Our picksAmerica Is About to Enter Its Years of Lead | Anti-Science Extremism | No Threat Assessment, and more
· Internal Document Shows Trump Officials Were Told to Make Comments Sympathetic to Kyle Rittenhouse
· DHS Unlikely to Publish Threat Assessment on Time, but Draft Flagged White Supremacist Threat
· A Pro-Trump Militant Group Has Recruited Thousands of Police, Soldiers, and Veterans
· America Is About to Enter Its Years of Lead
· Trump’s Spy Chief Just Released “Russian Disinformation” against Hillary Clinton that He Acknowledged May Be Fabricated
· German State Suspects Intelligence Staff of Far-Right Activity
· Anti-Science Extremism in America: Escalating and Globalizing
· Hold Russia Accountable for Latest Chemical Weapons Attack
Internal Document Shows Trump Officials Were Told to Make Comments Sympathetic to Kyle Rittenhouse (Julia Ainsley, NBC News)
In prepping DHS officials for questions about Rittenhouse, the document suggests they say he took a gun to Kenosha “to help defend small business owners.”
DHS Unlikely to Publish Threat Assessment on Time, but Draft Flagged White Supremacist Threat (Geneva Sands, CNN)
The Department of Homeland Security is poised to miss its deadline to publish the first Homeland Threat Assessment, which was the subject of a recent whistleblower complaint alleging political motivations.
The assessment, which is intended to provide an overview of the terrorist threat landscape and anticipate emerging threats, was scheduled to be released on Thursday, according to the department’s counterterrorism action plan.
Last month, leaked drafts of the assessment showed changing language about the threat from White supremacists.
Around the same time the drafts were made public, DHS whistleblower Brian Murphy claimed that top department officials raised concerns about how the assessment would reflect upon President Donald Trump. Murphy previously led the department’s intelligence division, before being reassigned amid controversy that his office gathered intelligence on US journalists.
All three DHS threat assessment drafts state that among domestic extremists, white supremacists will remain the most “persistent and lethal threat” in the US through 2021.
A Pro-Trump Militant Group Has Recruited Thousands of Police, Soldiers, and Veterans (Mike Giglio, The Atlantic)
As Trump spent the year warning about voter fraud, the Oath Keepers and other militant groups were listening. What would happen, I wondered, if Trump lost, said the election had been stolen, and refused to concede? Or the flip side: What if he won and his opponents poured into the streets in protest? The U.S. was already seeing a surge in political violence, and in August the FBI put out a bulletin that warned of a possible escalation heading into the election. How much worse would things get if trained professionals took up arms?
