by WorldTribune Staff, June 27, 2024 Contract With Our Readers
On Oct. 31, 2021, The Washington Post ran an article titled “Red Flags” with the subhead “As Trump propelled his supporters to Washington, law enforcement agencies failed to heed mounting warnings about violence on Jan. 6.”
One of those warnings was inexplicably detailed with even psychic overtones.
Days before the Jan. 6, 2021 protest at the U.S. Capitol, Donell Harvin, who at the time was heading up Washington, D.C.’s Homeland Security and Intelligence division, warned that individuals may use explosive devices near the Capitol as a distraction to draw security forces away from the Capitol and allow extremists to attack “‘government buildings, maybe even the Capitol.”
Revolver News, which has been at the forefront of reporting on the J6 pipe bombs, noted of Harvin: “This deep-state official and vehement never-Trumper is responsible for predicting the infamous January 6th pipe bombs to an uncanny and rather troubling degree of accuracy. Why isn’t he interested in taking credit?”
On July 12, 2022, Harvin testified in one of the House Select Committee’s live shows (photo at left).
Harvin claimed that President Donald Trump’s Dec. 19, 2020 tweet united violent groups.
“These nonaligned groups were aligning,” he told the Jan. 6 House select committee. “All the red flags went up at that point. When you have armed militia collaborating with white supremacy groups collaborating with conspiracy theory groups online, all towards the common goal, you started seeing what we call in terrorism a blended ideology. And that’s a very, very bad sign.”
The Post article stated: “Forty-eight hours before the attack, Harvin began pressing every alarm button he could. He invited the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, military intelligence services and other agencies to see the information in real time as his team collected it. He took another extreme step: He asked the city’s health department to convene a call of D.C.-area hospitals and urged them to prepare for a mass casualty event. Empty your emergency rooms, he said, and stock up your blood banks.”
The Washington Post piece “represents a very different version of events than that of FBI Director Christopher Wray,” Revolver News noted.
The FBI chief had told Democrat Sen. Amy Klobuchar that officials were simply caught off guard on J6.
“The Washington Post’s red flag piece highlights figures like Harvin as a means of criticizing the ostensible incompetence and ignorance of federal agencies that should have taken more active steps to prevent January 6 from unfolding as it did,” Revolver News wrote. “Of course, it would never occur to the penetrating minds of the Post that Christopher Wray and other key figures opted not to take preventative steps on January 6 precisely because they wanted it to take place—that they needed something they could contort into an ‘insurrection’ in order to justify the political weaponization of the national security apparatus against Trump supporters.”
Revolver News continued: “Harvin’s urging hospitals to “stock up blood banks” for a mass casualty event may be a bit hysterical and hyperbolic, but all of the warning signs the Washington Post covered, including chatter from militia groups, chat rooms, and information from informants (yes, there were several), all seem to reasonably support the idea that there would be concern in relation to January 6th. The Post piece (likely inadvertently) takes a different turn, however, when it relays a concern regarding January 6th that is so uncannily specific that it forces us to ask some very uncomfortable questions regarding the source and nature of this foreknowledge.”
One of the most remarkable revelations in the Washington Post’s reporting:
“By the time Harvin called a major planning meeting on Dec. 30, the young analyst was ready to present a worst-case scenario: Someone could plant an improvised explosive device near the Capitol, he said. With law enforcement distracted, extremists might then band together and attack government buildings, maybe even the Capitol.”
What Harvin envisioned is pretty much exactly what happened with the pipe bombs which were discovered near the RNC and DNC buildings.
“The bombs did not explode, and given that they were planted the evening before with an hour-long kitchen timer, it is unlikely that they were intended to explode,” Revolver News noted. “Surveillance footage of the DNC pipe bomb’s discovery shocked the nation, as it depicted Secret Service agents and Capitol Police officers abandoning all safety protocols out of an inexplicable certainty that the bomb posed no threat—even to the point of letting schoolchildren walk right by it! Given that the bombs did not go off and likely were never intended to, the critical role they played was not in explosive destruction but rather in diverting resources from the unfolding attack on the Capitol. As mentioned earlier in this piece, the pipe bombs were discovered at 12:40 and 1:05 p.m., respectively—a fifteen-minute window that aligned perfectly with the unfolding Ray Epps orchestrated attack on the Capitol that began at 12:53.”
Revolver News continued: “It was the utterly bizarre fact that the pipe bombs had been lying in their respective locations, undiscovered, for nearly 17 hours, only to be independently discovered within this decisive 15-minute time frame, that suggested to former Capitol Police chief Steve Sund and others that the purpose of the bombs was diversionary. Of course, it is a very strange thing that the person who planted the bomb somehow knew that they would be ‘randomly’ discovered by pedestrians and law enforcement within the exact 15-minute window so as to achieve the diversionary effect. It is also very strange that this magically clairvoyant ‘junior analyst’ in Harvin’s office would have thought to emphasize the diversionary rather than destructive importance of the hypothetical explosives—something that would only make sense in a bizarre and rather unlikely scenario as that which played out with the pipe bombs on January 6th.”
As the Post piece reports, Harvin thought back to the clairvoyant powers of this mysterious and unnamed “junior analyst”:
Midway through Trump’s speech, about 12:45 p.m., Capitol Police officers, along with agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, were dispatched to investigate reports of a pipe bomb with a timer found outside the Republican National Committee headquarters and suspicious packages at the Supreme Court and near the Democratic National Committee headquarters — all offices close to the Capitol.
The activity proved a distraction for officers guarding the Capitol. A D.C. homeland security official assigned to keep eyes on the swelling crowd was sitting in a black SUV on the east side of the Capitol, by a row of Capitol Police bomb-squad trucks. Suddenly, officers jumped into several of the trucks near him. Half pulled away to the south. Several more took off to the west. The official realized his SUV was now one of the last remaining vehicles and that fewer than 10 officers remained between the Capitol and the growing number of protesters.
The official called Donell Harvin, who said the bomb squads were responding to the suspicious package reported near the RNC building. The two flashed back to their tabletop exercise on Dec. 30, and how an analyst had imagined a scenario in which improvised explosive devices could be used to distract law enforcement before an attack on the Capitol. “Is this really happening?” the official asked Harvin.
Revolver News noted: “And this was the last we heard of this enigmatic young analyst who, if these reports are true, made the most strikingly and inexplicably accurate prediction about January 6 by a mile. Interestingly, the only other notable person to have made a similar prediction was none other than Ray Epps, who, in an interview with the FBI that is littered with inconsistencies, claimed that the motivating factor for his flying across the country to attend the January 6 protest in the first place was his concern that bad actors might plant explosives on the side streets near the Capitol. This prediction is not quite as hauntingly precise as Donell Harvin’s young analyst, but still a striking prediction given the source, and especially so given the fact that Ray, in his own words, played a prominent role in the initial and decisive breach of the west perimeter of the Capitol, whose baffling synchronicity with the discovery of the pipe bombs caused people like Steve Sund to espouse the ‘diversion theory’ of the pipe bombs in the first place.”