Following an exposé by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, organizers of plans to disrupt Donald Trump’s inaugural ceremony have reportedly decided to dramatically scale back earlier plans for massive road blocks and other mischief.
An organizer for extremist group DisruptJ20 now insists that recent undercover videos showing members of the group planning all manner of illegal acts don’t really reflect their plans. The organizer says its activities were “intentionally overstated” on the video, according to US News and World Report.
Indeed, organizer Legba Carrefour is attempting to sell the idea that his group was engaging in what might be considered a “rope-a-dope” play by wildly overplaying its plans for the videographers and other news outlets in order to sow chaos through disinformation.
“By virtue of us making those claims, it whips people up into the kind of panic that accidentally ends up causing the chaos we want. You can say ‘all of Metro is being blockaded’ and people will stay home,” the anarchist now says.
Videos of the group’s plans were unveiled by Project Veritas over the last few days.
O’Keefe’s videos added detail to an earlier story by the Washington Examiner’s Ryan Lovelace, whose article, “How protesters plan to wreck Donald Trump’s inauguration,” revealed the plans of #DisruptJ20 to cause trouble during the inaugural ceremony.
Reporting and the O’Keefe videos revealed such plans as shutting down D.C.’s Metro mass transportation system, various highways and roads, and plans to throw caustic chemical bombs among people attending the day’s events.
But now Carrefour is claiming their plans have changed.
“The reason a lot of our plans are pared down is that stuff we wanted to blockade is already being shut down,” Carrefour said. “This is definitely a different beast in the amount of the city that is being shut down.”
Carrefour even tried to take credit for the street closures, saying that the only reason they were closed down was because of their threats.
The anarchist leader also claimed he isn’t bothered by being outed by the O’Keefe videos.
“They have nothing on me that I would not feel comfortable talking about in front of the police. Don’t care,” he claimed.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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