Keith Kloor is a writer in New York and adjunct professor of journalism at New York University.

In the sweaty, waning days of August, I went to a Cheesecake Factory in the Virginia suburbs to learn about a conspiracy that would rock the FBI, if true. The two men who met me for lunch, a retired CIA agent and a former National Security Council official in the Trump administration, were wearing shorts and flip-flops. Otherwise, they were all business, and utterly serious. “There’s substantial evidence that ISIS was involved in this,” the former NSC staffer told me, a few minutes after we had settled into our booth at the back of the restaurant.

He was referring to the worst mass shooting in American history, which happened last year in Las Vegas when Stephen Paddock killed 58 people and wounded more than 800 others at an outdoor concert. According to a final report issued by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department on August 3, Paddock’s motive was unclear, but he “acted alone” and had no links to “any hate group or any domestic or foreign terrorist organization.”


My two lunch companions believe otherwise. They belong to a small group of about a dozen members from the intelligence and special operations community pushing the theory that Paddock’s rampage was part of a coordinated anti-Trump plot involving the Islamic State and Antifa, or left-wing “anti-fascist” activists.

I know, it sounds nuts.

The idea sprang from the twisted, feverish mind of Infowars’ Alex Jones days after the Vegas attack. “They found Antifa information in the room,” Jones claimed in one telecast. “The whole thing has the hallmarks of being scripted by deep-state Democrats and their Islamic allies using mental-patient cutouts,” he said. Others of his ilk then amplified the unsubstantiated Antifa-ISIS allegations on social media in what became a frothy concoction of phony tweets, Facebook posts and YouTube videos.

But weeks later, the theory took on a life of its own in an ad hoc “alternative” investigation spearheaded by my two lunch companions—Brad Johnson, a retired CIA officer, and Rich Higgins, a former Pentagon official who last year served for a few months in the White House as director of strategic planning for the National Security Council. (Yes, the same Rich Higgins who infamously got tossed off the NSC for writing a controversial memo warning that “Islamists,” “globalists” and the “deep state” together were trying to subvert Donald Trump’s presidency.) A month after the October shooting in Vegas, Johnson, Higgins and a handful of associates collaborated on a 51-page PowerPoint document based, according to its executive summary, on “open source information with tactical counter terrorism analysis, cyber intelligence, and digital data mining capabilities.” Higgins and Johnson told me they sent the document to contacts in the CIA and FBI, as well as to conservatives in Congress and the media. Higgins claims a current FBI agent in his and Johnson’s circle—who he says had input on the document—“filed it as a formal report with the bureau.”

So far, however, nobody with any real standing has taken the document seriously, much less acknowledged having received it. The findings of the Las Vegas police investigation—in which the FBI was of assistance—directly contradict Higgins and Johnson’s theory. In response to questions about the theory, Sandra Breault, an FBI spokesperson, said only: “The FBI Las Vegas office has the utmost confidence in our agents and analysts’ investigative techniques.” The CIA declined to comment.

Even as there appears to be no evidence supporting Higgins and Johnson’s theory, it is having alarming, real-world effects. At least one member of Congress whom Higgins says he briefed about the theory appears to have parroted its contents on television.

I learned about Johnson's and Higgins’ effort months ago, while interviewing Higgins for a previous article. I said I would look into the story only if he and his co-authors put their names and faces to the document, which they had not yet done. And so, on a broiling late summer day, I met him and Johnson at the Cheesecake Factory in the Fair Oaks Mall in Northern Virginia. I made it clear at the outset that I was skeptical. Higgins sat stone-faced beside me in the booth, as Johnson explained why I should read between the lines of the final law enforcement report that found “no evidence” linking Paddock to any terrorists. “When they say there is no evidence of terrorist involvement, what they are saying is, at the level of proof, they have found no evidence,” Johnson asserted. He paused for an instant, keeping his eyes tightly locked on me. “Now, at the level of intelligence, it is frickin’ chin deep in it.”

Even as there appears to be no hard evidence supporting Higgins' and Johnson’s theory, and very little support for it outside the authors of the document, it is having alarming, real-world effects. At least one member of Congress whom Higgins says he briefed about the theory appears to have parroted its contents on television. And, as with conspiracy theories that have arisen in other national tragedies, from 9/11 to Sandy Hook, the Vegas theory has caused measurable damage: the Higgins and Johnson report, which was posted online anonymously earlier this year, goes so far as to name an individual they allege was Paddock’s accomplice and had “possible ties to Islamic organizations and possible Islamic State linkage.” That man, Brian Hodge, an Australian native based in Los Angeles who was at the Mandalay Bay on the night of the shooting, spoke with me—and vehemently denies any involvement. He also told me the attention he has gotten from Higgins' and Johnson’s claim—their report contains detailed personal information about him—has led to death threats and strangers showing up at his home. “It’s been a living nightmare,” Hodge told me by phone.

AP

What’s also alarming about this particular conspiracy is that it’s being driven by people who not long ago held senior positions in the intelligence community and who still have access to members of the government. One day in late September, Higgins texted me via Signal: “I was told by a fairly senior former official that the Bureau has placed everyone knowledgeable on Vegas under a gag order with threats of polygraphs. Even formers have been told, ‘Shut the fuck up’.” In other words, the government, Higgins claimed, wasn’t allowing officials to follow up on his and Johnson’s supposed leads. I don’t know if this is true. What’s clear is that Higgins’ very ties to a network of intelligence officers, analysts, agents and contractors have fed into his conspiracy theories—and reinforced his and Johnson’s determination to stay on the case, with little regard for the consequences.



***

At a news conference on October 5, 2017, Las Vegas Sheriff Joseph Lombardo was still reeling from the heinous magnitude of the carnage. Days earlier, Paddock had fired more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition into a crowd of 22,000 country music fans gathered on the Las Vegas strip. It was a chillingly premeditated act: Paddock had stockpiled an arsenal of weaponry in his suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, which overlooked the concert venue. In addition to the 24 high-powered rifles in his hotel room, police found explosives in his car parked in the hotel’s garage. (Paddock shot himself dead before police got to him.)

“Do you think this was all accomplished on his own?” an anguished Lombardo asked at the news conference. “You’ve got to make the assumption he had to have some help at some point.” Such speculation ran wild in the days and weeks after the shooting. Part of this stemmed from the Islamic State’s “news” agency having declared a role in the attack; as some experts observed at the time, the propaganda arm of the Islamic State tends not to make false claims about such events. But no evidence was ever offered by the jihadis, and the FBI ruled out the possibility. Lombardo also moved away from the possibility that Paddock had help.

Still, it was hard for some observers to accept that Paddock had acted alone. Within weeks of the massacre, Higgins and Johnson’s small hive of like minds in the intelligence and special ops community—among them a retired Delta Force troop commander and a former member of Seal Team 6, according to Higgins—informally teamed up to examine data they thought investigators were ignoring. The work was done mostly in conference calls and via email, Higgins told me. It included an analysis of acoustic signatures from cellphone videos recorded during the shooting and posted on YouTube, which led them to believe a second gunman was likely involved. This conspiracy theory had spread on the internet days after the Vegas tragedy, and was firmly rebuffed by law enforcement and independent fact-checkers.

No matter. The document authored by Higgins and Johnson argues that Paddock was likely killed by another collaborator in the room with him in “an op gone bad.” No evidence from the hotel room supports this theory; Paddock’s death was ruled a suicide. Nonetheless, the supposed collaborator is identified in the PowerPoint document: Brian Hodge.

The broken windows of Mandalay Bay, the hotel from which Stephen Paddock opened fire on concertgoers, killing 58 people. | AP

Hodge, who moved to the United States from Australia in 2013, was in Las Vegas for business the night of the massacre and was staying in the same hotel as Paddock, in a room on the same floor. According to Hodge, he was returning to his room as the shooting unfolded, so he fled downstairs and hid in some bushes outside the hotel, posting on social media in real-time about what he thought was happening. Although he was not an actual witness to anything, he talked about being onsite and disseminated faulty information he pulled off the internet. At one point, he posted, “There are multiple shooters with automatic weapons.” All this caught the attention of Australian media, who knew of Hodge because of his career in the entertainment industry, and Hodge gave a series of interviews in the hours after the shooting in which he talked about hiding in those bushes for hours, until a Las Vegas SWAT team led him to safety. Unfortunately, Hodge also made misstatements—for instance, mistakenly saying his hotel room was next door to the shooter’s, rather than just on the same floor.

Hodge says an FBI agent from the Las Vegas field office called him the day after the shooting to ask him about the media statements he had made. (An FBI spokesperson says the Bureau does not confirm, much less discuss, interviews with any of the witnesses in the investigation.) While nothing appeared to come from the interview, Hodge found himself the subject of wild speculation on the internet in the days after the shooting. YouTubers and bloggers dissected his media appearances, raising questions about his various misstatements and assertions.

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Soon enough, all this became gruel for Higgins and Johnson, who examined Hodge’s digital footprint on social media and, in turn, came to believe he was “the go-between ISIS and Antifa,” as Higgins told me over lunch. The unsubstantiated conjecture is based on a hodgepodge of spurious assumptions. For example, this is how the authors infer in their PowerPoint that Hodge is somehow connected to Antifa: “While not excessively political, it is clear from his Facebook activity that Mr. Hodge supports left wing issues such as transgender rights, support of gay marriage, and that he holds some anti-right wing views.” One piece of evidence given for Hodge’s supposed ISIS ties is that he allegedly ate at a Turkish döner kebab restaurant in New Mexico in the days after the attack. Except even that is untrue, according to Hodge, who insists he never traveled to New Mexico, much went to the restaurant.

In the days and weeks after the shooting, when Hodge saw that he was becoming the focus of conspiracy theories, he changed his social media privacy settings so that only select friends and family had access. To Higgins and Johnson, this was suspicious. In their document, they write that in some cases, “the purposeful deletion of data is evidence of consciousness of guilt,” and “since the Las Vegas attack, Mr. Hodge has attempted to conceal his electronic Social Media presence, locking down his Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts.” Hodge insists he has never deleted any of his social media posts. Regardless, instead of thinking that Hodge might be scared—since many people experiencing internet wrath withdraw from social media—the authors became so suspicious that they recommended in their report that Hodge be put under “National level surveillance” via FISA. When I asked whether they had ever simply tried to contact Hodge as they constructed their speculative narrative, they admitted they had not. “That’s not my job,” Higgins said to me recently. “That’s the FBI’s job.”

For a while after the shooting, Hodge was unaware of the unofficial attention he had attracted from various former members of the intelligence community. He tried to put the episode behind him. But he noticed that Laura Loomer, a notorious internet conspiracy monger, had started to become obsessed with him on Twitter. (Loomer is a regular guest and contributor at Infowars, where she has spun numerous conspiracies related to the Las Vegas shooting.) Hodge says a friend in the media and entertainment industry advised him it was best to ignore the fringy elements inhabiting the dark underbelly of the internet.

Then, sometime this past spring, Higgins' and Johnson’s document got posted online. It was so unnerving to Hodge—particularly because it contained his personal information—that he called the FBI switchboard, asking for help. Hodge told me that an agent from the Los Angeles field office responded to him over the phone and told him there wasn’t anything the Bureau could do about the anonymous conspiracy theories circulating on the internet. The document was soon seized on by Loomer and other far-right conspiracists, triggering another round of vitriol. Panicking, Hodge emailed the same FBI agent he had spoken with on the phone: “I really need some help from the FBI to shut this down,” he pleaded. “It is getting very scary and is having a massive impact on my life.” In a response email, which Hodge provided to me, the agent advised Hodge to report any threats or harassment to his local police department. Hodge told me he never personally filed a police report but that a friend—who he says is a “high-profile” figure in the entertainment industry—contacted the LAPD threat unit on his behalf. An officer I spoke with at the unit couldn’t tell me over the phone whether anyone connected to Hodge had filed such a report, but he did say that it is very rare for the department to investigate claims made through a third party.

Both Higgins and Johnson claim they did not post the document online. Of course, none of this is any consolation to Hodge, who is most upset by the privacy violations with which he has contended. “His complaint is valid,” Higgins acknowledged to me. “I don’t think his shit should have been posted all over the internet.”



***

At lunch, Higgins, a 44-year-old former Army serviceman, wore a black T-shirt with a logo for Operation Restored Warrior, a religious veterans’ organization. He credits the group with helping him steady his life in 2011, after a turbulent stretch in the Pentagon. According to Ed McCallum, the former director of the Combatting Terrorism Technical Support Office and Higgins’ boss from 2002 to 2010, Higgins distinguished himself as a brash, innovative thinker—but often butted heads with leadership and “made some enemies” at the Pentagon. Higgins left the Defense Department in 2013. He says he wanted to make more money in the private sector, but McCallum says Higgins was also feeling besieged. “I protected him for a while,” McCallum told me, “but they went after him hard.”

Higgins has a history of propagating controversial ideas. An ally of Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s first, short-lived national security adviser, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s former political strategist, Higgins was an early Trump supporter and traveled with the 2016 presidential campaign before joining the administration. The controversial memo he penned while at the National Security Council distills his worldview: “Cultural Marxist narratives,” he wrote—that is, the “forced inclusion of post-modern notions of tolerance” such as “transgender acceptance”—are destroying America’s “Judeo-Christian culture.” Higgins argued that this was all part of a larger “political warfare campaign” waged by “Islamists” in concert with the “hard left.” McCallum told me that Higgins developed these ideas (some of which McCallum agrees with) while writing his 2010 National Defense University master’s thesis, in which Higgins describes Islam as “a threat to the United States.”

Higgins has kept a mostly low profile since his memo leaked last year and was widely ridiculed. (Slate called it “face-melting gibberish.”) Remarried and recently having become a father for the third time, he told me he splits his time between government contract work and strategic communications for a new nonprofit called Unconstrained Analytics. On his résumé, he describes himself as “an expert on information age unconventional warfare.”

Guns litter the interior of Stephen Paddock’s hotel suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas after the Oct. 1, 2017, mass shooting. | Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department via AP

Higgins says he “was brought on to the Vegas thing” by Johnson, with whom he had worked at an interagency level when Johnson was at the CIA in the 2000s. Johnson, retired a decade ago after a 25-year career as a senior operations officer and chief of station in various overseas assignments. “I made things go bump in the night,” he said with a grin, as we sipped our coffee. Several years ago, he founded a nonprofit organization called Americans for Intelligence Reform, which according to its website, was created to draw attention to “political corruption and diminished capabilities within the intelligence community.” Johnson is among those who are convinced that an entrenched “deep state”—both Obama administration holdovers and establishment Republicans—is trying to sabotage Trump. He periodically expounds on this view and his Las Vegas theories in interviews with fringe media outlets, most notably Jack Posobiec of One America News network, who helped to spread the “Pizzagate” conspiracy in 2016.

Higgins’ and Johnson’s views about the so-called deep state, the left and Islam are clearly at the heart of their Vegas conspiracy. The official police investigation of the shooting suggests that Paddock, a reclusive 64-year-old gambler, had psychological problems—his personal doctor thought he was manic-depressive. According to the final police report, “Paddock would often complain of being sick and told [his girlfriend] that doctors couldn’t cure him.” The report says he would get bad headaches from chemical smells and took to wearing cotton gloves. Family members noted that he had grown “irritable” in recent years and that he did not look well. (The FBI says it will release its own psychological profile of Paddock—a “behavioral analysis report”—later this year, which will “piece together the why,” as Aaron Rouse, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Las Vegas field office, put it in a recent radio interview.)

Higgins and Johnson, however, say the attack was all about “anti-Trump bias,” in Higgins’ words. He and Johnson told me Paddock was a registered Democrat in Florida. (In fact, this was an internet rumor; according to his family, Paddock had no political affiliation.) Johnson also told me Paddock had “targeted” country music fans, which he characterized as a natural Trump fan base. To Higgins, the timing of Paddock’s apparent plotting—just before Trump was elected, he began purchasing dozens of weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition—was the biggest “indicator” of the anti-Trump sentiment Paddock apparently was motivated by.

Perhaps, I countered at lunch, it stemmed from personal demons eating away at Paddock—something unknowable that, as one of his brothers said, “drove him into the pit of hell.” Johnson grew perturbed. “I don’t think you’re set up to absorb and process what you’re being told,” he said.

As Higgins and Johnson see it, this deep-state machinery is also what’s preventing the FBI from pursuing their “leads” in the Vegas shooting. Higgins believes this lack of interest can be traced to then-acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe allegedly giving the order to “bury the investigation.” Higgins offers no proof but speculates that it was done to save face because the FBI had “not been following up on these anti-Trump activists.” (A spokesperson for McCabe declined to comment.)

OK, but McCabe has left the FBI, I noted. So, what would be preventing the Bureau from following up now, if there were good reason to do so?

“It’s too late,” Higgins said. “The Bureau isn’t going to go back. … It would just rip the country apart.”

“McCabe is gone, but everything remains the same,” Johnson chimed in. “[Deputy Attorney General] Rod Rosenstein isn’t going to want this to come out.”

I mentioned that hundreds of agents from multiple federal and state agencies had participated in the official Vegas investigation. Were they all part of a massive cover-up?

Higgins and Johnson were silent for moment. “Everybody does what you’ve been doing,” Johnson said. “Sitting here and talking to us right now, saying, ‘How could the FBI be denying? How could they all be misleading us?’ And so forth. But it’s all bullshit. Almost nothing you think is true is true.”



***

Not everyone has been as skeptical as I am. In January, Congressman Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican, appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to talk about what he considered to be “credible evidence of a possible terrorist nexus” regarding the Las Vegas shooting massacre. Perry didn’t offer any specifics when pressed by another guest on the show—a lawyer for the shooting victims—and he wouldn’t say where he got his information. His remarks were denounced across the political spectrum, including by members of Nevada’s congressional delegation, who demanded an apology. According to Higgins, Perry—who did not respond to requests for comment for this article—was referring on-air to the document compiled by Higgins and Johnson. Higgins told me that Perry was one of about a dozen Republican members of Congress he and Johnson briefed about the Vegas theory, and that Higgins briefed Perry himself.

In front of the iconic, retro "Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas" sign, mourners placed flowers and candles. | AP

Since then, only alt-right fringe media figures have been willing to take the document at face value—people like Loomer and Posobiec, who have clashed over who deserves more credit for propagating the theory first. (Loomer, for her part, remains fixated on Hodge, and also insists that ISIS is responsible for the Las Vegas shooting.) At the Cheesecake Factory, Higgins was palpably frustrated that his group’s “alternative analysis” could not get traction beyond the internet’s backwaters. I told him it didn’t help that the other contributors to the document refused to come out from the shadows.

“Why should they?” Johnson said. He launched into an anti-media rant. “What do you represent to them? Trouble. Liars. You’re going to sabotage them in the press. That’s what always happens.”

“He’s been talking to me,” I said, pointing to Higgins.

“Don’t use me as an example,” Higgins said with a chuckle. “I’m like Swiss cheese over here. I’ve already been shot to shit. I can say anything now.”

Brian Hodge knows this all too well. He told me he has hired a lawyer to help him figure out a way forward, and that experts he has consulted have told him, “This is never going away.” He feels that the FBI hung him out to dry, and the whole ordeal has made him distrusting and fearful. “I look over my shoulders all the time now,” he says. He believes his phone is being tapped.

The paranoia that has overtaken him is, oddly enough, a trait I also detected in his two accusers. At one point during our lunch, Johnson said, “I get death threats all the time,” and talked about being “targeted by the Chinese.” Higgins likewise believes his phone is being monitored.

Still, they remain undeterred, and hopeful they can persuade influential—and somewhat more mainstream—conservative allies to take up the case. “We talked to Tucker Carlson,” Johnson confided over lunch. “He found it very exciting and wanted to do it, but it got spiked.” Carlson told me by phone that he did talk with Higgins—but he categorically denied wanting to run the story and being overruled. “I’ve never talked to any supervisor at Fox about this story,” Carlson told me. “So, nobody put the kibosh on it. The reason we couldn’t do the story is we couldn’t prove it.”

That leaves Higgins in the company of the Infowars crowd. It’s a place no one with any standing in the intelligence community wants to be, and Higgins knows this. “The Loomers of the world are devastating to folks like me,” he says. “Everything is a conspiracy to them.”