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.”
That’s all I have for you today. Have a nice Caturday!
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The US Department of Justice has told lawyers for Donald Trump it thinks he has not handed back all the documents he took from the White House, the New York Times reported.
The paper said Jay Bratt, the DoJ head of counterintelligence operations, communicated with lawyers for Trump “in recent weeks”.
The news, the Times said, is “the most concrete indication yet that investigators remain skeptical that Mr Trump has been fully cooperative in their efforts to recover documents … supposed to have [been] turned over to the National Archives at the end of his term”.
Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, said the news “looks like a major step toward an indictment of Trump by DoJ for obstruction of justice”.
In early 2021, as football star Herschel Walker considered running for Senate, he approached some of Georgia’s top Republican operatives about advising his campaign. The operatives were warned about political vulnerabilities in Walker’s past — including allegations of violence against women — that were openly discussed in the state’s political circles, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Walker’s reaction to being confronted with the allegations was also troubling, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. When the consultants would ask the candidate about incidents even in the public record, he would often get simultaneously defensive and aggressive, accusing the questioner of being a Democratic plant or ally of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the minority leader.
Those consultants passed on working with Walker, but he pressed ahead with his campaign. After all, Walker’s overwhelming name recognition in Georgia as a Heisman Trophy-winning football star and backing from former president Donald Trump instantly made him so formidable that state and national Republican leaders didn’t mount a serious challenge in the primary, despite concerns about Walker’s baggage.
Now, less than five weeks before the midterm elections, they’re stuck with him as those liabilities threaten to dominate the news and derail his campaign in a state widely viewed as a must-win for Republicans to retake the Senate.
This is a party that no longer has a platform. Their only agenda appears to be power at any cost to ensure anyone who is not a white male christianist is disenfranchised from their constitutional rights and standing. The other is ensuring taxes are only paid by poor people. They’re empowered by dark money and now a weird cult of brown-shirt militias ready and willing to commit violence to the cause of White Nationalism and patriarchy. The Oath Keepers Trial is just surreal. I’m not sure the press quite knows how to report it.
Sitting members of Congress aiding and abetting a plot to overthrow the government. Insurrectionists criminally charged with plotting to end American democracy for good. Justice Department prosecutors under crushing political pressure. Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra is the all-but-forgotten true story of good, old-fashioned American extremism getting supercharged by proximity to power. When extremist elected officials get caught plotting against America with the violent ultra right, this is the story of the lengths they will go to… to cover their tracks. Follow now and join Rachel Maddow for the first two episodes on October 10th.
You may read the interview with her at Rolling Stone. “The MSNBC host’s eight-part series explores what the prosecution of American fascists in the WW II era can teach us about accountability for Jan. 6”. So, I’m hoping that puts all this into perspective. The article is from Maddow Blog.
Since the Jan. 6 attack, we've seen hundreds of criminal suspects face a variety of charges.
But by any fair measure, the sedition trial for the Oath Keepers' Stewart Rhodes is qualitatively different. -MaddowBlog https://t.co/hKOoRdWqUw
As part of the proceedings, federal prosecutors revealed a recording in which Rhodes said just days after the Jan. 6 attack that his “only regret” about that day is that members of his pro-Trump paramilitary group didn’t bring rifles.
In other words, the assault on the U.S. Capitol, according to the Oath Keepers founder, wasn’t quite violent enough.
Part of what makes these developments striking is the seriousness of the details. Prosecutors have alleged that Rhodes and his confederates conspired to use force to stop the peaceful transfer of power. To that end, they not only breached the Capitol, they also stashed a significant number of weapons, including grenades, just outside of D.C. in preparation for an escalated offensive.
Federal law enforcement has also alleged that it believes Oath Keepers members intended to launch a second armed attack intended to prevent President Joe Biden from taking office.
But as Rachel noted on last night’s show, there’s also a historical dimension to this: Rhodes’ case is the largest sedition trial in the United States since World War II. Charges like these are incredibly uncommon — Americans rarely try to overthrow their own government — and hard to prove.
That said, as a New York Times report explained, “Because of the nature of the Oath Keepers’ defense — and because of the government’s wealth of evidence — the trial is less likely to focus on disputes over what the group did in the days and weeks leading up to Jan. 6 than it is to hinge on the question of why they did it.”
Soon after the F.B.I. searched Donald J. Trump’s home in Florida for classified documents, online researchers zeroed in on a worrying trend.
Posts on Twitter that mentioned “civil war” had soared nearly 3,000 percent in just a few hours as Mr. Trump’s supporters blasted the action as a provocation. Similar spikes followed, including on Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, Parler, Gab and Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s social media platform. Mentions of the phrase more than doubled on radio programs and podcasts, as measured by Critical Mention, a media-tracking firm.
Now experts are bracing for renewed discussions of civil war, as the Nov. 8 midterm elections approach and political talk grows more urgent and heated.
More than a century and a half after the actual Civil War, the deadliest war in U.S. history, “civil war” references have become increasingly commonplace on the right. While in many cases the term is used only loosely — shorthand for the nation’s intensifying partisan divisions — observers note that the phrase, for some, is far more than a metaphor.
Polling, social media studies and a rise in threats suggest that a growing number of Americans are anticipating, or even welcoming, the possibility of sustained political violence, researchers studying extremism say. What was once the subject of serious discussion only on the political periphery has migrated closer to the mainstream.
But while that trend is clear, there is far less agreement among experts about what it means.
Some elements of the far right view it literally: a call for an organized battle for control of the government. Others envision something akin to a drawn-out insurgency, punctuated with eruptions of political violence, such as the attack on the F.B.I.’s Cincinnati field office in August. A third group describes the country as entering a “cold” civil war, manifested by intractable polarization and mistrust, rather than a “hot” war with conflict.
Given the idiots we see coming to politics as Trumpists, I think it’s a literal call to battle. Let’s not forget the case against the Proud Boys.
These groups go after the military, veterans, and police officers. This is from Empty Wheel.
While the Oath Keepers, like the Proud Boys, intentionally recruit law enforcement, the Proud Boys have been better at co-opting cops. Around five of the charged Proud Boys were former or still cops when charged. Tarrio had been a formal informant during a prior criminal prosecution. And several other members of the Proud Boys, including Joe Biggs, provided information to the FBI about what they claimed were Antifa.
Biggs described his own relationship with the FBI this way:
By late 2018, Biggs also started to get “cautionary” phone calls from FBI agents located in Jacksonville and Daytona Beach inquiring about what Biggs meant by something politically or culturally provocative he had said on the air or on social media concerning a national issue, political parties, the Proud Boys, Antifa or other groups. Biggs regularly satisfied FBI personnel with his answers. He also stayed in touch with a number of FBI agents in and out of Florida. In late July 2020, an FBI Special Agent out of the Daytona Beach area telephoned Biggs and asked Biggs to meet with him and another FBI agent at a local restaurant. Biggs agreed. Biggs learned after he travelled to the restaurant that the purpose of the meeting was to determine if Biggs could share information about Antifa networks operating in Florida and elsewhere. They wanted to know what Biggs was “seeing on the ground.” Biggs did have information about Antifa in Florida and Antifa networks in other parts of the United States. He agreed to share the information. The three met for approximately two hours. After the meeting, Biggs stayed in touch with the agent who had called him originally to set up the meeting. He answered follow-up questions in a series of several phone calls over the next few weeks. They spoke often.
This is the same office where an FBI Agent, in August, refused to participate in the arrest of militia-associated men who planned to bring weapons to January 6. The agent then ran to Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, bitching, after his clearance was suspended because he didn’t like the way FBI was running domestic terrorism investigations.
The single FBI informant known to have been present on January 6 appears not to have told his handlers about a meeting he was at the night before where using violence was discussed. And so DOJ has given two members of the Kansas City Proud Boy cell who were with him — Ryan Ashlock and Louis Colon — unbelievably sweet plea deals, I suspect to sustain the rest of the cases against the Proud Boys.
Both Tarrio and Biggs have made specific requests for their own communications with law enforcement — in Tarrio’s case, he claims it is Brady material. That is, they plan to argue they couldn’t be guilty of plotting against the government because they’ve been so chummy with often right wing authoritarian cops in the past.
Notice one of the rogue FBI agents ran to two Republican congressmen. We haven’t even begun to hear about the complicity of Republican elected officials in the January 6th insurrection, the fake electors scheme, and their relationships to militias and other kook cults.
this guy just rolled on the entire Proud Boy leadership and pled guilty to sedition https://t.co/3zwVuA0YbN
— Robert Evans (The Only Robert Evans) (@IwriteOK) October 6, 2022
NEW: Bertino's guilty plea is the first to seditious conspiracy by a member of the Proud Boys. Judge Tim Kelly accepted it while the separate seditious conspiracy trial of Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes was occurring down the hall. https://t.co/h9B1jhq5OZ
The Tabby, Henri Rousseau Original Title: Le Chat Tigre
Let’s dive into the Politico story. These guys do scare me because think of how many angry white men basically decide to take out innocent women and children when they finally explode. Elmer’s wife and kids have a right to be frightened.
Bertino, who previously testified to the Jan. 6 select committee, was involved in key conversations and chats with other members of the group, including national chair Enrique Tarrio and other leaders facing seditious conspiracy charges in the weeks before Jan. 6.
Tarrio is set to go on trial in December, along with Proud Boys Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola, who was the first member of the Jan. 6 mob to breach the Capitol when he shattered a Senate-wing window with a police riot shield.
Prosecutors say Tarrio and his allies developed a plan to besiege the Capitol, relying on — and in fact organizing and spurring on — members of the mob to help break through police lines and get inside the Capitol. It was part of an effort that prosecutors say was intended to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power.
Kelly accepted Bertino’s plea after asking Bertino a series of standard questions to ensure, under oath, that Bertino entered it voluntarily and without being threatened or coerced.
The seditious conspiracy charges against the Proud Boys leaders are the gravest leveled by the Justice Department against any of the more than 850 defendants charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Bertino was briefly featured during video testimony aired by the Jan. 6 select committee during its first public hearing in June. He described a surge in Proud Boys membership after then-President Donald Trump urged the group to “stand back and stand by” during a debate against Joe Biden.
“Would you say that Proud Boys numbers increased after the stand back, stand by comment?” an investigator asked.
“Exponentially. I’d say tripled probably,” Bertino replied.
Several leaders of the far-right Oath Keepers, including founder Stewart Rhodes, are currently on trial for seditious conspiracy as well, just down the hall from where Bertino entered his plea. Prosecutors say they spent the weeks after Election Day fomenting an “armed rebellion” against the government and seizing on the opportunity created by the Jan. 6 mob to disrupt the transfer of power.
Head of a Dog, Edouard Manet,1876
These cases are very interesting. As I said, I’m looking forward to listening to Maddow’s podcast. I was a history major at university, and I’d never heard this story. I hope we can get some insight into what happens as we move deeper into holding Trump and his droogies accountable.
Don’t forget! Trump asked the Supreme Court to intervene in his documents case, which is sitting on Uncle Clarence Thomas’ desk. What do you want to bet Ginnie’s fingerprints are all over it now? Is it a Trump stall play? A Hail Mary? All I know is the Supreme Court and Judge Loose Cannon have gone to the dogs now.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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The January 6 Committee will hold a hearing today beginning at 1PM. There won’t be a hearing on Thursday night, but at least one is planned for next week. As Dakinikat wrote yesterday, the hearing is expected to focus on ties between Trump and militia groups the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, and how Trump used tweets to communicate with them and urge his followers to converge on Washington DC to interfere with the certification of electoral votes on January 6, 2021.
The Jan. 6 select committee plans to make its most complex case yet at its public hearing Tuesday: that Donald Trump’s words and actions influenced extremists and brought them to the steps of the Capitol.
“Be there. Will be wild,” Trump tweeted on Dec. 19, 2020, barely two weeks before a mob seeded with members of the far-right Proud Boys and Oath Keepers besieged the Capitol and threatened the transfer of power to Joe Biden. That tweet will be the focal point of the Jan. 6 panel’s seventh public hearing, as House investigators aim to show that the former president’s most extreme supporters were intently listening — and quickly began preparing for potential violence in support of Trump’s goal to stay in power.
The tweet was a “clarion call” to the groups, said Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), who is leading Tuesday’s hearing along with Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).
Tuesday’s hearing will require investigators to delve into the sordid world of internet extremism and specifically lay out how Trump’s words rippled through its corners.
Former Oath Keepers spokesperson Jason Van Tatenhove is expected to be one of the witnesses Tuesday afternoon, according to a person familiar with the situation. Van Tatenhove has described himself as a former “propagandist” for the Oath Keepers, and left the group several years ago, he told local television station KDVR. The select panel has cited concerns about harassment and security of the witnesses, mostly declining to name them before the hearings begin.
A bit more detail:
The panel intends to highlight how adherents to the antisemitic, fringe conspiracy theories of QAnon latched onto Trump’s stolen-election claims, as well as how the extremist Proud Boys and Oath Keepers used Trump’s crusade to fundraise for a violent effort to keep Biden from office. Committee members will also get into how the White House pushed forward with plans for a march on the Capitol — one witnesses say Trump desperately tried to join — even as warnings about the likelihood of brutality grew.
Jason Van Tatenhove, former spokesperson for the Oathkeepers
The role of social media platforms in extremists’ mobilization will also play a role in Tuesday’s hearing, Murphy said. The select panel subpoenaed companies like Alphabet, the parent company of Google; Meta, Facebook’s parent company; and Twitter earlier this year for records related to the attack. The committee has scrutinized the companies’ roles in spreading misinformation and providing breeding grounds for extremism….
Committee aides previewing the hearing said it would also touch on members of Congress who helped fan the flames of the false election fraud claims and how that effort helped drive forward the pressure campaign against then-Vice President Mike Pence, who presided over the Jan. 6 session of Congress to count electoral votes.
The Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday plans to demonstrate how right-wing militia groups that led the assault on the U.S. Capitol were connected to key Trump allies, including Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, who were at the center of the plot to overturn the 2020 election.
“We’ll show how some of these right-wing extremist groups who came to D.C. and led the attack on the Capitol had ties to Trump associates, including Roger Stone and General Flynn,” a committee aide said Monday on a conference call with reporters.
“And we know that both members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys have been charged with seditious conspiracy by the DOJ in relation to their actions on Jan. 6.” [….]
In linking the domestic extremist groups and the Trump inner circle that was aggressively working to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory, the committee is making the case that actions by President Donald Trump and his allies resulted in the violence at the Capitol, which claimed the lives of both police officers and Trump supporters.
Aides said the hearing will also reveal ties between some Trump associates and the QAnon movement, which subscribes to a set of bizarre, sometimes antisemitic conspiracy theories in which Trump is viewed as a savior fighting the evil forces of the deep state.
An Ohio man who accused Joe Biden, other Democrats, and the mainstream media of “treason” is set to testify in a public hearing Tuesday before the House committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol last year, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The hearing is expected to focus on the rise of radical extremism in the United States, and the source said one of the key witnesses will be Stephen Ayres of Warren, Ohio, who recently admitted to illegally entering the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021….
In court documents filed last month, Ayres acknowledged that the day before the riot, he drove to Washington, D.C., to protest Congress’ certification of the 2020 presidential election results.
Stephen Michael Ayres
On Facebook, Ayres had spotlighted then-President Donald Trump’s call for supporters to descend on Washington on Jan. 6, which Trump said will “be wild” in a Tweet he posted on Dec. 19, 2020….
Two days before he left for the nation’s capital, Ayres posted a message on Facebook saying, “Mainstream media, social media, Democrat party, FISA courts, Chief Justice John Roberts, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, etc….all have committed TREASON against a sitting U.S. president!!! All are now put on notice by ‘We The People!'”
In the week before that, Ayres said in social media posts that it was “time for us to start standing up to tyranny!” and he warned that “If the [deep state] robs president Trump!!! Civil War will ensue!” according to the FBI.
Ayres joined the mob outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, then entered the building that afternoon, court documents say.
Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone corroborated virtually all of the revelations from previous witnesses, including former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, in lengthy testimony before the panel last week, a top Jan. 6 committee member told NBC News.
“Cipollone has corroborated almost everything that we’ve learned from the prior hearings,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said in an exclusive interview just hours before the next hearing. “I certainly did not hear him contradict Cassidy Hutchinson. … He had the opportunity to say whatever he wanted to say, so I didn’t see any contradiction there.”
It was unclear if Cipollone was directly asked by investigators about the specifics of some of the more explosive aspects of Hutchinson’s testimony — including that they would be charged with “every crime imaginable” if Trump went to the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Raskin added this additional preview of the hearing:
Raskin said the hearing will include new details about what committee members have been told was “the craziest meeting in the Trump presidency,” on Dec. 18, 2020, describing it as “hot-blooded, contentious, deranged” when the president met with outside and internal legal advisers for a “Hail Mary desperation ploy” to subvert an election they had lost, including possibly seizing state election machines and appointing Trump ally Sidney Powell as a special counsel.
Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, an ally of former President Donald Trump, is expected to meet Friday with the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
Patrick Byrne
There have been no ground rules or topics defined, according to one of the sources. The meeting will be behind closed doors….
Byrne played an active role supporting efforts to question and push baseless claims about the 2020 election, including attending a meeting in mid-December at the White House to discuss strategies to overturn the election. That meeting with Trump also included former national security adviser Michael Flynn and his lawyer Sidney Powell, as well as some White House staff. It focused on ideas to block Joe Biden’s certification as president and discussed the prospect of seizing voting machines. White House officials in the meeting pushed back at the ideas in heated exchanges, CNN previously reported.
CNN reported earlier Monday that former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone had been asked about the December 18, 2020, meeting in his interview with the committee last week….
Two sources familiar with Cipollone’s testimony told CNN that he was asked extensively about his role in that meeting where Trump welcomed the group of extreme election deniers to the West Wing and what was discussed. One source familiar with Cipollone’s testimony told CNN that he described to the committee his view of how insane the meeting was.
The session, which, according to two people familiar with the matter, began as an impromptu gathering, devolved and eventually broke out into screaming matches at certain points as some of Trump’s aides pushed back on Powell and Flynn’s more outrageous suggestions about overturning the election.
The day after this meeting, Gangel notes, Trump sent his infamous “will be wild” tweet.
When Representative Jamie Raskin enters a Capitol Hill hearing room on Tuesday to lay out what the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has uncovered about the role of domestic extremists in the riot, it will be his latest — and potentially most important — step in a five-year effort to crush a dangerous movement.
Long before the Jan. 6, 2021, assault, Mr. Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, had thrown himself into stamping out the rise of white nationalism and domestic extremism in America. He trained his focus on the issue after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., five years ago. Since then, he has held teach-ins, led a multipart House investigation that exposed the lackluster federal effort to confront the threat, released intelligence assessments indicating that white supremacists have infiltrated law enforcement and strategized about ways to crack down on paramilitary groups.
Now, with millions of Americans expected to tune in, Mr. Raskin — along with Representative Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida — is set to take a leading role in a hearing that promises to dig deeply into how far-right groups helped to orchestrate and carry out the Jan. 6 assault at the Capitol — and how they were brought together, incited and empowered by President Donald J. Trump.
“Charlottesville was a rude awakening for the country,” Mr. Raskin, 59, said in an interview, rattling off a list of deadly hate crimes that had taken place in the years before the siege on the Capitol. “There is a real pattern of young, white men getting hyped up on racist provocation and incitement.”
Tuesday’s session, set for 1 p.m., is expected to document how, after Mr. Trump’s many efforts to overturn the 2020 election had failed, he and his allies turned to violent far-right extremist groups whose support Mr. Trump had long cultivated, who in turn began assembling a mob to pressure Congress to reject the will of the voters.
Read the rest at the NYT.
Have a great Tuesday everyone! If you’re watching the hearings, I hope you’ll share your reactions with us.
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Day one of the January 6 committee hearings has finally arrived. At 8:00 tonight, we’ll begin to learn what the committee has discovered about the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election and Trump’s culpability for the attack on the Capitol building last year. We’ll be live-blogging the hearings, so please check in tonight and share your reactions. We can use this post or, if necessary, we’ll post another thread tonight.
When the US House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection opens its hearings on Thursday evening, it will do so in prime time and with primetime production values. The seven Democrats and two Republicans – shunned by their own party – who sit on the panel are pulling out all the stops in an attempt to seize the public’s attention.
They have brought onboard a former president of ABC News, James Goldston, a veteran of Good Morning America and other mass-market TV programmes, to tightly choreograph the six public hearings into movie-length episodes ranging from 90 minutes to two and a half hours. His task: to fulfill the prediction of one of the Democratic committee members, Jamie Raskin, that the hearings “will tell a story that will really blow the roof off the House”….
Reports suggest that one ratings-boosting tactic under consideration would be to show clips from the committee’s interviews with Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner. They were witness to many of Donald Trump’s rantings in the buildup to January 6, and highlights of their quizzing could command a large audience.
As a counterpoint to the glamorous couple, the committee is also likely to focus during the opening session on the activities of far-right groups including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. This week, the justice department charged the national chairman of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, and four of the group’s other leaders with seditious conspiracy.
The indictments will act as backdrop to two of the committee’s main ambitions for the hearings. First, to show in dramatic and previously unseen footage – edited for maximum effect on TV and social media alike – the harrowing violence and brutal destruction that was unleashed during the storming of the Capitol, in which the vice-president was forced to flee rioters shouting: “Hang Mike Pence.”
The second ambition is to convey to the American people that the maelstrom of rage was not random and unprompted, but rather the opposite – instigated, organised, meticulously planned and conceived by an array of conscious actors.
Committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on Monday offered a glimps of what’s to come.
“The select committee has found evidence about a lot more than incitement here,” he said during a Washington Postinterview on Monday after noting that majorities in both the House and Senate found former President Trump guilty of inciting the attack on the Capitol. “We’re gonna be laying out the evidence about all of the actors who were pivotal to what took place on Jan. 6,” he continued.
Raskin added that the committee has evidence of “concerted planning and premeditated activity” — in other words, “a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of power.”
When asked whether Trump himself led this effort, Raskin acknowledged that “people are going to have to make judgments themselves about the relative role that different people played.” But, he added, “I think that Donald Trump and the White House were at the center of these events. That’s the only way really of making sense of them all.”
Committee Vice Chairwoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) described efforts to overturn the election similarly, telling CBS on Sunday that the attack on the Capitol was one facet of an “extremely well-organized” conspiracy….
“No president has ever come close to doing what happened here in terms of trying to organize an inside coup to overthrow an election and bypass the constitutional order,” Raskin said at a Georgetown University event in April. “And then also use a violent insurrection made up of domestic violent extremist groups, white nationalist and racist, fascist groups in order to support the coup.”
With public hearings kicking off this week, the House select committee investigating January 6 is zeroing in on former President Donald Trump, and is preparing to use its platform to argue that he was responsible for grave abuses of power that nearly upended US democracy.
The committee’s central mission has been to uncover the full scope of Trump’s unprecedented attempt to stop the transfer of power to President Joe Biden. This includes Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 defeat by pressuring state and federal officials, and what committee members say was his “dereliction of duty” on January 6 while his supporters ransacked the US Capitol.
Lawmakers will try to convict Trump in the court of public opinion – which is all they can do, because it’s not within their powers to actually indict Trump. But they have an emerging legal foundation to claim that Trump broke the law, thanks to a landmark court ruling from a federal judge who said it was “more likely than not” that Trump committed crimes regarding January 6.
These highly choreographed hearings will be the panel’s first opportunity to show the public what they’ve learned from more than 1,000 witness interviews and 135,000 documents. An avalanche of new information about January 6 has come to light since Trump’s impeachment trial in February 2021, where he was acquitted of one count of “incitement of insurrection.”
“We are going to tell the story of a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of power,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who serves on the committee, told the Washington Post earlier this week, adding that the committee “has found evidence of concerted planning and premediated activity” related to the events of January 6.
Cohen then wraps up the piece by summarizing what is known so far about “Trump’s leadership role in the anti-democratic scheme, and how it all fits into the ongoing criminal investigations.”
Then-President Donald Trump pressured the Secret Service for two weeks to come up with a plan for him to join his supporters on a march toward the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the Washington Post reported Tuesday. pic.twitter.com/pLvIQzAz4Q
When the House 6 January select committee convenes its first hearing to examine the worst attack on the US Capitol since 1814, the nine-member panel and the two witnesses who will testify Thursday will be the highest-profile occupants of the ornate Cannon House Office Building Caucus Room since the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee used it for hearings in the mid-20th century.
Seventy-four years after Hollywood luminaries like acclaimed screenwriter Dalton Trumbo were blacklisted after failing to answer that committee’s questions about whether they had “now or … ever been” members of the Communist Party, one of the film industry’s finest will once again be a star witness in the exact same room.
The select committee on Tuesday announced that one of the first two witnesses to testify in what is expected to be a series of at least eight hearings will be Nick Quested, the award-winning documentarian who earned an Oscar nomination for his film Restrepo in 2010. The other will be Caroline Edwards, a US Capitol Police officer who was one of the first to be on the receiving end of blows delivered by the pro-Trump mob who stormed the Capitol in hopes of preventing Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
Both witnesses will testify during the second hour of the two-hour hearing, following opening presentations by the select committee’s chairman – Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi – and Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, the panel’s vice-chair.
The Independent has learned that the panel’s aim in putting Ms Edwards and Mr Quested in the spotlight for the first prime time hearing on the 6 January insurrection is to highlight the role played by the pro-Trump extremist groups in starting and escalating the violence.
Mr Quested, who spent the days leading up to the riot embedded with leaders of the Proud Boys gang as part of a documentary project, has already provided US authorities with footage of a 5 January 2021 meeting between then-Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Elmer Stewart Rhodes, founder and leader of the Oath Keepers.
The footage of Mr Tarrio and Mr Rhodes meeting on the eve of the insurrection appears to have figured prominently in grand jury proceedings which led to last week’s unsealing of an indictment against Mr Tarrio and four other Proud Boys members for seditious conspiracy.
The press has learned so much about what will happen tonight. I hope the committee will still have a few surprises for us.
Two more relevant reads:
The hearings must make it clear beyond a reasonable doubt that there should be a prosecution of Trump and all of the others in his close-knit circle who were involved. Should the hearings provide a roadmap to indictment, Attorney General Merrick Garland must not fail to act.
The House select committee on the Jan. 6 attack is finally beginning its televised hearings, and the Democratic faithful are hoping for a political punch in the nose to detractors — and a wakeup call to those who still don’t understand what actually happened during the insurrection.
“These hearings are important to accelerate awareness,” Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, explained to me. It remains to be seen if they can actually be the “punch in the nose” to Donald Trump that so many hope for.
Trump’s alleged activities on or before Jan. 6 include a conspiracy to obstruct a lawful function of the federal government. These hearings must energize the pursuit of justice, or they will be pointless – just more high wind in the trees.
Face it. Trump was impeached not once, but twice. We know what a grifter he is. We know he doesn’t care. Most of us believe him to be a crook. We have seen it all before. Can the hearings really shock the nation into a zeitgeist that leads us to a newfound respect for each other — and to a settling of accounts that holds Trump responsible for one of the worst days in the modern history of our country? Probably not.
Trump openly led the insurrection. Congress can’t prosecute him, but the DOJ can.
The nation needs indictments. You cannot have closure before you indict and prosecute every single person involved in the insurrection. You cannot stand over the dead corpse of democracy and declare we should move on.
In short, the hearings in Congress must make it clear beyond a reasonable doubt that there should be a prosecution of Trump and all of the others in his close-knit circle who were involved. Should the hearings provide a roadmap to indictment, Attorney General Merrick Garland must not fail to act….
What’s the worst-case scenario for these hearings? No needle movement. No charges. The entire issue fades into the mist like a bad case of COVID: You survive, but the cough persists.
Make no mistake, democracy is still in the balance and it has been since Trump slithered down that golden escalator and began his campaign for president.
We’re still in the moment, as Eisen would say. These are uncertain times and we must act. These hearings are important — easily as important as the hearings that helped bring down Nixon and perhaps even more. Today the entire government hangs in the balance.
Here's one way to view the Jan. 6 Committee and its potential for eventual accountability.
While it’s doubtful the hearings will meet the sky-high expectations of those who believed the committee would expose open-and-shut wrongdoing from some of the nation’s top officials, the prime-time hearings will deliver one thing: evidence for many of the lawsuits seeking to make former President Donald Trump and other election denialists actually pay for the violence.
“What the committee can’t do is hold people accountable. But that’s where criminal prosecutions and civil litigation comes in,” said Edward G. Caspar, an attorney representing injured and traumatized Capitol Police officers who are suing Trump after the violence insurrection….
one of the big challenges for the panel’s investigation—with its contentious lawsuits, secret interviews, and promises to expose the truth—is that it ultimately has no power to punish those who are responsible for last year’s attack on the Capitol.
So far, legal scholars and progressive activists have focused their exasperated calls for action on the Department of Justice. But the real action could come from lawsuits like the one Conrad Smith and seven fellow Capitol Police officers filed in August against Trump, his campaign, Stop the Steal election denial movement organizers like Ali Alexander and Roger Stone, and enforcer gangs like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia.
“The committee is playing a critical role here for America,” Caspar said. “If you think of the three means of seeking accountability for those responsible for the attack—congressional hearings, criminal prosecution, civil litigation—they’re like a three-legged stool. The committee can shine a very bright light on the evidence and present it to the public. That’s something the others can’t do.”
A lot is riding on the hearing tonight. If the committee can really “blow the roof off,” people who haven’t been paying close attention will continue to tune in upcoming hearings. Here’s hoping they can meet the challenge.
Please share your thoughts on all this, and I hope you’ll also check back tonight to help us live blog.
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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: 
The tweet was a “clarion call” to the groups, said Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), who is leading Tuesday’s hearing along with Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).
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