Saturday, February 6, 2021

Coup hunt may be FBI's biggest

One month after the events which left five people dead including a US Capitol police officer, there is no sign of the Department of Justice and FBI letting up in their relentless pursuit of the insurrectionists. In the past week alone there have been arrests of alleged rioters in Seattle, Washington; Las Vegas, Nevada; Corinth, Texas; Garner, North Carolina; and Marion, Illinois.

All 56 FBI field offices are engaged in a huge investigation that ranks alongside the biggest the bureau has conducted. As Michael Sherwin, acting US attorney for Washington DC which is leading the hunt, has put it: “The scope and scale of this investigation are really unprecedented, not only in FBI history but probably DoJ history.”

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Already the number of people who have been arrested, either by the FBI, Capitol police or local Washington DC officers has reached 235, spanning more than 40 states.

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So far at least 26 people have been charged with conspiracy or assault.

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As the investigation widens and deepens, the focus is tightening on anyone considered to have acted as a coordinator of the action in an attempt to take out the ringleaders.

  Guardian
Check Fox News, Congress and Mar-A-Lago.
Prosecutors have made clear that they are ramping up the charges against select individuals as a means of discouraging further violence from Trump supporters and their far-right and white supremacist allies. “We are going to focus on the most significant charges as a deterrent, because regardless of if it was just a trespass in the Capitol or someone planted a pipe bomb, you will be charged and you will be found,” Sherwin said.
Maybe not in that order.
[A]t least 200,000 digital media tips that have poured into the FBI from across the country, some coming from friends and even family members who recognized individual rioters from the profusion of video and stills footage plastered across the internet and promptly informed on them.

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Another chilling element emerging from the indictments is the number of current and former law enforcement officers and military personnel who are among them. An analysis of the first 150 people to be arrested by CNN found that at least 21 had military experience, some ongoing.

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At least four law enforcement officers who were actively serving in their positions at the time of the 6 January attack have been accused, and have left their jobs.

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Political scientists at the University of Chicago who studied the profiles of arrestees and published their conclusions in the Atlantic found that many were middle-class and middle-aged – with an average age of 40. Almost 90% of them had no known links with militant groups. Some 40% were business owners or with white-collar jobs, and they came from relatively lucrative backgrounds as “CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants”.

The one common denominator uniting this large group is not any extremist group, website or media outlet, but an individual – Donald Trump.

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