Today, Explained - Bombs in the mail

Episode Date: October 25, 2018

America’s favorite Democrats are getting pipe bombs in the mail. Who even mails bombs anymore? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, America's favorite Democrats got packages in the mail. They were not care packages. They were bombs. It all started on Monday. Police are investigating a possible explosive device found in a mailbox near philanthropist and billionaire George Soros' home. And then yesterday on Wednesday, we started to hear about all of these other Democrats who started receiving suspicious packages as well. Jen Kirby writes about national security for Vox.

Hillary Clinton got one at her house in Chappaqua, New York. Former President Barack Obama received a package in his offices in Washington, D.C. Then another package was sent to the CNN offices in the Time Warner building in New York City by Columbus Circle in Manhattan. And it was addressed to John Brennan, who was the former CIA director under President Barack Obama. Then we found that another package had gone to Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz's office in Florida. She's the former chairwoman of the DNC. That package had actually been addressed to former Attorney General Eric Holder, also under Barack Obama. It had been misaddressed to Eric Holder, but the return address was Debbie

Wasserman Schultz. So that's why it ended up in her office. Then later, the FBI said it had gotten two more packages. Both of them were directed to Maxine Waters. One had been intercepted, according to reports, by U.S. Capitol Police and had been referred to the FBI, and another was found in a mail facility in Los Angeles. Former Vice President Joe Biden had also been sent a package which had been found in a facility in Delaware. And then this morning, we found out that Robert De Niro, who's been a

prominent critic of President Trump, received one in his offices in Tribeca. So that's a lot. What do all these people have in common other than the fact that they probably voted for Hillary Clinton? Good question. Of course, the real ties, they're all prominent Democrats, and many of them have been prominent critics of President Trump and have spoken out about him and criticized him. And many of them have also been targets of President Trump and the right wing. I'm sorry, Hillary. I know you're very disappointed you didn't win, but you're a criminal. How many Americans are aware of George Soros, an evil man?

And Maxine Waters, a very low IQ individual. You ever see her? He said things about them, criticized them at rallies, things like that. So it goes kind of both ways. What exactly are they receiving? Do we know what these mail bombs look like? Yeah. So according to the FBI, all the package was really similar. They basically contained a pipe bomb device. We should say up front that none of these devices went off. They were all in manila packages that have bubble wrap on the inside. All of the labels were printed out and then all of them had the return address to Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Her name was misspelled, but all had the same return address. And then all had six forever stamps.

That's what we know so far. So is the theory that they're all being sent by the same person or people? Yeah. So it's not 100% clear right now. The similarities in the packaging is definitely something to note. And of course, all of these packages are being sent to the FBI labs in Quantico, Virginia, where they're going to be analyzed. It seems that most of them were in the mail, but that might not be clear. So in New York City, for example, the New York City Police Department said they're looking at surveillance cameras and everything to see how the packages might have ended up at CNN.

Two former presidents received these bombs in the mail. What has the current president said so far? Yesterday afternoon, after the first reports of these suspicious packages had come out and the story was still very much developing, President Trump gave some remarks before he signed a bipartisan opium bill. And he basically said what a president should say. And I just want to tell you that in these times, we have to unify. We have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America. So that was a little more than 24 hours ago. Has it lasted? Has he been stayed and has he been a unifier?

It's been a gradual process. Last night he had a rally in Wisconsin and he tried to keep up that message of this is an attack on our democracy and that there's no place for this in our politics. There is one way to settle our disagreements. It's called peacefully at the ballot box. But he kind of started moving in a different direction because he also put a little bit of the blame on the media. The media also has a responsibility to set a simple tone and to stop the endless hostility and constant negative and oftentimes false attacks and stories. Then this morning, he came out with a pretty pointed tweet. He said, a very big part of the anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the mainstream media that I refer to as fake news. So you could say that in less than 24 hours, he's really done a bit of a turn from where he was yesterday afternoon. We'll see what happens as these reports develop, as more information comes out. But that's where we are right now.

And a lot of people in the president's corner in the sort of right wing media have been talking about this being a false flag. What does that even mean? On the right, particularly in places like Twitter, where these things tend to fester. Some people have been saying that this was sort of a setup by the Democrats, that they were doing this to make it seem as if it was the fault of some crazy Trump supporter. Not one of these bombs went off. And if a Democrat operative's purpose here is to make it look like, hey, you know, there are mobs everywhere. The mobs are not just Democrat mobs. I mean, look at this. You've got people who are trying to trying to harm CNN and Obama and Hillary and Bill Clinton and Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz. And I just it it might serve a purpose here. Obviously, right now, we have absolutely no information about who the person

or people are who sent these packages. But it's sort of an odd thing to see people initially jump to that conclusion of blaming your opponent for basically attacking themselves. None of these bombs went off. Barack Obama's alive and Bobby De Niro is going to be OK. But should people be scared that someone or some individuals just tried to kill a bunch of the highest profile members of one party in this country? I mean, I think it's a moment that we should definitely take very seriously. We don't want any politician on the left or the right to be the subject of an attack or anything. And it does happen on both the left and the right. In 2017, there was the shooting at a congressional baseball

practice. And it seemed that the shooter had been motivated by animus towards President Trump. So I don't think that the public should necessarily be scared when these kinds of attacks happen. It's probably the best piece of advice to be nice to your neighbor, to the person on the subway, to somebody on Twitter, because civility does matter and we don't want to see things escalate to this point. Coming up, who even mails a bomb anymore? This is Today Explained. If the midterms are bringing you down, there's a podcast for that, too. It's called Fake the Nation. It's hosted by Iranian-American comedian Nagin Farsad. Every week, she invites funny, politically savvy people like Larry Wilmore and W. Kamau Bell and Judy Gold onto the show to make sense of the week's political news. Have a laugh, learn something, fake the nation, wherever you listen.

New episodes drop every Thursday evening, just in time for your evening commute. I like podcasts that drop in time for your evening commute. Alex Ward, you also report here on National Security at Vox. You co-host the Worldly podcast. Mail bombs, how do they work? They work like regular bombs, only they fit in the mail. I wish there were a greater explanation than that, but that's just the truth. But when do they explode? None of these things even exploded. Are they real bombs? Can they just be juggled around and chucked around in mail carriers and trucks and then

somehow magically explode when you open an envelope? Like, I just have no idea. Well, so this is the question that it's kind of easy to make a bomb. You can find these blueprints online. The problem is how to make them explode. That's where the actual expertise comes in. And more importantly, how to make them explode when you want them to and where you want them to. So what this kind of tells us is one of two things.

Either this person was fine at constructing a bomb but had no expertise on making it explode, or it was all a scare tactic and these were just kind of dummy bombs that were meant to scare folks but not really actually do the deed. You can also look at the targets in this case, right? They seem to be all of one political persuasion, and so maybe it was also just a crime against left-leaning folks, but it could also just be a campaign to spread fear among the left, among the country, among wherever. What happens next in this investigation? I mean, I've heard that these bombs are going to Quantico to hang out with the FBI. What's going to happen there?

So the first thing that's going to happen is you're going to see the FBI, ATF, Secret Service take these bombs apart. They're going to look at everything, how they were made, what they were made with, the serial numbers of the components. Effectively, they're just going to try to track down where all these things came from. And also the way that the bomb is made, and you can kind of tell just by like, which screws went first or whatever, tells you something about the person or people, that maybe they learned a technique from somewhere. And then if they learned a technique from somewhere, whether it be a certain blueprint

online or maybe a specific bomb maker, you can start to pin down their social circles. And so it's a mix of finding kind of the person and the way that they do things and the actual materials used. And then you can start to track down where they were bought, et cetera, and you start to get a geographic location. I saw images circulating online yesterday of the actual materials used. And then you can start to track down where they were bought, et cetera, and you start to get a geographic location. I saw images circulating online yesterday of the actual pipe bombs. Were those images real? I mean, it looked like some sort of shoddy homemade pipe with some stuff stuffed into it. Yeah. I mean, that's what a pipe bomb is. They don't have to look good to be effective,

right? I mean, if you even look at like the Boston Marathon bombings, right, that was just like a pressure cooker with nails in it. Yeah. And it killed people and it hurt tons. So these things can be crude. They do need to work in order to actually hurt people. Does the fact that this was a crude, thrown-together mail bomb make it easier or harder to track? It totally depends.

I mean if they were homemade, they'd be harder, right? Because you can go to like sort of scrap heaps and bring them together. That's what Ted Kaczynski did, the Unabomber, right? He used homemade materials that he got from scrap heaps. Right. If this is someone who goes to some hardware store and buys materials, then it's probably easier to find, right? Because you can track down the store based on the serial number, et cetera.

ATF has a massive database of the serial numbers of all these weird materials to use in explosives. So that actually makes it somewhat more simple. You mentioned the Unabomber. I mean, if I remember right, the FBI didn't find him until they released his manifesto to the public and his brother apparently read it and said something like, oh, that sounds like my brother. Does that mean that it's going to be really hard to find the individual or individuals behind this if there's no manifesto to share with the world?

It is hard. It is not impossible, but it is definitely easier now in the age of social media. So one of the things that the investigators will definitely look for is, you know, has someone sent threatening letters to all of these targets? Or have they talked bad about them on social media? And surely Secret Service, ATF, FBI will pool all the info together and they'll start to find that maybe, oh, look, like these three people have sent hate mail, like physical hate mail to these folks and have threatened to do this kind of thing. And so you might be able to track them. So again, social media makes it easier. You can just go online and see who's been saying some nonsense in chat rooms. As much as a science as investigations can be, right? Look at the

serial numbers, see how it was made, go knock on doors. A lot of it is luck too. Is there a profile of the kind of person who does this? Is it always like a crazy middle-aged white guy or what? No, that's the scary thing is that there is no person. There's no kind of person that does these things. I talked to a former head of the Secret Service, Ralph Basham, yesterday. And one of the things he told me is that the Secret Service did this study where they tried to look at the kinds of personalities of people who might want to commit these kinds of crimes, kill people. And what he said was the common thread is that there's no common thread.

Basically that we just don't have a profile of the kind of person that does these things. And that's pretty scary because it makes it even way harder to pinpoint down the person that may have done this or the kind of person that may do something like this in the future. When you spoke to him, did he feel confident that the FBI would find whoever sent these mail bombs? He was very confident. He said it would probably happen pretty quickly. Part of the reason he was so confident is because all of these packages arrived in mailboxes around the same period of time. That indicates or at least suggests that this person or people sent these bombs through the mail from one or very few locations nearby. That makes it much easier to track down. Had this person, you know, put a mail in California and another one in Wisconsin and then Florida and then New York, well, then it would be harder to have a geographic location and to pin it down.

One thing that strikes me about this coordinated effort is that they got a hold of some pretty serious addresses pretty easily. Like, I didn't know that George Soros lived in Westchester and they sent the Clintons mail to their home. Is that surprising? Or are these easy locations to get a hold of? And then if they're easy, might we see other people trying to copy whatever approach was just taken here? I mean, in the age of the internet, you can pretty much find anything these days. Yeah. That to me is not so mastermindy. And the scary thing for me is I don't really see anything here

yet that suggests that this person is like uniquely capable and pulled off something amazing. So what bothers me is that in this age of like lone wolf attacks, there's no way to stop it. There's no way to plan for it. Like this is just kind of the world we live in. This is the kind of thing we have to deal with. And as someone who is motivated to do something like this has the tools at their disposal. They have bomb blueprints online. You can find addresses online. You can find these materials at your local store and your home goods. It's not that hard to pull off something like this.

You know, we've had this entire conversation and this one word hasn't come up and I wonder why that is. Does this not feel like terrorism because none of these bombs actually went off? Maybe, but if you remember even like the Times Square bomber, right, his bomb didn't go off. But this was clearly a terrorist plot that didn't work. But make no mistake, this is terrorism. Alex Ward is one of the hosts of the Worldly podcast here at Vox. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. Ashley Carman, Caitlin Tiffany, we're here talking about your Verge podcast, Why'd You Push That Button? It's about the strange decisions technology sort of forces upon us. We've talked about your two newest episodes, but I wonder if we could go into the archives because the show's been around for a couple of seasons and hear about some of your favorite episodes.

Caitlin? Yeah. My favorite episode that we have done is one about like holding on to text threads. You know how you look in your storage on your iPhone or whatever phone and you're like, oh, I have four gigs of text messages. I once accidentally deleted my mom and brother thread, which is a very important thread to me. And I felt so sad. Oh my God, I'm so sorry.

We talked to like a sociologist about why it like feels so weighty, even though like obviously you're not, it would be very impossible and stupid to go back and like read all those texts. Like no one's ever going to do that actually. Yeah. Yeah. So like, why does it feel so bad to delete them? Why'd you push that button?

In this case, the button is delete maybe. Wherever you find your podcasts. Any old place.