Steven Hirsch/New York Post via AP
Luigi Mangione, accused of fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City, appears in court for a hearing, February 21, 2025, in New York.
One week after the killing of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson, an intelligence report compiled by a regional intelligence center made an admission that’s shocking in its simplicity: Rising health care costs are correlated to threats against executives and civil unrest.
The two-page document obtained by the Prospect and compiled by the Connecticut regional intelligence center—one of dozens of fusion centers across the country that communicate intelligence between federal agencies and state law enforcement—is uncharacteristically forthright in its language and assessment that health care costs lead to instability, and that the reaction to suspect Luigi Mangione’s alleged action was largely positive.
According to the dossier, “Healthcare expenditure in the United States increased from $2.75Trillion (T) in 2004, to $4.09T in 2018, in inflation adjusted dollars. 2019 and 2020, saw expenditures of $4.2T and $4.6T respectfully, which represents a 10.6% increase year over year and was largely influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Historically, threats or actual acts of violence against those in the healthcare industry rose by more than 60% from 2011 to 2018.”
The dossier adds that the public “may view the ensuing manhunt and subsequent arrest of Mangione as NYPD, and largely policing as a whole, as a tool that is willing to expend massive resources to protect the wealthy, while the average citizen is left to their own means for personal security.”
Intelligence bulletins often use preemptive surveillance gathering in an effort to head off copycat attacks, identify perceived threats, and provide guidance for future deterrence. The Connecticut dossier states that intelligence agencies are monitoring “efforts from individuals and groups to collect the home addresses of C-Suite executives in order to conduct first amendment protected activities.”
But despite the Big Brother overture, the report goes on to describe not only health care costs, but wealth distribution as a contributing factor to national-security vulnerabilities. “Overall trust in the U.S. Healthcare System is at a historic low, only marginally higher than the all-time low in 2007, while levels of income inequality have reached historic highs. A separate study (n=400,000) reveals among the leading contributors to low trust were concerns about financial motives, quality of care, influence of other entities or agendas, and perception of discrimination or bias.”
The lack of conspiratorial language in the report stands in sharp contrast to the messaging coming from Pam Bondi, the U.S. attorney general and highest-ranking law enforcement official in the land. In the wake of several high-profile attacks against Tesla cars and dealerships in recent months, Bondi announced she would be pursuing terrorism charges against the alleged perpetrators of the attacks.
“The days of committing crimes without consequence have ended,” Bondi said earlier this month. “Let this be a warning: if you join this wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties, the Department of Justice will put you behind bars.”
As many have pointed out, there is little evidence that the Tesla attacks fit within the definition of terrorism. Instead, the use of terrorism enhancements seems oriented around instilling fear and inching closer to the criminalization of any and all political opposition to the sitting administration. It also could have a downstream effect on fusion centers, which have already been heavily criticized for framing political activism as domestic terrorism.
As the Brennan Center documented in a 2022 report on fusion center abuses, the interface between federal intelligence agencies and local and state police often devolves into a whirlpool of surveillance and fearmongering that all too often concludes with framing activists and free-speech advocates as threats to the American homeland. The Brennan Center found that “Fusion centers have repeatedly targeted minority communities and protest movements under the guise of counterterrorism or public safety. In their early years, they often singled out American Muslims for unwarranted scrutiny. Their bulletins have regularly painted racial and environmental justice activists as menacing threats.”
Meanwhile, these Frankenstein centers have also amplified Department of Homeland Security and FBI threat warnings lumping anti-abortion and pro-choice advocates together, despite the long history of targeted violence dating back to the 1950s coming only from the anti-abortion side. And beyond the danger that state-run intelligence agencies pose to civil liberties, they also are rife with security issues of their own. In 2020, hackers penetrated a private firm working on contract for a state fusion center and exposed hundreds of thousands of FBI and DHS records, totaling some 270 gigabytes of information from more than 200 law enforcement agencies.
Given all of this, it is a surprising sight to see an intelligence center produce a product that takes as its premise the idea that perhaps it is not the American citizen who is the problem, but the economic and corporate forces who share some responsibility for dissent escalating to violence.
In a final moment of clarity, the report dips into editorializing to draw an affirmative comparison between Luigi Mangione and the champion of Sherwood Forest:
“Many view Thompson as a symbolic representation of both as reports of insurance companies denying life sustaining medication coverage circulate online.” the report says. “It is not an unfair comparison to equate the current reaction toward Mangione to the reactions to Robin Hood, citizens may see Mangione’s alleged actions as an attack against a system designed to work against them.”
Read the entire intelligence report below:
