I’m trying to ponder what could be driving this story that most American simply couldn’t care less about. My only explanation is that because the 2022 midterms weren’t an electoral red wedding for Democrats, the party thinks they won, which isn’t necessarily an incorrect take, but that also doesn’t mean the top concerns for liberals are what most people fixate on daily.
That’s an overreach. Case in point, the latest January 6 development doesn’t pass the smell test. We’re learning about this lone intelligence analyst now. Yahoo! News has the scoop, where a young intelligence officer at the Department of Homeland Security stumbled upon multiple threads about the overthrow of the American government, sneaking weapons into the Capitol Building undetected, and anecdotes about a Second American Civil War. What’s his/her/they/ze name? We don’t know—Yahoo! is shielding their identity over safety concerns (via Yahoo! News):
On Dec. 20, 2020, a 21-year-old intelligence analyst went online to search for local Washington, D.C., fishing holes and stumbled upon the blueprint of a plot to storm the Capitol and execute members of Congress and law enforcement officers to prevent the certification of electoral votes to make Joe Biden the next president.
The domestic terrorism analyst with the Department of Homeland Security saw a link to a website where people “actively at that moment were discussing the commission of acts of terroristic violence and the violent overthrow of the government of the United States,” according to the analyst’s written account later provided to investigators.
There the analyst “witnessed upwards of 500 pages worth of potential threats to national security,” including people urging others — and discussing how — to smuggle illegal weapons into the nation’s capital and avoid detection by law enforcement. The DHS intelligence analyst also saw “discussion references of overthrowing the US Government by force/sparking a second civil war, and veiled credible threats of violence toward other US persons who were perceived enemies, specifically Members of Congress and other federal employees.”
[…]
Over those 16 days, this analyst and others inside DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis saw the plot unfold in excruciating detail. They watched as maps of the Capitol access tunnels were circulated online, along with tactical information about how to smuggle illegal weapons into D.C. and which radio frequencies to use for communication during the attack. They saw threats to members of Congress and local D.C. and Capitol police, and operational plans for the attack. They saw online posts by people who said they had put their last will and testament in order and told their children they were going to Washington, D.C., to defend the country and were willing, and expecting, to die for their cause.
On Jan. 6, 2021, a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters as well as white supremacists, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, militia and other violent extremists stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s win in the presidential election. The attack left more than 100 police officers injured and is tied to at least nine deaths, including suicides, and over 880 indictments have been issued, according to a recent Senate report on DHS and FBI domestic counterterrorism failures.
Yahoo News obtained the unredacted copy of a March 2022 DHS Office of Inspector General report and underlying materials, including the four-page letter written by the intelligence analyst who did everything possible to warn of the impending attack.
Yahoo News is withholding the name of the analyst after DHS expressed concerns about the analyst’s personal safety.
[…]
The young analyst’s story began on Dec. 20, 2020, with a search on Reddit for local fishing spots that uncovered the blueprints of a plot to overthrow the government. The day before, Trump had tweeted, “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
This was perceived by some as a call to arms. The analyst soon found links to online forums, including Parler, and saw the beginnings of a plot to violently storm the Capitol on Jan. 6 to stop the electoral votes from being certified and prevent Biden from becoming president.
The next day, on Dec. 21, the analyst showed these findings to a senior member of the Counterterrorism Mission Center. This supervisor called these threats to attack the Capitol “a good find” and expressed interest in getting more information. The analyst was told to send an official Request for Information to the open source collection office, also part of DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis. Do this “as soon as possible” and “mark it URGENT,” the manager said.
[…]
Every day, multiple times a day between Dec. 29 and Jan. 4, the analyst sounded the alarm on the urgent need for reporting that could be used to warn other agencies.
Among the online posts, which were included in the inspector general report, were calls for people to bring weapons to D.C. on Jan. 6. “Bring your gun,” one post from Jan. 4, 2021, said. “It’s just gonna be another protest if you don’t, and you’ll watch Biden slide into the white house.” The report also included Jan. 2 posts from about 12 people who said they had told their families goodbye because they were willing to “die for the cause.”
By Jan. 5, the open source collection office still had not produced any reports or issued any warning on anything it had found, preventing the counterterrorism analyst and the entire mission center from warning agencies in D.C. of the threats they were seeing online. The analyst was tasked with producing a briefing that could quickly be turned into an intelligence product and sent out to warn Capitol Police and others in D.C.
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So, after Congress gaveled a select committee to investigate this incident, which was supposed to be the Democrats’ main attack arm for the 2022 midterms until the economy crashed, no one knew about this person or the alarms he/she/they/ze (isn’t this s**t ridiculous) raised? Yahoo! News just happened to come across the memo about the threats. All we have to go on is Yahoo’s word because that worked so well for the Russian collusion hoax, where every anonymous source was garbage and every “bombshell” development a dud. Also, no agency mentioned in this story is going to offer comment–and they didn't.
It reads like a liberal fantasy, too, with said analyst finding a Reddit post about fishing spots that lead to coup talk, Parler links, and a cacophony of right-wing noise. Far too often, the media has been wrong about January 6 and Russian collusion. I’m not willing to give the benefit of the doubt here, especially with this 11th-hour memo find that seems like a gross attempt to yank this riot back into the national spotlight when everyone, liberals included, has moved on with their lives. With Republicans in charge of the House again, I’d bet heavily this committee is dissolved, which could explain the timing of this story.
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