Breaking 1-06-21: MAGA terrorist attack on Capitol

...from what I've heard from listening to different intelligence community professionals give interviews about this, @vlaurelio...

...the FBI is largely handcuffed when it comes to the type of domestic surveillance we might expect them to be able to conduct for something like this.

Nobody domestically wants the federal government surveilling personal communications...the whole thing with Eric Snowden encapsulates the breadth of this concern.

The government has a "playbook" for dealing with foreign "terrorists"...aided in no small part by using geography and racial identity to formulate a consistent approach to curtail, disturb, thwart and/or destroy anything dubbed as a terroristic threat under the aforementioned definition.

There isn't anything quite like that available to the federal government, I'm hearing...at least not as comprehensive as an international or foreign plan is.

That doesn't seem, on its face, to make any sense. The Department of Homeland Security was created to get the counter-intelligence arms of the United States (the FBI for domestic threats, the CIA for international ones) to work more closely together after what happened with 9/11.

As laymen or civilians, we can easily enough see and track communications on internet sites and social media platforms, but from what I understand, even if a federal agent runs across something threatening in perusing Instagram or Facebook...or gets a retweet or something from Twitter...

...the only thing they can do is report those concerns up their respective chains of command...who, again, supposedly don't have clear actionable procedures to implement to deal proactively with something domestic (i.e. against American citizens)...but I could totally be missing something.

I'd like to stay away from playing the "race" card in this (even though it's been a winning hand for me lately)...

...but I'm just about to call bullsh!t on that entire line of reasoning.

If those jackasses and murderers at the capitol had been anybody other than who they were...
...people are mostly right...

...there WOULD have been a bloodbath, all right.

Because there wouldn't have been any doubt as to "procedure" then...

 

Chris Lemmon

@lemmon717

Replying to
@emptywheel
They are afraid of microchips in their vaccines, but are running around the capitol with their phone's location data turned on.


8:22 AM · Jan 11, 2021·Twitter Web App

Replying to
@emptywheel
Sincerely hope there are fingerprints and a match on the fire extinguisher turned murder weapon

8:19 AM · Jan 11, 2021


@emptywheel
Their DL and SS numbers were required for parler. Parler got hacked last night and that info may have been turned over to the FBI

8:23 AM · Jan 11, 2021

 

LOL they would be stupid to make a deal with Trump

 

I've been leaning more and more towards accountability & Trump now needing to be prosecuted, but I have always thought that if there was a deal to be made that extradited him to a foreign country and stripped his citizenship, that would the cleanest way to strip the band aid off this nightmare in our nations history.

Important to note though that the Biden DOJ cannot legally tell the state of NY what to do in its prosecutions so I don't really know if there is a way to really do this where Trump will see the value because:

A. He'll just pardon himself for federal crimes (will at least stall out prosecutions for years)
B. NY is going to do what its going to do regardless either way
C. He has all the incentive in the world to stay in the US and keep his super pac alive so he can grift.

...

The other option is for the Democrats to pass a resolution under the 14th amendment barring Trump from office. They can do this in February with a slim majority, but if they do this in a partisan manner, you open up the door for the Repugs to go ape sh$t about how in the future any party with a slim majority in the House and Senate can just bar the candidate they don't want to face in an election under the 14th amendment. It's completely different in this situation given the whole insurrection & treason thing, BUT they'll be able to frame that this way unless it's at least 2/3 vote with a large number of Republicans signing on, and NONE of them minus Romney & a few others will sign on because they want Trumps Super Pac to help them with 2022 elections.

....

So all of these situations have consequences. It might be where the best thing to do honestly is impeachment after Biden's 100 days that fails to get 2/3 in the Senate, but puts Republicans on the record of supporting insurrection, and the the Democrats and the coalition of other voters who aren't fascists do everything they/we can to keep the Repugs/Trump insurrectionists from gaining the House and Senate in 2022. Nothing is a greater threat to Democracy now than that mid term election. These RINOS (they aren't real Republicans anymore) cannot be trusted with real power for the time being. If voters give them control of the House and Senate, I have no doubt that the firewall of Democracy will be crushed in 2024.

 

they were able to track, monitor, and arrest the proud boy leader on his past crime/s right?

they should have done the same with his accomplices

also just this open interaction, retweeting, tagging, mentioning of the organizers with govt / eelxtid officlals..

 

Trump's word is ****

 

Vox article on whether the Capitol building attack was domestic terrorism, which describes three ways in which “terrorist” label is used:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22219233/us-capitol-attack-domestic-terrorism-definition

 

A President cannot issue pardons in cases of impeachment. All the more reason to impeach him ASAP.

also:
On the other hand, the Office of Legal Counsel argued that the president lacks the power to self-pardon in a memorandum issued right before President Richard Nixon resigned. The lawyers argued that, on a basic level, "no one may be a judge in his own case." (The memo did point out that the vice president or Congress could pardon a president in certain situations.)

Then there's the question of equality, and the American justice system decrees that no one is above the law. If the president could pardon himself for any federal offense, he would be operating without accountability. There is also an argument that a pardon inherently requires two people, the person giving the pardon and the person receiving it. Indeed, having the "power to grant" a pardon certainly seems to envision a grantor and a grantee.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opini...eech-sparks-impeachment-calls-new-ncna1253418

 

He's a fan of NDAs. I'm sure he would sign one with that clause.

 

...hey brother...

...I AGREE with you, man.

...what the FBI is doing now is reactive, like most law enforcement here is. Our expectation (especially witnessing what happened) is for them to be proactive. Preventative.

...there aren't many instances (if you swap out the particulars) where they wouldn't have been proactive and preventative.

The FBI is the domestic arm of federal law enforcement. They have to follow habeus corpus and bill of rights procedures stateside. Sure, they get to supersede local jurisdiction, but they have to play by the same rules as Barney Fife in Mayberry.

Innocent until proven guilty. I understand that.

Terrorism (international or otherwise) presumes guilt and encourages more latitude in engaging and dealing with it. In a lot of cases, the ends can be legally justified as part of the means.

This is why it's a lot easier to lay this entire thing at the feet of that seditious idiot Donald Trump than even his ridiculous speech-ifying before all this happened....and whoever else helped him or encouraged him to not act on this.

The Donald has the responsibility of enforcing the law (and what greater irony in all this is there than that...a career criminal enforcing federal law...God and county)...

...and however anybody wants to parse it out...he didn't do any of that. If anybody has the ability to be proactive in a law enforcement scenario stateside, it's supposed to be the Donald. And by extension, the people he put in charge of the Pentagon and the security agencies, where's there's a f@ck-ton of "acting" this and "acting" that...acting like they don't give a damn, even if they might have had any clue as to what they were supposed to be doing...

...this thing stinks, brother. All around. No doubt.

But a fish rots from the head down. So there's all that republican "trickle-down", voodoo economics for you, right there...

 

I'd be shocked if Trump doesn't issue pardons much faster than the House can technically have an official vote on impeachment proceedings.

You know the way I look at it, we are going to be looking at years of litigation regardless that'll be going to the Supreme Court. I think self pardon's will be issued not because he thinks he has the power (I'm sure Pat Cippilone is telling him it's likely to be struck down), but because he knows it'll be yet another stall tactic and abuse of our judicial system.

Whats going to happen regardless is prosecutors all across the US are going to be dealing with Trump investigations for years. Trump's self pardoning will all but solidify that the Biden DOJ will have to pursue investigations given that he'll publicly be making a mockery of our justice system. When he does this self pardon he'll earn himself at least a couple years of gumming up prosecutions, but he'll earn himself news cycle after news cycle of information coming out of investigations documenting crimes committed by the Trump regime.

 

this is what I'm talking about

"
The leader of the right-wing group Proud Boys was released from police custody on Tuesday and ordered by a judge to leave Washington, D.C. — and stay away.

Henry "Enrique" Tarrio, 36, was arrested Monday shortly after his arrival in the District, where Trump supporters are gathering to rally during Congress' official certification of the Electoral College ballots on Wednesday.

Tarrio was charged with destruction of property and possession of high-capacity firearm magazines.

In media interviews, Tarrio has claimed responsibility for tearing down and burning a Black Lives Matter banner at a historic Black church last month."

The Proud Boys destroyed the and burned the BLM banner at a historic Black church last month

The FBI "reacted" by arresting Tarrio then released him afterwards.. Was he put on monitoring or surveillance after that?

but why didn't they do anything with the accomlices of Tarrio?

 

yeah he'll sign but he won't abide by it

he'll find a way around it, break it, and/or rescind it

what's the consequnce of Trump doin those? impeachment starts?

 

....AAARRRRRGH.

...you...

...you...

...GOT me, pardnah...

...might be a question for whoever the head of the Bureau is...
...keeping in mind, of course, that this is the Donald's responsibility...

 

Terrorism expert on whether this qualifies as terrorism:

https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2021/january/capitol-seige-klausen.html

You call the individuals that stormed the Capitol insurrectionists but others say they were domestic terrorists. Do you agree with that characterization?

There are many definitions applied to terrorism, both legally and sociologically. Generally speaking, what unifies all these definitions is that terrorism is an organized, violent campaign directed against civilians with the intention of causing fear and intimidation.

Individuals can, however, be charged and convicted for sedition. What happened at the Capitol was seditious, in that civilians were trying to disrupt and undermine the constitutional government. They were delusional people that thought they could stop the change in government.

That said, we should be careful about exaggerating the risks to the state and the risk to governance in our use of terms like “domestic terrorist” and “domestic terrorism.” Certainly lawmakers, staff and media in the Capitol felt they were personally under attack — and they were  — but this was a seditious insurrection, not terrorism, and the distinction is important.

The hapless insurrectionists who took over the Capitol did not mean to harm the population. There was looting and vandalism. Previously some of the groups that form the hard core have been implicated in crimes involving racial hatred. But this was not an organized terrorist movement using violence against the general population to obtain concessions. Most of them are fantastically ignorant of the crime they committed.

​

DC Mayor, meanwhile, says it is textbook terrorism:

https://www.npr.org/sections/congre...esterday-is-textbook-terrorism-d-c-mayor-says

"What happened yesterday is textbook terrorism," Bowser said. She then read a definition of that crime aloud, citing the U.S. code of federal regulations.

"It is defined as 'the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives,' " Bowser said.

​

 

Trump is incapable of typing up a self pardon, ha. They have to be filed by the Office of the Pardon Attorney so he can't really do it in a secret move. I feel like Pence would call the 25th if word got out that he were going to try.

 

I have something to get off my chest. I dumped destruction of property in a open top container near my neighborhood and I have high capacity magazines in my bedroom closet.
Please no one report me, I’m your friend

 

I just think there has been some breakdown. Maybe the FBI were deliberately sent going after a false lead so they poured all their resources there instead of focusing on the Capitol

Also the response to the storming. I would think the FBI, the feds, the police, reserve should have treated it as a mass shooting.

Surround the capitol, ID, question, and inventory everyone coming out. its possible that his trump and his cabal stopped them from doing that.

 

so lawmakers, staff and media in the Capitol are not part of the general population so this is not terrorism?

so they were just a hit squad. okay...

 

See, this is why this is going to be a domestic terrorism case. It was orchestrated within the Trunp organization.



Jake Tapper
@jaketapper

NPR: Ex-Capitol Police Chief Says Requests For National Guard Denied 6 Times In Riots
Ex-Capitol Police Chief Says Requests For National Guard Denied 6 Times In Riots
Steven Sund contradicts reports that help was not requested, saying security officials at the House and Senate rebuffed calls for assistance ahead of and during the attack on the Capitol.
npr.org
9:14 AM · Jan 11, 2021·Twitter for iPhone