US government issues alert over threat of violence in August tied to Trump conspiracy theories
The Department of Homeland Security has issued a chilling warning of the potential for further political violence “with little to no warning” by domestic extremists who mistakenly believe Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
Multiple conspiracy theories of voter fraud are fuelling the mistaken belief that the 2020 presidential election results will be overturned in August and the former president will retake the White House this month.
According to a DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis bulletin obtained by ABC News, extremists are calling for violence “if desired outcomes are not realised”.
“The current threat environment is one which is fuelled in large part by conspiracy theories and other false narratives that are spread online by foreign governments, by foreign terrorist groups and by domestic extremist thought leaders, and are consumed by individuals who are predisposed to engage in violence,” a senior DHS official warned in the alert.
Threats online of retaliatory violence had received “much more public visibility” in the last few days.
“The discussions and these theories have migrated away from being contained within the conspiracy and extremist online communities, to where they’re being the topic of discussion on web forums, or more public web forums, and even within the sort of media ecosystem,” the official said.
August has repeatedly been cited by conspiracy theorists as the month when the 2020 election results would be struck down.
Mr Trump himself has fuelled the false narrative with claims of widespread voter fraud without offering any evidence.
Supporters such as MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and Rudy Giuliani have further amplified the conspiracies that voting machines were hacked and dead people voted, which are widely believed by Republican voters.
The DHS said it did not have any specific evidence of an imminent plot.
The department says it “does not have the luxury of waiting till we uncover information with the level of specificity, regarding a potential location and the time of an attack”.
“Past circumstances have illustrated that calls for violence could expand rapidly in the public domain and may be occurring outside of publicly available channels. As such, lone offenders and small groups of individuals could mobilise to violence with little-to-no warning,” the bulletin sent to state and local law enforcement agencies reads.
“As public visibility of the narratives increases, we are concerned about more calls to violence. Reporting indicates that the timing for these activities may occur during August 2021, although we lack information on specific plots or planned actions,” the DHS bulletin says.
The DHS official said they had heeded the lessons of the 6 January insurrection in which a mob stormed the Capitol to prevent the House from certifying the election results was that plans for violent attacks “may be communicated on public forums”.
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