Today is the second full day of Trump 2.0, and the whirlwind of activity is already exhausting. Trump is trying to reverse everything Joe Biden accomplished over the past 4 years. He has issued hundreds of pardons to the January 6 rioters and other criminals. He is beginning to enact the policies laid out in “Project 2025.” And he has begun his campaign of revenge and retribution against anyone he perceives as criticizing him or opposing his wishes. I can’t possibly touch on everything that has happened, so I’ll just share commentary on two stories that I think are important: Trump’s pardons of the January 6 criminals and Elon Musk’s public performance of the Nazi salute.
First, in one fell swoop, Trump has destroyed the hard work of hundreds of prosecutors, judges, investigators, and members of the public who worked tirelessly to track down the criminals who attacked and trashed the Capitol and threatened the lives of legislators, law enforcement officers, and Trump’s own Vice President on January 6, 2021. We were assured by VP J.D. Vance, and multiple Republican politicians that Trump would only free non-violent offenders from that day, but it was all a lie. He released them all back into society where they can do whatever they want–no paroles, no supervision of any kind. In my opinion, Trump sees these criminals as his defenders. They can now organize and act as his private army.
In one of the first acts of his second administration, President Donald Trump pardoned nearly all of the January 6 criminals and new details reveal the spur-of-the-moment decision to release 1,500 people charged.
“Trump just said: ‘F*** it: Release ‘em all,’” an adviser familiar with the discussions told the Axios.
On the campaign trail, Trump flirted with pardoning who he describes as the “J6 hostages,” and on Monday decided to issue pardons to most of the people charged in connection to the riot and effort to overturn the 2020 election. That ended their prison sentence and allowed those convicted to walk out of prison.
In one of the first acts of his second administration, President Donald Trump pardoned nearly all of the January 6 criminals and new details reveal the spur-of-the-moment decision to release 1,500 people charged.
“Trump just said: ‘F*** it: Release ‘em all,’” an adviser familiar with the discussions told the Axios.
On the campaign trail, Trump flirted with pardoning who he describes as the “J6 hostages,” and on Monday decided to issue pardons to most of the people charged in connection to the riot and effort to overturn the 2020 election. That ended their prison sentence and allowed those convicted to walk out of prison.
Trump’s pardons were made in defiance of JD Vance’s advice that convicts who committed violence during the Capitol attack shouldn’t be granted clemency. He told Fox News last week: “If you committed violence that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
The president’s move also came as a surprise to some Republicans, who have said they don’t agree with his move.
“Well, I think I agree with the vice president,” Sen. Mitch McConnell told Semafor. “No one should excuse violence. And particularly violence against police officers.”
But Trump not only excuses violence that he perceives as supportive of him; he also celebrates it. Again and again, he has said that the January 5 attack was a “day of love.”
Donald Trump spent the four years after the January 6 insurrection attempting to rewrite the violence and chaos he inspired as his supporters stormed the US Capitol.
On the first day of his second term as president, he took the rewriting to its final step by issuing pardons and reducing sentences for those involved in the insurrection, including the leaders of far-right militias and those who battled with police that day.
If the criminal charges were meant to deter future acts of political violence, the pardons of more than 1,500 people do the opposite, experts said.
“This is going beyond rewriting what January 6 was,” said Robert Pape, the director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago who has studied January 6 defendants. “This is about legitimating future January 6ths.”
A procession of Proud Boys marched in Washington on Monday, carrying a banner that congratulated Trump on his victory, a visible representation of the welcome the far right is receiving from the new administration, and their former national chairperson, Enrique Tarrio, received a full pardon. Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the rightwing Oath Keepers militia group, had his sentence commuted.
“This will have powerful future consequences for normalizing political violence, because many of those he has granted clemency to are an ongoing threat for political violence in the future,” Pape said.
Even those who didn’t themselves participate in violence on January 6 may have played a part in violence. Pape’s research shows that nearly 500 people convicted of low-level non-violent misdemeanors were “knowing and willing participants in the violent aspects of the Capitol siege, and that without the participation of this vast group, the siege would likely have never happened or been quickly ended by the police”….
Trump also directed the justice department to drop the charges in ongoing cases, ending the years of work by the department to find and prosecute the Capitol rioters. Trump named Ed Martin, a conservative lawyer who was involved in the Stop the Steal movement and supported January 6 causes the interim US attorney for Washington DC, putting him in charge of the January 6 prosecutions, NBC News reported.
This also undercuts Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi, who said she planned to evaluate these releases case by case. A bit more from The Guardian:
Perhaps the most visible face of the rioters, Jacob Chansley, known as the “QAnon shaman”, wrote on Twitter/X that he had just received the news from his lawyer that he was pardoned. “NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!! I LOVE THIS COUNTRY!!! GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!!
Jacob Chansley, the QAnon Shaman
Several of those who have publicly discussed their cases have books scheduled to be released about their involvement on January 6 or intend to do speaking engagements about it. Others have started organizations to support those who were involved in the January 6 attack.
Those involved and their supporters were also looking for ways to seek retribution for what they believed was a system rigged against them for their political views.
They could bring civil lawsuits against the government seeking redress or reparations for the charges or time spent in prison, using the language in Trump’s pardon as proof they were overcharged. The pardons call the charges a “grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years”.
I hope your blood is boiling after Donald Trump’s pardon of approximately 1,500 terrorists who attacked our Capitol on Jan. 6. And yes, Trump’s own hand-picked FBI Director testified before Congress that Jan. 6 was an “act of domestic terrorism.” So those people Trump has now pardoned—which includes those in the video below you can see brutally attacking police officers—are terrorists. This is akin to Bin Laden pardoning those involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack.
Overall, the pardons covered more than 600 rioters who had been charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding law enforcement officers at the Capitol. Approximately, 175 of these Trump allies used deadly or dangerous weapons in the attack–including toxic sprays, baseball bats, two-by-fours, crutches, hockey sticks and broken wooden table legs.
Those Trump pardoned include people like Julian Khater, who pled guilty to “assaulting law enforcement officers with pepper spray,” including Officer Brian Sicknick, who died the following day. And Ronald Colton McAbee, a former sheriff’s deputy who was sentenced to nearly six years in prison for assaulting police officers. As DOJ detailed, McAbee held down a police officer who had been “knocked to the ground, kicked, and stripped of his baton by other rioters” enabling the crowd to viciously beat him. As a result, “the officer sustained physical injuries, including a head laceration, concussion, elbow injury, bruising, and bodily abrasions.”
Daniel Joseph “DJ” Rodriguez who used a stun gun on Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone and was sentenced to 12.5 years for his bevy of crimes. And David Dempsey who prosecutors called “one of the most violent” Jan. 6 attackers—who assaulted and injured numerous police officers by spraying then with pepper spray and hitting them with various items including a metal crutch, chairs and a long wooden pole. He pled guilty and was sentenced to two decades in prison.
Then there are the leaders of the militant groups the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who had been convicted of “Seditious Conspiracy”—which is almost as serious as Treason. As DOJ noted, the Oath Keepers leaders “plotted to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power” and then came to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6 “with paramilitary gear and supplies including firearms, tactical vests with plates, helmets, and radio equipment.” Yet Trump freed them from prison despite their sentences of nearly 20 years.
These are violent and dangerous people—including many with military experience and tactical planning skills–who Trump pardoned and released from jail. Why? Trump—like any other aspiring dictators—wants to make a public showing that if you commit crimes and violence on his behalf, he will have your back.
However, there is also an even more sinister reason for Trump’s pardons of the most violent attackers. Trump wants to incentivize others in MAGA to do the same in the future—with the implicit promise being “I will pardon you like I did the Jan. 6 terrorists.”
That is not just my view. That what authoritarian expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained to me last year when I interviewed her about Trump’s praise of the Jan. 6 attackers and vow to pardon them. She first shared that Trump—like other fascist leaders—is trying “to change the perception of violence. To get people to see that violence is not negative.” Trump is thereby conditioning his supporters to believe that. “Violence is sometimes morally necessary and even righteous, and even patriotic.”
As to Trump’s promise of pardons, Ben-Ghiat explained, “All authoritarians use pardons because why do you want people sitting in jail–the worst people in the world–who are for you the best people and could serve your goals?”
We’ll find out if it worked for Trump when and if people publicly protest his decisions and actions.
President Donald Trump defended his decision to free all of roughly 1,600 Jan. 6 riot defendants on Tuesday as the leaders of two extremist groups who played outsize roles in the Capitol attack walked out of federal prisons after serving a fraction of their sentences for seditious conspiracy. Trump called the conspirators’ sentences “ridiculous and excessive,” saying he pardoned “people that were treated unbelievably poorly.”
But counterterrorism experts say the pardons could further embolden fringe groups and hamper the Justice Department’s fight against political violence.
Former Proud Boys Chairman Enrique Tarrio
Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was headed home to Miami from a Louisiana prison and expected to address the media Tuesday at the airport, his lawyer said, freed from the longest sentence in the riot — 22 years — for mobilizing his right-wing group as an “army” to keep Trump in power as Congress met to confirm the 2020 election.
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was sentenced to 18 years, was released shortly after midnight in Cumberland, Maryland, his lawyer said, and emerged later Tuesday outside the D.C. jail to await release of those held on Jan. 6 charges. Rhodes was found guilty of urging Trump to use paramilitary groups to hold the White House and bringing armed followers to Washington ready for “civil war.”
Extremism researchers raised concerns over the message their freedom sends to armed militia-style groups or others with violent anti-government views. If those convicted of plotting such violence against the government walked free with support from the nation’s commander in chief,would others be energized to take up more action?
“Those groups of course are going to see the return of battle-hardened leaders, who in addition to having a kind of real-life legitimacy due to having actually fought the government, will also have a strong sense of victimhood and martyrdom, which will further radicalize and fuel recruitment platforms,” said Jacob Ware, a Council on Foreign Relations research fellow. “This move is going to make combating terrorism far more difficult, not just over the next four years as groups feel like they have an ally in the White House, but beyond that as well.”
Ware called the pardons “a pretty catastrophic moment for domestic counterterrorism.”
The Proud Boys and especially the Oath Keepers “have been relatively dormant for several years now,” hit very hard and deterred by the seditious conspiracy cases, he said.
“In the past when individuals were acquitted of this crime, recognized as among the most serious in a democracy, it incontrovertibly breathed new life into far-right violent extremism in the United States,” said Bruce Hoffman, a veteran counterterrorism and homeland security fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
In 1988 a jury in Fort Smith, Arkansas, acquitted 14 white supremacists of seditious conspiracy, revitalizing an anti-government militia movement that spurred the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City five years later, Hoffman said.
I guess we’ll find out soon enough if these predictions are accurate.
I’m sure you’ve seen the Nazi salute that Elon Musk performed during a speech at Trump’s inaugural “parade.” Personally, I don’t think there’s any doubt that the salute was genuine and intended to shock, but some observers are trying to minimize it.
“I just want to say thank you for making it happen,” the owner of SpaceX, X and Tesla, the richest person on earth and a major Trump donor and adviser, told Trump supporters at the Capital One Arena in Washington.
Musk then slapped his right hand into his chest, fingers splayed, before shooting out his right arm on an upwards diagonal, fingers together and palm facing down.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which campaigns against antisemitism, defines the Nazi salute as “raising an outstretched right arm with the palm down”.
As the crowd roared, Musk turned and saluted again, his arm and hand slightly lower.
“My heart goes out to you,” Musk said, striking himself on the chest again. “It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured. Thanks to you. We’re gonna have safe cities, finally safe cities. Secure borders, sensible spending. Basic stuff. And we’re gonna take ‘Doge’ to Mars.” [….]
Social media users expressed shock at Musk’s gesture. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University, said: “Historian of fascism here. It was a Nazi salute and a very belligerent one too.”
Musk did not immediately comment, though he did repost footage of his remarks that included the second salute and endorsed memes seeking to turn footage of his salutes into jokes.
One X user wrote: “Can we please retire the calling people a Nazi thing?”
Musk wrote: “Yeah exactly” and added a “yawning” emoji.
Nonetheless, Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, described Musk delivering “a Roman salute, a fascist salute most commonly associated with Nazi Germany”.
The ADL, meanwhile, says that in Germany between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi salute “was often accompanied by chanting or shouting ‘Heil Hitler’ or ‘Sieg Heil.’ Since world war two, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists have continued to use the salute, making it the most common white supremacist hand sign in the world.”
There were angry reactions across Europe to Elon Musk’s apparent use of a salute banned for its Nazi links in Germany, where some condemned it as malicious provocation or an outreach of solidarity to far-right groups.
Michel Friedman, a prominent German-French publicist and former deputy chair of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, described Musk’s actions – at an event after Donald Trump’s swearing in as US president – as a disgrace and said Musk had shown that a “dangerous point for the entire free world” had been reached.
Friedman, who descends from a family of Polish Jews, hardly any of whom survived the Holocaust, told the daily Tagesspiegel he had been shocked when watching the inauguration live on television, adding that as far as he was concerned Musk had unambiguously performed the Nazi “Heil Hitler” salute, despite attempts to downplay it.
“I thought to myself, the breaking of taboos is reaching a point that is dangerous for the entire free world. The brutalisation, the dehumanisation, Auschwitz, all of that is Hitler. A mass murderer, a warmonger, a person for whom people were nothing more than numbers – fair game, not worth mentioning,” Friedman said.
Charlotte Knobloch, the president of the Jewish community in Munich and Upper Bavaria, described the gesture as “highly disconcerting”. But she said it was not as significant as Musk’s recent attempts to meddle in German politics, where he has endorsed the far-right Alternative für Deutschland ahead of next month’s federal election.
“Far more worrying are Elon Musk’s political positions, his offensive interference in the German parliamentary election campaign and his support for a party whose anti-democratic aims should be under no illusions,” she said in a statement.
Right-wing extremists are celebrating Elon Musk’s straight-arm gesture during a speech Monday, although his intention wasn’t totally clear and some hate watchdogs are saying not to read too much into it….
Many social media users noticed that the gesture looked like a Nazi salute. Musk has only fanned the flames of suspicion by not explicitly denying those claims in a dozen posts since, though he did make light of the criticism and lashed out at people making that interpretation.
“The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired,” Musk posted on X several hours after he left the stage.
Critics and fans alike of the Tesla CEO and world’s richest man were quick to react to the gesture.
“The White Flame will rise again,” a chapter of the white nationalist group White Lives Matter posted on Telegram.
“Maybe woke really is dead,” white nationalist Keith Woods posted on X.
“Did Elon Musk just Heil Hitler …” right-wing commentator Evan Kilgore posted on X. “We are so back.”
Some expert commentary:
Kurt Braddock, a professor of communication at American University who studies extremism, radicalization and terrorism, said the gesture was a fascist salute and “people shouldn’t doubt what they saw.”
“I know what I saw, I know what the response to it was among elements of the extreme right including neo-Nazis, Braddock said. “And none of it is a laughing matter.”
1934: German dictator Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) giving the Nazi salute from his car whilst at the Nazi Party Congress. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Efraim Zuroff, the retired head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office and formerly the organization’s top Nazi hunter, said he also saw it as Nazi salute, and that it happened at U.S. presidential inauguration celebration made it especially shocking to see.
“It’s totally improper, and it raises all sorts of questions regarding his motivations, or his ignorance,” he said in a telephone interview from Israel. “This is America, the leader of the free world, the people who sacrificed 200,000 soldiers who died to defend Europe. He has to explain himself.”
In Europe where the fascist salute is associated with the hate, death and destruction of World War II, Musk’s arm gesture elicited outrage.
An Italian communist youth organization on Tuesday hung an effigy of Musk upside down in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto, where Mussolini’s body was hung upside down after he was executed during the final days of World War II. The organization, Cambiare Rotta (Change Course), noted in a Facebook post that a photo of the effigy had been removed by the social media company.
“We are correctly a little afraid, because that image is scary,’’ author Filippo Ceccarelli told Italian La7 private television.
Known as the Roman salute in Italy, the straight-arm greeting officially adopted in 1925 by the dictator Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime is banned in Italy though it is rarely prosecuted.
Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term on Monday before the world’s richest people. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg were among those seated closest to Trump as he demonized the most vulnerable members of our society, rewrote the history of his criminal prosecutions, and pledged to roll back Joe Biden’s efforts to address climate change.
They smiled. They laughed. They thumbs-upped. They loved it.
By the end of Inauguration Day, Trump had signed an executive order attempting to abolish “birthright citizenship,” cut off all asylum claims at the southern border, signed an order prohibiting federal recognition of transgender Americans, once again ended America’s commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and issued pardons to 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, including the seditionist leader of the Proud Boys.
Not so long ago, some of the ultra-wealthy and big corporations would feign disgust with Trump. They paid lip service to social justice movements and pledged to make paltry efforts to reduce their climate impact. That’s all over now. America’s oligarchs are done pretending — there is too much money to be made and power to be amassed together. They’ll get to keep their Trump tax cuts, and can expect to receive more. The government investigations of their businesses and regulatory scrutiny will end. All they have to do is act like — or freely admit — they support Trump and his policies. Pay up, show respect, get paid, and whatever else you want.
In the days leading up to Trump’s second inauguration, pockets of deep-blue Washington were transformed into a mecca of MAGA glitz and boozy, Trumpified access-peddling. In downtown D.C., Trump’s Sunday and Monday afternoon pageantries were quickly followed with rows of richly dressed MAGA fans and ticket-holders standing out in the cold, waiting to get into the evening’s selections of this exclusive party, sponsored by that corporate colossus, all to toast the dawn of yet another four years of reality-TV-style authoritarian decay.
Just a few short years ago, corporate America was so mad about the Jan. 6 insurrection, when Trump whipped up his supporters and they attacked the U.S. Capitol to try to block Joe Biden from becoming president. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said it was “appalled by the violence at the Capitol,” and Zuckerberg, its CEO, declared on Jan. 7, 2021 that the company would block Trump from posting after its platform was used “to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government.”
Zuckerberg’s concerns about the health of our democracy appear to have subsided. On Jan. 7 this year, he announced Facebook would end its fact-checking program. He also went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to talk about how the “corporate world is pretty culturally neutered” and society has become “emasculated.” Meta, like many big corporations, made a large donation ($1 million) to Trump’s inaugural committee….
Due to cold weather, Trump’s coronation was moved inside, into the Capitol building his supporters ransacked four years ago. Holding the ceremony in the small Capitol rotunda gave it an exclusive, cozy feel and kept out the riff-raff: No commoners could watch Trump’s swearing-in live in-person — not even Republican governors, who were relegated to an overflow room. Only the elite of the elite and the best Trump supporters. Musk. Zuckerberg. Bezos. Google CEO Sundar Pichai sat with them. Apple CEO Tim Cook was there. Former Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush were seated in front of UFC’s Dana White. Rogan, conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, and Turning Point USA chief Charlie Kirk were there, too….
Musk — who leads Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter) — came out as a MAGA fanatic this summer and leaned in, spending $153 million to boost Trump’s presidential campaign via his Super PAC. He amplified Trump’s campaign against migrants and undocumented immigrants, running ads decrying the “HISTORIC BORDER INVASION” and “illegal immigrants getting handouts.” [….]
Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chairman, has his own space business, Blue Origin, and Amazon provides cloud services to the government. The world’s second-richest man started cozying up to Trump not long before the election, when he killed The Washington Post’s planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. Bezos, who’s owned the paper since 2013, wrote in a Post op-ed that “no quid pro quo of any kind” was to blame for his decision. After Trump won, Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. The company, which is spending $40 million to license a documentary and a limited series about First Lady Melania Trump, recently deleted its public commitments to protecting the rights of Black and LGBTQ+ people from its website. The Post’s editorial board separately endorsed most of Trump’s Cabinet and Cabinet-level nominees….
Zuckerberg, the third-richest man in the world, was seen as a Trump enemy — specifically because he funded election infrastructure during the 2020 contest, after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump literally threatened to jail him for life. Following Trump’s win, Zuckerberg flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club to suck up to the incoming commander in chief. Shortly before Trump’s inauguration, Meta announced it is ending its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and changedits policies to allow users to attack LGBTQ+ people as “mentally ill,” women as “crazy,” and Mexican immigrants as “trash.”
If corporate America used to toss liberals some cultural wins here and there, instead of improving anyone’s material conditions, the ultra-wealthy are done bothering with that charade now.
There is no reason for America’s oligarchs to hide anymore, no penalty to pay. What matters, financially-speaking, is getting close to Trump.
We are turning into post Soviet Russia. I wonder if it is going to be possible to fight this? We can only hope.
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It’s difficult for me to focus on anything except the legal news about Trump’s crimes; but before I get to the latest on that, I want to call attention to Joe Biden’s latest foreign policy efforts. I admit I really that I originally was not at all enthused about a Biden presidency, but he has turned out to be very good at his job. His age and experience have prepared him for this moment in history.
CAMP DAVID, Maryland, Aug 18 (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden and the leaders of South Korea and Japan agreed at Camp David on Friday to deepen military and economic cooperation and made their strongest joint condemnation yet of “dangerous and aggressive behavior” by China in the South China Sea.
The Biden administration held the summit with the leaders of the main U.S. allies in Asia, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, in a bid to project unity in the face of China’s growing power and nuclear threats from North Korea.
In a summit statement the three countries committed to consult promptly with each other during crises and to coordinate responses to regional challenges, provocations and threats affecting common interests.
They also agreed to hold military training exercises annually and to share real-time information on North Korean missile launches by the end of 2023. The countries promised to hold trilateral summits annually.
While the political commitments fall short of a formal three-way alliance, they represent a bold move for Seoul and Tokyo, which have a long history of mutual acrimony stemming from Japan’s harsh 1910-1945 colonial rule of Korea.
The summit at the Maryland presidential retreat was the first standalone meeting between the U.S. and Japan and South Korea and came about thanks to a rapprochement launched by Yoon and driven by shared perceptions of threats posed by China and North Korea, as well as Russia after its invasion of Ukraine.
The leaders’ language on China stood out as stronger than expected, and is likely to provoke a response from Beijing, which is a vital trading partner for both South Korea and Japan.
“Regarding the dangerous and aggressive behavior supporting unlawful maritime claims that we have recently witnessed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the South China Sea, we strongly oppose any unilateral attempts to change the status quo in the waters of the Indo-Pacific,” the statement said.
President Joe Biden will chalk up a fresh victory in his campaign to boost U.S. influence in the Indo-Pacific by sealing a deal with Vietnam next month aimed to draw Hanoi closer to Washington at a time of rising tensions with Beijing.
Biden will sign a strategic partnership agreement with Vietnam during a state visit to the Southeast Asian country in mid-September, according to three people with knowledge of the deal’s planning. They were granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak on the record about the agreement.
The agreement will allow for new bilateral collaboration that will boost Vietnam’s efforts to develop its high technology sector in areas including semiconductor production and artificial intelligence….
The deal adds to Biden’s string of successful diplomatic initiatives aimed to reassert U.S. influence in Asia in the face of China’s growing economic, diplomatic and military muscle in the region. They include a historic Camp David summit Friday with Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol — aimed at addressing regional threats from North Korea and China.
The Vietnam agreement coincides with an uptick in tension between Hanoi and Beijing over long-standing territorial disputes in the South China Sea. Vietnam — along with the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei — has long protested Beijing’s claim of authority over parts of the South China Sea that extend 1,200 miles from China’s coastline. Hanoi banned the Barbie movie last month due to a scene that appeared to reference the nine-dash line Beijing says marks its territorial waters. Satellite imagery released this week indicates China is building an airfield on an island that Hanoi says is Vietnamese territory.
But the agreement doesn’t necessarily signal that Vietnam is moving away from its giant neighbor China in favor of better ties with Washington.
“Vietnam is not aligning with the U.S. against China. … They’re happy to improve relations with the U.S., but it doesn’t mean they’re moving against China — they’re going to continue to calibrate very carefully,” said Scot Marciel, a former principal deputy assistant secretary for East Asia and the Pacific at the State Department who opened the first State Department office in Hanoi in 1993.
Prosecutors are seeking 33-year prison sentences for former Proud Boys chair Enrique Tarrio and his ally Joe Biggs, who they say aimed to foment a revolution on Jan. 6 to keep former President Donald Trump in power.
The proposed jail sentences would nearly double the lengthiest Jan. 6 sentence handed down to date — 18 years for Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes — a decision prosecutors say reflects the pivotal role that Proud Boys leaders played in stoking and exacerbating the violence at the Capitol that day.
“The defendants understood the stakes, and they embraced their role in bringing about a ‘revolution,’” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memo released Thursday night. “They unleashed a force on the Capitol that was calculated to exert their political will on elected officials by force and to undo the results of a democratic election. The foot soldiers of the right aimed to keep their leader in power. They failed. They are not heroes; they are criminals.”
Both Tarrio and Biggs were convicted of seditious conspiracy in May by a jury who also found allies Philadelphia Proud Boy leader Zachary Rehl and Seattle Proud Boy leader Ethan Nordean guilty of the grave offense. Prosecutors are seeking 30 years for Rehl and 27 years for Nordean.
A fifth Proud Boy tried alongside the others, Dominic Pezzola, was acquitted of seditious conspiracy but convicted on other serious offenses. Pezzola may be the best known of the group, however. He shattered a Senate-wing window with a stolen police riot shield, triggering the breach of the Capitol itself. Prosecutors are seeking a 20-year jail term for him.
I always have a hard time excerpting Marcy’s posts, but I hope you’ll go read it at the link. The gist is that the FBI used Biggs to target “Antifa.” They were focused on radical left groups and ignored the violent extremist on the right. Here’s the summary at the end of the post:
The FBI claims it had no notice of the terrorist attack on the nation’s Capitol, not even with an FBI agent “speaking often” with one of its leaders and an DC intelligence cop speaking often with the other one.
So now, DOJ wants to hold Joe Biggs accountable for the lies he told to the FBI agent who thought a key leader of the Proud Boys would make an appropriate informant targeting Antifa. But thus far, his handler has not been held accountable for missing the planning of a terrorist attack in DC when while speaking “often” with one of its key leaders.
Notably, the Daytona FBI office is the same one where, after fake whistleblower Stephen Friend refused to participate in a SWAT arrest of a Three Percenter known to own an assault rifle, his supervisor said “he wished I just ‘called in sick’ for this warrant,” before taking disciplinary action against him (though Friend didn’t start in Daytona Beach until after Biggs had already been arrested).
The second of these interviews (but not the first) interview was mentioned in Biggs’ arrest affidavit. It’s possible that investigating agents didn’t even know about what occurred in the first one.
Indeed, it’s really hard to credit the reliability of a 302 written two days after Biggs described his chummy relationship but not this interview in an attempt to stay out of jail.
This is why the FBI didn’t warn against January 6. Because these terrorists were the FBI’s people.
Authorities are searching for a member of the Proud Boys extremist group who disappeared days before his sentencing in a U.S. Capitol riot case, where prosecutors are seeking more than a decade in prison, according to a warrant made public Friday.
Christopher Worrell, 52, of Naples, Florida, was supposed to be sentenced Friday after being found guilty of spraying pepper spray gel on police officers, as part of the mob storming the Capitol as Congress was certifying Joe Biden’s presidential victory on Jan. 6, 2021. Prosecutors had asked a judge to sentence him to 14 years.
The sentencing was canceled and a bench warrant for his arrest issued under seal on Tuesday, according to court records. The U.S. attorney’s office for Washington, D.C., encouraged the public to share any information about his whereabouts.
Worrell had been on house arrest in Florida since his release from jail in Washington in November 2021, less than a month after a judge substantiated his civil-rights complaints about his treatment in the jail.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth found Worrell’s medical care for a broken hand had been delayed, and held D.C. jail officials in contempt of court.
The big topic of conversation in the media and Twitter yesterday was a Trump ally who has previously passed under the radar–Kenneth Chesebro, who appears to be one of the unindicted co-conspirators in the Georgia election interference case. It turns out this guy was integral to what happened on January 6. Chesboro was also the originator of the scheme to use “fake electors” to overthrow the 2020 election.
When conspiracy theorist Alex Jones marched his way to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, riling up his legion of supporters, an unassuming middle-aged man in a red “Trump 2020” hat conspicuously tagged along.
Videos and photographs reviewed by CNN show the man dutifully recording Jones with his phone as the bombastic media personality ascended to the restricted area of the Capitol grounds where mobs of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters eventually broke in.
While the man’s actions outside the Capitol that day have drawn little scrutiny, his alleged connections to a plot to overthrow the 2020 election have recently come into sharp focus: He is attorney Kenneth Chesebro, the alleged architect of the scheme to subvert the 2020 Electoral College process by using fake GOP electors in multiple states.
When asked by the House select committee where he was the first week of January 2021 and on January 6, Chesebro invoked his Fifth Amendment rights. But a CNN investigation has placed him outside of the Capitol at the same time as his alleged plot to keep Trump in office unraveled inside it.
There is no indication Chesebro entered the Capitol Building or was violent. Jones did not enter the Capitol on January 6, 2021, or engage in violence, but he had warned of a coming battle the day before and urged his supporters to converge on the Capitol.
Chesebro is the only one of the unindicted co-conspirators in Trump’s recent federal indictment and only member of Trump’s legal efforts who is now known to have been on the Capitol grounds on January 6.
CNN was able to place Chesebro at the protest through publicly available databases with photos and videos from that day. Interviews with his acquaintances also confirmed his identity. Chesebro declined CNN’s requests for comment, citing ongoing litigation.
It was unclear why Chesebro was following Jones on January 6.
“Even if Chesebro is simply a diehard Infowars fan, I think that would further illustrate how thin the line was between the serious, credentialed people who sought to undermine election results and the extremist figures who sought to unleash havoc was in that period, to the extent it meaningfully existed at all,” said Jared Holt, an expert at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue which investigates extremism, hate and disinformation.
VEGA ALTA, Puerto Rico — The blinds were drawn at a handsome villa in an oceanfront gated community on the northern coast of this Caribbean island. Inside, a woman’s voice could be heard calling out “Ken” — but no one answered the door.
Records show this isthe tropical refuge of Kenneth J. Chesebro, a lawyer who allegedly marshaled supporters of President Donald Trump to pose as electors in states won by Joe Biden in 2020, creating a pretext for Vice President Mike Pence to delay counting or disregard valid electoral college votes on Jan. 6, 2021.
Since then, Chesebro, 62, has kept a low profile. He decamped to Puerto Rico from New York last year, and some friends said he’d fallen out of touch. A prominent law firm issued no public announcement last year when it tapped him to run a new department and added no mention of him to its website.
Lawyers handling a case against him in Wisconsin have told a judge they were unable to locate him. Even the House select committee that investigated the pro-Trump attack on the Capitol did not depose him until last fall — after it had interviewed more than a thousand others and conducted public hearings — because it had trouble finding him, according to a person familiar with the situation who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Chesebro was among 19 people charged Monday in Georgia with a raft of crimes related to alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A 98-page indictment secured by Atlanta-area prosecutors portrays Chesebro as central not just to the convening of sham electors but also to the “strategy for disrupting and delaying the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.” He faces seven felony charges, including conspiracy to commit forgery and conspiracy to file false documents, as well as violation of an anti-racketeering act originally aimed at dismantling organized crime groups.
Background information on Chesebro:
A Harvard-trained lawyer once keen on liberal causes, and registered as a Democrat as recently as 2016, Chesebro may be the least well knownof the small set of figures key to both indictments. His retreat from public life since Jan. 6 has deepened the mystery for former classmates and colleagues puzzling over how he became a central player in plansto reverse the outcome of a democratic election.
“The Ken I knew would not have been involved with that,” said Holly Hostrop, a lawyer who worked with Chesebro about 20 years ago on litigation against the tobacco industry that extracted millions in punitive damages for ailing smokers. “I have great respect for his legal skills and felt we were on the side of angels in that litigation. It makes me wonder how he got sucked into this.”
The successful appellate lawyer studied at Harvard University under Laurence Tribe, the preeminent legal scholar who advised congressional Democrats on both of Trump’s impeachments. Chesebro continued working with Tribe for about 20 years, on wide-ranging litigation involving class-action claims and punitive damages.
But friends said his politics seemed to shift after he reaped sizable returns from his investments in cryptocurrency in the past half-decade. He began to stake out more-libertarian positions in legal briefs, especially in his home state of Wisconsin, where he started donating to Republicans and working with a former judge, Jim Troupis, who Chesebro would later testify under oath had brought him into Trump’s orbit.
“He was not making good-faith legal arguments for his client,” said Tribe, who expressed dismay over his former mentee’s emergence as an architect of Trump’s plans to cling to power. “He was inventing legal fiction that paid no attention to the law and creating a pretext for a conspiracy to steal an election.”
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Next Biden plans to build closer ties with Vietnam. Politico: 
Now some legal news.
Read more details at the Politico link.
Another Proud Boy, Christopher Worrell, was supposed to be sentenced soon, but yesterday, news broke that he has disappeared. Associated Press: 
The big topic of conversation in the media and Twitter yesterday was a Trump ally who has previously passed under the radar–Kenneth Chesebro, who appears to be one of the unindicted co-conspirators in the Georgia election interference case. It turns out this guy was integral to what happened on January 6. Chesboro was also the originator of the scheme to use “fake electors” to overthrow the 2020 election.
More on Cheseboro from The Washington Post: 
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