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Post by Admin on Feb 12, 2021 4:47:47 GMT
Oath Keeper Jessica Watkins wasn’t planning to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6 with her mace, taser, and nightstick only. After more than two months of preparation and training, the Army veteran was prepared to “fight hand to hand” to take over the Capitol. Then, there was the “quick reaction force” she helped set up—an armed group that would be lingering outside D.C., ready to bring guns to Watkins and other Oath Keepers “if it gets bad” or if Trump somehow ordered them to storm the city. “I’m no doctor. I’m a soldier. A medic with a rifle, maybe, but a solider [sic]. I will hurt/kill those who try to hurt/kill me or others,” Watkins said in one text message, according to a detention memo filed Thursday. Watkins, 38, is one of three members of the far-right paramilitary group to be charged with conspiring and recruiting others to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6 as Congress met to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral victory. Thomas Edward Caldwell, the 65-year-old apparent leader of the Oath Keepers, and Donovan Crowl, a 50-year-old former U.S. Marine, have also been charged. All three are currently in custody. “Clad in camouflaged battle fatigues, a tactical vest emblazoned with an Oath Keepers patch, combat boots, military-grade helmet, and radio equipment, Watkins and her fellow Oath Keepers militia members were among those hundreds of insurgents who stormed the Capitol,” the 21-page memo requesting detention pending trial states. “But unlike the vast majority, Watkins had trained and plotted for a moment like this… For Watkins, this was a moment to relish in the swirling violence in the air,” the memo adds. The memo details the chilling lengths the trio went to in coordinating election-related attacks, including training recruits to get them in “fighting shape” for another attack at the inauguration and vetting people interested in the Jan. 6 attack to “ensure the right people” were affiliated with the Oath Keepers. In the lead up to Jan. 6, Watkins’ believed she was “awaiting direction from President Trump” himself, prosecutors allege in a stark memo that seemingly draws a direct link between Trump and the most militant, coordinated aspects of the insurrection. It comes as Trump faces his second impeachment trial for allegedly inciting the riot over months. Watkins allegedly breached the Capitol with the Ohio State Regular Militia, a far-right group she founded in 2019. The group is a subset of the Oath Keepers, which FBI agents describe as a “large but loosely organized collection of the militia who believe the federal government has been corrupted by a shadowy conspiracy that is trying to strip American citizens of their rights.”
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Post by Admin on Feb 28, 2021 5:05:06 GMT
Jessica Watkins, an Oath Keeper accused of preparing and training for at least two months to “fight hand to hand” to take over the Capitol, spoke out publicly for the first time in court Friday, claiming she plans to leave the far-right paramilitary group behind. “My fellow Oath Keepers have kind of turned my stomach against it,” Watkins said during an afternoon detention hearing. “We’re done with that lifestyle ... I did it out of love for my country but it’s time to let all of that go.” Watkins, a 38-year-old Army vet, is among several Oath Keepers who have been charged with conspiring and recruiting others to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6 as Congress met to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral victory. She pleaded not guilty during Friday’s hearing. Prosecutors have argued that Watkins’ continued loyalty to the Oath Keepers justifies their request to keep her detained pending trial—but she now insists she no longer wants to be affiliated with the militia group. U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta ultimately sided with prosecutors on Friday, ordering Watkins to remain in jail until her trial. Mehta said he found the allegations against her disturbing, particularly the militia group’s coordination of a “quick reaction force,” an armed group that they planned to have stationed outside D.C. should the situation get bad. He also noted that directions on how to make explosives were found in Watkins’ home. “She was organizing groups to come to the city on January 6. On the nature and circumstances of the offense, candidly, present a danger. This is historic, an incursion on the Capitol. She was an organizer,” Mehta said before his ruling. “Even before the election, Ms. Watkins was engaged in militaristic training.” Federal authorities have described the Oath Keepers as “a large but loosely organized collection of [the] militia who believe that the federal government has been co-opted by a shadowy conspiracy that is trying to strip American citizens of their rights” and who heavily recruit former military, law enforcement, and first responders.
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Post by Admin on Feb 28, 2021 20:16:39 GMT
U.S. Capitol Police plan to maintain their enhanced level of security around the Capitol at least through President Joe Biden's first official address to Congress because intelligence suggests that extremists could be planning an attack, acting Chief Yogananda Pittman said Thursday. "We know that members of the militia groups that were present on January 6th have stated their desires that they want to blow up the Capitol and kill as many members as possible with a direct nexus to the State of the Union, which we know that date has not been identified," she told members of Congress, referring to Biden's coming first address to a joint session of Congress. "So based on that information, we think that it's prudent that Capitol Police maintain its enhanced and robust security posture until we address those vulnerabilities going forward," she said. Pittman was asked at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol about the need for continued security measures around the building, including fencing and the deployment of the National Guard. Pittman emphasized that the rioters who attacked the Capitol "weren't only interested in attacking members of Congress and officers." "They wanted to send a symbolic message to the nation as to who was in charge of that legislative process," she said. Biden is expected to deliver an address to a joint session of Congress, similar to a State of the Union address, sometime after Congress passes his Covid-19 relief package. Pittman told members of the subcommittee that oversees funding for the legislative branch that while her department knew armed extremists could commit violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, intelligence collected before the assault showed "no credible threat" of the size and scale of the riot.
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Post by Admin on Mar 4, 2021 6:09:01 GMT
The FBI arrested a notorious white supremacist livestreamer in an early morning raid in Florida on Tuesday. FBI agents, working with Fort Lauderdale police and the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, arrested Paul N. Miller, 32, on one charge of being a “convicted felon in possession of a firearm.” The FBI said in a press release that Miller was arrested without incident. Miller’s neighbors in Fort Lauderdale’s Riverside neighborhood reported hearing flashbangs during the raid, which took place around 5 a.m. ET, local TV station NBC 6 reported. One neighbor described seeing law enforcement officers carrying out a box that appeared to have “a shotgun on the front or an AK.” Miller, who goes by the name “Gypsy Crusader” online, has amassed more than 40,000 followers on Telegram, a messaging app and social media network popular with far-right extremists. Many of Miller’s videos feature him dressing up as characters like the Joker or Nintendo’s Mario, then hurling racial abuse at strangers, including children, through the randomized chat app Omegle. Miller can be seen holding a gun in some of his videos. A grand jury indicted Miller on the firearms charge on Feb. 25, according to court records unsealed Tuesday. Miller is charged with illegally possessing a gun on Jan. 17, 2018. The indictment doesn’t describe the 2018 incident in which Miller allegedly had the firearm.
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Post by Admin on Apr 20, 2021 5:07:52 GMT
The far-right paramilitary the Oath Keepers is home to active-duty law-enforcement officers who are training up other members to prepare for civil war, according to one of the group’s top figures. CBS News’ 60 Minutes profiled the the increasingly notorious militia on Sunday night, and one of its leaders from Arizona, Jim Arroyo, spoke openly about the close involvement of police officers. “Our guys are very experienced,” said Arroyo.
“We have active-duty law enforcement in our organization that are helping to train us. We can blend in with our law enforcement and in fact, in a lot of cases, our training is much more advanced because of our military backgrounds.” Arroyo’s statement was backed up by Javed Ali, an ex-National Security Council senior director and FBI counterterrorism official, who said the Oath Keepers are a “unique and challenging” threat to the U.S. because a “large percentage have tactical training and operational experience in either the military or law enforcement. That at least gives them a capability that a lot of other people in this far-right space don't have.” Dozens of members have been implicated in the storming of the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington.
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