One lie that Trump often uses is "no one knew" or "know one could have known" when in fact many people knew, or in some cases most people knew. In that light, let's take a look at this week's events.
Quoting from the annual Homeland Threat Assessment, October 2020
As Secretary, I am concerned about any form of violent extremism. That is why we design our programs to be threat agnostic – ensuring that we can combat a broad range of domestic threats. However, I am particularly concerned about white supremacist violent extremists who have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years.
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/2020_10_06_homeland-threat-assessment.pdfAlso interesting that it is so easy for me to access, for free, a threat assessment for corporate clients from G4s that said the following in anticipation of January 6.
Regardless of the context or intent in which President Trump posted the aforementioned Tweets, there are a large number of individuals who are seeing this as a “marching order.” While many online discussions about this are occurring in forums such as Minecraft and Discord, the below are a sample of open discussions on pro-Trump website thedonald.win. G4S notes that online threats of violence often do not then correspond with actual violence. Many individuals posting threats online may not intend actual violence, or indeed even be attending these protests. However, due to the significant number of individuals posting openly and evidence of long-time planning, G4S assesses that isolated acts of violence are likely, and that there is also an elevated risk of attempted widespread violence and attempted acts of domestic terrorism.
I also found this passage particularly interesting.
Security risk in D.C. will be significantly impacted by a number of factors, which could escalate or mitigate the threat. These include, but are not limited to:
-Statements By Key Political Figures (particularly
President Trump, and to a lesser extent Vice
President Pence and President-Elect Biden)
https://www.g4s.com/en-us/-/media/g4s/usa/files/whitepapers/1_-_g4s_crs_-_intelligence_assessment_jan_2021_washington_dc_-_210104.ashx?la=en&hash=86001B27FAEA725CDD73605B088933C8So their assessment in advance was that Trump invited a bunch of nutcases to the Capital and whether the bomb went off or not would depend in part on what Trump said.
If I can get access to Intel like that, and it is widely reported in the media that businesses had access to information like that in advance, and if homeland security said that "white supremacist violent extremists" are our biggest threat, I wonder what type of intelligence the President of the United States might have had access to?
Truly, one could have known.
