UPDATE 2: The Boston Globe is reporting that Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley and her husband retreated to her office during the attack and staff barricaded and bolted the door.  When she went to her panic button (every office has one) she found that it had been ripped out.  Capitol Hill Police moved her several times to keep her away from the mob.

UPDATE 1:  New Jersey Rep. Mikie Sherrill told constituents on a live stream last night that she witnessed certain representatives actually giving tours of the Capitol on January 5th that she’s now realized were actually reconnaissance for the attack the following day.  She didn’t name them publicly, but is going to make sure that they are brought to justice along with other complicit representatives as well as Trump.  She does know what she’s talking about, being a Navy helicopter pilot and member of flag staff for a decade.  This story just piles more evidence on the emerging narrative that the attack was most certainly carefully planned and executed from the highest levels of the government.

ORIGINAL STORY: Seth Abramson, a NYTimes bestselling author and analyst for several networks, has compiled over 250 reports on last Wednesday and a seriously disturbing pattern is emerging about what events led to an invasion of the Capitol.  The punch line is that this entire sordid episode was planned and executed with the specific intent of disrupting the certification of the Electoral Vote long enough for violent extremists to actually stop the certification.  I won’t post the entire thread here, but you can read it here on Threadreader.  It is required reading to begin to understand what happened on January 6th.

To set the scene, here were the main players:

Trump
Giuliani
Rep. Biggs (R-AZ)
Rep. Gosar (R-AZ)
Rep. Brooks (R-AL)
Sen. Tuberville (R-AL)
Arizona Proud Boys
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall

Assisted by:

Ali Alexander, far-right activist
Roger Stone, friend and advisor to the president
Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign manager
Donald Trump Jr., son of the president

Roger Stone is in the center of this conspiracy (sound familiar?), is close to the Proud Boys, and coordinated the effort.  Alexander originally organized a “Stop the Steal” rally for January 6.  Stone had coined the term.  The event was eventually combined with another event, “Save America” which had been organized by a Trump dark money group.  Since the election, Trump has raised over $300 million from loyalists for “election defense” but much of the money apparently went to Stone and Manafort to organize the insurrection.  Stone recruited Biggs, Gosar, and Brooks in the house to object to the Arizona electoral vote, and got Tuberville to join in the Senate.

Here’s the money line:  THE ONLY REASON THEY WERE TO OBJECT TO THE ELECTORAL VOTE WAS TO DELAY THE CERTIFICATION LONG ENOUGH TO GIVE THE MOB, LED BY THE PROUD BOYS, TIME TO BREACH THE CAPITOL AND STOP THE CERTIFICATION COMPLETELY. 

Here are the Arizona Proud Boys at the Capitol.  They wore the orange hats to distinguish members during the invasion:

That, boys and girls, is chilling.  Seth Abramson has compiled public data that reveals a narrative that the President of the United States, one US Senator, three US Congressmen, a state attorney general, Trump’s insane attorney, two convicted felons, Trump’s shitbag son, and a violent far right group of extremists hatched a plan IN THE WHITE HOUSE to actually overturn a free and fair election, overthrow the US government, and hand it to Donald Trump, Dictator.  Apparently, idiots like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley were unwitting accomplices to the overthrow plot just trying to stay on the Crazy Train to 2024.

Read Abramson’s thread.  It will give you cold chills about how close the United States government actually came to collapsing on Wednesday, January 6, 2021.

The attack on democracy by insurrectionists last week was planned on social media platform Parler, which is was the Facebook for Criminals before Amazon yanked it off its servers for violating community standards.  Apparently, Amazon takes a dim view of threatening mass murder and overthrow of governments, and now that Parler is offline, extremists are being forced back into the dark web, the cozy home for racists and child pornographers.

All that is good, but here’s what’s really good…before Parler was taken offline, hackers (who the press calls researchers) scraped personal data on approximately 12 million users, a lot of whom are white supremacists, anti-government types, Trumpists, and armed insurgents.  What’s REALLY good?  After promising anonymity and more “freedom”, Parler actually was more intrusive than even Facebook.  Like Facebook, Parler followed people around, but even required users to upload their DRIVER’S LICENSE to become a “verified person”.  Also all videos posted to the site captured actual GPS coordinates for the video.  The result?  Thousands of the rioters who carried their phones (all of them) incriminated themselves as Parler captured who they were, where they were, and what they did.  Apparently the hackers captured up to 70 terabytes (that’s a lot) of data including said driver’s licenses, geolocations, deleted messages, and something like 1.1 million videos that included GPS locations.

The FBI has a LOT of doors to knock on now, and that’s a good thing.

Earlier, we were talking about retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Larry Rendell Brock, Jr. who was photographed taking part in the paramilitary operation that took over the Capitol on Wednesday.  Members of Oathkeepers and the Three Percenters, as well as othersThere were a lot of others like Brock at the Capitol who were working together as a unit to…wait for it…shut down the US Congress and kidnap or even kill elected officials of the US Government.  That is the very definition insurrection. AND, Ooo; Ooo; here’s the good part – on top of the jail time they get, under several federal laws, a military retiree convicted of certain crimes, INCLUDING INSURRECTION, can be court-martialed, convicted, STRIPPED OF ALL THEIR RETIREMENT and other benefits.  That’s right, folks, and it gets better.  Just last year, the Supreme Court declined to take an appeal of a court-martial of a military retiree for rape that stripped him of his retirement benefits.

I’m hearing that arrests are up to 100 and climbing, and the FBI is looking for a whole bushel basket full of other Trumpists-turned-felons.  Oh, and by the by – The Justice Department announced today that Larry Brock was arrested today in Texas.  Mr. Zip Tie, Eric Gavelek Munchel, was also arrested today in Tennessee.  All these cases are being prosecuted by the Justice Department Anti-Terrorism Division in Washington.  Boom.

Aunt Tifa was in on the attack.

There are internet sleuths working to identify the insurrectionists who attacked to Capitol last Wednesday.  Here is a video of a paramilitary team of Oathkeepers moving as a unit up the steps on the east side of the Capitol building.  If you can identify any of these terrorists, please contact @jsrailton through Twitter.

NEW FOOTAGE: a long, disciplined line of men in body armor moves as a unit up the #CapitolBuilding steps.

We need to identify this group.

Grateful to @lehudgins for the find.
Source: https://t.co/1CQlT5Sqa7 pic.twitter.com/Omdva2SiUS

— John Scott-Railton (@jsrailton) January 10, 2021