Page:CTRL0000034600 - Transcribed Interview of Richard Peter Donoghue, (Oct. 1, 2021).pdf/145

145 I knew that the FBI and the other agencies routinely used social media to try to get insights about what might be coming, and so it didn't seem strange to me that he was citing that as a source for their estimate of the crowd size.

Now, the next line says, "Thus far, solely pro-Trump protesters planning to come in. No intel regarding counter-protesters."

Yes.

And do you remember who said that on the call?

Mike Sherwin.

And why was it significant that there was pro-Trump protesters coming and not—

One of the—

Go ahead.

One of the main concerns we had was that you were going to have thousands of pro-Trump protesters come to the city and thousands of anti-Trump protesters come to the city and that we would have clashes in the streets of Washington between these two groups.

So, as we got closer to the 6th, the intelligence seemed to indicate that the anti-Trump groups were not going to show up, which, to some extent, was a relief to us, because it minimized the potential for conflict between those two groups.

We had seen conflict between those groups in the past. There was a murder in Portland at the end of August, where a pro-Trump protester was shot by an anti-Trump, ANTIFA-aligned individual. We knew that there was potential for violence, and our biggest concern, early on, was that we were going to have these two groups clash in the streets and that we'd have this, sort of, chaotic scene all over the city.

So, in the sense of not having those counter-protesters, there was an