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emptywheel: Two FBI Agents Were Palling Around with Alleged January 6 Leader Joe Biggs
Link to tweet
https://www.emptywheel.net/2021/08/29/two-fbi-agents-were-palling-around-with-alleged-terrorist-joe-biggs/
Let’s talk about how central Joe Biggs is to what we know of the implementation of January 6.
It explains a lot that — at least according to a claim Biggs himself made — two FBI agents were relying on him for information against Antifa in the lead-up to the terrorist attack.
By late 2018, Biggs also started to get “cautionary” phone calls from FBI agents located in Jacksonville and Daytona Beach inquiring about what Biggs meant by something politically or culturally provocative he had said on the air or on social media concerning a national issue, political parties, the Proud Boys, Antifa or other groups. Biggs regularly satisfied FBI personnel with his answers. He also stayed in touch with a number of FBI agents in and out of Florida. In late July 2020, an FBI Special Agent out of the Daytona Beach area telephoned Biggs and asked Biggs to meet with him and another FBI agent at a local restaurant. Biggs agreed. Biggs learned after he travelled to the restaurant that the purpose of the meeting was to determine if Biggs could share information about Antifa networks operating in Florida and elsewhere. They wanted to know what Biggs was “seeing on the ground.” Biggs did have information about Antifa in Florida and Antifa networks in other parts of the United States. He agreed to share the information. The three met for approximately two hours. After the meeting, Biggs stayed in touch with the agent who had called him originally to set up the meeting. He answered follow-up questions in a series of several phone calls over the next few weeks. They spoke often.
I don’t mean they were complicit. Rather, that they weren’t even aware that he was in the middle of plans to conduct a terrorist attack on the nation’s Capitol is a testament to and perhaps an explanation for how the FBI missed all this.
Joe Biggs is a former Army Staff Sergeant who did tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan before he left with a medical discharge and PTSD. After some troubled years, he started contributing to InfoWars, serving as a key proponent of the PizzaGate scandal that turned John Podesta emails stolen by Russia into an attack on a pizza restaurant in DC; he was formally ousted from InfoWars shortly after the Comet Ping Pong attack, but remained in the InfoWars orbit. Alex Jones claims he gave Biggs a big severance when he left. After that, Biggs was a key proponent of the Seth Rich conspiracy, posting the manufactured FBI Report that served as a basis for the Fox News story that had to be retracted.
*snip*
9 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa
Antifa is a left-wing, anti-fascist and anti-racist political movement in the United States. It is highly decentralized and comprises an array of autonomous groups that aim to achieve their objectives through the use of both nonviolent and violent direct action rather than through policy reform. Much of antifa political activism is nonviolent, involving poster and flyer campaigns, mutual aid, delivering speeches, marching in protest, and community organizing. They also engage in protest tactics, seeking to combat fascists and racists such as neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other far-right extremists, and differing from other leftist opposition movements by their willingness to directly confront far-right activists, and in some cases, law enforcement. This sometimes involves digital activism, doxing, harassment, violence, and property damage against those they identify as belonging to the far right.
Individuals involved in the movement tend to hold anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, and anti-state views, subscribing to a range of left-wing ideologies. A majority of individuals involved are anarchists, communists, and socialists who describe themselves as revolutionaries and criticize liberal democracy, although some social democrats and others on the American Left, among them environmentalists, LGBT and indigenous rights advocates, also adhere to the antifa movement. The name antifa and the logo with two flags representing anarchism and communism are derived from the German antifa movement.
Antifa activists' actions have received support and criticism from various organizations and pundits, with some on the left criticizing antifa for its willingness to adopt violent direct actions and for being counterproductive or backfiring by emboldening the right and their allies. Part of the right characterizes it as a domestic terrorist organization or uses antifa as a catch-all term for any left-leaning or liberal protest actions. Some scholars argue that antifa is a legitimate response to the rise of the far right and that antifa's violence such as milkshaking is not equivalent to right-wing violence. Scholars tend to reject the equivalence between antifa and white supremacy.
There have been numerous efforts to discredit antifa by various individuals and groups on the right. Some have been done via hoaxes on social media, many of them false flag attacks originating from alt-right and 4chan users posing as antifa backers on Twitter; some hoaxes have been picked up and portrayed as fact by right-leaning media and politicians. During the George Floyd protests in May and June 2020, the Trump administration blamed antifa for orchestrating the mass protests; analysis of federal arrests did not find links to antifa. There were repeated calls by Donald Trump and William Barr to designate antifa as a terrorist organization despite the fact that it is not an organization, a move that academics, legal experts, and others have argued would exceed the authority of the presidency and violate the First Amendment. Several analyses, reports, and studies have concluded that antifa is not a major domestic terrorism risk.
Antifa is a left-wing, anti-fascist and anti-racist political movement in the United States. It is highly decentralized and comprises an array of autonomous groups that aim to achieve their objectives through the use of both nonviolent and violent direct action rather than through policy reform. Much of antifa political activism is nonviolent, involving poster and flyer campaigns, mutual aid, delivering speeches, marching in protest, and community organizing. They also engage in protest tactics, seeking to combat fascists and racists such as neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other far-right extremists, and differing from other leftist opposition movements by their willingness to directly confront far-right activists, and in some cases, law enforcement. This sometimes involves digital activism, doxing, harassment, violence, and property damage against those they identify as belonging to the far right.
Individuals involved in the movement tend to hold anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, and anti-state views, subscribing to a range of left-wing ideologies. A majority of individuals involved are anarchists, communists, and socialists who describe themselves as revolutionaries and criticize liberal democracy, although some social democrats and others on the American Left, among them environmentalists, LGBT and indigenous rights advocates, also adhere to the antifa movement. The name antifa and the logo with two flags representing anarchism and communism are derived from the German antifa movement.
Antifa activists' actions have received support and criticism from various organizations and pundits, with some on the left criticizing antifa for its willingness to adopt violent direct actions and for being counterproductive or backfiring by emboldening the right and their allies. Part of the right characterizes it as a domestic terrorist organization or uses antifa as a catch-all term for any left-leaning or liberal protest actions. Some scholars argue that antifa is a legitimate response to the rise of the far right and that antifa's violence such as milkshaking is not equivalent to right-wing violence. Scholars tend to reject the equivalence between antifa and white supremacy.
There have been numerous efforts to discredit antifa by various individuals and groups on the right. Some have been done via hoaxes on social media, many of them false flag attacks originating from alt-right and 4chan users posing as antifa backers on Twitter; some hoaxes have been picked up and portrayed as fact by right-leaning media and politicians. During the George Floyd protests in May and June 2020, the Trump administration blamed antifa for orchestrating the mass protests; analysis of federal arrests did not find links to antifa. There were repeated calls by Donald Trump and William Barr to designate antifa as a terrorist organization despite the fact that it is not an organization, a move that academics, legal experts, and others have argued would exceed the authority of the presidency and violate the First Amendment. Several analyses, reports, and studies have concluded that antifa is not a major domestic terrorism risk.
