WASHINGTON (Huffington Post) – The Washington, D.C., former chief of homeland security and intelligence has warned the next insurrection won’t be like the Donald Trump-incited violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I think the threat has evolved and changed,” the ex-city official, Donell Harvin, told MSNBC “Deadline: White House” on the anniversary of the violence.
“There’s certainly a possibility, and this is my concern, that we’re so busy looking in the rearview mirror of what happened last year that we’re not looking at the threat that’s in front of us and we’re going to bump right into it,” Harvin cautioned.
That threat, said Harvin, is “the blended and mixed ideologies that came together at the Capitol” are still together and “just as effective and operationally sound as they were on Jan. 6 and they’ve just basically blended back into the states.”
“And so, instead of waiting for the very last moment to affect an election, the analysis suggests that the battle’s going to be back at the states,” he continued. “Consider the fact that if the federal government wasn’t prepared for what happened on Jan. 6, what are the state and local authorities going to be prepared for?”
Frank Figliuzzi, the FBI’s former assistant director for counterintelligence and now a national security analyst for MSNBC, agreed.
“We are looking at what I would call an entrenched insurgency at this point, a decentralized insurgency,” Figliuzzi said, warning the next insurrection “will unlikely be at the Capitol” but instead at state, county or local level.
Then-President Donald Trump had claimed for weeks that the election was marked by massive electoral fraud, urging his supporters to “fight like hell” to stop the election from being stolen.
Three retired U.S. army generals have sounded the alarm about the deepening political divide in the United States, warning about the possibility of a civil war after the 2024 presidential elections.
Former Major Gen. Paul Eaton, former Major Gen. Antonio Taguba, and former Brig. Gen. Steven Anderson made the warnings in an op-ed in The Washington Post last month.
The generals said there was a potential for chaos in the U.S. armed forces, citing the “disturbing number” of veterans and active-duty members of the military that participated in the Capitol attack. More than 1 in 10 of individuals charged in connection with the riot had a service record.