Except that they think it's a sham anyway. "Lmao, Biden could prosecute because they already didn't have anything and the committee is made of lying pedophiles" would be the likely reaction
A few thoughts about January 6, 2021
- Thread starter ObsidianJones
- Start date
You're vastly underestimating the average Trump supporter's capacity for self-delusion. "Biden's just running a long con to defend the baby-eating lizard people!"
This. Though, I imagine that many people on both sides see him as a personal threat and are unhappy he's not being punished, politics makes strange bedfellows.
And, also this.
WASHINGTON — On Dec. 19, 2020, the day that then-President Donald Trump sent a tweet summoning his supporters to a “wild” protest in the nation’s capital on Jan. 6, one of the FBI’s own confidential sources warned the bureau that the far-right considered Trump’s message “a call to arms,” according to an email reviewed by NBC News.
That tip to the FBI, from a source who is still used by the bureau and spoke on the condition of anonymity, warned there was a “big” threat of violence on Jan. 6. It was among hundreds of pages of reports viewed by NBC News that this source sent to the FBI in the weeks before the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol. The email, which has not been previously reported, warned that the Trump tweet was “gaining hold” on social media.
“Trump tweeted what people on the right are considering a call to arms in DC on Jan 6,” the confidential source wrote on the afternoon of Dec. 19, the day of Trump’s 1:42 a.m. “will be wild” tweet.
The information the source sent to the bureau in the weeks before the attack, pulled from extremist chatter on a variety of social media forums, included discussion of civil war, talk of hanging traitors and calls for militias to take up arms. It highlighted messages like “war is inevitable”; “hell is going to break loose”; “locked and loaded”; “my powder is dry, my guns are clean”; and “I’m not afraid of death and I’ll gladly take lives for the preservation of our country.” It included information on a “boogaloo” extremist who was prepared to die in D.C.
“We all must join/link forces and be ready to leave our lives behind,” that extremist wrote in a message relayed to the bureau by the confidential source. “We must pool resources and fight like there’s no tomorrow! The Constitution still lives and we must preserve it. Blood is the price of freedom.”
The additional information reviewed by NBC News adds to the growing pile of evidence that the bureau received intelligence that indicated Jan. 6 was a major threat and that pro-Trump extremists wanted to kill members of Congress. It illustrates that the warnings weren’t just coming from average Americans sending information into the FBI tip line, but from at least one trusted source vetted by the bureau.
The FBI confidential human source who sent that information spoke to NBC News after the Jan. 6 committee released a summary of its investigation, which avoided criticizing law enforcement failures in the lead-up to the attack because, as NBC News first reported last month, committee leaders decided to keep the focus on Trump. The full report is set to be released Wednesday.
The confidential human source has provided information that the FBI has used in Jan. 6 cases before. NBC News was able to verify their work with the bureau by reviewing documents, and by confirming their role with another person familiar with the source’s work with the FBI. The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The source said they were perplexed by the committee’s efforts to avoid reaching what seemed to them, and to many experts, as an obvious conclusion: that law enforcement failed to adequately respond to the intelligence in its possession ahead of the Jan. 6 attack.
“My first response was, like, what the f---?” the confidential human source said in reaction to NBC News’ reporting this week on the committee’s decision to avoid criticizing law enforcement in their summary.
“The bureau saw this coming,” they said. The source said they were frustrated that law enforcement’s failures in the lead-up to Jan. 6 “would be relegated to a footnote or glossed over” and that the committee had suggested there wasn’t adequate time to put together an analysis.
A separate source familiar with the Jan. 6 committee’s work confirmed that the Dec. 19, 2020, tip to the FBI was in the possession of the committee and was among many examples of intelligence the FBI received ahead of the Jan. 6 attack. That source expected that the Dec. 19 tip would be excluded from the Jan. 6 committee’s full report. A committee spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The FBI confidential source said that they had “put together hundreds of pages of reports over the two weeks proceeding Jan. 6” for the bureau leading up to the attack.
“This didn’t go down the black hole of a web form or a tip line, this went to an agent directly,” the source said, who added they were confident the information was passed onto FBI officials in D.C. “To me, there’s no excuse to say, ‘We didn’t see this coming.’”
In the nearly two years since Jan. 6, the public has learned a decent amount about the tips the FBI received ahead of the Capitol attack, including one from the son of a Capitol rioter on Christmas Eve 2020 and from a member of the Oath Keepers who recorded a call in November 2020 that had him concerned the organization was going to take up arms against the government. The threat of violence on Jan. 6 wasn’t exactly a secret to anyone looking at the chatter from pro-Trump figures on social media before the attack: “Violent threats ripple through far-right internet forums ahead of protest,” read an NBC News headline on Jan. 5, 2021. But the newly revealed emails show that the bureau was warned by at least one of its own confidential sources about the potential for violence on Jan. 6 and that Trump’s rhetoric was having a radicalizing effect.
The Jan. 6 committee itself has highlighted Trump’s “will be wild” tweet as a major inflection point. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said during a committee hearing over the summer that Trump’s “will be wild” tweet had galvanized his followers, unleashed a political firestorm and had changed “the course of our history as a country.” As NPR documented, the tweet has been cited in numerous cases against Jan. 6 defendants.
The FBI, which will receive an increase of more than half a billion dollars under the government budget expected to pass Congress this week, has made several changes since the Jan. 6 attack. In a statement to NBC News in August, the FBI said it had “increased our focus on swift information sharing” and “improved automated systems established to assist investigators and analysts” since the Capitol attack. Months after the attack, FBI Director Chris Wray created the position of intelligence analyst in charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, giving an intelligence analyst a leadership title typically reserved for FBI special agents.
The Justice Department’s inspector general, which is running an investigation into the FBI’s handling of Jan. 6, said in an annual report issued this week that domestic terrorism was a particularly challenging issue for law enforcement given the importance of “preserving individuals’ First Amendment right to free speech or activity while protecting against the threat to national security.” Because of the volume of threats online, Wray has said, the bureau spends “an enormous amount of time” trying to figure out whether the “unbelievably horrific, angry, combative things” that people say online “reflect intention as opposed to aspiration.”
Striking that balance is difficult, says Bill Fulton, a contract intelligence analyst and former FBI confidential source.
“I think what the FBI has learned is that we have to be a little more proactive in how we deal with these people,” Fulton told NBC News. “But on the flip side of that, every time we are, people scream. And every time we don’t, people scream.”
The FBI confidential source who alerted the bureau about the far-right’s reaction to Trump’s “wild” tweet thinks there’s a lot more that could have been done. They said they were in regular communication with the bureau in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6. Two days after their email on Trump’s tweets, a bureau official thanked them for the information they provided about extremists headed to D.C. in January.
“t’s good to be able to help DC get their ducks in a row before anything happens,” the FBI email stated.
Goddamn, what is the point of them?
In lighter news:
In lighter news:
Charlie Kirk failed to graduate from Kindergarten, confirmed.
Committee refers Trump to Justice Department
The House committee lays out a number of criminal statutes it believes were violated in the plots to stave off Trump’s defeat and says there’s evidence for criminal referrals to the Justice Department for Trump, Eastman and “others.”
The report summary first released Monday says there’s evidence to pursue Trump on multiple crimes, including obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to make false statements, assisting or aiding an insurrection, conspiring to injure or impede an officer and seditious conspiracy.
The panel says it also has the evidence to refer Eastman on the obstruction charge, and it names him as a co-conspirator in other alleged criminal activity lawmakers have gathered evidence on.
The committee alluded to evidence of criminal obstruction of the House investigation but the summary does not go into detail about that evidence.
Trump’s false victory declaration was ‘premeditated’
The committee outlines 17 findings from its investigation that underpin its reasoning for criminal referrals, including that Trump knew the fraud allegations he was pushing were false and continued to amplify them anyway.
“President Trump’s decision to declare victory falsely on election night and, unlawfully, to call for the vote counting to stop, was not a spontaneous decision. It was premeditated,” the report states.
The committee also revealed emails from Tom Fitton, president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, from before the 2020 presidential election that say Trump should declare victory regardless of the outcome.
It notes that Trump’s top allies, including those who testified before the committee, acknowledged they found no proof to back up the former president’s claims.
“Ultimately, even Rudolph Giuliani and his legal team acknowledged that they had no definitive evidence of election fraud sufficient to change the election outcome,” it adds, referring to Trump’s then-personal attorney.
“For example, although Giuliani repeatedly had claimed in public that Dominion voting machines stole the election, he admitted during his Select Committee deposition that ‘I do not think the machines stole the election,’” it states.
Trump refused to act as riot unfolded
The committee lays out Trump’s failure to act as the riot unfolded, noting that as he watched the riot on television, he made no calls for security assistance and resisted efforts from staffers asking him to call off his supporters.
“President Trump did not contact a single top national security official during the day. Not at the Pentagon, nor at the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the F.B.I., the Capitol Police Department, or the D.C. Mayor’s office,” the committee writes. “As Vice President Pence has confirmed, President Trump didn’t even try to reach his own Vice President to make sure that Pence was safe.”
Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the committee he had this reaction to Trump, “You know, you’re the Commander in Chief. You’ve got an assault going on on the Capitol of the United States of America. And there’s nothing? No call? Nothing? Zero?”
White House staffers, meantime, described being appalled that as the Capitol was under attack, Trump fired off a tweet criticizing Pence.
Hicks texted a colleague that night to say, “Attacking the VP? Wtf is wrong with him,” according to the committee’s summary report.
“No photographs exist of the President for the remainder of the afternoon until after 4 p.m. President Trump appears to have instructed that the White House photographer was not to take any photographs,” the committee writes, citing testimony from former White House photographer Shealah Craighead.
In the aftermath, on the evening of January 6, Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale told Katrina Pierson, one of the rally organizers, that he felt guilty helping Trump win, the report states.
The events of the day, Parscale said, resulted from “a sitting president asking for civil war.”
The House committee lays out a number of criminal statutes it believes were violated in the plots to stave off Trump’s defeat and says there’s evidence for criminal referrals to the Justice Department for Trump, Eastman and “others.”
The report summary first released Monday says there’s evidence to pursue Trump on multiple crimes, including obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to make false statements, assisting or aiding an insurrection, conspiring to injure or impede an officer and seditious conspiracy.
The panel says it also has the evidence to refer Eastman on the obstruction charge, and it names him as a co-conspirator in other alleged criminal activity lawmakers have gathered evidence on.
The committee alluded to evidence of criminal obstruction of the House investigation but the summary does not go into detail about that evidence.
Trump’s false victory declaration was ‘premeditated’
The committee outlines 17 findings from its investigation that underpin its reasoning for criminal referrals, including that Trump knew the fraud allegations he was pushing were false and continued to amplify them anyway.
“President Trump’s decision to declare victory falsely on election night and, unlawfully, to call for the vote counting to stop, was not a spontaneous decision. It was premeditated,” the report states.
The committee also revealed emails from Tom Fitton, president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, from before the 2020 presidential election that say Trump should declare victory regardless of the outcome.
It notes that Trump’s top allies, including those who testified before the committee, acknowledged they found no proof to back up the former president’s claims.
“Ultimately, even Rudolph Giuliani and his legal team acknowledged that they had no definitive evidence of election fraud sufficient to change the election outcome,” it adds, referring to Trump’s then-personal attorney.
“For example, although Giuliani repeatedly had claimed in public that Dominion voting machines stole the election, he admitted during his Select Committee deposition that ‘I do not think the machines stole the election,’” it states.
Trump refused to act as riot unfolded
The committee lays out Trump’s failure to act as the riot unfolded, noting that as he watched the riot on television, he made no calls for security assistance and resisted efforts from staffers asking him to call off his supporters.
“President Trump did not contact a single top national security official during the day. Not at the Pentagon, nor at the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the F.B.I., the Capitol Police Department, or the D.C. Mayor’s office,” the committee writes. “As Vice President Pence has confirmed, President Trump didn’t even try to reach his own Vice President to make sure that Pence was safe.”
Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the committee he had this reaction to Trump, “You know, you’re the Commander in Chief. You’ve got an assault going on on the Capitol of the United States of America. And there’s nothing? No call? Nothing? Zero?”
White House staffers, meantime, described being appalled that as the Capitol was under attack, Trump fired off a tweet criticizing Pence.
Hicks texted a colleague that night to say, “Attacking the VP? Wtf is wrong with him,” according to the committee’s summary report.
“No photographs exist of the President for the remainder of the afternoon until after 4 p.m. President Trump appears to have instructed that the White House photographer was not to take any photographs,” the committee writes, citing testimony from former White House photographer Shealah Craighead.
In the aftermath, on the evening of January 6, Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale told Katrina Pierson, one of the rally organizers, that he felt guilty helping Trump win, the report states.
The events of the day, Parscale said, resulted from “a sitting president asking for civil war.”
Huh, that time of year again? Seems like no time has passed, judging by the total lack of meaningful response.
Lock 'em up and throw away the jail.
www.cnn.com
They're lucky I don't get to decide their fate, because I'd treat them as the enemies of the United States of America that they are.
Oath Keepers members found guilty of seditious conspiracy | CNN Politics
Three members of the Oath Keepers and a fourth person associated with the far-right militia group were convicted of seditious conspiracy by a Washington, DC, jury on Monday for their role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection.
www.cnn.com
They're lucky I don't get to decide their fate, because I'd treat them as the enemies of the United States of America that they are.
Bob’s Burgers actor Jay Johnston arrested in connection with January 6
After years of speculation, the FBI has apprehended Mr. Show's Jay Johnston
www.avclub.com
Yes, and now he'll be able to tell the story of the story of Jan. 6th.Bob’s Burgers actor Jay Johnston arrested in connection with January 6
After years of speculation, the FBI has apprehended Mr. Show's Jay Johnston
FBI Knew Proud Boys Were Prepping to “Kill People,” Did Nothing
A new Senate report savages the FBI and DHS for ignoring pre–January 6 intel.
newrepublic.com
Michigan attorney general charges 'false electors' over efforts to overturn the 2020 election
Sixteen people forged documents and claimed to be "duly elected and qualified electors" for Michigan, Attorney General Dana Nessel said.
Thank you. Hope they have fun rotting in jail.Michigan attorney general charges 'false electors' over efforts to overturn the 2020 election
Sixteen people forged documents and claimed to be "duly elected and qualified electors" for Michigan, Attorney General Dana Nessel said.www.nbcnews.com
Trump to face racketeering charge in Georgia for attempting to overturn 2020 election results: report
A district attorney in Georgia is preparing to charge former President Donald Trump with racketeering for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state, according to a report.
nypost.com
Trump hit with sweeping indictment in alleged effort to overturn 2020 election
Former President Trump has been indicted on charges related to special counsel Jack Smith's probe into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
abcnews.go.com