The most elaborate Trump assassination plot yet bucked his own script
The White House released its long-delayed counterterrorism strategy in May, identifying “violent left-wing extremists” as a major terror threat, following a directive from President Donald Trump last September ordering the FBI to investigate antifascists based on a wildly varied set of characteristics that include “extremism on migration, race, and gender.”Then, as Trump was preparing to celebrate his 80th and the country’s 250th birthdays with an Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the White House lawn last month, local law enforcement in Ohio uncovered an extraordinary plot by a national network to carry out a drone attack, with snipers positioned on rooftops to kill “high-value targets including the president, Vice President JD Vance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Elon Musk.The wide array of grievances and political beliefs of the defendants who spent weeks training with rifles and coordinating efforts to acquire drones are an awkward fit for the counterterrorism strategy authored by White House aide Sebastian Gorka, and a National Security Presidential Memorandum, or NSPM-7, issued by Trump in the weeks after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.One of the UFC terror plotters, 19-year-old Tycen Proper, who told his mother he was mapping locations in Washington, D.C. for “hit and run missions,” had recently “made sympathetic comments about Adolf Hitler” on Facebook, according to the government’s criminal complaint.The counterterrorism strategy doesn’t even mention white supremacist violence — or “racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism,” in the federal government’s preferred nomenclature. In contrast, the Biden administration made confronting white supremacist terrorism a top priority.“The UFC plot clashes with the administration’s decision to downplay far-right extremism,” Jacob Ware, co-author of God, Guns and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, told Raw Story. “That’s a political choice that I don’t think is being followed by the rank-and-file FBI agents who stopped this terror attack.”Another defendant, a 32-year-old California man named Michael Alan Thomas, expressed views that appear to be a twist on the QAnon conspiracy theory, which originally positioned Trump as a hero maneuvering to vanquish a shadowy cabal of global elites perpetrating horrendous crimes against children.According to his charging document, Thomas told FBI agents “that he believes that the U.S. government is run by an elite group of individuals who sacrifice and consume infants who also were deeply involved with Jeffrey Epstein and are now protected by President Donald Trump.”That grievance doesn’t appear anywhere in NSPM-7, which instead singles out antifascists for harboring “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.”Rather than respond to questions from Raw Story about whether the Trump administration should reassess its prioritization of terror threats, the White House referred questions to the FBI.To be sure, some of the grievances and ideologies expressed by individuals tied to the alleged terror plot do align with the criteria in NSPM-7. A TikTok account for William Lee Falkner, one of the defendants, includes a bio stating, “F--- ICE,” which is in line with NSPM-7’s focus on threats against federal immigration enforcement officers. Another man who is not accused of direct involvement in the terror plot but is alleged to have communicated online with one of the defendants identified himself as “antifa” in his TikTok bio.But the most recurrent themes uniting the defendants and others ensnared in the FBI investigation of the UFC terror plot is a concern about the Epstein files and a belief that political elites are protecting pedophiles, coupled with anger about Israel’s perceived influence over U.S. foreign policy.“The key tenets of this plot are anti-elite, anti-government, anti-Semitism and anti-Israel,” Ware said. “Those are not new, and they belong to a true American far-right, anti-government extremist movement that goes back decades in our country, and is probably the deadliest domestic terrorism movement in American history.”Eight men were indicted last week on charges of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the alleged plot. In contrast to recent indictments against 15 anti-ICE activists in Minnesota, the government hasn't designated the UFC prosecutions as an NSPM-7 case.The case has flummoxed extremism researchers, who note how quickly the alleged plotters from five states across the country coordinated online and put in motion a credible plan to attack the seat of U.S. government.Beyond those accused of direct involvement in the terror plot, federal investigators have pursued leads based on contacts found in the defendants’ phones, prompting a widening investigation into a larger universe of people with a host of grievances against the government.The plot first came to light when police officers and sheriff’s deputies arrived at the home of Tycen Proper in rural Knox County outside of Columbus, Ohio, in response to a “disturbance” call four days before the June 14 UFC Freedom 250 event.Proper’s father told the police that his 19-year-old son had quit his job and spent all his graduation money on a rifle, ballistic plates, ammunition and camping gear. His mother told investigators that Proper “had recently begun interacting with a group online that was comprised of individuals who claimed to be ex-military and Christian-based.” Talking to his online friends, his mother said, had “caused Proper to lean heavily into his religion, and she believed that those individuals were using religion to influence her son.”Sheriff’s deputies transported Proper to a mental health facility, where they got him admitted through an emergency application based on his homicidal ideations, according to court records. The following day, during an interview with the FBI, Proper told investigators that he reported to “Fulcrum,” whom the FBI later identified as Daniel Eskridge, a 32-year-old man from rural northwest Missouri.Eskridge suggested in a group chat with Proper and others in late May that the plotters should select targets that “can’t easily be turned into a right vs. left thing.” The criminal complaint against Eskridge states that he suggested a business leader as “a very good target” because “he fits the bill for someone both sides would cheer and support us for taking out.”The name Eskridge suggested is redacted from the complaint, but the superseding indictment unsealed last week identifies Elon Musk, the trillionaire owner of SpaceX, as one of the targets of the attack.Proper identified Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Jim Justice (R-WV), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Reps. Carol Miller (R-WV) and Riley Moore (R-WV) as targets, based on their support for Israel, according to court filings.Despite portraying itself as anti-establishment outsiders, the MAGA movement has essentially become the establishment, and anti-government extremists recognize Trump and his allies as such, Ware said. For decades, anti-government extremists have expressed hostility towards Democratic and Republican administrations alike.“This is a reversion to the mean, where far-right extremists include Republicans in their crosshairs,” Ware said.Court documents reveal Eskridge using language that wouldn’t have sounded out of place among the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Trump’s behalf five years ago.“Our goal is to in a general sense ‘restore the old republic,’” he said. “Our constitutional republic has been stolen by corporations, politicians and foreign actors.”Eskridge wrote that he was “tired of being ruled over by treasonous pedophilic criminal politicians and foreign agents.”In another post, Eskridge predicted that the UFC attack would be “the first battle of the second American Revolution.”When investigators accessed Proper’s phone, they also discovered a user with the nickname “Shepherd,” who they later identified as Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez, 31, of Omaha, Neb. Court records detail extensive posts by Alvarez in a “Hunters” Signal chat that appear to provide instructions for the planned UFC attack. The FBI has reportedly determined that Alvarez was responsible for planning, organizing and directing the thwarted attack.Describing Alvarez as the “alleged ringleader,” a Department of Homeland Security press release highlights the fact that Alvarez came to the United States as a child with his parents and was accorded temporary legal status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program during the Obama administration.Court documents don’t shed much light on Alvarez’s political beliefs, but they reference a TikTok account that he posted in an online chat with the other alleged plotters. Investigators determined the TikTok account was registered to a woman who shares the same residence with Alvarez.As a possible indication of Alvarez’s political beliefs, videos posted on the account promote Landback, a global movement calling for the return of ancestral lands to indigenous stewardship. The videos also highlight environmentalist themes and include depictions of Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman and John Brown, the insurrectionary abolitionist — both heroes of the left.A man who identified himself as a friend of Alvarez’s since high school told Raw Story that he “is not mentally well and should have never been a part of what happened.” The friend declined to comment further out concern that anything he said would aggravate Alvarez’s legal challenges.Proper’s mother told the FBI, according to court filings, that the group “expressed ultra-religious and anti-government sentiments, specifically citing grievances about government corruption, the handling of the Epstein files, data centers taking up all the water in communities, and other government actions.”A concern about data centers also surfaced in court filings related to the arrest of a 20-year-old Chicago man, Alexander Mercado, who is alleged to have been an administrator of Signal groups that included some of the plotters involved in the planned UFC attack. After an FBI agent attempted to question Mercado, the government alleges he uninstalled the Signal application on his phone, leading to his arrest for obstruction of justice.In support of its successful motion to hold him in detention to protect community safety, the government submitted a message in which Mercado allegedly mentioned the planned UFC attack on Signal, adding, “I got word several other factions are attempting to strike, breach, and rescue operations on [ICE] camps and data centers.” (The message included an ice-cube emoji.)The ideological span of the individuals linked to the plot and their range of targets should be cause for government officials and independent researchers to reassess threat prioritization, Matthew Ivanovich, a senior research manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told Raw Story.“Seeing such a decentralized group that crosses ideological boundaries, I do think it drives that there is a need to be thinking about the grievance-based side of things, like data centers and AI in general,” he said. “We need to be thinking more about grievance-based motivators to violence, and less about ideology.”The FBI’s access to the UFC terror plotters’ electronic devices has prompted agents to cast suspicion on an array of people who communicated with them online, leading to at least one other arrest only tangentially related to the thwarted attack.The government alleges that Trevon McDaniel, 19, of Elk Grove, Calif., exchanged TikTok messages with Alvarez, the alleged UFC attack ringleader.“We need to gather as many heroes before the 22,” Alvarez allegedly told McDaniel, who posted videos of himself dressed in a superhero costume on TikTok under the name “Wolf-Spider.”In another conversation cited by the government, Alvarez told McDaniel: “July is the month.”“Fourth of July,” McDaniel replied. “Use subliminal messaging so people understand what you mean, but basically fireworks it’s a good distraction and good use for ICE and cops.”The government does not allege that McDaniel had any involvement in the UFC terror plot, but he was charged with “threats concerning an attempt to damage or destroy” the John Moss Federal Building in Sacramento “by means of fire or an explosive.”The criminal complaint cites a June 22 TikTok video posted by McDaniel in which he says, “You know, Fourth of July is coming up, guys. Make sure you hold on to all your fireworks. It’d be a shame if fireworks were going off near generators so certain federal buildings were losing their, uh, power.”Olaf Hedberg, McDaniel’s lawyer, declined to comment.Shortly after the first wave of arrests in the UFC terror plot, FBI agents attempted to question a TikTok user in north Texas about the planned attack, according to a recent story in the Intercept. The TikTok user, who goes by the moniker Doberman and identifies as an “armed leftist” and “Antifa,” reportedly told the agents she didn’t know anything about the plot.Two weeks later, the FBI returned with a search warrant and breached Doberman’s front door with a flash-bang, pointed rifles at her, and led her to a police cruiser in handcuffs. The agents seized her cell phone. When the agents returned her phone, she said they offered her hundreds of thousands of dollars to become a confidential informant.Doberman told the Intercept she has no interest in helping the government. In a new TikTok video last month, she posted screenshots of the search warrant, writing: “Yes, I was raided. No, I won’t quit.”
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