#SeditionHunters - "arrest Friday" is back! Not just in numbers but in importance: the first arrest in awhile of a perp with an "organizational" role on Jan 6. But first, the colorful & violent #PinstripeBoilersuit, FBI #37 and #94, Josiah Kenyon of NV..1/
#PinstripeBoilersuit was ID'd within days of the Capitol attack: a witness told FBI they'd met him on the Washington Metro, gave his motel, ID'd from motel records. Arrests often lag IDs by many months, presumably to not overload the court system. 2/ justice.gov/usao-dc/press-…
And now, the biggest of the big game, hunted for months, the two who ran the breaches on West and East sides of the Capitol - #MaroonPB and #ZZtopPB. The #1 arrest priority for many, not the leaders of the insurrection but on-the-ground executors. 3/
We knew #MaroonPB (Ronald Loehrke of GA) was a Marine from his tattoos, here he is in uniform 2012. #ZZTopPB is James Haffner of South Dakota. Cannot emphasize enough how huge this is. 4/
Indictment is sealed but there's a press release, that doesn't fully explain their role. #MaroonPB was the absolute first perp we made a reel of, before even Proud Boys leader Joe Biggs. He's key to understanding the organization of the Capitol attack. 5/ justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/two…
Here's a "trailer" for the updated #MaroonPB reel, from June. He gave the signal for the taking of the W. Plaza, walked around the Capitol and helped initiate the NE breaches. He was the first clue to the larger organization of the attack. 6/
Here's the reel itself, over 19 minutes - #MaroonPB was everywhere, almost always with #ZZTopPB. If anyone wonders why #SeditionHunters have said for months there was organization - just watch. With this arrest we should expect other big ones too. 7/
Here's #MaroonPB urging people to go from West to East sides of the Capitol to help with the NE breaches - "don't back down patriots - the whole f--ing world is watching you!" (find by @RavenDragon2015) 8/
Here's #MaroonPB at the front of the NE barricade breach. In the yellow hat in front is #LemonyKickit who also moved from W to E to help push through police lines and keep the breaches synchronized. 9/
Here's #MaroonPB in a meeting on the E. Steps so suspicious it got its own hashtag, #J6EastMeet: talking with cops, gesturing. The silver-haired man in front is Warren Gilbert (#GnarleyParley), father of Joey Gilbert who is running for NV governor. 10/
After the E steps meeting, #MaroonPB walked around on E. Plaza and had a triumphal hug with a guy wearing a hat from the Navy VFA-81 Sunliners. 11/
Then #MaroonPB made his way to the top of the E. steps in time for the breach attempts, where #ZZTopPB bear-sprayed the officers guarding the Capitol. (h/t @StevieG54099097 for all video). 12/
#MaroonPB was one of the first people into the Capitol through the main E doors breach, hauled in by people waiting on the inside. He goes in so fast you may have to pause to see him; he's out of frame 6 seconds into the video. He stood out at the Capitol for his competence. 13/
Inside the Capitol #MaroonPB joined the early group in Sen. Merkley's office - not the later pot-smoking crowd, but one with several perps suspected of having roles. 14/
The complaint for #MaroonPB (Loehrke) & #ZZTopPB (Haffner) is public: 25 pages that summarize work by #SeditionHunters over many months. All his Capitol sightings, hotel Jan 5th, earlier Proud Boy marches. Finding him was a true crowdsourced manhunt. 15/ justice.gov/usao-dc/press-…
The complaint adds new insight from phone searches: #MaroonPB is a friend of arrested Proud Boy leader Ethan Nordean (#Rufio), who asked #MaroonPB to be "on the front line" with him. Reply from #MaroonPB - he'd bring three "bad mother f---ers" with him. 16/
Journos who call Jan 6 a riot (or complain about DOJ's pace): conspiracy indictments are coming. There was organization; FBI knows it; the hundreds of #SeditionHunters who upended their lives to help know it. The dominoes were being stacked for months and they will now fall. 17/
Journos: to understand how large these efforts are, search Twitter under the hashtags. So many people contributed to this effort they can't all be named. See how much it took. Here's @22ColeRin in March teaching people how to even find #MaroonPB. 18/
The Capitol attack is too big for one person to work out, even a small investigative team. It takes hundreds. Look at one new video from the Plaza, less than a minute long - 98 total hashtags on the front lines facing down police, including all the Proud Boys leadership. 19/
h/t @AlHunt08657198 for the annotation, but it took hundreds to find, describe, categorize perps. It's been a massive, grinding effort, but it will be solved. Perps like #MaroonPB are the threads to pull to untangle the whole story, and FBI is pulling them. 20/
Journalists please understand - collaborative efforts are the only way to find truth in complicated datasets. Society has worked out how to do this - people come together to attack a problem. If we can do this for black holes (below), surely we can do it for democracy too. 21/
Update to clarify: #MaroonPB & #ZZTopPB had moved to GA and SD only recently; both lived in Seattle (Nordean's hometown) on Jan 6. So they're now marked as "Pacific NW" in the PB table (bit.ly/CapitolPBTable). The Western states combined now match a hotspot like FL, NY, AZ. 22/
The PNW connection should have been caught earlier: #MaroonPB stuck so close to two Proud Boys on Jan 6 morning they got flagged as "friends" in his reel in April - we now know they are Jeffrey & Jeremy Grace of Battle Ground, WA. PBs on Jan 6 largely moved in state groups. 23/
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The dreaded "I told you so" moment: for years this account has warned that Trump and his backers want to dictate what schools can teach, from K-12 and university. That they wanted to impose curricula. And now it's here: Trump is trying to seize Columbia, a private university. 1/
n Sep. 2022 I put it in a Twitter thread: that Trump had offered control over education as a quid pro quo for supporting his coup. Trump may not care about schools, but the people behind him do. They want to take away freedom of thought and speech. 2/
Trump and his backers copy Victor Orban, who seized universities in Hungary. Hungarian envoys are now at every major right-wing conference. CPAC went to Hungary. University leaders should have read Orban's blueprint and prepared. This is their plan. 3/ verfassungsblog.de/how-the-destro…
Trump is doing it: using the Justice Department to go after his 'enemies' and support his Big Lie. Pardoning the J6ers was just the first step. He's now using DOJ to attack those who said he lost in 2020, starting with Chris Krebs. It's full dictator mode: no law but power. 1/
Cannot emphasize enough how bad this is. A president using law enforcement to persecute those who won't repeat his lies. A pliant Attorney General who has also said she would send US citizens to foreign torture camps. All Americans must speak out or this is the end. 2/
Going to add some other reactions here - many see how bad this is. Tim Miller calls the move "Stalinesque". He says "Any person who reveres our constitutional republic should speak out against it." 3/
Journalists reporting on Pete Hegseth's brother Phil seem to be missing his work in 2017-2018 - he worked for Cliff May's Foundation for the Defense of Democracies as a "social and digital media specialist", and also wrote some articles for them. 1/ web.archive.org/web/2017100314…x.com/MilitaryTimes/…
This doesn't seem like earthshaking stuff, but it's trivial to find and oddly he omits it from his LinkedIn. Phil Hegseth shows up on the FDD staff page in Feb 2017 and is gone in June 2018. Here's one of his articles, a summary of a report. 2/ web.archive.org/web/2017110221…
The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies had a roster of very well known conservative voices so there's a lot of people you can call for stories about Phil Hegseth - including Michael G. Waltz, now Pete Hegseth's Signal buddy. 3/ web.archive.org/web/2017091201…
Today 19 Dem Senators helped enable both Trump's attack on science and the techbro power grab by confirming the most unqualified person ever to lead the Office of Science & Technology Policy: a non-scientist (BA in politics) who spent 8 years working for Peter Thiel. 1/
The Senate-confirmed head of OSTP has ALWAYS been a high-level scientist - this is the person who advises the president on science and technology. Why Kratsios? Because he's a Thiel protege. In 2017, Trump picked him up directly from his job at Thiel Capital - a VC guy. 2/
By now Kratisos is in AI. In Dec. Trump nominated a slew of AI-tinged science advisors. Of 4 names here, only one (the woman) has science PhD: Lynne Parker is an EE prof & NSF director. The other 3 are Thiel / Andreessen VC men, techbro nepo babies. The Pete Hegseths of tech. 3/
Mother Jones has written on this story from 2023, that our now-US-Attorney for DC brokered Michael Flynn's pardon as a quid pro quo. I can't QT Dan Friedman since he's since blocked me. But Martin's involvement in Flynn's pardon is an important story and it's worth revisiting. 1/
This paragraph in the article, which says Ali Alexander used Ed Martin to process funds for the Jan 6 rally, seems wrong, maybe got scrambled. Charlie Kirk's TPUSA handled the money, which Caroline Wren got from donor Julie Fancelli. There IS an Ed Martin connection tho... 2/
Ali Alexander's testimony shows the J6C were going after Ed Martin's involvement with busing people to DC. They ask if Martin fronted money for buses and got reimbursed by Kirk's TPUSA. Ali swears he doesn't know about logistics, just helped publicize. 3/ govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GP…
As Trump begins disobeying court orders, watch for support from Josh Hawley (Yale Law, here with new theories on how US courts work) and Ted Cruz (Princeton). Both are proteges of Peter Thiel (Stanford), as is JD Vance (Yale). Hawley & Cruz were key to Trump's plans on Jan 6.. 1/
In the weeks leading up to January 6, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz were treated as a pair by other Senators, and were assumed to be LEADING the plot. Trump called them over and over in the hours before the attack, threatened them after. He'll use them now. 2/
On Jan 6, Hawley and Cruz were the two Senators who stood to sustain objections to the vote - vital for producing a delay. Then night before, Trump called Hawley 3 times and Cruz once. On Jan 6 he called Hawley again. He needed them then, and will now. 3/