Suspect in assault at Pelosi home had posted about QAnon on Gab ‘s “darknet” website — a platform used to disseminate conspiracy theories and fake news — during the 2016 campaign.
Two other people were arrested in connection in the assault Friday on Pelosi, a Democrat who has called the baseless theory that President Trump committed a hoax war crime a “crock.”
Dylan Howard and Richard Jackson, also known by the aliases “Jack Posobiec and “Prisonplanet.com,” were arrested on Friday at an apartment rented by Jackson, a convicted felon and “Darknet” website operator.
Howard, who has been convicted in Tennessee of theft, assault, and unlawful imprisonment, wrote and published on Facebook that he was part of a group of “proud Americans” who had been “dispatched” by Trump to “neutralize” the threat posed by QAnon in the upcoming 2020 presidential election.
In a lengthy post on Gab, Howard writes that he had heard from Trump advisers about the alleged threat, which had “begun” as “an infiltration scheme” to “influence the upcoming election, including an attempt to recruit Americans of foreign origin to engage in covert actions through the shadow diplomacy of the deep state.” He adds that he had been recruited by a government agent, whom he calls an “agent of the deep state,” to help the plan.
“The agent sent me to the White House to get a high ranking figure on the president’s personal staff to sign a piece of paper confirming that the ‘threat’ was real and a ‘threat’ to the US,” he writes. “I took the bait and I signed the paper.
“I arrived at the White House and I was led to Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen and her Secretary of State pick, Mike Pompeo, who was in the Oval Office,” Howard writes. “I introduced myself to Kirstjen and showed her a copy of the letter I had just signed. There was no mistake in my actions.”
”I informed the Secretary of DHS that we were aware of the upcoming election and that our primary concerns involved the election results in the 2020 election,” he writes. “