The probability is high that the FBI cultivated this information but due to the saturation point of agents working higher radical and militant people across the country had to prioritize cases. If true and this assessment is accurate, we have a real problem in America and worse a resource problem. Even law enforcement is overwhelmed and data from Fusion Centers may be in question. Nonetheless….here are new facts:
Baton Rouge Gunman Created Alternate Identity Prior to Shooting
WSJ: Gavin Eugene Long, the gunman who killed three Baton Rouge, La., police officers Sunday, had legally changed his name to Cosmo Setepenra after pledging allegiance to a group of black Americans who claim to be part of a sovereign nation.
Long filed a notice on May 16, 2015, stating that he had joined Washitaw Nation and would change his name to Cosmo Augur Setepenra, according to court documents filed with the Jackson County, Mo., recorder of deeds office.
The declaration that he joined the separatist group had no legal force, but it is evidence that he sympathized with the sovereign-citizens movement, which law-enforcement officials consider to be an extremist threat.
Cosmo is a name that he had also used as his online persona in recent years, according to his tweets and other social-media posts. In a series of rants connected to Cosmo in the weeks before the shooting, Long, who was black, talked of his willingness to die for what he believed was an injustice aimed at him.
Long, 29 years old, was killed by police following Sunday’s shooting.
Police concerns about the sovereign-citizens movement have intensified over the past decade. Law-enforcement officers perceive the sovereign-citizens movement as the top threat, ahead of jihadists, among extremist groups in the U.S., according to a 2013-2014 survey by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.
Officers had ranked the movement as the seventh biggest threat in a similar survey published in 2009.
Adherents to the antigovernment sovereign-citizens movement believe the federal government underwent a secret transformation that made slaves of all Americans, according the Southern Law Poverty Center, which has tracked the movement.
The Washitaw Nation is a related group that believes the Louisiana Purchase, in which the U.S. acquired land from France in 1803, was fraudulent. Its members claim to be part of an indigenous culture that rightfully owns the land, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
To join Washitaw Nation, a person needs to file a series of written documents with a local court, or county clerk’s office. Long submitted eight pages of documents into the official record three days after his May 2015 filing. Washitaw Nation isn’t a Native American tribe.
Long argued that, under a United Nations statute granting rights to indigenous people, he was giving up his birth name and his allegiance to the U.S., including his Social Security number, to join the group.
The man who fatally shot three police officers in Baton Rouge on Sunday before being killed has been identified as a former Marine sergeant. Mark Kelly reports. Image: AFP
The link between Long and Cosmo is also shown by a website that tracks internet-domain registration. A Gavin Long from Kansas City registered a website called “Convos With Cosmo,” which is very similar to others used for his business dealings and audio and video posts. The website was registered in April.
On July 4, in an audio file posted to one of these sites, “Cosmo” tells the story of joining the Marines in 2005 and then being stationed in Japan and California before an attempt to deploy him to Iraq in 2008. Cosmo said he was a data-network specialist, which he said made him responsible for his group’s network.
The Pentagon said Long joined the Marines in 2005 and said he had a similar rotation to the one described above.
Cosmo said the military tried to deploy him to Iraq before all of his gear had arrived from Japan, and he fought the order.
Sovereign citizens deny they are subject to most taxes and many laws. Members of the movement have harassed government officials by filing liens against officials’ property. They have been prosecuted in dozens of tax-avoidance and other financial schemes, according to a research brief by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.
People associated with the sovereign-citizens movement have also been linked to the deaths of several law-enforcement officers, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation describing them as part of “domestic terrorist movement.”
Two police officers in West Memphis, Ark., were shot and killed during a 2010 traffic stop by a father and son identified by the Southern Law Poverty Center and the Anti-Defamation League as sovereign citizens. Suspects in the 2012 shooting deaths of two sheriff’s deputies in St. John the Baptist Parish, La., also described themselves as members of the movement.
Long began using the Twitter account “Convos with Cosmo” in October 2015. The account was used primarily for motivational messages, boasts about himself or links to some of his ideas on issues like sex. They took a more militaristic turn in recent weeks, though, following recent police shootings that killed two black men, one in Baton Rouge and another in Minnesota.
On July 8, one day after Micah Johnson killed five law-enforcement officers in Dallas, Cosmo posted a video suggesting that he could do something that would make people speculate about his motivations.
That same day, Long sent an email to 13 people whom he described as his “Peace Family” and told them “that if anything may happen to me or with me, I am NOT affiliated with anybody, any group, nationality, association, religion, corporation, business, etc.”
He said that for him “as a Man (Protector and Provider) (And Spiritual Being) and me knowing my role as a Man, my duties as a Man, and that I determine my destiny and no one else, I am taking this Earth Plane existence day by day and even hour by hour because anything is possible from here on out.”
The email was sent less than 24 hours after the Dallas shooting that killed five law enforcement officers.
The day after the Dallas law-enforcement officials were shot, Cosmo tweeted: “The Shooter was NOT WHITE, He was one of us!”
In his most recent video posted on his YouTube page Thursday, he is in his car, promoting a book and talking about “wanting my people to succeed.” It isn’t clear where the video is set, but he mentions the protests in Baton Rouge and says he wasn’t able to participate.
“I just got here. I came for my people I am not really into the protesting. I do education,” he said, arguing that the protesters will be gone in the next month.
By Sunday night the video had been viewed more than 11,000 times and was filled with hundreds of comments condemning the shootings.
Cosmo claimed that he dropped out of school, sold his cars, gave away his material possessions and packed two suitcases and headed to Africa, a place he called his “ancestral home.”
He posted videos of his journey, including a stay at what he called a “mid-level” guesthouse in Accra, Ghana, in a clip titled “African-Americans this is what Africa really looks like.”
On July 13, six days after the Dallas shooting, he tweeted: “Violence is not THE answer (its a answer), but at what point do you stand up so that your people dont become the Native Americans…EXTINCT?”
His final tweet, sent just hours before the Baton Rouge police officers were killed, suggested he knew that he was about to die as well: “Just bc you wake up every morning doesn’t mean that you’re living. And just bc you shed your physical body doesn’t mean that you’re dead.”
—Jim Oberman contributed to this article
