Antifa Terrorists Set Fire to Federal Courthouse in Portland, and Ted Wheeler Gets Hit With Tear Gas

Time to total’y Destroy Antifa and arrest all those who support and finanace these crinimals

@Ronald J. Ward:

It’s hard to know if it was Antifa setting the fires or if it was Trump’s thugs in his wag the dog assault on peaceful protestors.

Where did you glean that opinion from? Was it from the sea of red MAGA hats in Portland’s riotous mob?

@Greg:

You’re an idiot. There’s no “maybe” about that fact.

@Ronald J. Ward: Yeah, because the 50 days before the feds showed up were peaceful and “the summer of love”. Right?

There was so much peace and tranquility, the federal officers had to bring their own spray paint to deface the buildings, their own fireworks to set of inside, their own laser pointers to blind themselves with and their own bats to bust out windows with it. For the past 57 days, certainly no one other than federal officers has been rioting.

The stupidity is strong with this one.

@Greg: van der Luub was a tool of socialists, just like the Portland army of useful idiots. But, hopefully Trump understands the lessons taught about the perils of ignoring political terror.

@Ronald J. Ward:

Even as his thugs are beating and stealing cameras from the press, here you are again at his side.

Ever notice how those thugs, as you call them, are all dressed in black? Ever wonder why in multiple videos you see those all black dressed thugs knocking out windows and then walking away as the useful idiot protesters pour into a building for the purpose of looting?

Now, I fully understand that useful idiots like you and Comrade Greggie don’t pay attention to the small details, but those all dressed in black thugs are Antifa. And I promise you, they are not on Trump’s side. They want anarchy and that is what Portland is and has been for some time. They just got emboldened during the days of summer love in Ferguson and Baltimore. And they know that Democrat mayor and governors are cowards.

But have no fear, AJ/Ward, the more emboldened they get, the closer to your home they get and sooner or later, you also can enjoy the summer of love.

@Ronald J. Ward:

We’ve learned they aren’t specialized in riots or civil unrest

You didnt watch the press conference with DHS so your glowing ignorance shines brightly.
When the Federal building as attacked the agents all inside, not bothering anyone. The anarchists tore down the fence then ripped the plywood off the windows to smash the glass so they could gain entry to torch the building, they had barricaded the exit.
All of this was filmed.
This is federal property there were always federal employees using the facility, they were sent back up because the Mayor is ordering his police to stand down even if that means my employees are murdered.

@Ronald J. Ward:

Who precisely are these men dressed in green that Trump sent? We’ve learned they aren’t specialized in riots or civil unrest but from. The Customs and Border Protection, ICE, Transportation Security Administration, Even the Coast Guard, those experience in boarder patroll and screening airline passengers. What the hell!

What difference does it make who they are? If there weren’t any leftist terrorists attacking federal property, they wouldn’t even be there. Look at Dallas; no federal troops in unmarked vans picking thugs up off the streets. Know why? There aren’t any leftist terrorists staging violent riots there. It’s the same in many other cities. See the lesson? Nah… you can’t. You’re a leftist.

@retire05:

People who display as much ignorance as you do usually are embarrassed but I think you are too pathetically uninformed to even realize when you are showing blatant stupidity.

People like AJ take great pride in their stupidity. For them on the left, it’s a competition.

@Greg: Sorry Greg there is a consensus on the data indeed Retire05 has reached the correct conclusion, The science is settled You are an idiot, several villages have called inquiring about you to see if you were their missing idiot. We have assured them that you were indeed our idiot referred them to Portland and Seattle where they have gathered entire villages comprised of idiots. The rumor of special breeding programs of idiots has been confirmed and they have marked the brooders by having them wear Yellow and present themselves to federal authorities.

July 25, 2020 — Federal Agents Push Into Portland Streets, Stretching Limits of Their Authority — Videos Show How Federal Officers Escalated Violence in Portland

The President is lying. The video camera and witnesses on the scene are not. Federal forces on the streets of Portland have progressively escalated the anger and violence. Given that the results are obvious and Trump has only doubled down, it clear that this is by intention rather than a result of stupidity. Escalating violence and casting himself as the only one who can suppress it is part of his effort to remain in office.

PORTLAND, Ore. — After flooding the streets around the federal courthouse in Portland with tear gas during Friday’s early morning hours, dozens of federal officers in camouflage and tactical gear stood in formation around the front of the building.

Then, as one protester blared a soundtrack of “The Imperial March,” the officers started advancing. Through the acrid haze, they continued to fire flash grenades and welt-inducing marble-size balls filled with caustic chemicals. They moved down Main Street and continued up the hill, where one of the agents announced over a loudspeaker: “This is an unlawful assembly.”

By the time the security forces halted their advance, the federal courthouse they had been sent to protect was out of sight — two blocks behind them.

The aggressive incursion of federal officers into Portland has been stretching the legal limits of federal law enforcement, as agents with batons and riot gear range deep into the streets of a city whose leadership has made it clear they are not welcome.

“I think it’s absolutely improper,” Oregon’s attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, said in an interview on Friday. “It’s absolutely beyond their authority.”

The state lost its bid on Friday for a restraining order against four federal agencies on the grounds that the state attorney general lacked standing, but several other challenges are still making their way through the courts.

Federal officers who arrived this month to help control protests over racial injustice and police violence have made dozens of arrests for federal crimes, including assaults on federal officers and failing to comply with law enforcement commands. More than 40 protesters have been arrested, and dozens now face federal criminal charges.

One protester standing on a city street outside the federal courthouse was shot in the head with a crowd-control munition, leaving a bloody scene and a serious facial injury that required surgery. In another incident, an officer was seen repeatedly using a baton to whack a Navy veteran who said he had come to speak to the agents. Videos taken by members of the public captured camouflaged personnel pulling protesters into unmarked vans.

The inspectors general of the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security have opened investigations into the tactics.

During 57 consecutive nights of protests, demonstrators have squared off first with the Portland police and then with federal agents in what at times have been pitched battles, with protesters throwing water bottles or fireworks and agents responding with frequent volleys of tear gas. The arrival of the federal agents caused the protests to swell and focused the ire of protesters onto the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse, across from a park shaded by mature trees.

What began as a movement for racial justice became a broader campaign to dislodge the federal forces from the city.

The federal agents from four agencies arrived after President Trump signed an executive order on June 26 ordering the protection of federal monuments and buildings.

Their presence quickly became a political rallying point.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat, compared the agents to an “occupying army.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, called them “storm troopers.”

Mr. Trump criticized the police protests around the country in cities “all run by liberal Democrats” and defended the move to send in federal agents, warning that with the continuing turbulence in the streets, “They were going to lose Portland.”

Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary of homeland security, described the protesters squaring off with federal agents outside the federal courthouse in Portland as “anarchists and criminals.”

“We will continue to take the appropriate action to protect our facilities and our law enforcement officers,” Mr. Wolf said at a news briefing this past week. “If we left tomorrow they would burn that building down.”

There is broad agreement among legal scholars that the federal government has the right to protect its buildings. But how far that authority extends into a city — and which tactics may be employed — is less clear.

Robert Tsai, a professor at the Washington College of Law at American University, said the nation’s founders explicitly left local policing within the jurisdiction of local authorities.

He questioned whether the federal agents had the right to extend their operations blocks away from the buildings they are protecting.

“If the federal troops are starting to wander the streets, they appear to be crossing the line into general policing, which is outside their powers,” Professor Tsai said.

Homeland Security officials say they are operating under a federal statute that permits federal agents to venture outside the boundaries of the courthouse to “conduct investigations” into crimes against federal property or officers.

But patrolling the streets and detaining or tear-gassing protesters go beyond that legal authority, said David Lapan, the former spokesman for the agency when it was led by John Kelly, Mr. Trump’s first secretary of homeland security.

“That’s not an investigation,” Mr. Lapan said. “That’s just a show of force.”

John Malcolm, vice president for the Institute for Constitutional Government at the conservative Heritage Foundation, and a former deputy assistant attorney general during the George W. Bush administration, said federal agents have clear legal authority to pursue protesters who have damaged federal property.

“Once they have committed a crime the federal authorities have probable cause to go arrest them,” Mr. Malcolm said. “I don’t care how many blocks away they are from that property.”

While federal authorities are not intended to be riot police, he said, the federal government has the authority to send in troops in extreme situations in which there is a breakdown of authority and local officials are unable to effectively enforce local laws.

“But we are not there yet, and I pray that we don’t get there,” he said.

Outraged by the federal presence, government leaders in Portland have been looking for ways to push back against the deployment. The Portland Police Bureau ousted federal representatives from the city’s command post. Mayor Ted Wheeler, who himself was hit with tear gas fired by federal agents on Wednesday night, called the federal deployment an abuse of authority.

“My colleagues and I are looking at every possible legal option we have to get the feds out of here,” Mr. Wheeler said in an interview.

In the state’s legal challenge, Ms. Rosenblum argued that the operations of federal authorities, using unmarked vehicles to detain protesters, resembled abductions. The lawsuit called on the court to order the agents to stop arresting individuals without probable cause and to clearly identify themselves and their agency before detaining or arresting “any person off the streets in Oregon.”

But in his ruling on Friday, Judge Michael W. Mosman of the U.S. District Court in Portland said the state attorney general’s office did not have standing to bring the case because it had not shown that the issue was “an interest that is specific to the state itself.”

In an interview, Ms. Rosenblum said that having federal agents battling protesters in Portland was un-American because the country does not have a tradition of a national police force.

“The police should be ideally as local as possible,” she said. “It’s about trust, relationships and community building.”

She warned that all Americans need to be concerned about what is happening in Portland.

“It could be happening in your city next,” she said.

The inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph V. Cuffari, told lawmakers in a letter that he planned to examine the authority the agency used to deploy agents to Portland.

Some of the protesters who originally focused their anger on the case of George Floyd, whose death in police custody in Minneapolis in May sparked demonstrations around the country, now have turned much of their attention to the presence of federal officers on Portland’s streets.

On Friday night, a crowd gathered outside a fence erected around the federal courthouse; some in the crowd lit fires, lobbed fireworks over the fence and attempted to pull it down with power tools. Federal agents entered the street to disperse the crowd at 2:30 a.m.

Most of the demonstrations during the evening, though, were peaceful. A group of military veterans lined up along the fence, joining a “Wall of Moms,” hundreds of mothers who have linked arms to challenge the presence of the federal agents, who had been there on previous nights. There was also a “Wall of Dads” carrying leaf blowers to combat the tear gas.

Jennifer Kristiansen, a family-law attorney, was one of many women who came out to the protests in recent days to join the “Wall of Moms.” In the early morning hours on Tuesday, she said, as agents were clearing protesters from in front of the courthouse, one of them reported to another that Ms. Kristiansen had struck him.

Ms. Kristiansen said that she had done no such thing and that one of the officers ended up assaulting her, groping her chest and backside during the arrest.

“This is not creeping authoritarianism,” Ms. Kristiansen said. “The authoritarianism is here.”

It’s either Trump or American democracy. You get to choose in November. If you fail to vote, or if you choose poorly, you may not get a chance to choose again.

When you click on the link, you’re looking at the source. Do you really need further explanation in order to figure out what it is? Maybe so. You can’t seem to figure out that the escalating violence between Trump’s enforcers and citizens on the streets wouldn’t be happening if the enforcers weren’t there to engage in it.

They’re present against the will of the Oregon’s elected State and local governments, as well as Portland’s policing authorities, who rightly predicted what the results of their interference would be.

@Greg:

Two more questions for you, Comrade Greggie:

when did the rioting, looting and burning start in Portland?

how long have Federal LEOs been in Portland?

Andy Ngo has films of the Portland (according to NYSlimes, mostly peaceful) riots going back a couple of months.

Jennifer Kristiansen, a family-law attorney, was one of many women who came out to the protests in recent days to join the “Wall of Moms.”

What the hell was a 37 year old white broad who is an attorney doing with Antifa?

https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1285839279843753985?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1285839279843753985%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rightjournalism.com%2Fvideo-proof-most-of-the-portland-moms-are-just-antifa-rioters-that-put-on-a-yellow-shirt-now-for-optics-hardly-any-media-coverage%2F

By linking the NYSlimes, you prove you like being lied to.

https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2020/05/protest-escalates-at-downtown-portland-justice-center.html

If little Miss Commie Jennifer and her Antifa goons come to my town, they will be met with such fire power they never knew existed.

@Greg:

That’s why we have elections

Yep. And I had to endure the failures of Obama for 8 long years. Surely our representative republic can last another 5.

The problem is that your Jackass in Chief has sent his untrained goons

Untrained? Do you even know the training that BORTAC officers go through? Those “untrained goons” are some of the same people that protect Nancy Pelosi’s sagging ass. Those guys should walk off the job and say they will no longer protect her sagging ass.

She’s a 37-year-old mother of two and an attorney practicing Family Law. Not exactly the face of Trump’s favorite boogieman, ANTIFA.

Are you making the claim that since she is white, 37, an attorney and a mother of two she can’t be Antifa? Why wasn’t she home with her children instead of trying to incite a riot?

@retire05, #23:

Untrained? Do you even know the training that BORTAC officers go through?

Does it emphasize “fire power they never knew existed”?

They’re essentially Special Weapons and Tactics personnel. They’re trained in the coordinated application of special weapons, force, and violence. They’re called in when peaceful measures don’t work. They come with an aggressive attitude. They’re not trained in crowd control, or in peacefully deescalating tense or dangerous situations. What the hell do you not understand?

Why do right-wing idiots presume they know all? This does seem to be part of the profile.

@Greg:

They’re not trained in crowd control, or in peacefully deescalating tense or dangerous situations. What the hell do you not understand?

What the hell do you not understand?

The unit was created in 1984 to serve a civil disturbance
function in response to rioting at legacy Immigration and
Naturalization Service detention facilities
https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Border%20Patrol%20Tactical%20Unit.pdf

Don’t worry, Comrade Greggie. No one can see you when you soil yourself after you have been shown the fool and idiot you are.

@Greg: greggie the rock, how do you know they were veterans? Oh, that is because the nyt said there were. What a rock!

@Greg: Protesting Portland moms and U.S. military vets are not terrorist threats.
What we have are the same female protestors that simply put on a yellow shirt and very few real vets mostly stolen valor fakes that never served even in ROTC.
Yes some abc depts are not what they used to be such is BLM they dont sell federal land to settlers anymore.
The Border Patrol Tactical Unit provides an immediate- response capability to emergent and high-risk incidents requiring specialized skills and tactics. So these are the “untrained” guys you smear you also know the full scope of their training.
As they deal with drug smugglers I’m sure they can gather evidence against terrorists that attack federal property.

@Greg: Guess what we wouldn’t have in Portland if left wing political terrorists were not rioting every night? Federal officers.

They’re essentially Special Weapons and Tactics personnel. They’re trained in the coordinated application of special weapons, force, and violence. They’re called in when peaceful measures don’t work. They come with an aggressive attitude. They’re not trained in crowd control, or in peacefully deescalating tense or dangerous situations. What the hell do you not understand?

They’ve been called in after a month and a half of left wing violence, riots committed simply for the sake of rioting. They have to protect federal property because the failed Democrat government there can’t be bothered to protect lives and property. Who do you think is coordinating the use of fireworks, umbrellas and leaf blowers against the federal officers? Are they like the telegraph vine that just suddenly everyone gets the same idea at the same time? The riots in Portland and Seattle are coordinated and funded by Sosos surrogates. You aren’t “anti-fascist”. You are whole-heartedly, all in, FULL fascist.

A group of veterans formed a line in front of protesters in Portland on Friday as the city endured another night of tense demonstrations.

They misspelled “night of left wing terrorism and violence”. Many of the federal cops are vets, too. So, what does that mean? Does being a vet give the terrorists carte blanc to riot and destroy federal property? What’s next, a line of pretend “Covington kids”? Do you think the significance of the left’s lies and subterfuge is lost upon us?

Horse hockey. BORTAC was not “created to serve in civil disturbance”. They were created to respond to and neutralize terrorist threats.

They are facing left wing domestic terrorists. These terrorists use the same tactics as Hamas, hiding among women and children, instigating violence and they whining and crying when retaliatory force is employed. You’re people are terrorists.