“The plot to bomb an apartment complex housing Somali immigrants in western Kansas was just the beginning of a plan by three militia members to ‘exterminate cockroaches,’ a prosecutor told jurors Thursday.”
So begins a fairly standard media piece about the prosecution of three Kansas men–Curtis Allen, Patrick Stein, and Gavin Wright–for their role in an alleged Garden City bomb plot. This article comes courtesy of Time magazine.
In the media retelling the hero of the story was a fellow named Dan Day. Reports Time: “Dan Day knew the plan would go forward and innocent people would die.” Here Time paraphrases prosecutor Risa Berkower who claimed that Day “struggled with what to do, prayed about what to do. And then he contacted the FBI, and later agreed to wear a wire.”
A seemingly predictable in-depth article by Jessica Pressler in New York Magazine tells a different story. After a series of gratuitous shots at President Donald Trump and a discussion of the criminally troubled backgrounds of the three accused, Pressler gets to the plot twist.
Apparently, it was not until a hearing at the federal court house in Wichita that the conspirators realized it was Dan Day who set them up.
“He’s the one who fed us all the information, showed us how bad they were, doing this and that and the other,” Patrick Stein told Pressler. “He was working for the Feds the entire time. It was all a setup.”
Writes Pressler, “This time, Stein’s paranoid fantasy had turned out to be at least partially true.” Day, she reports, was in fact a paid informant for the FBI. He apparently had been reporting on Stein since Stein introduced him to the other soon-to-be conspirators at a gun show in February 2016.
According to Stein, it was Day who told the group he saw ISIS recruitment fliers in the Finney County Public Library and who directed their attention to the apartment complex in Garden city where Somalis lives. Day lived in Garden City. Stein did not.
It was Day who introduced the group to major arms dealer, a man that Day knew to be an undercover FBI agent whose guns had been shipped to Kansas from Quantico, Virginia.
This same FBI undercover agent offered to build an ammonium nitrate bomb of the sort Tim McVeigh used in Oklahoma City if the conspirators provided the ammonium nitrate.
On their own, writes Pressler, the three conspirators “mostly succeeded in burning the hair off [Curtis Allen’s] finger” when trying to build a bomb. The FBI even used drones to record their meetings.
Unaware of the FBI involvement, Allen’s girlfriend reported Allen’s weapons stash to Liberal police. Upon learning this, the Feds arranged the delivery of ammonium-nitrate to the conspirators and arrested the conspirators promptly after the hand off.
Stein, writes Pressler, had “become the thing he feared most: a casualty of the Obama administration, specifically, its attempt to aggressively infiltrate right-wing militias the same way that Islamic groups had been targeted after 9/11.”
Ed Robinson, the court appointed public defender Stein later dismissed as a “libtard,” agreed that Stein had a point “about the Feds overdoing it.”
Said Robinson, “I think it’s unfortunate that if the FBI thought these gentlemen were so dangerous, why would they let this investigation go on for ten months, with people they think are possibly murderers, with all these guns, all this ammunition?”
There are serious people who believe the Oklahoma City bombing was a result of a sting gone awry. These misfires happen occasionally at all level of police work. Were the conspirators Muslim, the likely media angle would have been overeager Feds, sting-gone-awry.
In that the conspirators were targeting Muslims, the media will likely portray President Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator and the lowlife perps on trial as everyday Kansans caught up in Trump’s cycle of hate.
The shooting in Olathe of an Indian national last February provided the template. Now it is just a matter of changing names and dates.
