It’s getting harder and harder for the Occupiers to claim that those guys who tried to blow up a bridge near Cleveland had nothing to do with them.
Last week I told you about Brandon “Skabby” Baxter, one of the five men arrested last week in the bombing plot. Occupy Cleveland says he doesn’t represent them, even though he organized an Occupy event just a week ago. Oh, and a video of Baxter acting on behalf of Occupy Cleveland in March — getting arrested for disrupting a sheriff’s auction and then taunting the cops — is still on Occupy Cleveland’s site.
If that’s not a direct enough link for you, the Cleveland Plain Dealer now reports:
One of the five self-described anarchists arrested last week for attempting to blow up a local bridge signed the lease for a West Side warehouse where about a dozen members of the Occupy Cleveland group live.
In a one-hour recording of a Friday evening general assembly meeting of the group posted on its website http://occupycleveland.com/live-stream/, Occupy leaders expressed concern about Anthony Hayne’s name being on the lease, which strengthens his link to the group.
“We have a person facing terrorism charges on the lease of our warehouse,” said one of the leaders. “If this gets into the media, it would be a disaster…”
Hayne, 35, of Cleveland, has a criminal record dating to 2000. He was one of five men arrested by the FBI and charged with setting fake explosive charges under the Ohio 82 bridge between Sagamore Hills Township and Brecksville Monday night.
An FBI affidavit said Hayne helped plan the bombing attempt. It also said he was one of a group that last Sunday picked up a duffel bag containing smoke grenades and gas masks, as well as two black boxes that the suspects thought contained bombs.
Yeah, but other than that.
Fortunately for Occupy Cleveland, they have an ally in keeping this out of the media: the media. Here’s just one example, from Ron Futrell at Breitbart.com:
The Occupy Cleveland members who allegedly plotted to blow up a Cleveland bridge and kill dozens of innocent people should use NBC’s Brian Williams as their lead defense witness.
First, the Peacock Network totally ignored the background of the accused men. It did not mention one word of who these people were, how their leftism informed their alleged terrorist plot–planning to also blow up banks, the Republican National Convention, and other American sites.
Here’s the entire script as read by Williams:
The FBI arrested five self-described anarchists in Cleveland, Ohio today, the men are between 20 and 37 years of age. They’re accused of plotting to blow up a bridge over a park in Cleveland. The plot was uncovered by an FBI sting operation that provided them with what they thought to be bomb material. As is the case with so many of these similar situations, the FBI said in the end there was never any real danger associated with the plan.
There was no video shown of cars going over the bridge; NBC made it look abandoned. Yet 13,000 people a day travel over that bridge, and the OWS-affiliated suspects allegedly pulled the trigger on what they thought were plastic explosives that would’ve destroyed the bridge and killed occupants during rush hour. Still, Williams claimed “there was never any real danger associated with the plan.”
Yeah, it’s not like they held up a misspelled sign at a Tea Party or something. Brian Williams is right to scoff.
The Occupiers are trying to get Hayne’s name off the lease. They don’t need to worry about keeping it out of the news, thanks to our moral, ethical, and intellectual superiors like Brian Williams.