https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/03/politics/fbi-raids-capitol-attack-investigation/index.html

The FBI recently raided the homes of two men who sponsored an invective-laced rally near the US Capitol a day before the deadly insurrection, the first known search warrants involving people who organized and spoke at rallies preceding the attack.
CNN learned of the raids through an eyewitness account, public records, a lawyer representing one of the rally organizers and an FBI spokeswoman who confirmed details of the searches.
FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller confirmed that federal agents executed search warrants last week at two properties in Orange County, California, which public records indicate belong to Russell Taylor and Alan Hostetter. The two men run the American Phoenix Project, which co-sponsored a pro-Donald Trump rally near the Supreme Court on January 5, one day before the attack.
Neither man has been charged with any crimes.

Footage of the rally shows the men spewing militant vitriol: Hostetter told the crowd to prepare for "war tomorrow" against "vipers" in Congress who refused to nullify President Joe Biden's win. Taylor said, "We will not return to our peaceful way of life until this election is made right."
Court documents related to the search warrants are still under seal, but the raids are the first publicly known federal actions against people who organized rallies linked to the Capitol attack. Federal investigators have issued more than 500 subpoenas and search warrants in the probe.
A key question about the fledgling investigation has been how aggressively prosecutors will scrutinize the people who organized and spoke at rallies that preceded the stunning assault.
Search warrants

Taylor and Hostetter are well-documented promoters of conspiracy theories ranging from QAnon and the "deep state" to those related to the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election.
An FBI spokesperson told CNN the search was conducted at the property Taylor owns at 6 a.m. Wednesday. CNN obtained photos and videos of FBI agents at his house hours later.
Spokespeople for the FBI and the Justice Department declined to comment further about the raids or what investigators were searching for, noting that the case files are still sealed.
A lawyer for Taylor, Dyke Huish, told CNN that the agents were "just gathering information on people that were at or near the Capitol building on the day in question," referring to January 6. Huish said Taylor "cooperated with investigators" and the search was finished "without incident." Eimiller, the FBI spokeswoman, said "no arrests were made" during the searches.
Taylor acknowledged the raid on his Orange County home in a Telegram post on Friday. Using a pseudonym, Taylor urged his followers to "hold the line," adding, "I am working with a lawyer and per his recommendation he said to keep on the down low for a bit to stay off any radars."
Hostetter didn't respond to multiple requests for comment about the raid or his DC rally.
The founder of the group that co-sponsored the rally, Virginia Women for Trump, told CNN that she hasn't been interviewed by the FBI. An employee at Women for America First, a separate organization that held the rally near the White House with Trump one day later, told CNN that nobody at the organization had been interviewed by the FBI either.


Through their right-wing organization, Taylor and Hostetter secured speaking slots at the rally, and used their speeches to spew violent, battle-ready rhetoric.
Weeks earlier, they reached out to Virginia Women for Trump, which was planning an event at the Supreme Court on January 5, one day before Congress would tally the electoral votes and put the final nail in the coffin of Trump's effort to overturn his loss.
Alice Butler-Short, founder of Virginia Women for Trump, said she primarily organized the rally and invited the speakers, but Taylor and Hostetter helped pay for the logistics and security.
"They kind of found me on Facebook," Butler-Short said in an interview with CNN.
The lineup of speakers also included the far-right conspiracy theorist Ali Alexander, who ran a "Stop the Steal" group, and Trump ally Roger Stone, who supports the Proud Boys extremist group. They pushed the debunked conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from Trump. Though Stone said, "We renounce violence," Hostetter ratcheted things up is his speech.
"We are at war in this country," Hostetter said. "We are at war tomorrow."
He continued, "Our voices tomorrow are going to put the fear of God in the cowards and the traitors, the (Republicans in name only), the communists of the Democrat Party, they need to know we as a people, a hundred million strong, are coming for them If they do the wrong thing."
"I will see you all tomorrow at the frontlines," Hostetter said as he ended the speech. "We are taking our country back."
Taylor expressed support for QAnon in his speech and issued a call-to-arms, saying, "In these streets we will fight, and we will bleed before we allow our freedom to be taken from us." (Huish, his attorney, later claimed he was speaking metaphorically and "has never called for violence.")

Taylor's lawyer tried to distance his client from the mob that invaded the Capitol, saying Taylor was "outside" but "never entered the building nor did he cause any damage to the building."
"His sole purpose in going to Washington DC was to participate in a peaceful and patriotic protest in those things that he believes to be true and correct," Huish told CNN in a statement.
In a since-deleted Instagram video from January 6, Hostetter said he was avoiding the Ellipse because he had "gear" that wouldn't be allowed in. In another video obtained by CNN, Taylor said he was walking towards the Capitol and said he was just informed that rioters had breached barricades near the building. He is wearing a flak jacket with what looks like a knife sticking out.
"We'll see if the Capitol Police are oath keepers of the Constitution," Taylor is heard saying.
Photos from Hostetter's Instagram and photojournalists place him and Taylor just outside the Capitol building during the riot. An AFP photographer snapped an image of Taylor giving police the finger around 4:30 p.m. near the North side of the Capitol, near the entrance to the Senate.

Two other photos show Taylor near a police line on the North side of the Capitol. One photo shows him using his body to push against a police line; the other shows him near a police line with what appears to be a gas mask.
He later wrote on Facebook that he never made it inside.




Where are the raids on the BLM and Anti-Fa people who were at it all of 2020?  Christopher Wray testified that Anti-Fa is an Idea not an organization and that 'White Supremacists" were the 'real' threat in America prior to the election. Curious why he doesnt think those kind of statements might radicalize regular Americans.who have watched his Bureau do illegal secret police shit for 6 years and never be held accountable.

When it comes to domestic extremists such as those who stormed the Capitol, a longtime CIA officer argues that the U.S. should treat them as an insurgency.


https://www.npr.org/2021/02/02/963343896/former-cia-officer-treat-domestic-extremism-as-an-insurgency?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_term=nprnews

When it comes to domestic extremists such as those who stormed the Capitol, a longtime CIA officer argues that the U.S. should treat them as an insurgency.

That means using counterinsurgency tactics — similar in some ways to those used in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Robert Grenier served as the CIA's station chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2001. He went on to become the CIA's Iraq mission manager and then director of the CIA Counterterrorism Center from 2004 to 2006.

"We may be witnessing the dawn of a sustained wave of violent insurgency within our own country, perpetrated by our own countrymen," Grenier wrote in The New York Times last week. And without national action, he argues, "extremists who seek a social apocalypse ... are capable of producing endemic political violence of a sort not seen in this country since Reconstruction."

In an interview with All Things Considered, Grenier discusses what that national action would mean.

As someone who has watched many violent insurgencies unfold in various countries around the world, what felt the same to you? What felt different?

I don't want to be one to suggest that somehow the United States is going to in any way resemble Iraq or Afghanistan at the height of violence. But what I think is useful is to have some way of thinking about the problem and thinking through the elements of the solution. So I think as in any insurgency situation, you have committed insurgents who are typically a relatively small proportion of the affected population. But what enables them to carry forward their program is a large number of people from whom they can draw tacit support. And that's what I'm primarily concerned with here. I think what is most important is that we drive a wedge between those violent individuals and the people who may otherwise see them as reflecting their interests and fighting on their behalf.

What do you do about it?

I think the most important element of the struggle, if you will, is information. We're not talking about an alien population here. There are friends of mine who believe that the election was stolen. There are members of my family who have very strong doubts. And I think there are a great many people who don't trust you, Mary Louise, I hate to be the one to break it to you, who don't trust NPR or The New York Times.

But again, I think this is the work of a nation. I mean, it's trite to say that we need a national conversation, but in fact, that's what we need.

And so it's people, it's all of us who really need to be engaging with one another in a very sincere way, admitting what we don't know and trying to seek out the truth together. Because without that, I think that there's a level of distrust that is not only unfortunate for the politics in this country, but will also provide a basis for sporadic but endemic violence in this country.

Is there anything that you think could be done with a sense of urgency?

Part of it is simply setting the proper national tone.

But another, I think, very important element that we haven't talked about yet is what I would refer to as insurgent leadership. The fact of the matter is that the most violent elements that we are concerned about right now see former President Trump as a broadly popular and charismatic symbol. He is their charismatic leader, whether he chooses to acknowledge it or not. You know, just as I saw in the Middle East that the air went out of violent demonstrations when [Iraqi leader] Saddam Hussein was defeated and seen to be defeated, I think the same situation applies here. The fact of the matter is that Mr. Trump has lost. It's very important that people see that he has lost, is a private citizen. But I think it's extremely important that his potency as a symbol for the most violent among us is somehow addressed.

Your view is that it's not enough that he was defeated at the polls, but that he must also be convicted in his Senate impeachment trial. And you argue this is a national security imperative.

I think it's a national security imperative precisely because he is seen as the charismatic leader of a great many violent people. And I think that that needs to be countered. So long as he is there and leading the resistance, if you will, which he shows every sign of intending to do, he is going to be an inspiration to very violent people.

You were station chief in Islamabad on 9/11, which meant it suddenly became your problem to find and kill or capture Osama bin Laden and other senior al-Qaida leaders. Without comparing American citizens to al-Qaida, are there lessons that you take from that?

Yes. And that is that, you know, even at the seeming height of the crisis immediately after 9/11, there really weren't that many members of al-Qaida in Afghanistan. And the thrust of our campaign there was, yes, to hunt down al-Qaida, but primarily to remove the supportive environment in which they were able to live and to flourish. And that meant fighting the Taliban. And I think that is the heart of what we need to deal with here. Hunting down people who are criminals, that is something that which U.S. law enforcement is very well capable of doing and doing while preserving fundamental civil rights. That's in some ways the easiest part of the problem. The difficult part of the problem is affecting the environment within which violent elements otherwise would be able to thrive.

"CNN learned of the raids "

Shocked CNN was not on scene with reporters, satellite trucks, etc. to brathlessly record it all.

The enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan were labeled "terrorists" and "insurgents.".  Now we have politicians and intelligence officials labeling Trump supporters -- not just those who committed acts of violence -- as "domestic terrorists" and "insurgents."

Funny how Obama said "One man's terrorist is another man's Freedom Fighter," but magically that no longer applies.

This is NOT "unity."  It's the exact opposite.

The enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan were labeled "terrorists" and "insurgents.".  Now we have politicians and intelligence officials labeling Trump supporters -- not just those who committed acts of violence -- as "domestic terrorists" and "insurgents."

Funny how Obama said "One man's terrorist is another man's Freedom Fighter," but magically that no longer applies.

This is NOT "unity."  It's the exact opposite.

Can't condemn Antfa and "downplay" these insurgents in the same breath. That's hypocrisy...Keep your story straight.

I say punish them both.  Raid looks justified,  hope they do that to Antifa leaders too.

Can't condemn Antfa and "downplay" these insurgents in the same breath. That's hypocrisy...Keep your story straight.

I say punish them both.  Raid looks justified,  hope they do that to Antifa leaders too.

Did I mention ANTIFA?  It's not about hypocrisy.  It's about the gov't using a narrative to paint whoever they don't like as insurgents and domestic terrorists.

Tyranny.

Can't condemn Antfa and "downplay" these insurgents in the same breath. That's hypocrisy...Keep your story straight.

I say punish them both.  Raid looks justified,  hope they do that to Antifa leaders too.

i kinda agree, but this seriously smacks of encroachment of Free Speech, persecution of wrongthink.  Not sure where the Fine Line is anymore.

pretty soon, execution of search warrant at homes of long-time registered republican voter...?   

well, not in Hawaii, when it comes to heading to the polls, everybody registers as a democrat.

i kinda agree, but this seriously smacks of encroachment of Free Speech, persecution of wrongthink.  Not sure where the Fine Line is anymore.

pretty soon, execution of search warrant at homes of long-time registered republican voter...   

Yup, I also agree with you on that.   Hard to figure out the fine line.  Free speech is the foundation of America.  They clearly were making threats though.  Then the threats they made came true.  So if this is just an raid for investigation it seams legit. Hope they get whatever evidence needed and come with a fair conclusion.   Doesn't appear they were charged with any crimes. 

.

Did I mention ANTIFA?  It's not about hypocrisy.  It's about the gov't using a narrative to paint whoever they don't like as insurgents and domestic terrorists.

Tyranny.

Many on this forum including yourself demand hard action on antifa in countless other threads,  yet shy away from punishing the capital/Trump insurgency the same level.   They are both wrong just because one side you like shouldn't effect the outcome.

Question do you think antifa are insurgency or terrorists?   I can't recall if you answered that or used that language to describe them before.  When advocating against them.  Would you be fine if the government had a narrative against antifa leading to raids etc?

I think they are both terrorists of the same coin. The far right and far left terrorists.

.

Many on this forum including yourself demand hard action on antifa in countless other threads,  yet shy away from punishing the capital/Trump insurgency the same level.   They are both wrong just because one side you like shouldn't effect the outcome.

Question do you think antifa are insurgency or terrorists?   I can't recall if you answered that or used that language to describe them before.  When advocating against them.  Would you be fine if the government had a narrative against antifa leading to raids etc?

I think they are both terrorists of the same coin. The far right and far left terrorists.

Bullshit.

Just utter bullshit.

"yet shy away from punishing the capital/Trump insurgency"

You fell for the rhetoric.  Trump didn't have an insurgency. 

The insurgency was the stolen election.

The evidence shows Trump did the EXACT OPPOSITE, telling the protestors to peacefully make their VOICES heard.  Not even close to the charges of inciting insurgency.

Bunch of Democrats playing the victim to deflect from a stolen election.

Now team Biden is going to begin purging the military. ISIS was formed by military officers and enlisted expelled from Sadams former army by Rumsfeld, he was warned by everyone that they would eventually become insurgents if he did it.

 https://www.reuters.com/article/BigStory12/idUSKBN2A335W

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military on Wednesday acknowledged it was unsure about how to address white nationalism and other extremism in its ranks, and announced plans for military-wide stand-downs pausing regular activity at some point in the next 60 days to tackle the issue.

The decision to a hold a stand-down was made by Lloyd Austin, who made history by becoming the military’s first Black defense secretary after a long career rising in the ranks of the Army. In his confirmation hearing, Austin underscored the need to rid the military of “racists and extremists”.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Austin ordered the stand-down after a meeting with the U.S. military branch leaders, who are under pressure to show progress in combating extremism after current and former military servicemembers were found to have participated in the siege of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

The Pentagon has yet to define how it will deal with extremism or offer data estimating how many service members hold white nationalist ideology. It has also not disclosed how many troops have been disciplined for extremism.

“We don’t know how we’re going to be able to get after this in a meaningful, productive, tangible way and that is why he had this meeting today and that is why he certainly ordered this stand-down,” Kirby told reporters.

It was unclear whether the announcement was meant to foreshadow any near-term concrete actions by President Joe Biden’s Pentagon or whether the stand-down was more of a symbolic move, meant to demonstrate Austin’s acknowledgement of the problem and continued resolve.

The Pentagon did not define whether stand-downs pausing regular activity across the U.S. military might last minutes or hours, or what commanders would do during that time to express opposition to extremism.

The announcement came as mourners filed beneath the U.S. Capitol dome to pay tribute to Brian Sicknick, the Capitol Police officer who died from injuries sustained during the Jan. 6 storming of the seat of government.

The assault on the building led to the second impeachment of former President Donald Trump, who spoke at a rally in his final days in office and urged supporters to go to the Capitol and “fight.” His impeachment trial in the Senate for inciting the siege is scheduled to start next week.

Bullshit.

Just utter bullshit.

"yet shy away from punishing the capital/Trump insurgency"

You fell for the rhetoric.  Trump didn't have an insurgency. 

The insurgency was the stolen election.

The evidence shows Trump did the EXACT OPPOSITE, telling the protestors to peacefully make their VOICES heard.  Not even close to the charges of inciting insurgency.

Bunch of Democrats playing the victim to deflect from a stolen election.

Still waiting on proof of your claims.  Stolen?  Show me some court cases.  Why is Biden president?   Sounds like a sore loser.  You are beyond biased to a point of blindness toward Trump. 

Now team Biden is going to begin purging the military. ISIS was formed by military officers and enlisted expelled from Sadams former army by Rumsfeld, he was warned by everyone that they would eventually become insurgents if he did it.

So you saying the always trumpets are going to form the next isis? 

So you saying the always trumpets are going to form the next isis? 

.

Still waiting on proof of your claims.  Stolen?  Show me some court cases.  Why is Biden president?   Sounds like a sore loser.  You are beyond biased to a point of blindness toward Trump.

Trumps election case is currently at the SCOTUS and being reviewed to see if it will proceed to arguments.

Still waiting on proof of your claims.  Stolen?  Show me some court cases.  Why is Biden president?   Sounds like a sore loser.  You are beyond biased to a point of blindness toward Trump.

You can't see the light when your head is that far up your ass.  Try a new approach. 

Every court refused to see the evidence over technical reasons: standing, jurisdiction, etc.  Does that mean the evidence doesn't exist?

No one is as blind as he who will not see.

Side Note if you take that debit card that the Dems put $600 on for Bat Flu relief and jump thru all the hoops required to deposit it into your checking account, you will notice pretty quick its all set up to mine all your personal data. They could have just sent  IRS checks like before, but instead they had a plan in place hoover up info of citizens they didnt already have.

 100% if you use that like a debit card as they hope they would be monitoring every purchase you made. I would love to see how many folks walked into a gun store and bought a weapon or ammo with it. And they are probably on a potential  ' white nationalist insurrectionist' list somewhere on an AWS cloud.

Side Note if you take that debit card that the Dems put $600 on for Bat Flu relief and jump thru all the hoops required to deposit it into your checking account, you will notice pretty quick its all set up to mine all your personal data. They could have just sent  IRS checks like before, but instead they had a plan in place hoover up info of citizens they didnt already have.

 100% if you use that like a debit card as they hope they would be monitoring every purchase you made. I would love to see how many folks walked into a gun store and bought a weapon or ammo with it. And they are probably on a potential  ' white nationalist insurrectionist' list somewhere on an AWS cloud.

So if the recipient HYPOTHETICALLY goes out and buys:

a case of wine in bottles,
some absorbent cloth rags,
6 gas cans, and
6 gallons of gasoline

can the President, the Congress and the IRS Director be charged with enabling violent insurrection?