The likely culprit in the Portland/Vancouver Ballot Drop fire is the DHS itself
With any crime: follow the money. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has the means, the motive, the opportunity, and it profits.
There is a certain way news story roll out, become promoted, and deliver messages that rings they are being fabricated or promoted by the national security state. One such story is the current Portland/Vancouver ballot drop box fires that conveniently further many goals of the unnecessary Dept. of Homeland Security.
In 2020, the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) participated in the response to the Nashville "Christmas Day Bombing," which I suspected at the time was a live-fire exercise. There was the strange truck warning people to clear the area, and the critical infrastructure focus of the exercise did not match the eventual "suspect" who didn't appear to ever have existed. Christmas was likely chosen because downtown Nashville would have been deserted.
Also in 2020, CISA sponsored an elaborate tabletop election security exercise called "Operation Blackout," which simulated events such as attacking election infrastructure by hacking autonomous vehicles and ramming them into polling places and hacking security cameras near ballot drop boxes. In fact, the entire concept of "domestic terrorist extremists" attacking ballot boxes seems to originate from CISA itself c.a. 2019. The reality is that every documented instance of this actually happening have not been politically motivated and are usually street people in altered states of consciousness.
I remember when I cast my ballot at Portland's pioneer courthouse square worrying it might be spoiled by a street person dumping liquid in the box or setting it on fire, but when I looked at the box design, I realized it would be nearly impossible and the box wouldn't get enough ventilation.
On September 10, 2024, CISA rolls out an intelligence brief about "extremists" having "chatter" online to destroy ballot boxes complete with a list of risk mitigation strategies - i.e. things CISA wants. This was published through “Property of the People,” ostensibly a public-interest Freedom of Information litigation agency, but which looks suspiciously like an intelligence operation to promote “leaks” the security services want out there in a way they wouldn’t gain press coverage if they were simply published to CISA’s website.
Then on October 11th, another website called “Distributed Denial of Secrets” gets a leak of the alleged source intelligence behind the “chatter.” These supposedly come from a right wing milita called “American Patriots of the People,” which had been “infiltrated.” Sounds like a classic FBI entrapment operation. Worse: DDoS is run by a woman whose now deleted Twitter account reveals she works for the CIA.
In 2022, a group called “Clean Elections USA” recruited 4,500 “patriots” to citizen-monitor ballot drop boxes. To me, this looks like a “vacuum cleaner operation” - a way to attract individuals whom the DHS would then surveil … and entrap. I have had a sense that the film “2000 mules” was created by the security services in order to manufacture the boogie of an “election denier” and thus justify security grift to protect the public from a non-threat.
Now that we actually have an incident, election workers and law enforcement across the nation are implementing CISA's recommendations! I wonder how much of that "chatter" is fabricated by FBI informants as part of an entrapment strategy and to justify its unconstitutional mass surveillance program. We saw this in 2022/23 when there was a wave of attacks on electric substations. The reality is these were done by criminal groups looking to create blackouts in order to rob businesses and ATM's, but CISA and the FBI dreamed up "domestic terrorist extremists," as a threat and entrapped several gullible people online into conspiracies, even though not one substation attack in history has ever been linked to "extremists."
There are three scenarios:
CISA is running a multiagency live exercise with media management and public communications a critical component - much like Nashville. The advantage of this is no ballots have to actually be destroyed - Vancouver officials can collect the ballots and then replace them with blanks before the ballot box is burned, creating a list of people to contact after officials mock dry them out. Anybody who does not re-submit their ballot gets their original one cast. One aspect that suggests this to be the case is KATU cameras were on site improbably early at 6:00 AM and managed to capture perfect footage just in time to be run on the morning news and kick off a narrative. Without good images, the story would not make the international press. Not many officials need to be "in the know." The challenge is how to wrap it up by finding a criminal and not looking incompetent like when they couldn't find the culprit in the Macon substation attack because CISA believed its own propaganda about extremists. In the coming days we'll see if it's a suicide or someone dies in a shootout
CISA and the FBI are running an entrapment operation - sending in an informant to some welder who participates in online "patriot" chat rooms, having the informant suggest using thermite to cut through ballot boxes or supplying with ATF-supplied explosives after showing the welder-patriot the film "2000 mules," and then letting it happen. Over the next few days the FBI heroically finds the welder who is then put on trial and points to him as the reason we need to monitor "chatter," but many aspects to the case are covered up because the FBI will explain internally that they didn't mean to let it happen and it went live by mistake so everyone who was in the know including the informant will stay silent forever.
This is a true false flag and CISA/DHS assets arsoned the boxes directly. No culprit is ever found and the FBI will blame Portland pulling out of the JTTF as a reason.
Why Portland/Vancouver?
It creates a federal nexus as an interstate crime allowing the FBI to come in and take control of the investigation and evidence.
Portland is already associated with political extremism in the national consciousness - although I have long viewed "antifa" and "proud boys" and the 2020 violence as a good old-fashioned Cointelpro op. In the national consciousness given the right-wing inclinations of the national security state, it causes the rest of the country to swing right. Everyone is already believing the Gaza story placed in the NY Times by one of the "journalists" behind the Russiagate hoax, so this reinforces national security goal of continuing to paint Palestinian supporters as terrorists and progressive/liberals as evil pro-Palestine in various public consciousnesses.
Existing security assets in place from the 2020 psyop.
More speculative: OR/CD-5 and WA/CD-3 are swing districts and if the national security state wanted to flip Congress by, in part, having a CISA live-fire cyberhacking exercise as a component where anything out of place observed by election officials can be blamed on the exercise. The thing is, given intelligence compartmentalization, there could be bad actors within CISA doing this under the cover of an otherwise clean drill.
Oddities:
The Vancouver Transit center has security cameras, why no footage?
What's the point of releasing a description of a suspect without an image of him, presumably taken by security camera. If it was a witness, we'd get a sketch artist.
Why take the incendiary device to Alabama? It's about as phony as the FBI's crime lab in Quantico.
Untimely arrival of a photojournalist to Vancouver.
Unusual appearance on the scene of the BATF in Vancouver to take possession of the device. Vancouver PD has a bomb squad. No ATF authority.
I've been to the location of the Multnomah drop box on Belmont many times - there are no security folks around there at 3 in the morning and these heroes were never interviewed in local media or identified.
Security cameras are so much better than the images released and are designed to have license plate resolution. In modern investigations, police can track images across multiple cameras across a city. If an informant was riding along with the “mark” of the operation, not releasing the footage makes more sense.
My concerns:
This whole incident justifies undemocratic and unconstitutional mass surveillance.
Public resources are wasted on a non-threat invented in the minds eyes of security officials needing to justify their existence.
Us vs. them relations between the public and security officials.
Continuing to reinforce the politically correct idea (especially among Democrats) that drop boxes are secure detracts from their limitations. My main concern is voter intimidation that mail voting and drop boxes enable. Husbands and wives can't hide their votes from each other, and I have known offices to have ballot marking events.