Attorney General William Barr advised federal prosecutors in a conference call last week to consider charging the rioters and insurrectionists who committed violent crimes at demonstrations this year with sedition, the New York Times reported.
Barr told the feds on the call that they needed “to crack down on rioting, looting, assaults on law enforcement officers and other violence committed” during the riots that were sparked by the death of George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis, who died in police custody in May.
The attorney general mentioned sedition as part of a list of possible federal statutes that prosecutors could use to bring charges, including assaulting a federal officer, rioting, use of explosives and racketeering, according to the people familiar with the call. Justice Department officials included sedition on a list of such charges in a follow-up email.
Barr also reportedly asked the Justice Department to consider charging Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan for allowing left-wing agitators to establish the odious Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone (CHOP), also known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. The “woke” inhabitants of “autonomous zone” terrorized the neighborhood and stunk up the place until people started getting killed. Then the cockamamie police-free experiment was shut down.
Barr’s “highly unusual suggestions” “alarmed” some of the attorneys on the call, according to two sources, who wanted to remain anonymous “because they feared retribution.”
NYT reporter Katie Benner could not resist the temptation to editorialize in her straight news story.
The most extreme form of the federal sedition law, which is rarely invoked, criminalizes conspiracies to overthrow the government of the United States — an extraordinary situation that does not seem to fit the circumstances of the unrest in places like Portland, Ore., and elsewhere in response to police killings of Black men.
Benner can be forgiven if she hasn’t kept up with the agenda of the antifa radicals who’ve been fomenting violent insurrection at “peaceful protests” all over the nation since May. After all, she likely gets the bulk of her news from the New York Times, which has yet to cover the situation honestly.
In reality, the circumstances in Portland and elsewhere are part of a rather extraordinary conspiracy by far-left organizers to overthrow the government of the United States. And the militants are actually quite open about it, as Portland-based journalist Andy Ngo recently noted in the Spectator.
“We are witnessing glimmers of the full insurrection the far-left has been working toward for decades,” Ngo wrote.
The destruction of businesses we’re witnessing across the US is not mere opportunism by looters. It plays a critical role in antifa and BLM ideology. Their stated goal is to abolish capitalism. To do that, they have to make economic recovery impossible. Antifa sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to exploit an economically weakened America during the coronavirus pandemic. It’s Going Down, one of the most popular antifa blogs in North America, tweeted on Friday:
’10 years from now, people won’t look back and ask: “Why did it explode in 2020?” Massive unemployment while the rich rake in billions from tax-cuts + bailouts, the earth on the brink of collapse + police murdering people daily. Instead they’ll ask: “Why didn’t it happen sooner?”‘
The riots could cost insurance companies $1 billion to $2 billion — potentially record-setting insured losses, the New York Post reported Wednesday.
In January of this year, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas released several videos stemming from an investigation into socialist candidate Bernie Sanders’ campaign.
Multiple Sanders staffers in Iowa and South Carolina spoke of the violent insurrection that was coming if Bernie was not elected in 2020. All of the Marxists were infatuated with the idea of putting Trump supporters in Soviet style Gulogs and taking “extreme actions” against capitalists.
Bernard B. Kerik, former police commissioner of the New York City Police Department, told The Epoch Times that he believes the antifa/BLM riots are “a radical, leftist, socialist attempt at revolution.”
Operations including coordination, equipment, and travel costs would likely cost “tens of millions of dollars,” Kerik said. A friend of his, an FBI agent, told him she was at Newark airport on May 29 where she observed “probably 25 of these Antifa kids walking in through the airport.”
“They’re coming from other cities,” he said. “That cost money. They didn’t do this on their own. Somebody’s paying for this.”
John Miller, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism, said that outside radical groups have organized scouts, medics, and even supply routes of weapons “for breakaway groups to commit vandalism and violence.”
Miller said the militants plan for violence in advance, using encrypted communications.
Mike Griffin, a longtime political activist from Minneapolis, said he noticed people he’d never seen before demonstrating, including “well-dressed young white men in expensive boots carrying hammers and talking about torching buildings.”
“I know protests, I’ve been doing it for 20 years,” he told The New York Times. “People not affiliated with the protests are creating havoc on the streets.”
Communism expert Trevor Loudon, meanwhile, told The Epoch Times that Antifa is only one part of the picture, noting that “every significant communist or socialist party in the United States has been involved in these protests and riots from the beginning.”
According to Loudon, “Communist Party USA, Liberation Road, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Democratic Socialists of America, Revolutionary Communist Party, Workers World Party, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation” have been involved, among others.
Arsonists have been caught deliberately starting fires on the West coast, and it is likely that at least some of them will turn out to be left-wing activists.
Indeed, a Washington man with a history of left-wing agitation was arrested last Wednesday after he was caught starting a fire in the brush along a highway near Tacoma.
“Militant antifa cells across the country mobilized to aid BLM rioters,” Andy Ngo explained on Twitter. “Every part of the rioting has a purpose. Fires destroy economy. Riots can overwhelm police & even military. All of it leads to a destabilized state if maintained.”