Thread by @SusanKBradford

news.yahoo.com/homeland-secur…

Wow The DHS launched a failed op that ensnared hundreds, if not thousands, of US protesters in what new docs show was as a sweeping, power-hungry effort bef the 2020 election to bolster TFG’s spurious claims abt a “terrorist org” he accused his Democratic rivals of supporting.

SHOULDNT THIS BE A BIGGER DEAL? The man who instigated this did so on behalf of a man who plans to run again for president y’all! When will it stop? @maddow @JoyAnnReid @NicolleDWallace @AriMelber @AliVelshi @CapehartJ @Lawrence @chrislhayes @MSNBC #TrumpCrimeSyndicate

2/An internal investigative report, made publ this month by Sen. Ron Wyden details the findings of DHS lawyers concerning a previously undisclosed effort by Trump’s acting secretary of DHS, Chad Wolf, to amass secret dossiers on 🇺🇸 in Portland attending anti-racism protests…

3/in summer 2020 sparked by the 👮‍♂️ murder of George Floyd. The report describes attempts by top officials to link protesters to an imaginary terrorist plot in an apparent effort to boost TFG’s reelection odds, raising concerns now abt the ability of a sitting president to co-opt

4/billions of 💵’ worth of domestic intel assets for their own political gain. DHS analysts recounted orders to generate evidence of financial ties betw protesters in custody; an effort that, had they not failed, wld have seemingly served to legitimize TFG’s false claims abt…

5/ “Antifa,” an “org” that even his most loyal intel officers failed to 🥁 up proof ever existed. “Did not find any evidence that assertion was true”The DHS report offers a full accounting of the intel activities happening behind the scenes of officers’ protest containment;

6/“twisted efforts,” Wyden said, of TFG admin officials promoting “baseless conspiracy theories” to manufacture of a domestic terrorist threat for the president’s “political gain.” The report describes the dossiers generated by DHS as having detailed the past whereabouts & the…

7/“friends & followers of the subjects, as well as their interests” — up to & incl “First Amendment speech activity.” Intel analysts had internally raised concerns abt the decision to accuse any1 caught in the streets by default of being an “anarchist extremist” spec bec…

8/ “sufficient facts” were never found “to support such a characterization.”

One field ops analyst told interviewers that the charts were hastily “thrown together,” adding they “didn’t even know why some of the ppl were arrested.”

9/In some cases, it was unclear whether arrests were made by👮‍♂️or by 1 of the several fed agencies on the ground. The analysts were never provided arrest affidavits or paperwork said a witness, adding that they “just worked off the assumption that every1 on the list was arrested.”

10/Lawyers who reviewed 43 of the dossiers found it “concerning,” the report says, that 13 of them stemmed from “nonviolent crimes.” These incl trespassing, tho it was unclear to analysts & investigators whether the cases had “any relationship to fed property,” the report says.

11/A footnote in the report states that “at least 1 witness” told investigators that dossiers had been requested on ppl who were “not arrested” but merely accused of threats. Another, citing emails exchanged betw top intel officials, states dossiers were created “on persons …

12/arrested having nothing 2 do w homeland security or threats to officers.” Questioned by investigators the agency’s chief intel officer acknowledged fielding req’s by Wolf & his acting deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, to create dossiers “against every1 participating in Portland protest’

13/regardless of whether they’d been accused of any crime, the report says. That officer, Brian Murphy, then head of the agency’s Office of Intel & Analysis (I&A), told interviewers that he’d rejected the💡, informing his bosses that he cld only “look at ppl who were arrested,” &

14/adding that it was something his office had done “thousands” of times bef. The DHS report, finalized more than a yr ago, includes descriptions of orders handed down to “senior leadership” instructing them to broadly apply the label “violent antifa anarchists inspired” …

15/to Portland protesters unless they had intel showing “something different.”

Once the dossiers were received by the agency’s emerging threat center, it became clear that DHS had no real way to tie the protesters to any terrorist activities, neither at home nor abroad.

16/Efforts to 🥁 up evidence to support the admin’s claim that a “larger network was directing or financing” the protesters — a task assigned to another unit, known as the Homeland Identities, Targeting & Exploitation Ctr, …

17/🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨
diverted away from its usual work of analyzing nat’l security threats — “did not find any evidence that assertion was true,” the report says.
🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨

Srsly? ‘Diverted from its usual work of analyzing national security threats???!! HERLO? Is this 🎤 on?

18/Fears of political toadies occupying key intel roles had been aired publicly by former intel community members during TFG admin’s early yrs, but their concerns were all but ignored by Senate Repug during confirmation hearings that wld ultimately inflict serious reputational

19/damage on a number of agencies that, for their own survival, had long avoided partisan leanings.

The report is based on interviews w approx 80 employees conducted by attys drawn from various agency components, including USBP & the US Coast Guard.

20/The investigation began in resp to leaks of internal DHS emails in July 2020 that prompted q’s from lawmakers abt potential intel abuses, incl monitoring of journalists’ activities online & the liberal application of terrorism-related language to describe 🇺🇸 engaged in protest

21/I&A is one of the nation’s 17 intelligence community members overseen by the nation’s “top spy,” the director of national intelligence, whose office drafts daily top-secret briefings for the president.

But wait, there’s more!

22/The directorship was held throughout the protests by John Ratcliffe, a Republican of TX & renowned Trump loyalist, whose nomination to the post was withdrawn initially in 2019 over qualifications concerns raised by lawmakers & career intel officials.

23/The dossiers, known as Operational Background Reports, or OBRs, are known colloquially within the agency as “⚾️ cards,” the report says. The task of creating them was handed, “w little to no guidance on execution,” to the agency’s Current & Emerging Threats Center, …

24/an analysis unit whose “actionable intel” is distributed widely thruout the gov. According to the report, the dossiers would’ve bn shared w, among others, the agency’s Field Ops Division, which works closely w House & Senate committee staffers, & the Fed Protection Serv,

25/whose core mission is securing some 9,000 fed facilities across 🇺🇸. The extent to which entities outside the fed gov were meant to be involved is unclear; however, the report indicates that DHS state & local partners, which would naturally incl LEOs, but also potentially orgs

26/like Nat’l Governors Asso, cld have also been in the loop. Funded to the tune of $1.5B, the Fed Protective Serv (FPS) is comprised of thousands of security officers drawn from private contractors such as Triple Canopy, a firm merged in 2014 w another contractor called Academi,

27/previously known as Blackwater. 🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨 Erik Prince y’all!!!!

Its staff notoriously included elite warfighters recruited from among the Navy SEALS, the Army Rangers, and the Marines expeditionary force MARSOC.

28/Activated to engage protesters targeting fed bldgs in Portland — incl the well-vandalized Hatfield Fed Courthouse — FPS personnel were eventually joined by officers hailing from across the fed gov, incl some on loan by the US Marshals Serv tactical unit normally tasked …

29/w making the arrests of the nation’s most violent fugitives. They converged 4 a mission dubbed “Op Diligent Valor,” authorized under EO13933, purportedly to apprehend “anarchists & left-wing extremists” who’d bn driven by Floyd’s murder to target US monuments …

30/commemorating slave owners & Confederate traitors - dangerous individuals, Trump said advancing a “fringe ideology” painting the US gov as “fundamentally unjust.”
Floyd’s 💀 at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, convicted of murder & sentenced to 22 1/2 yrs

31/ in prison in 2021, sparked more than 100 days of continuous marches in Portland. Sporadic protests continued well into the next spring, frequently marked by nightly standoffs betw protesters toting bottles, fruit, & fireworks & riot-control squads armed w nightsticks, …

32/pepperspray, & “kinetic impact munitions” designed to irritate, disorient, & compel compliance thru pain. Police would eventually rack up an unprecedented 6,000 documented use-of-force cases against the demonstrators, who in turn reportedly inflicted more than $2.3M in damage

33/to fed buildings alone.

HOW DO WE KNOW THAT THESE DHS THUGS DIDNT CAUSE THE DAMAGE THEMSELVES!

Police ran off legal observers & physically beat journalist who suffered injuries at the hands of fed agents armed w crowd control weapons as well.

I REMEMBER THIS!

34/In response to the bad press, DOJ lawyers filed a successful motion in court giving police the power to force reporters off the streets. Reports began surfacing, meanwhile, of protesters being abducted near demonstrations by men jumping out of unmarked 🚐 in military fatigues.

35/After widely circulated footage confirmed the accounts, DHS acknowledged the abductions, as well as the fact that agents had taken intentional steps to ensure their identities remained secret.

36/

37/Analysts wld feed protesters’ names into an array of databases, incl LexisNexis, a tool used by Immigration & Customs Enforcement agents to hunt undocumented immigrants. Another tool, referred to as “Tangles” — a likely ref to the now-defunct FB app CrowdTangle —

38/was used to “[compile] info from the subject’s available SM profiles. The report also states that dossiers were requested on multiple journalists, incl Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare.

39/Wittes was targeted for publishing unclassified DHS materials, incl the initial leak that set off the investigation. Wittes had coauthored an article at Lawfare w Steve Vladeck, a UT law professor, in July 2020, which included leaked guidance — known as a “job aid” —

40/disclosing DHS plans to act on Trump’s EO. The doc, Lawfare reported, implicated “at least parts of the intel community” in the “monitoring & collecting info on some protest activities.” Later leaks obtained by the NYT incl’d a DHS memo that, among other things, …

41/summarized tweets that had been published by Wittes.
One tweet, published on July 26 — a wk after Lawfare published the guidance doc — incl’d a leaked 📧 by DHS’s acting chief intel officer, relaying orders to begin referring to all violence in Portland as the work of “Antifa"

42/

43/As the summer nights grew longer & the 2020 elections near, the media spent less time focused on the cause of the demonstrations — the suffocation of a Black father of five by a white Minneapolis police officer who was outwardly unmoved by Floyd’s desperate pleas for air, …

44/or the heartrending cries for his mother. Headlines shifted instead, as if on cue, to focus on the narrative crafted by the TFG’s flailing reelection campaign; a pre-packed delusion designed to strike fear in voters’ imaginations & tether Dems to a fictitious terrorist threat.

45/Nothing could dissuade TFG from continuing to propagate the claims, which his supporters — most to this day — continue to blindly believe. “In my 📕 it’s virtually a part of their campaign, Antifa,” Trump said in the final mos bef the election.

46/“The Dems act like, gee, I don’t know exactly what that is.”

Trump’s highest ranking intel crony, John Ratcliffe, meanwhile, would go on to play the only card left w a little help from Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

47/Shocking & alarming career intel officials, Graham posted a ltr online ahead of the election’s final debate. It contained a batch of Russian disinfo that a Republican-led committee had disregarded as bogus 4 yrs earlier.

48/Apparently, it focused on the only Democratic left on whom they could find any material with which to smear: Hillary Clinton, who had no election to lose.

49/that’s the article in full. I took liberties w short cuts & abbreviations using emojis when possible to save my character counts.

Good gawd… this BETTER reach the news cycle before Tuesday! @NicolleDWallace @maddow @Lawrence @MSNBC @JoyAnnReid @AliVelshi @AriMelber