FBI Says It Thwarted a Drone Plot Against the White House UFC Event
Director Kash Patel said the FBI broke up an alleged plan to use explosive drones and a sniper team against the weekend's White House UFC card, with five arrested.
The FBI said on Tuesday that it had disrupted an alleged plot to attack the UFC fight night held at the White House over the weekend, an event staged on the South Lawn to mark 250 years of American independence and, not incidentally, President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday.
FBI Director Kash Patel announced the arrests of five people across Ohio, Missouri and California, saying agents had uncovered the plan before the June 14 event and moved in. The bureau, he said, became aware of the threat on June 10.
According to Patel and a criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday, the alleged scheme was elaborate. The plotters discussed using explosive-laden drones to strike buildings near the event, the complaint says, forcing a mass evacuation that would funnel crowds toward a pre-positioned sniper team; a second phase allegedly envisioned storming the White House gates. Patel said encrypted Signal chats showed roughly two dozen people discussing what he called “pre-operational activity.”
Tycen Proper, a 19-year-old from Ohio, has been charged with multiple felony counts in connection with the alleged plot, according to the unsealed complaint. Two men arrested in California, Bryan Omar Roa and Michael Alan Thomas, appeared in a Riverside courtroom on Monday. None of the accused has entered a plea, and the allegations have not been tested in court.
The event itself was unusual, a professional mixed-martial-arts card on the lawn of the White House, the kind of spectacle Trump has embraced and critics have called a politicisation of the executive mansion, held the same weekend his name came off the Kennedy Center by court order. The FBI’s account, if it holds up, would make the show also the target of one of the more serious security threats against a presidential event in recent memory.
Much remains unconfirmed, including how far the plan had progressed and whether the suspects had the means to carry it out. Patel framed the operation as a success of intelligence-sharing; defence lawyers will scrutinise how the case was built. For now, what is on the record is a set of arrests, a sealed-then-unsealed complaint, and an event that went ahead without incident while, the government says, a plot against it was being quietly dismantled.
