon supporters have found a home since they were kicked off Twitter and Parler was de-platformed, commenters have been sharing documents describing the 1871 act, claiming it proves that Trump will be sworn in on March 4.

This chick is some serious batshit crazy!

pic.twitter.com/20lsZGS8y0

— Bad Legal Takes (@BadLegalTakes) January 25, 2021

The source for this date is the fact that 1933 was also the year when inaugurations were changed from March 4 to Jan. 20 — to shorten the lame-duck period of outgoing presidents. QAnon followers believe that Trump will become the president of the original republic, and not the corporation that they believe the 1871 act created.

While there was some crossover between QAnon and the sovereign citizen movement prior to Trump’s election loss, the conspiracy theory has gained a lot of traction in recent days, as QAnon followers struggled to reconcile their beliefs with Biden’s inauguration.

The claims about the U.S. being a corporation have also begun to gain traction outside the main QAnon groups.

“Can someone tell me why I’m 22 years old and I just learned that the United States is a corporation, not a country,” one TikTok user asked in a video posted over the weekend and viewed 47,000 times.

In the comments, other TikTok users repeat the lie about Trump being inaugurated on March 4.

In the wake of Biden’s inauguration, QAnon followers initially appeared despondent, lashing out that QAnon was a sham. But within days, and at the urging of the movement’s biggest influencers, QAnon followers started to come around, and begin to believe in “the plan” once again.

The Times continues:

The Department of Homeland Security does not have information indicating a “specific, credible plot,” according to a statement from the agency. The alert issued was categorized as one warning of developing trends in terrorism, rather than a notice of an imminent attack.

Yeah, DHS did not have information indicating a “specific, credible plot” about January 6 either, despite Donald Trump tweeting about it constantly and it being discussed on social media by Trump/QAnon cult members for months before. Of course, Trump’s acting DHS secretary may have been ordered to stand down and not to take any action, something that should be investigated by Congress.

The FBI did its job but went unheeded. Report: FBI Office Warned Of ‘War’ At U.S. Capitol Despite Claim Attack Was Unknown. Also, Report: Capitol Police knew Congress might be targeted days before attack.

[A]n intelligence official involved in drafting Wednesday’s bulletin said the decision to issue the report was driven by the department’s conclusion that Mr. Biden’s peaceful inauguration last week could create a false sense of security because “the intent to engage in violence has not gone away” among extremists angered by the outcome of the presidential election.

The warning contained in a “National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin” was a notable departure for a Department of Homeland Security accused of being reluctant during the Trump administration to publish intelligence reports or public warnings about the dangers posed by domestic extremists and white supremacist groups for fear of angering Mr. Trump, according to current and former homeland security officials.

Starting with the deadly extremist protest in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, when Mr. Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides,” he played down any danger posed by extremist groups. And when racial justice protests erupted nationwide last year, his consistent message was that it was the so-called radical left that was to blame for the violence and destruction that had punctuated the demonstrations.

Even after the Department of Homeland Security in September 2019 singled out white supremacists as a leading domestic terrorism threat, analysts and intelligence officials said their warnings were watered down, delayed or both. Former officials in the Trump administration have even said that White House officials sought to suppress the phrase “domestic terrorism.”

As recently as last September, a former top intelligence official with the department, Brian Murphy, filed a whistle-blower complaint accusing department leaders, including the acting secretary, Chad F. Wolf, and his deputy, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, of ordering him to modify intelligence assessments to make the threat of white supremacy “appear less severe” and include information on left-wing groups to align with Mr. Trump’s messaging.

Mr. Wolf and Mr. Cuccinelli denied the accusations, and after a congressional backlash, released an annual threat assessment in October that acknowledged that violent white supremacy was the “most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland.”

The intelligence official involved with the bulletin, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss its findings, added that the public warning should have been issued as early as November, when Mr. Trump was making an escalating series of false accusations about the election, and that far-right groups continued to be galvanized by such false statements.

But at the time, Mr. Trump was also seeking to dismiss department officials whom he regarded as disloyal, including Christopher Krebs, the chief of its cybersecurity agency, after a committee overseeing the election declared it had been “the most secure in American history.” The agency failed to issue a warning to state and local agencies warning of specific violence aimed at the Capitol before the attack on Jan. 6.

The report listed a broad range of grievances across the political spectrum, including “anger over Covid-19 restrictions, the 2020 election results, and police use of force.”

[T]he bulletin’s specific references to the Jan. 6 attack and a mass shooting in El Paso that targeted Hispanics made clear that the most lethal current threat is from the racist extremist groups.

Until now, the closest federal law enforcement had come to that conclusion since the attack at the Capitol was in a joint bulletin issued this month by law enforcement agencies, warning that extremists aiming to start a race war “may exploit the aftermath of the Capitol breach by conducting attacks to destabilize and force a climactic conflict in the United States,” according to a copy of the bulletin obtained by The New York Times.

But that warning came in a private channel to law enforcement agencies.

* * *

The bulletins issued by the Department of Homeland Security, which was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, have typically identified foreign terrorist threats. Federal authorities have for years lagged on warnings about the threat of terrorism from within United States borders, perpetrated by American citizens.

“There’s value in soliciting the public’s assistance in identifying and alerting authorities about suspicious activity,” said Brian Harrell, a former assistant secretary for homeland security in the Trump administration. “The watchful public will always be the best ‘eyes and ears’ for law enforcement.”

Asked during a briefing about the motivation for the new terrorism bulletin, Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of homeland security under President George W. Bush, said, “In my view, it is domestic terrorism mounted by right-wing extremists and neo-Nazi groups.” He added, “We have to be candid and face what the real risk is.”

Such candor has long been an exception.

When a warning in a 2009 Department of Homeland Security report, early in the Obama administration, that military veterans returning from combat could be vulnerable to recruitment by terrorist groups or extremists prompted a backlash from conservatives, the homeland security secretary at the time, Janet Napolitano, was forced to apologize.

The report was retracted and an edited version was eventually reissued.

“It was an early lesson in how fraught dealing with these issues can be, but it turns out the report itself and the substance of the report was quite prescient,” Ms. Napolitano said in an interview. “What we saw two weeks ago is what I think we were seeing in 2009, but it has only grown and it seems to have exploded in the last four years.”

The right-wing media shit fit over their so-called “patriot” (sic) militias and anti-government, white nationalist and Christian nationalist organizations being called “domestic terrorists” – they most certainly are! – led directly to January 6. FBI moves on alleged members of extremist groups Oath Keepers, Three Percenters; FBI moves on alleged members of extremist groups after riot; Investigators Eye Right-Wing Militias at Capitol Riot; ‘We Took Over the Capitol’: Tracking the Oath Keepers Charged With Conspiracy; ‘Me Before Forcing Entry into the Capitol’: Three Oath Keepers Charged in Connection with Capitol Hill Siege Thanks to Facebook, Parler and Ronan Farrow Article.

By the way, the Oath Keepers claim to be active duty and retired military, and law enforcement officers.

This week, Mr. Biden ordered a comprehensive assessment of the threat of domestic violent extremism. During his confirmation hearing, the president’s pick for homeland security secretary, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, said he would empower the department’s intelligence branch, which has long struggled to distinguish its assessments from the F.B.I.

The department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis is responsible for gathering information on emerging threats and sharing it with state authorities to bolster coordination among federal and local law enforcement.

“The truth is what has to come out of D.H.S,” Mr. Chertoff said. “Not playing patty cake with political agendas.”

The AP reports AP source: Lawmakers threatened ahead of impeachment trial:

Federal law enforcement officials are examining a number of threats aimed at members of Congress as the second trial of former President Donald Trump nears, including ominous chatter about killing legislators or attacking them outside of the U.S. Capitol, a U.S. official told The Associated Press.

The threats, and concerns that armed protesters could return to sack the Capitol anew, have prompted the U.S. Capitol Police and other federal law enforcement to insist thousands of National Guard troops remain in Washington as the Senate moves forward with plans for Trump’s trial, the official said.

Similar to those intercepted by investigators ahead of Biden’s inauguration, the threats that law enforcement agents are tracking vary in specificity and credibility, said the official, who had been briefed on the matter. Mainly posted online and in chat groups, the messages have included plots to attack members of Congress during travel to and from the Capitol complex during the trial, according to the official.

The official was not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation publicly and spoke Sunday to the AP on condition of anonymity.

Law enforcement officials are already starting to plan for the possibility of armed protesters returning to the nation’s capital when Trump’s Senate trial on a charge of inciting a violent insurrection begins the week of Feb. 8. It would be the first impeachment trial of a former U.S. president.

Gen. Dan Hokanson, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said Monday that about 13,000 Guard members are still deployed in D.C., and that their numbers would shrink to 7,000 by the end of this week. John Whitley, the acting secretary of the Army, told a Pentagon news conference that this number is based on requests for assistance from the Capitol Police, the Park Police, the Secret Service and the Metropolitan Police Department. Whitley said the number is to drop to 5,000 by mid-March.

They should rethink this plan based upon the QAnon conspiracy theory built around March 4.

Anyone still associating with QAnon or still flying the flag of treason (Trump flags) should be considered a potential terrorist. If you see or hear something, report it to the FBI.