Prosecutors Say Man Went to Obama’s DC Neighborhood After Trump Posted Supposed Address Transcript

… a man arrested last week with weapons in the neighborhood of former President Barack Obama here in Washington DC. Federal prosecutors say the suspect began live-streaming in that area shortly after he re-shared a social media post from the former President Donald Trump in which Trump posted what he claimed was Obama’s address. CNN’s Katelyn Polantz joins me now. Katelyn, so did the former President share something close to the Obama’s address?

He reportedly shared an address that put this man inside the perimeter where the Secret Service was protecting in a neighborhood in Washington DC where the Obama’s currently live.

So within a few blocks, in other words?

It appears to be in the neighborhood itself according to the court documents. But what’s so concerning about this is that wasn’t when this guy got on the radar of in investigators or federal protection, the FBI. They had been monitoring him because he participated in January 6th, allegedly. There are videos of him. He was posting on YouTube about being an insurrectionist, and then had a series of live streams in the month of June where he’s talking about January 6th, his participation, as well as saying threatening things like he wanted to blow up his car outside of a federal building. The day before he goes to this neighborhood in Washington DC, there was also another incident where he was live streaming himself talking about January 6th inside of an elementary school in Maryland. And so all of this comes together and on a live stream, the Feds watch him walk through the neighborhood, he’s streaming, he’s saying he has them surrounded, presumably the Obama’s, and then he takes off on foot. They finally arrest him in a wooded area very nearby.

Goodness. Hold that thought for a moment because I know you have new reporting as well on the indictment against former President Trump, and that there might be a more detailed, or a less, I should say, redacted version of that indictment coming out.

Yeah. So we’re waiting to see if there are more details about what we can learn of the investigation that led to this indictment. So back whenever the FBI did that search of Mar-a-Lago last year, they had to submit a pretty detailed affidavit in court saying, “This is why we believe we will find evidence inside Mar-a-Lago.” After that search, we got a version of that court document that had a lot of redactions in it, but now that Trump has been indicted, CNN and other media outlets went back to court and said, “Can you give us another version with fewer redactions now that we see the indictment?” And so a judge has told the Justice Department we are going to get to see another version of that paper.

Notable. Okay, we’ll learn more there. I do want to go back and bring in Senior National Security Analyst and former Assistant Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, Juliette Kayyem, on the question here of a former president sharing what turned out not to be the exact address of the Obamas here in Washington, but at least in the neighborhood, put this suspect in the neighborhood there, and the suspect considered enough of a threat that he was taken in by Secret Service protecting the former President. Is that a dangerous thing for a former president to do, to share with his followers that information?

When I heard this story, I was thinking about the moments after President Biden became president, he denied Donald Trump access to present national security briefings, and now I think it was prescient. Forget Mar-a-Lago and the classified information he took, Donald Trump, as I’ve been saying for many years, knows exactly what he is doing. He puts out what’s allegedly an address or something close, as Katelyn’s describing as in the neighborhood, that’s close enough for me, and it certainly will be close enough for the Secret Service. He is not doing that for neighborly brotherhood. He is doing that because his followers will do something with it. Most will ignore it. Most Trump supporters do not support violence, but he knows that there’s some group of them that will do something. And Trump can claim plausible deniability, he can claim, “I was just putting this out there, why is everyone taking everything so seriously?” But we’ve got seven years of evidence of him doing this, and yet he did it again against a former president. And not surprising that the person who took the bait is someone who also followed him on January 6th.

So let me ask you, bigger picture, so folks at home can understand the seriousness of this. There is a deep problem with right-wing extremism in this country. In fact, the FBI, not just under this administration but the previous one, has identified right-wing extremism as the greatest domestic terror threat, outpacing even international terrorist groups. So you have a former president sharing information that someone in one of those groups might then use, if you were looking at this from your former perch at the Department of Homeland Security, would you consider that person, in this case the former President, as aiding an abetting a threat by doing that?

Aiding and abetting would be hard because I think Trump could say, “I wasn’t directing them towards something.” But what you could look to for Trump is a sense of assisting this environment. And the solution may not be a legal prosecution. That’s different than, say, January 6th, where there might be evidence of a direct involvement with the violence. In this case, what it takes from a counter-terrorism perspective, because I view this in that lens, that you have someone who’s inciting violence against democratic institutions and against our democracy, you do the things that are being done. These prosecutions are significant, even against the guys who were at January 6th, the low level guys, you put people in jail because it makes it harder for there to be recruitment and fundraising. But also, the thing that’s not happening enough, and I can’t say it enough, which is there has to be a certain amount of shaming of what Trump is doing by his people. And that’s what you don’t see right now from the Republican Party. You see some of it, and it’s important. That will go very far to say, as we’ve seen in other instances where a party basically abandons a president that, “This is not a sustainable… This is not reflective of who we are.” And unfortunately, we’re not seeing that enough.

Right. And establishing here, the degree of the former President’s help here, as it were… No one seems to be debating the degree to which the former President is discouraging this kind of anger, and in this case, sharing information that someone with that kind of anger might use. Juliette Kayyem, I know we’re going to continue this conversation, sadly. It’s good to have you on.