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I always felt sure this was a false-flag. The idea that someone could get away with doing that in DC, the most surveilled place in America, next to the most surveilled political offices? It’s just impossible. It doesn’t work like that. Especially not in the AI age. Every street is surveilled, so even with no facial features or DNA they could figure out who did it through brute force process of omission.
I suppose the reason for this is that if the protesters managed to actually secure the building, they could make a whole show of the bomb in order to justify lethal force against the protesters. Maybe they would even let it explode so that they would have footage to put on repeat.
Who's "they"?
CIA in conjunction with DC police. Like, they wanted a contingency plan for if the protesters had somehow hardened their position; it may require the use of lethal force to disperse them; this requires an emotional justification for the public (the bombing).
And there wasn't a single Trump-friendly DC police officer to blow the lid on this operation?
Fallacious logic. There have been plenty of conspiracies that have held up to scrutiny with no one whistle-blowing, despite the likely large number of personelle involved.
MK-Ultra, for example, is only know due to a filing mishap that meant not all the paperwork on said project was successfully destroyed.
More recently, we've learned of 275 plain-clothes FBI agents amoung the January 6 crowd - not a single whistleblower.
Conspiracies can work just fine, it seems.
Given that police are the profession with just about the highest concentration of MAGA true believers, I'm going to call BS on the idea that operation Bring Down Trump could proceed without a single person breaking ranks.
Why would you tell the MAGA true believers about Operation Bring Down Trump?
That's the thing that really muddies the waters in conspiracy discourse, everyone acts like they have no idea how the government (or people) work. They act like "the government" is this magical monolithic entity. But "the government" doesn't do things, people inside the government do things, and sometimes they do things unofficially and/or illegally.
The threat that people are trying to get at when they talk about "the Deep State" isn't that "the CIA" will "decide" to screw over an elected official. You think there's some internal CIA policy that says "it is the official position of the Central Intelligence Agency to bork This Guy in Particular"?
No, the threat is that some guys at the CIA who don't like This Guy in Particular will use their official position and resources to bork him. I mean, look at Watergate. There wasn't an official FBI position of "we will leak evidence of the Watergate scandal to the Washington Post," Mark Felt took advantage of his position as Deputy Director to do that. And it would be the same with the DC police - IF this theory is true (and it seems too soon to tell, to me) it's not "the DC police" doing this. It's a group of DC police officers who, by virtue of not being completely stupid, aren't going to tell DC police officers who would disagree with their plan any more than they would post it on the Internet.
That's not to say that there's never been an Official Policy To Do Something Bad (there has), but the Stringer Bell's rule applies doubly so to people in the government. (If only conspiracy theorists would actually watch and pay attention to The X-Files, which actually understands the dynamic here decently well.)
Just a quiet conspiracy between everybody who had access to footage in what is, as OP put it, the most surveilled place in America.
Unless you think that every unsolved murder in Washington, D.C. is also such a conspiracy I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that it's quite possible to evade D.C.'s surveillance footage even if you don't have an inside person, and having one would make it even easier.
Frankly, that's all that needs to be said here. But I'm going to go further than that. Remember when I said
You're doing this here! "The government" and even "the FBI" doesn't have access to all of the footage from D.C.
There are going to be three types of cameras in Washington, D.C. - government, public, and private. Government cameras will be split between different agencies - no single agency will have custody of all of them. Public cameras are livestreaming on the internet. Private cameras' footage is not available to the government without a request.
This means that when the FBI-ATF team is put together to deal with the bomber, they don't have access to ~any of the relevant footage. They have to go around and get it: speak to other government agencies, knock on the doors of hotels and restaurants and ask if they have video surveillance footage, etc.
Now, I don't know how large the team working this is (it likely fluctuates based on the need) but my guess is that probably you have a small core team, plus subject-matter-experts and analysts that are tapped for specific tasks.
This means that the group of people who have access to the footage that is relevant to this event is possibly quite small! Call it an agent-in-charge, a six-man team, and about two dozen SMEs and analysts who are tapped with specific tasking at the discretion of the team lead.
And the minimum theoretical amount of people on that team that can gatekeep access to the video footage is...one. Potentially whichever agent raises his hand and says "I'll do it" when the lead agent asks who wants to go round up the video footage, that guy is your chokepoint. Any cameras he decides weren't rolling that day weren't, any livestreams that he decides to ignore are ignored, any footage that was regrettably scrubbed the day before he happened to knock on the door was scrubbed. As long as he doesn't get caught ignoring any obvious leads, what are the odds that someone double-checks his work? The Bureau isn't drowning in free time.
Now, I don't know how the FBI does things. I hope they have procedures in place that make this difficult or impossible. But I do know how research and analysis works. A single eye can blind the whole body.
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