Tag: fake terrorism

FBI arrests Houston man for alleged ISIS ties, terror plot on US soil

A Texas man is in FBI custody on Thursday after authorities say he attempted to support ISIS and planned a terrorist attack on American soil – all from his apartment in Houston.

Authorities said 28-year-old Anas Said was searching for ways to commit violent acts on behalf of the Islamic State in the Houston area. He has been charged with attempting to provide material support to the terrorist group.

Said was arrested last week at the apartment complex where he lived, according to FBI Special Agent in Charge Douglas Williams. 

Williams said that while in custody, Said admitted to researching how to conduct an attack on local military recruiting centers, offering his home as sanctuary for ISIS operatives, bragging that he would commit a “9/11-style” attack if he had the resources and attempting to produce ISIS propaganda.

“We stopped a potential terrorist attack from happening right here in Houston! Any day we can publicly say that is a good day,” FBI Houston said. 

A detention hearing is scheduled for Thursday afternoon in federal court in Houston.

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Family: FBI knew Oklahoma bomb plot suspect is schizophrenic

The family of a man accused of attempting to detonate what he believed was an explosives-laden van outside an Oklahoma bank says he is a paranoid schizophrenic and that the FBI knew it.

Clifford and Melonie Varnell, of Sayre, Oklahoma, issued a statement late Tuesday that questions the tactics undercover FBI agents used to arrest 23-year-old Jerry Drake Varnell. He was taken into custody early Saturday for the alleged plot to detonate a vehicle bomb in an alley adjacent to BancFirst in downtown Oklahoma City.

Varnell, who lives with his mother and stepfather in Sayre, about 130 miles west of Oklahoma City, is jobless due to his schizophrenia and does not have the resources to carry out such an act alone, according to the family’s statement.

“The FBI came and picked him up from our home, they gave him a vehicle, gave him a fake bomb, and every means to make this happen,” the statement said, adding that authorities “should not have aided and abetted a paranoid schizophrenic to commit this act.”

FBI spokeswoman Jessica Rice in Oklahoma City and Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Williams declined comment Wednesday.

Varnell “has suffered through countless serious full-blown schizophrenic delusional episodes and he has been put in numerous mental hospitals since he was 16 years old,” the family’s statement said. It added that his parents are his legal guardians and do all they can “to keep him safe and functional.”

“The mental health system has consistently failed us due to the lack of establishments and health care coverage for a person like him,” the statement said. Varnell takes medication “but he will never be completely functional in life,” it said.

The Varnells say their son is easily influenced and they believe a confidential informant who tipped FBI agents off to the alleged plot may have helped inspire it.

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FBI thwarts man’s alleged plan to attack Nashville power grid with explosive-laden drone

A Columbia, Tennessee man allegedly attempted to fly a drone packed with explosives into an energy facility before the FBI stopped him from destroying the critical infrastructure, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).

In a press release, the DOJ said 24-year-old Skyler Philippi was arrested and charged with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and attempted destruction of an energy facility.

“As charged, Skyler Philippi believed he was moments away from launching an attack on a Nashville energy facility to further his violent white supremacist ideology – but the FBI had already compromised his plot,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said. “This case serves as yet another warning to those seeking to sow violence and chaos in the name of hatred by attacking our country’s critical infrastructure: the Justice Department will find you, we will disrupt your plot, and we will hold you accountable.”

The DOJ said Philippi told a confidential human source (CHS) in June, that he wanted to commit a mass shooting at a YMCA in the Columbia, Tennessee area.

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The FBI Entraps Another Fake Assassin

Two attempts on the life of a former president, less than two months apart, is unprecedented in American history. And yet it’s not entirely surprising given that the country’s most powerful institutions and industries have spent the last eight years weaponizing the most suggestible and mentally ill of our citizenry to target Donald Trump and his supporters. Now it seems the FBI may be recruiting from abroad as well. 

According to the Trump campaign, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently briefed the Republican candidate on “real and specific threats from Iran to assassinate him in an effort to destabilize and sow chaos in the United States.” The Secret Service was alerted to the threat before the July 13 attempt on Trump’s life and reportedly increased his security because of it. But that was not enough to stop Thomas Matthew Crooks from shooting Trump in the face, killing Corey Comperatore, and wounding two other attendees.  

There’s little doubt the Iranians are targeting Trump, say former intelligence officials with whom I spoke. “The Iranians are promiscuous assassins, and they hate Trump more than anyone else on earth,” says Peter Theroux, a retired CIA officer who worked on Iran and related issues during his tenure at Langley. “Trump enforced sanctions against Iran. He moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. He was the most antithetical to everything Tehran wants, including the triumphal visit to Riyadh he made for his first presidential trip in 2017.” 

But above all, there’s the fact Trump ordered the January 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, onetime chief of the Quds Force, the external operations unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and second in command only to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The Iranians have vowed to avenge the terror master’s death and have threatened not only the former president but also former Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Iran envoy Brian Hook, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and his successor Robert O’Brien. In August 2022, the Justice Department charged an IRGC officer for plotting to kill Bolton. 

The Islamic Republic definitely has it out for Trump, but it seems this most recent Iranian plot to kill the Republican candidate was hatched by the FBI. 

Last month the DOJ announced it had charged a Pakistani national with ties to Iran in connection to a plot to assassinate a politician or U.S. government official on U.S. soil. According to reports, Trump was the target.

The suspect, Asif Merchant, entered the country in April and was arrested on July 12 as he prepared to leave the country. It appears that Merchant was the Iranian threat the Secret Service was briefed on before the July 13 rally in Butler, PA.

The FBI arranged his entry into the U.S. According to an August Twitter post from Fox correspondent Bill Melugin, Merchant “was admitted into the U.S. via parole for ‘significant public benefit’ when [Customs and Border Patrol] encountered him at the airport in [Texas] in April after he flew in from overseas.” The sponsor of his parole, Melugin reported, “was the FBI’s Dallas office, for ‘security interests.’”

Melugin’s sources told him the FBI had intelligence on Merchant “before he arrived in the U.S. and needed him to physically come into the country to develop the case on him and arrest him, and that if they had arrested him at Customs, they would not have been able to gather evidence and information about his plot.”

But to date there’s little evidence the FBI developed a case based on intelligence collected before Merchant’s entry. Rather, it seems more likely that federal law enforcement imported a terrorist entrapment target for the purpose of fabricating a plot. Former FBI agent turned whistleblower Steve Friend says the Bureau’s playbook is simple: “Identify a vulnerable person. Establish fake friendships with undercover agents and informants. Encourage him to agree to commit a terrorist act he is otherwise incapable of committing. Arrest him.”

Friend says that if the FBI really had probable cause for an arrest, it would make sense to facilitate Merchant’s travel rather than going through a lengthy and possibly contentious extradition process. But what’s curious, he says, “is that he was in the country for several months before they executed the arrest.”

If the FBI had intelligence on Merchant’s plan to kill Trump before he arrived in the United States, there’s no evidence of it in the affidavit for his arrest. “It was all information about his actions while in the United States,” says Friend. “That doesn’t mean that he hadn’t done anything before then. But it confirms that they didn’t have enough to arrest him when he arrived here.”

Neither the affidavit nor the indictment make a strong case that Merchant is an experienced operative. The “use of coded language, use of multiple cellular telephones, and removal of cellular telephones to attempt to avoid surveillance” cited in the affidavit do not, contrary to the arresting agent’s contention, exemplify expert “tradecraft and operational security measures.” “It’s laughable,” says Friend. “Like complex tradecraft is telling an accomplice to put his phone in a box? A corner drug dealer’s tradecraft is more sophisticated than that.”

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Pakistani National with Iranian Ties Charged with Murder-for-Hire in Foiled Assassination Plot Against President Trump

A federal complaint unsealed on Tuesday in Brooklyn has charged Asif Merchant, also known as “Asif Raza Merchant,” a 46-year-old Pakistani national, with murder-for-hire in connection with a foiled assassination plot targeting a politician or U.S. government officials on American soil.

The plot was thwarted by law enforcement before any attack could be executed. Merchant is currently in federal custody in New York, according to the press release.

FBI investigators believe that the intended targets of the plot included Trump and other current and former U.S. government officials, according to a U.S. official briefed on the matter, per CNN.

According to court documents, Merchant orchestrated a plot to assassinate a politician or U.S. government officials on U.S. soil. In approximately April 2024, after spending time in Iran, Merchant arrived in the United States from Pakistan and contacted a person he believed could assist him with the scheme. This individual reported Merchant’s intentions to law enforcement and became a confidential source (CS).

In early June, during a meeting with the CS, Merchant outlined his assassination plot and indicated that this opportunity would not be a one-time event. He made a gesture resembling a gun with his hand while discussing the killing and specified that the targets would be “here,” referring to the United States.

Merchant’s plan included various criminal activities: stealing documents from a target’s residence, organizing protests, and ultimately assassinating a political figure or government official. He expressed concerns about security measures surrounding potential targets and discussed multiple scenarios for carrying out the assassination.

In mid-June, Merchant met with individuals he believed were hitmen but were actually undercover FBI agents (UCs). During these meetings, he sought their services for theft and assassination and indicated that he would provide instructions on whom to kill after leaving the U.S.

Merchant arranged to pay $5,000 in cash as an advance for the assassination services and successfully delivered this payment on June 21. Following this transaction, he made plans to leave the country on July 12, 2024, one day before Trump’s assassination attempt. However, law enforcement intervened and arrested him before he could depart.

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Biden Cites the Farcical FBI-Assisted Plot To Kidnap Gretchen Whitmer as an Example of Political Violence

President Joe Biden’s condemnation of political violence Sunday night following the attempted assassination of his Republican rival, Donald Trump, listed a number of recent such incidents, but it also included the curious case of the alleged plot to kidnap Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

“We cannot—we must not go down this road in America,” Biden said. “We’ve traveled it before throughout our history. Violence has never been the answer, whether it’s with members of Congress in both parties being targeted in the shot, or a violent mob attacking the Capitol on January 6th, or a brutal attack on the spouse of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, or information and intimidation on election officials, or the kidnapping plot against a sitting governor, or an attempted assassination on Donald Trump.”

The inclusion of the would-be Whitmer kidnappers is a bit of continued gaslighting by the Biden administration, because the plot was in large part concocted and encouraged by paid FBI informants and their Bureau handlers.

The arrest of six Michigan militia members who plotted to kidnap Whitmer before the 2020 presidential election grabbed national headlines and stoked fears of rising right-wing extremism. However, the federal case against the plotters unraveled as court documents and news investigations revealed that the FBI used no less than a dozen of confidential informants and two undercover agents to gather intel on the group. 

As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum noted, “During a June 2020 meeting highlighted by the FBI, for example, it was an informant who argued that kidnapping was necessary.”

“We have a saying in my office,” one FBI special agent told a confidential informant in the case. “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.”

That’s why two of the defendants charged in the Whitmer conspiracy were acquitted, and two others were only convicted after a mistrial that stunned and embarrassed the FBI.

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Michigan and Penn. Capitol Sent Bomb Threats, Staffers Blame the FBI

The Michigan and Pennsylvania state capitols were both evacuated on Sunday after receiving bomb threats, “in the name of Palestine,” but some doubt the threats were genuine, blaming the FBI instead.

The Gateway Pundit spoke to Michigan State Rep. Steve Carra, who said that the threat, if genuine, demonstrates the left’s commitment to political violence. The Michigan capitol has been the scene of angry pro-Palestine demonstrations in recent months.

“The radical left threatens death and destruction in an attempt to get their way and plants operatives at conservative rallies to incite violence, making it look like conservatives are extremists. Then government and the mainstream media pushes their narrative over the truth,” he said.

Rep. Carra continued that the threat could just as easily have been another operation led by the FBI, like the Gretchen Whitmer “kidnapping” plot, to sow confusion and political division.

He described such behaviour as “treasonous activity” and added, “quite frankly it’s repulsive that mainstream media aids and abets this dangerous behavior by peddling disinformation narratives instead of reporting on facts.”

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The Hidden History Of Robert Mueller’s Right-Wing Terror Factory, Part 1

In 2007, Orlando residents were furious to discover that an FBI informant had organized a neo-Nazi rally through one of the city’s mostly black neighborhoods a year earlier.

“To come into a predominantly black community, which could have resulted in great harm to the black community? I would hate to be part of a game,” Orlando City Councilwoman Daisy Lynum said at the time, calling for a “full-scale investigation” into the matter.

However, an FBI agent testified that his informant participated in the event, but didn’t organize it. The city’s uproar passed without a public investigation, full-scale or otherwise—until now.

Thanks to a trove of previously unpublicized law enforcement records and interviews with several players involved, Headline USA can reveal that the Orlando neo-Nazi rally was indeed organized by the FBI. The Orlando event also seems to have been part of a larger program to hold Nazi rallies across the country. And according to FBI records, the bureau sponsored those events despite knowing they led to an increase in the number of card-carrying Nazis in America.

Moreover, the FBI’s Nazi rallies led to a much larger operation to target right-wing groups. Dubbed “Primitive Affliction,” the operation featured a motorcycle front group, rogue undercover agents, Outlaw bikers, Satanists, bomb-makers and a fugitive on the lam in Mexico.

To top it off, the FBI’s Nazi operation was briefed to the highest levels of the bureau, including to then-Director Robert Mueller, according to at least one record unearthed by this publication.

Little has been written about Primitive Affliction outside of the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center—biased groups that trained agents in the case, according to the newly revealed records.

But despite the lack of publicity, Primitive Affliction covers a crucial time in right-wing extremist history. It began where the FBI’s 1990s-era cases against the Aryan Nations trailed off, and it helped shape the neo-Nazi groups that would march at the 2017 deadly Charlottesville Unite the Right rally—an event that inspired Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential candidacy.

Along with big-picture history, the records from Primitive Affliction reveal malfeasance by FBI agents and officers who today hold higher positions at the bureau.

The FBI declined to comment. Mueller didn’t respond to an email about Primitive Affliction.

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New Report: The FBI Organized Neo-Nazi Rallies To Lure, Identify Citizens

Media outlet Headline USA has produced a report that indicates FBI involvement in neo-Nazi marches and rallies across the country for the past twenty years. Additional bureau involvement stretches back to the 1970s. Much of the more recent activity took place under the watch of former FBI Director Robert Mueller.

The allegations are not only serious, but potentially history-altering, as one of the events with alleged FBI involvement, the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, was Joe Biden’s claimed impetus to run for president in the 2020 election.

Based on the testimony of operatives David Gletty and Bill White and backed by a trove of corroborating articles and internal FBI documents, the report makes for compelling, sobering reading.

Many readers of the CDMedia family of sites will be familiar with online evidence of FBI involvement in “far right” rallies supplied by jaded, eagle-eyed patriots. Matching khakis, uniformly physically fit men 25-35 years old, masks that fully cover the faces of all participants, flags so fresh out of the box that the crease marks are plainly visible, earpieces, etc.

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Facebook designates Grayzone journalist Kit Klarenberg a ‘dangerous individual’

The notoriously intelligence-friendly social media network appears to have imposed a ban on posting a recent report by Kit Klarenberg, and is automatically restricting users who re-publish his work.

Multiple Facebook users have reported being banned, or having their posts censored, after sharing an investigation by The Grayzone’s Kit Klarenberg into CIA and MI6 involvement in the creation of ISIS. Readers who post links to the piece on the social network find themselves frozen out of their accounts, on the apparent grounds that Facebook has classified Klarenberg as a “dangerous individual.”

“I just shared this article from @Kit Klarenberg on Facebook and the post was immediately deleted,” wrote Ricky Hale, the founder of popular independent left-wing outlet Council Estate Media.

In a Substack article published April 5, Hale wrote that “the page was hit with restrictions and I was told I had shared a post from a dangerous individual or organisation.”

Hale was only able to regain control of his Facebook page, which boasts over 44,000 fans, by removing administrative privileges from the user who shared it — which happens to be himself.

Other restrictions imposed due to sharing Klarenberg’s work have not been lifted, and may well never be. Hale says he has been blocked from changing the page’s name, inviting people to join the page, or creating new Facebook groups. “Given Facebook had already reduced my page’s visibility for another absurd violation, I’m assuming my posts are going to be invisible,” Hale lamented. “This means a Facebook page with 44,000 users has been rendered useless because of state censorship that’s been outsourced to big tech. This is not how a free society operates.”

It was not the first time that Facebook censored one of its users for posting Klarenberg’s article. Hours beforehand, another social media user revealed the piece had been removed from her Facebook timeline mere “seconds” after it was posted.

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