FBI extremist experts say the real peril will come if Trump is indicted or loses in 2024.
Twenty-five
minutes past midnight on Wednesday, Walker, the football superstar turned
Republican candidate for Georgia’s crucial U.S. Senate seat, mildly counseled
his supporters to “hang in there a little bit longer” in anticipation of a Dec.
6 runoff against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock. There was no talk from him or
other MAGA Republicans along the lines of Donald Trump’s bellicose invitation
to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” widely seen as an incitement to
the January 6, 2021, insurrection.
Instead, Walker cheerfully recounted Ronald Reagan’s beloved bromide
about the kid who thought he’d find a pony if he shoveled enough horse
manure. (He didn’t credit Reagan.) He compared himself to Will Ferrell’s
goofball NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby, who flips his race car and maniacally
staggers over the Talladega finish line on foot, despite knowing he’ll be
disqualified for lack of vehicle.
Does
absence of anarchy mean the U.S. government’s intelligence is flawed or
hyped? What about the FBI/Homeland
Security bulletin, based on that intelligence and circulated to law enforcement
and widely leaked late last month? It warned, “Following the 2022 midterm
election, perceptions of election-related fraud and dissatisfaction with
electoral outcomes likely will result in heightened threats of violence against
a broad range of targets―such as ideological opponents and election workers.”
Yet
“fraud” and “stop the steal” cries, so far, have been fleeting and muted, and
mob mayhem, absent.
But it’s
not over, FBI counter-terror veterans say.
Because it’s not THIS election that is driving all that online crazy.
Agitation and paranoia about the 2024 Presidential race, distrust of balloting
systems and the generally sour national mood will keep a lot of people pacing,
venting on social media, and a few, assembling arsenals.
“It’s
not going to get better before it gets worst,” says Tom O’Connor, who retired
from the FBI in 2019 after nearly 23 years working domestic and foreign terror
cases. “I’m not blaming the right or the
left. I’m blaming the voices, and there’s too many of them. Everybody’s gotta
come together and grow up, and I don’t see it happening.”
Endless
Simmer
“It
doesn’t end,” says another FBI veteran, “because 50 percent of the population
is never going to be satisfied. We all know for the foreseeable future that
we’re not going to get any closer to political compromise. The danger factor
may possibly increase, if Trump announces and then he is indicted. I’m sure
[Attorney General] Merrick Garland is losing sleep over that.”
“I am
happy to report that today has been relatively quiet on the political violence
front,” Suzanne Almeida, director of state operations for Common Cause, told
reporters Tuesday, according to the Washington Post. “We were absolutely prepared for more
significant incidents, but they simply have not come to fruition.”
O’Connor, now training police officials through his
firm, FEDSquared Consulting, says it’s no time to relax vigilance. If anything,
he says, the FBI and other law enforcement and security agencies need to work
harder to overcome the huge UNK-UNK (Unknown-Unknown) problem. Agents know that
they don’t know what they don’t know, and that bedevils them.
In the
weeks leading up to Election Day, FBI
agents were almost certainly poring over threat reports gleaned from online
platforms, wiretaps and tips from human sources, bureau veterans say. “For a
lot of people who are sending threats online, it’s not that hard to get the
identity of the person and go knock on their door,” says a former senior FBI
counter-terror official who still trains others. (Like some others, he asked
for anonymity to discuss operations.)
“For the most part, agents are knocking on doors, to get a sense of how
much of this stuff is real, how much is idle bragging. Then you go to bed at
night and pray you might be right.”
Most of
those situations turn out to be ambiguous—certainly not enough evidence to
justify a criminal case and an arrest.
Even so, FBI officials believe that it’s not necessary to arrest all
potential law-breakers; they think that a simple chat in a hothead’s living
room is message enough that the feds know exactly—exactly—– where he is, what
he’s been up to, and can find him anytime they choose
The
Silent Ones
But
there are surely a few people capable of carrying out monster attacks who aren’t
mouthing off publicly and who haven’t had any brushes with the FBI and other
law enforcement agencies.
“What
you always worry about are the people who are not online, “ says a retired FBI
official. As he and other veterans
remember all too painfully, immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks,
agents and analysts went into the counter-terror database and pulled every
threat that mentioned “airplane,” “airport,” or “airline.” They came up with about 1,200 threats—and not
a single one came from anybody who had anything to do with the Al Qaeda cell
that actually carried out the attacks.
The reason: the hijackers simply
didn’t talk to anybody, or have known relationships in the U.S., or send
incriminating emails to known Al Qaeda members. There were a couple of missed
contacts, but nothing that raised a huge red flag.
An
example that haunts FBI agents to this day is Unabomber Theodore
Kaczynski. The former mathematics
professor lived alone in a remote cabin in Montana. He talked to no one about his
grievances. He mailed 16 bombs, starting
in 1978, killing three people, and was
identified only when he sent a “manifesto” in 1995. The FBI, still clueless, gave it to the
Washington Post. David Kaczynski saw
similarities with essay written by his estranged brother, called the FBI and in
1996 made a deal in exchange for an agreement that the government would not
seek the death penalty. “Ted Kaczynski
was UNABOM suspect number 2,416,” says an FBI summary of the case. Which means that the FBI plodded through
2,415 other suspects over 18 years before getting its man.
Tim
McVeigh, convicted of bombing the Oklahoma City federal building on April 19,
1995, killing 168 people, including 19 children, kept his thoughts mostly to
himself. FBI could find only two men,
both friends of McVeigh, who knew his plan. No organization, no network, no
online postings. McVeigh was executed
June 11, 2001, exactly four months before the September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda
attacks.
Then
there was Nashville Christmas Day bomber Anthony Quinn Warner, an IT expert who
blew up himself, his beloved dogs and a city block on Dec. 25, 2020 with an
ingenious bomb rigged in his van. The FBI solved that crime quickly, concluding
that Warner was motivated by “eccentric” conspiracy theories, such as paranoia
about space lizards. Luckily, Warner
killed no one other than himself, because if he had gone on a Unabomber-like
rampage, it could have taken quite a while to locate him. He didn’t go online, and he expressed bits
and pieces of his paranoid fantasies to a handful of people, who didn’t put two
and two together until his spectacular end.
The
FBI’s failure to anticipate the 9/11 attacks is often called a “failure of
imagination.” In 2001, the FBI knew Al
Qaeda was going to stage another attack, but agents were looking for bombers or
shooters who were part of organized conspiracies and who had access to
considerable equipment. Agents did not
conceive of individuals who would train as pilots, force their way into
cockpits and fly airliners into buildings.
To be
sure, the FBI was well aware of the so-called Bojinka plot, a plan hatched by
Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the World Trade Center in Manhattan in 1993, and his
uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to bomb some airliners. This plan was foiled when police in the
Philippines responded to an apartment building fire and discovered bomb-making
materials and a laptop containing elements of the plot. Yousef, captured in Pakistan in 1995, and two
confederates were convicted for this conspiracy. In a separate trial, Yousef and two others
were convicted for the World Trade Center bombing. Those plots, like the downing of Pan Am 103
in 1988, involved bombs on planes, so
U.S. airport and airplane security authorities and law enforcers focused on
looking for explosive devices and firearms—not the boxcutters wielded by the
9/11 hijackers.
Even
after 9/11 and Al Qaeda attacks overseas, domestic terror, or DVE – domestic
violent extremism – was not a top priority for the FBI. It has been elevated to greater importance in
recent years.
Even so,
says O’Connor, “You only have so many agents and analysts who can work these
things. They have to be able to juggle
several balls and do it well, because the terrorists only have to get it right
once.”
Short-Sighted
O’Connor
calls the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol another failure of
imagination. “That thousands of
individuals were going to raid the U.S. Capitol violently was outside a lot of
people’s minds,” O’Connor says. To date, the Justice DepartmentI has charged more than
900 people in the so-called Capitol Breach investigation. Stewart Rhodes,
leader of the radical militia group Oath Keepers, is currently standing trial
in Washington, D.C. for seditious conspiracy in that case. When the verdict is about to come down, the
FBI and other federal, state and local law enforcement organizations will be on
alert.
“I don’t
see any other Republican who can rally the troops out there,” says the retired
FBI counter-terror veteran. “I don’t
think any of them can command the outpouring of rage that he can. If they [the
U.S. Justice Department and FBI] get ready to indict him, they’ll put out the
word to advise every state and local police agency out there.”
***Elaine
Shannon is a veteran national security correspondent for Time and
Newsweek. Latest book: Hunting LeRoux
(HarperCollins/Michael Mann Books)
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