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🧡 Citrus Play Dead 🧡
In April 2018, during an appropriations committee hearing, the Tennessee Republican took a more subdued and technical approach to immigration issues when quizzing then-Customs and Border Protection chief Kevin McAleenan. Fleischmann, looking down to read from a paper in front of him, wanted to know if McAleenan was on schedule to implement an upgrade of license plate reader technology at the border, as mandated by a previous appropriations bill.
McAleenan thanked the committee for its support and pledged continued work to upgrade LPR technology along the border.
A few days after the exchange, a lobbyist representing Perceptics, a tech company that sold state-of-the-art LPR cameras and technology to the government, emailed her team to confirm that Fleischmann had “asked about CBP’s plan to modernize its LPRs as we asked his office to do,” along with a link to a video clip of the hearing.
The lobbyist’s email, along with several others in a cache of thousands of hacked documents from Perceptics dumped on the dark web in June, reveal that Fleischmann’s question — and the congressional demand that the agency spend millions of dollars to upgrade the cameras used to automatically read and identify license plates — had been orchestrated in part by a company that hoped to profit from the decision. Fleischmann’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Following the hack, the CBP suspended its contract with Perceptics. But the emails provide a rare inside view of how the border security industry plays a quiet role in shaping immigration policy — and, in this case, how private contractors maneuvered to benefit from heated debate over President Donald Trump’s border wall.
IN 2017, TRUMP announced that he would end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — which provides legal protections for undocumented youth, also known as “Dreamers” — and demanded that protections only be restored in exchange for funds to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. The following year, GOP lawmakers attempted to hammer out a compromise that would enshrine rights for Dreamers while providing funds for Trump’s border security demands.
Congressional Republicans split into two camps. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., sponsored the more conservative faction’s bill, Securing America’s Future Act, which provided $38 billion in border security, including funds for the wall, and a provision to allow Dreamers to reapply for legal status every three years. Moderate Republicans, led by Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif., and Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla., presented the Border Security and Immigration Reform Act, which provided a permanent pathway to legal status for Dreamers and $25 billion in border security measures, including funds for a border wall.
The FBI specifically points to QAnon and Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory that claims Hillary Clinton and other top Democratic figures are running a child sex-trafficking ring beneath a pizza shop in Washington, D.C., as examples of groups whose messages could lead to “violent acts.”
“The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts,” the document, dated May 30, reads.
Acts of violence or attempts thereof have already been tied to both of the conspiracy theories.
In December 2016, a man fired a gun in the Comet Ping Pong pizza shop in D.C., claiming he was there to “self-investigate” the Pizzagate conspiracy, and an attorney for the man charged with the murder of the alleged boss of the Gambino Mafia family claimed his client, Anthony Comello, was inspired by QAnon.
The revelation of the document comes a week after FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee that white supremacist violence was the motivator for the majority of domestic terrorism cases the bureau has investigated in fiscal 2019.
The same month the document was written, Michael C. McGarrity, the FBI’s assistant director of the Counterterrorism Division, told Congress the FBI classifies domestic terror as either racially motivated, anti-government/anti-authority, environmental extremism, or abortion extremism, which he said encompasses both pro- and anti-abortion rights advocates.
The memo states that the new category for conspiracy theories is closely related to anti-government extremism but distinct from racially motivated violence.
The new extremism category focuses specifically on views that “attempt to explain events or circumstances as the result of a group of actors working in secret to benefit themselves at the expense of others” and are “usually at odds with official or prevailing explanations of events,” according to the document.
Amulet of Sekhmet
Solid gold amulet of the warrior goddess Sekhmet, usually depicted as a fierce lioness-headed woman. It dates to Third Intermediate Period, 22nd Dynasty, ca. 945-720 BC. Now in the Louvre. E 22812
