2 charged with plotting to blow up Democratic headquarters

[aubiefifty 18,231]

2 charged with plotting to blow up Democratic headquarters

Thu, July 15, 2021, 11:01 PM·2 min read

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Two California men have been charged with plotting to blow up the Democratic Party’s headquarters in the state capital, a bombing they hoped would be the first in a series of politically-motivated attacks, federal prosecutors said Thursday. 

The pair used multiple messaging apps to plan to attack targets they associated with Democrats after the November 2020 presidential election, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a statement. Their first intended target was the John L. Burton Democratic Headquarters in Sacramento, prosecutors said.

“According to the indictment, the defendants planned to use incendiary devices to attack their targets and hoped their attacks would prompt a movement,” the statement said. 

Ian Benjamin Rogers, 45, and Jarrod Copeland, 37, each face multiple charges including conspiracy to destroy by fire or explosive a building used or in affecting interstate commerce, prosecutors said. 

Rogers, of Napa, is charged with additional weapons violations, including one count of possession of unregistered destructive devices, and three counts of possession of machine guns. Copeland, of Vallejo, is charged with an additional count of destruction of records.

It wasn’t known Thursday evening if the men have attorneys who could speak on their behalf. 

“I want to blow up a democrat building bad,” Rogers wrote, according to the indictment unsealed Thursday in San Francisco federal court. Copeland responded, “I agree” and “Plan attack,” the indictment says. 

In late December 2020, Copeland told Rogers he contacted an anti-government militia group to gather support for their movement, according to court documents. 

In one exchange, Rogers wrote to Copeland, “after the 20th we go to war,” meaning that they would initiate acts of violence after Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021, the court papers say.

On Jan. 15, law enforcement officers searched Rogers’s home and seized a cache of weapons, including 45 to 50 firearms, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and five pipe bombs, prosecutors said. 

Copeland is accused of attempting to destroy evidence of the plan after Rogers’ Jan. 15 arrest. 

Rusty Hicks, chair of the California Democratic Party, called the accusations “extremely disturbing.” 

“We are relieved to know the plot was unsuccessful, the individuals believed to be responsible are in custody, and our staff and volunteers are safe and sound,” Hicks said in a statement. “Yet, it points to a broader issue of violent extremism that is far too common in today’s political discourse.”

Copeland was arrested Wednesday and made an initial court appearance Thursday. He’s scheduled to appear in court again on July 20 for a detention hearing. Rogers is scheduled to appear in court July 30 for a status conference.

If convicted on all charges, each defendant faces a maximum of 20 years in prison, officials said.

[aubiefifty 18,231]

has the right always been this violent or is it recent since trump became president? honest question and not a troll.

[homersapien 12,230]

50 minutes ago, aubiefifty said:

has the right always been this violent or is it recent since trump became president? honest question and not a troll.

Well - if you want to include racially-motivated violence in the first half of the 20 century.....

[CoffeeTiger 5,869]

The Government wasn't just blowing smoke when it said domestic right wing terrorism is one of the biggest threats to the U.S. right now. 

 

 

[aubiefifty 18,231]

28 minutes ago, CoffeeTiger said:

The Government wasn't just blowing smoke when it said domestic right wing terrorism is one of the biggest threats to the U.S. right now. 

 

 

i agree. it has gotten so bad with death threats i had to go arm myself. on facebook even. in public..................

[homersapien 12,230]

This historian predicted Jan. 6. Now he warns of greater violence.

Dana Milbank

Columnist

July 15, 2021

In September, I wrote that the United States faced a situation akin to the 1933 burning of Weimar Germany’s parliament, which Hitler used to seize power.

“America, this is our Reichstag moment,” the column said, citing the eminent Yale historian Timothy Snyder on the lessons of 20th-century authoritarianism. Snyder argued that President Donald Trump had “an authoritarian’s instinct” and was surrounding the election in “the authoritarian language of a coup d’etat.” Predicted Snyder: “It’s going to be messy.”

Trump enablers such as Sen. Lindsey Graham scoffed. “With all due respect to @Milbank, he’s in the bat$hit crazy phase of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” the South Carolina Republican tweeted, with a link to my column.

But now we know that 1933 was very much on the mind of the nation’s top soldier, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides of Trump’s “stomach-churning” lies about election fraud. “The gospel of the Führer,” Milley labeled Trump’s claims.

Milley, as reported in a forthcoming book by The Post’s Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, feared that people around Trump were seeking to “overturn the government,” saw that pro-Trump protesters would serve as “brownshirts in the streets” — and was determined that “the Nazis aren’t getting in” to block Joe Biden’s inauguration.

American democracy survived that coup attempt on Jan. 6. But the danger has not subsided. I called Snyder, who accurately predicted the insurrection, to ask how the history of European authoritarianism informs our current state.

“We’re looking almost certainly at an attempt in 2024 to take power without winning election,” he told me Thursday. Recent moves in Republican-controlled state legislatures to suppress the votes of people of color and to give the legislatures control over casting electoral votes “are all working toward the scenario in 2024 where they lose by 10 million votes but they still appoint their guy.”

History also warns of greater violence. “If people are excluded from voting rights, then naturally they’re going to start to think about other options, on the one side,” Snyder said. “But, on the other side, the people who are benefiting because their vote counts for more think of themselves as entitled — and when things don’t go their way, they’re also more likely to be violent.”

The extinguishing of our Reichstag fire on Jan. 6 made Trump’s failed coup less like 1933 Germany than 1923 Germany, when Hitler’s clownish Beer Hall Putsch failed. Historically, most coup attempts fail. “But a failed coup is practice for a successful coup,” Snyder said. This is what’s ominous about the Republicans’ determination to sabotage investigations that could help us learn from the Jan. 6 insurrection. Also ominous is the move in many Republican-controlled states to ban schools from teaching about systemic racism — “memory laws,” Snyder calls them — which “feeds into this authoritarian turn” by providing cover for the new attempts to disenfranchise more non-White voters. “They’re trying to ban the discussion of things like voter suppression, and it’s precisely the history of voter suppression which allows us to see it for what it is,” Snyder said.

It all boils down to this: “One of our two political parties is currently on an undemocratic track. That’s just the way it is, I think, for the 2022 and 2024 cycles.”

Many others are sounding similar alarms. A survey of 327 political scientists released this week by Bright Line Watch, a project by scholars at Dartmouth College, the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester, found widespread concern: The experts collectively estimated a 55 percent likelihood that at least some local officials will refuse to certify vote counts in 2024, a 46 percent likelihood that one or more state legislatures will pick electors contrary to the popular vote, and a 39 percent likelihood that Congress will refuse to certify the election.

This is why I write column after column not on the Biden administration, which is governing in conventional ways, but on the totalitarian lurch of the Republican Party. Admittedly, I’m partisan — not for Democrats but for democrats. At the moment, they are one and the same. Republicans have become an authoritarian faction fighting democracy.

This is also why the attempt in Washington to protect voting rights must have primacy if we are to arrest the slide into political violence. “Voting rights is critical,” Snyder explained, because “it makes violence less likely” and it “will make the Republicans become a party that competes again instead of a party which just tries to rig the game at every stage.”

At the moment, Republicans are “digging themselves ever deeper into becoming a party which only wins by keeping other people from voting, and that’s a downward spiral,” he argued. The way to extinguish the next Reichstag fire is to demand — and require — that Republicans honor the right of all Americans to vote.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/15/american-democracy-survived-its-reichstag-fire-jan-6-threat-has-not-subsided/

[aubiefifty 18,231]

4 hours ago, CoffeeTiger said:

The Government wasn't just blowing smoke when it said domestic right wing terrorism is one of the biggest threats to the U.S. right now. 

 

 

and all this time i thought it was golf...........lol. i wish i knew how to tag him.