Most People Suspected of Assaulting Officers in the January 6 Attack Remain at Large
There continue to be efforts to make grand judgments about the January 6 insurrectionists base off a review of the ~207 people who have been charged federally thus far. In my opinion, that’s a mistaken effort, unless the analysis breaks the current arrestees up into groups, first by excluding the 100 or so people just charged with trespassing crimes, who will appropriately be treated as people who engaged in civil disobedience.
Of the rest, there are maybe 25 who are members of an identified militia group. But that group is just a fraction of the total numbers of militia members we should expect will be arrested, because anyone in the Capitol or who planned to halt the vote certification can be charged, and we know of the people who joined Jessica Watkins’ Oath Keepers’ formation, as well as a busload of others from North Carolina. Plus, there are at least 10 more Proud Boys — probably significantly more — identifiable from videos as active participants. In other words, the number of militia members will continue to grow.
There’s another set of people — like Zip Tie Guy (Eric Munchel) and his mother — not known to have ties to militia (though definitely friendly to them), but who took actions that DOJ seems to treat more seriously. So, too, are the people — many of them women — who directed and instigated the crowd.
But there are another two sets of people that the FBI is clearly pursuing, of whom just a fraction have been arrested and identified so far. One is the group of people wanted for assaulting the media (AOM in the FBI’s wanted pictures), which is reportedly being led by a special group at DOJ. There are about 27 people identified in this group right now, none of whom have yet been arrested).
A more obvious one are people who’ve assaulted cops (just three of whom so far have ties to militia groups), identified by AFO at the FBI site. Multiple reports say that around 139 cops were assaulted on January 6. Just 26 people have been charged with either 18 USC 111 for assaulting a cop, or in closely related charges. Meanwhile, there are roughly 134 BOLO images of people who are suspected of assaulting cops, meaning there may be over 100 people suspected of assaulting cops on January 6 at large right now. All told, they would make up over a third of Federal suspects, yet most haven’t been arrested yet.
Here’s my running list of the people who, as of 2/22, had been charged with intimidating or assaulting police. I’ve also tracked how the FBI found them — whether by a tip based off Social Media, a law enforcement tip (this group includes several felons), those FBI BOLO posters, or some other means.
- Daniel Page Adams, whose arrest affidavit describes engaging in a “direct struggle with [unnamed] law enforcement officers” (his cousin, Cody Connell, described the exchange as a “civil war”). Tip SM
- Zachary Alam, who pushed cops around as he was trying to break into the Speaker’s Lobby. BOLO 79
- Wilmar Alvarado, who pushed cops in the mob trying to get in from the West Terrace. BOLO 65
- David Blair, who poked a cop with a lacrosse stick with a Confederate flag attached.
- Matthew Caspel, who was filmed charging the National Guard. Tip SM
- William Chrestman, who is accused of threatening a cop as Proud Boys pushed their way past the original line of defense (charged with 18 USC 115). NM
- Bruno Cua, who was filmed shoving a cop to be able to get into the Senate. Tip LE
- Nathan DeGrave, whom security cameras caught threatening to fight cops. Network Sandlin
- Daniel Egdvedt, a large man who took swipes and grabbed at several officers as they tried to remove him from the Capitol. BOLO 76
- Scott Fairlamb, who was caught in multiple videos shoving and punching officers (one who whom is identified but not named); Cori Bush has said she was threatened by him last summer. Tips, including SM
- Kyle Fitzsimons, who charged officers guarding the doorway of the Capitol. BOLO 139
- Michael Foy, a former Marine who was caught on multiple videos beating multiple cops with a hockey stick. Tip SM
- Robert Giswein, who appears to have ties to the Proud Boys and used a bat to beat cops. NM
- Alex Harkrider, who after being filmed fighting with police at the door of the Capitol, posted a picture with a crowbar labeled, “weapon;” he was charged with abetting Ryan Nichols’ assault. Tip SM
- Emanuel Jackson, whom videos caught punching one officer, and others show beating multiple officers with a metal baseball bat. BOLO 31
- Douglas Jensen, the QAnon who chased Officer Goodman up the stairs, got charged with resisting him.
- Taylor Johnatakis, charged with 111.
- Chad Jones, who used a Trump flag to break the glass in the Speaker’s Lobby door just before Ashli Babbitt was shot and may have intimidated three officers who were pursuing that group. Tip NM
- Vitali Gossjankowski, who was interviewed about whether he had tased MPD officer Michael Fanone, causing a heart attack; instead he was charged with tasing CPD officer MM (BOLO 98 — with a second one mentioned)
- Edward Jacob Lang, who identified himself in a screen cap of a violent mob attacking cops and who was filmed slamming a riot shield into police and later fighting them with a red baseball bat. Tip SM
- Mark Jefferson Leffingwell, whom a Capitol Police officer described in an affidavit punching him. Onsite arrest
- Joshua Lollar, who described fighting cops and was caught in pictures showing himself in the front lines confronting cops. Tip SM
- Michael Lopatic, who allegedly assaulted some cops with Stager and Sabol, then took a BWC to hide the assault. BOLO 133
- Patrick Edward McCaughey III, who was filmed crushing MPD Officer Daniel Hodges in one of the doors to the Capitol. BOLO 62
- Jonathan Mellis, who used some kind of stick to try to jab and beat police. Tip SM
- Matthew Ryan Miller, who released fire extinguisher in close quarters. Tip SM
- Aaron Mostofsky, possibly for stripping a cop of his or her armored vest and riot shield. NM
- Ryan Nichols, who was filmed wielding a crowbar and yelling, “This is not a peaceful protest,” then spraying pepper spray against police trying to prevent entry to the Capitol. Tip SM
- Jose Padilla, who shoved cops at a barricade, then helped use a Donald Trump sign as a battering ram against them. Tip SM
- Dominic Pezzola, a Proud Boy who stole a shield from cops. NM (BOLO 43)
- Jeffrey Sabol, helped drag a cop from the Capitol and beat him while prone. LE arrest (erratic driving)
- Ryan Samsel, who set off the riot by giving a cop a concussion; he appears to have coordinated with Joe Biggs. BOLO 51 (though not IDed by BOLO)
- Robert Sanford, who was filmed hitting Capitol Police Officer William Young on the head with a fire extinguisher. Tip NM
- Ronald Sandlin, who tried to wrestle cops to keep the door to the Senate open. MPD tip
- Peter Schwartz, a felon who maced several cops. Tip NM (BOLO 120)
- Christian Secor, a UCLA self-described fascist who helped shove through some cops to break into the Capitol and then sat in the Senate chamber. Tip NM
- Barton Wade Shively, who pushed and shoved some police trying to get into the Capitol, punched another, then struck one of those same cops later and kicked another. BOLO 55
- Peter Francis Stager, who was involved in beating a prone cop with a flagpole. Tip SM
- Tristan Stevens, who fought cops with a shield and baton. Video
- Thomas Webster, who attacked a cop with a flagpole (BOLO 145)
One reason I made this effort was to show that many of these people were identified via other means, and really a big number of people remain on the FBI’s BOLO list.
Unsurprisingly, more people on this list have tried to destroy evidence or flee, meaning it will likely take more time to find them all. There’s also reason to believe that the FBI would prefer to wait to charge these people until they’ve shored up their case.
There are a few more cases that were originally charged as 18 USC 231 that I suspect may get charged as 111 after indictment (which has happened with DeGrave, Sandlin, and Miller), including these.
Craig Bingert (BOLO 105)
Hughes brothers (BOLO 42 and others)
Here are some other notable arrests for which the FBI released a BOLO. Note that the first 30 or so of those posters weren’t targeted to a particular crime, but some — like bullhorn lady Rachel Powell — were identified as AFO in their BOLO but not charged that way.
Joshua Black (BOLO 6)
Steve Malonado (BOLO 20)
William Pepe (BOLO 4)
Matthew Perna (BOLO 73)
Rachel Powell (BOLO 110)
Kevin Seefriend (BOLO 30)
Joshua Wagner (BOLO 34)
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) 
I don’t doubt that half of FBI agents are MAGA. A loose term but you probably get my drift. Sorry to throw a bomb in here but assumptions about actors within any institution be it government including police of all kinds, courts, corporations, NGO’s and the lawyers and money managers serving them, somehow moving unambiguously against fascism is open to doubt.
In other words my comfort that a concerted effort against this mob is going be a resounding or even modest success is very cool.
Not to discourage EW in any way from charging into the breach to defend liberal democracy but time and again is the assumption that our institutions will save us. Such is open to question.
I’m reminded of the Vancouver Stanley Cup riot aftermath when I see posts pessimistic about the timeline on charges. It took 3 years for the final suspects to be charged in Vancouver. The city made a point of charging everyone they could find that was involved in property damage and theft.
As much as an individual maga police officers may slow or dismiss the investigations, a Biden appointed DOJ can push to continue filing charges for years to come to keep this in the news. And, it will likely just take that long to put all the cases together.
Half of FBI agents are MAGA? Let’s say a large fraction, even. I have no particular insight into this question, though I don’t recall McCabe suggesting anything like that, and he’s no Trump fan.
I doubt that’s the case. Many in the conservative folks at FBI are Mormons. Many of those Mormons, particularly those from Utah and Michigan, are Romney backers in all likelihood. But, yeah, it is a good bet that there’s enough believers in Twitler’s big lie about the 2020 election to warrant wariness by those of us opposed to Twitler’s chaos agenda of lawlessness and sedition.
“Many in the conservative folks at FBI are Mormons…particularly those from Utah and Michigan are Romney backers in all likelihood.” That Romney is trying to tack to the outside of the MAGA boat is simply an effort to maneuver himself into a position to lead what is left of the king’s horseman and men to clean up the mess left in the party without actually changing it. The Republican party base is a cluster of cults and “movements” that has no historical connection to democracy except in opposition to it.
Which astutely defines the tRump phenomenon: a cult of cults. A “maga” -cult, if you will.
It’s my sincere hope the apprehensions, indictments, prosecutions and sentences can be dragged out over the next couple years because as it stands, millions are salivating for 2024 and there will need to be a social counterweight to that.
Combined with Peterr’s prior post this is part of a pattern to eliminate any obstacles to creating the “new world order” where the militia imposes a dictatorship. Let’s review a few things, however:
1. DJT is a coward, between the draft dodging and his wimping out on walking to the Capitol on January 6th. This needs to be hammered home and played 24-7 for Jon McNaughton before he creates any more “art”.
2. The failure to (so far) arrest any of the cop killers makes me wonder how infused the FBI is with the RWNJ militants. Let’s remember these were the same types that thought HRC was enough of a threat to leak the non-story about her emails. I also wonder just how many of the police seen taking selfies and so on are re-thinking their political view now that the videos of the “[Bleep] the blue” chants and bloodshed are out there. As many of you know, I’ve been hammering the police unions for their lack of accountability and note that it appears none of them so far have publicly denounced this. I may have missed something, but did I see the former Capitol Police chief was trying to claim he wasn’t afraid, why was this different than Lafayette Park and BLM when these guys were armed? They are free to plot their next step without hindrance from law enforcement,.
3. Meghan McCain tried to equate this to the “BLM” riots but let’s remember that almost all of the violence was attributed to the police overreaction and RW provocateurs including off-duty police. She needs to STFU.
4. Every one of the GOP when they vote to acquit DJT needs to explain every day why they consider the riot to be OK. This is their party, and it looks like the GOP is more pissed that DJT didn’t succeed than anything else. Tom Cotton is silent after a brief harrumph and I never heard anything from Crenshaw or any other of the GOP warrior caucus and all of these clowns took the same oath I did.
Scum, all of them.
I find Cotton’s ongoing silence telling. I think this proves he and Crenshaw are both smarter than Hawley and Cruz and therefore more dangerous.
Hopefully, Hawley and Cruz will end up so tainted by this mess, they’ll never be serious candidates for POTUS again. I’m not sure Cruz ever was in the first place but Hawley is/was a different story. IMO Hawley’s going to have a hard time getting away from that photo of him holding up a fist as he walks thru the mob.
But the fact that both Cotton and Crenshaw have the smarts to duck this one and wait for it to blow over (that’s what it looks like they’re doing, to me) scares me about both of them.
It may not be any special intelligence, it could be that Cruz and Hawley are just astonishingly clumsy.
It goes w/out saying that Cruz is a buffoon…
Hawley, up to the point he got his picture taken w/ fist held high, did seem to be a bit smarter and therefore more of a threat over the long term…
Cotton has what I call ‘dog cunning’, like older Mafioso… not particularly, truly bright, just good at playing mean on the street level.
Both he and Crenshaw are going to be a problem for years to come…
Hawley is a lot of things, but astonishingly clumsy is not one of them.
Hawley has long aimed at being president. When he announced that he would be the first senator to sign on to the House objections to the vote certifications from Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, et al., Hawley was making a move to claim the mantle of Trump and win the support of Trump’s voters.
By his not-unreasonable political calculus, being first to do this gives him a leg up in the 2024 GOP primary — and in that primary election, that raised fist will only hurt him in the eyes of Lincoln Project Republicans, assuming they are still Republicans at that point.
I dunno…
I realize Hawley is smarter than most, but if people hadn’t died on the 6th…
I understand what you’re saying and that was my thought at the time too… that Hawley was getting in there first just for that reason…
Hawley’s situation reminds me a bit of Trump’s, in regard to George Schultz… back in January of 2020, I read a Schultz interview and when asked about the upcoming election, his immediate answer was. ‘The most important thing is getting him (Trump) out of there.’
When you start losing the elders of the tribe…
In a similar vein, Hawley looks to have lost Danforth’s support, in the moment…
And the MAGA base will continue to howl at the moon for the forseeable future…
You might be right… we’ll see over time.
The decisions by big money donors/corporate PACc on whether to fund Hawley, Cruz et al in future elections may be determinative on their prospects going forward. There are certainly mega wealthy donors who don’t shy away from crazy (Mercers), and the power of small dollar donations has been demonstrated as well. Still, I’m pretty sure that combination hasn’t really been tried on the right, and it may not be enough.
I was doing some work for a Land Management Agency and during a lunch engagement one of the employees stated that Park Service seems to hire a “certain type” of people and so I pounced. I said that certainly is true and I am glad you brought up that theory as I have had the same thoughts for quite sometime; however mine relates to the rest of the Federal Government and the type of people it attracts.
I went onto state that since 9/11 the budgets for the agencies that attract those that are interested in enforcement, incarceration, control and frankly killing has escalated along with their budgets, while those parts of the Government that worked for people and the land has significantly been reduced. I kept going to say that Dick Cheney knew this and has basically funded a new generation of right wing socialists that work for the FBI, Border Patrol, DOD, CIA, DEA, DHS….excetra and that many of these same people retire and double dip or come to our towns and work as police and fire.
I could tell he seemed to think that these people being funded were legitimate for government than the so-called climate change Park Personnel.
I also wonder if some of the really caring people that end up in the enforcement positions are the one more likely to take their own lives?
I’m curious how much of the FBI’s relative delay in charging a lot of the hard core is due to an effort to avoid tipping off targets about the FBI’s methods and capabilities.
That would be good…
I hope the wheels of justice do indeed end up grinding exceedingly fine here…
Looking forward to seeing how well the Nuremberg defense (I was just following my President’s orders!) works in court.
It worked for the CIA psychological consultants who guided the waterboarding and other torture at black sites during the hunt for Osama bin Laden. (Thank you, Eric Holder . . . grrrrr.)
Well, again, I hope your statement that law enforcement is deliberately taking its time turns out to be true…
As far as The GOP and torture goes, for all the carping I hear from the Lincoln Project types and The Bulwark crowd about this isn’t THEIR party anymore, the question I’d really like to ask them is, “How did you react back in the Bush years, when the torture memo came out and those absolutely repulsive Abu Ghraib photos appeared?”
Don’t get me wrong… in a fight like this, you take all the help you can get…
And still, if you weren’t appalled back then… why?
Yep. And the fact that there was little done to deter that from happening again embolden folks like Trump and his ilk when it comes to attaining and retaining political power in this country. Very frustrating to see the DP leadership careen from one crisis to the next while we pay to see their half-baked circuses that they claim are “we’re the accountability you voted for!” It’s the Fall of the Third Republic wrote in larger and larger letters day after day, year over year.
My guess is a fair amount.
I think there was also a lot of concern about tipping their hand to the White House before noon on January 20th, for fear that their efforts would be shut down or thwarted in some way.
Hope your guess is a good one.
My last comment (a reply to yours above) is hung up in moderation, btw…
Any particular reason why?
I didn’t use any naughty words or anything like that.
And now it’s just gone, period.
I freed it up, but don’t know enough about the tech to know why it got hung up.
Ever since Trump installed his “henchmen” in Pentagon…
This from Michael Beschloss:
” … @BeschlossDC
·
Feb 10
“Remember that after 2020 election, Trump forced out his Secretary of Defense and installed loyalists and sycophants at Pentagon. They were in those jobs on January 6 when requests to defend U.S. Capitol from attack were ignored.” …
~~~~~~~~
Am I alone in a gut feeling that Trump **isn’t smart enough** for this kind of strategic maneuvering and pre-planning? (Evidence all the failed business ventures and bankruptcies!)
Yeah, I think about the Russian mob a lot, scarcely ever hear it mentioned. I don’t often mention it either, almost seems bad form. What is called a rift in our country is exactly along the stresses known to be exploited by said gangsters.
He certainly was not planning all of this on his own. I’d bet that’s why the republicans just went apeshit over the prospect of witnesses being called during the trial. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some votes to convict were dependent on there being no witnesses. Scratch too deep and this could be very damaging for to them. Better to convict Trump and let sleeping dogs lie.
I’m new here. Can someone explain what “law and order” means? It seems to have something to do with black people and socialists but beyond that gets quite vague. For example, is law and order guy Trump a supporter of banking laws? Tax laws? Laws against rape? Laws against profiting from political office? Laws against using the trappings of the presidency to campaign for office? Campaign finance laws? Laws requiring retention of government records? Laws governing political appointments? Complying with judicial requirements issuing directly from courts? Taking care that the law be faithfully executed? International treaties? Unwritten laws governing basic human decency? This is a partial list. I’m very confused.
In conservative circles “law and order” became a catch phrase to indicate the speaker’s disapproval of anyone who would critique the police in particular for any reason whatsoever. And yes, it has deep racist roots. “Law and order!” is all about keeping Those People (and their socialist/communist allies) in Their Place.
And as you suspect, it is never used to critique anyone who is part of the power structure for their uses of the law to suppress dissent. Order must be maintained!
In fact, I also suspect you are not as very confused as you state. If so, well played.
Must agree with you Peterr, Doctor My Eyes seems very insightful with 20/20 vision.
I noticed that the “law and order”-sticker wearing cars (and ones with similar messages) tend to be the ones that are most likely to not drive that way.
Don’t follow those vehicles too often. They should do a study on exactly what proportion of pickup trucks, cars, and SUVs with such stickers are likely to be throwing litter out the window at any given moment. Their favorite litter of choice seems to be a lit cigarette here in California. I guess. I mean, maybe I saw it more than once.
Peterr
not so much a catch phrase as a dog whistle — those using it know what is meant. step out of line and it is tazers, dogs, water cannon, tear gas.
to the rest of us, mostly law abiding, quiet, tax paying citizens, it signifies we are just the peons, too dumb to even think about protesting, disagreeing, or not playing by the rules.
cynical — ja!
How could I have left off the original sin: laws against foreign influence in US elections?
“I’m very confused”
Lol….you’re not confused, you’re a reincarnation of Socrates cleverly illustrating contemporary decadence.
Welcome and well put.
Just don’t accept any offers of hemlock tea.
Most days I prefer chamomile…Celestial Seasoning… less mortifying.
Part of me says that it was inexcusable dereliction of law enforcement duty to let 90% of the rioters simply walk away. Each and every one of the rioters was trespassing for the stated purpose of interfering with a governmental activity. But there is a hopeful possibility: tracking the phones that went into the Capitol that day might lead to lots more information about lots more bad actors. I wonder if searches of the phones could be warranted simply because the phone was in the midst of a riot. You are not a criminal simply because your phone is trespassing in a restricted area, (and subsequently travels back to your home state with you) but it does give rise to legitimate suspicions about what the owner of the phone might have been up to. Maybe, that’s what’s going on. We will know which part of me is right when the number of those charged stays in the 200s or rises to the 800s.
I don’t think they *could* have arrested everyone: not enough space in jails and courtrooms, and too easy for them to get out of the area and be back in their hotels before the cops could catch them.
(That delay in getting the Guard mobilized made a difference.)
Chain link cages are just the thing for “mass incarceration” applications, right?
They are particularly useful for children traveling to the wrong locales with their custodial parents and black sites in Guantanamo Bay.
A motivated “law and order” enforcement agency could have re-purposed a vehicle impoundment lot, etc. — since they weren’t towing cars around the ellipse that day.
If DC authorities are not well prepared for incarceration of large numbers then the woods are bear shit free.
But without sufficient officers present then securing the area and allowing the cert of elect votes to conclude would be the highest priority and correct decision.
It seems they did the best they could under the circumstances? It’ll be an interesting CP and DCMP commission report on this riot. Methinks they’ll maybe be a bit more immediately capable to detain rioting combatants the next time if/this happens. At least one assumes that’ll be the plan anyways.
So far it looks to me that that the officers on the beat who were over-run and those who came in to re-take the Capitol did well.
Hell I haven’t even seen leaks of what their rules of engagement for the day were – that’s impressive discipline for a group of some 2000 humans who went through traumatic hours and are apparently very dissatisfied with their superiors.* The report will be interesting. I could easily be shown wrong.
And any group that tries to storm the Capitol again had better have hearts that can stand up to multiple tazering if they even touch the outdoor barriers.
(* Cf. The Seals who executed Bin Laden.)
I suspect that the rules of engagement if one crosses a riot line into the Capitol Building itself will likely be a tad more than a tazing if/when it happens again…
What we witnessed on Jan 6 was so much more incredibly dangerous to our nation than any so-called political leader in the Congress will currently openly admit in public. The seriousness is such that it might even squelch a public inquiry by the Congress into what could have happened and what should be done next time. Just imagine if you were a foreign power, terrorist group, or domestic seditionist faction that could competently foresee another Jan 6…what could you have done on Jan 6 to our country’s stability if you had only known in advance how easy taking significant space within the Capitol Building itself, knew you could occupy it for several hours with little serious threat to your own self, etc? It’s almost unthinkable the scenarios you might hatch and accomplish with foreknowledge of how easy last Jan 6 was going to be… The DP leadership is right to resist GOP calls to “remove the fences around the Capitol Building! It’s not a good look!” Yeah, it ain’t a good look but it’s better than finding out what happens if another rioter or other extremist elements crosses that threshold again. But to acknowledge that the vulnerability of such a grave nature to our own country’s political stability was ignored is not a good look politically.
Similarly, this aversion to looking bad is why we’ve seen little loudly backed inquiry into what we could have done better to prepare for the ongoing pandemic. It is unlikely to happen while the old hands from DC are running the Congress. What could have been done better >wasthe country was better prepared a dozen years ago<, that's on the record. Anyone who disputes that is seeking to be an apologist for ball droppers and/or has their head in the sand.
And let's not go into why there was no impeachment over the contents of the Mueller report, and why the two impeachment investigations that the DP leadership suddenly realized might be necessary at the very last minute, why those similarly have not seen much deep introspection from the same DP leadership. We are lead in DC by folks who only moment to moment manage things maybe kind of effectively when they have to… or not much at all… when it comes to confronting the existential threats to this country with any great effectiveness.
So tune in now on TV. You can see it all there, listening to Twitler's lawyers dissemble, compounding the lies and lack of accountability once again to this year's impeachment trial. The "political leadership" in the US Senate has changed since the last trial, yet the result is the same—no actual accountability for bad governance and bad actions. Why did so many people spend so much time helping the Senate "change hands" if the results are pretty much similar to the last political group who ran it? It seems it is meaningless to many of us, this US Senate that keeps a tradition alive of protecting the most powerful incompetents from any consequences whatsoever. 500,000 dead isn't enough. A trashed Capitol Building isn't enough, trashed by the direct actions of 45th President himself! Foreign collusion in our elections by that same man certainly didn't appear to be enough to even warrant an impeachment charge. So what is finally going to be enough for the Senate and the Congress to actually hold anyone powerful accountable, what will it take to clear the cobwebs from the political leaders of this Republic?
So, go ahead and assume that crossing into the Capitol Building uninvited is only going to get you tazed. That's certainly an interesting assumption to make.
timbo that is all cogent and very useful to my understanding.
But “if they even touch the outdoor barriers” does not mean “crossing into the Capitol Building uninvited”.
Stop and think about it: big city police routinely arrest 100s, perhaps 1000s of people every day; most are ID’d, issued some sort of court summons, and released. The important part is identification; it could have happened, but it didn’t. Maybe one day we will get an explanation.
My dad worked for the FCC, but for some unexplained reason had a White House Level security clearance. I didn’t even know that until he retired, and I lived with him. Putting all the stories he told through the years at our dinner table together with the context I learned after his retirement, all I can say for sure is that the Whitehouse and Capitol will always have the worlds most sophisticated communications interception and monitoring. In the 70’s their tech was at least 20 years ahead of anything out there. I personally saw that working on NSA spy hardware.
As soon as I saw what was happening at the capitol I kind of smiled. They can run, but they can’t hide. I have no doubt that every single cell phone in range was being tapped for all it’s sensors like GPS with their computers blazing thru any encryption. I would bet they have much much better individual location data on every phone than they can admit to. And every single binary bit of data was recorded. (I can admit we were doing that to embassies with antennas at a distance in late 70’s, we could see every word processor in the building, real time).
Now the leg work of connecting all this data to the individuals while laundering the source of their evidence. No real rush, that data isn’t going away.
There is always that conundrum that using that information gathered with classified technology in court admits to the existence of the technology and, by law, they can’t admit to having that information without special permissions. There is the added factor, if the policy still exists, that as soon as a secret technology is exposed, it is automatically obsolete for classified work. ( Ronnie Raygun put the whole electronic spy world in a tizzy when he admitted that we intercepted a Telex from Gadhafi to go after him. )
The NSA — or anyone else — is not regularly hoovering up the data, “blazing thru any encryption”, of any device that passes through the Capitol on any given day. Try spinning that yarn to any of the Gang of Eight.
What the FBI probably does have is access to provider information that can place a device at that location on that day. Some say that is quite accurate on the Capitol grounds, and I have little reason to doubt that. But nobody with any credibility is claiming that the insurrectionists’ devices had been digitally ransacked.
It’s certainly hard to imagine anyone who worked on equipment at the NSA not having an NDA stipulation in their contract.
Geeze. Really?
No, we didn’t use NDAs. I signed an acknowledgment with the Government that outlined what they would do to me if I ever reveled any information marked classified. Wasn’t an agreement.
I didn’t say I was deeply involved. I built and calibrated, and sometimes saw real tests of equipment that is now obsolete and in the public sphere. I also worked with a couple of the engineers that invented the tech. Nothing that I know directly is any longer classified.
I watched the Government’s ability to put together a system together to use that transatlantic phone line tap we now know about, to apply universal voice recognition on all the lines simultaneously. In 1978. I helped assemble the thing for testing at the place I worked. I was kind of shocked at how freely they told us what it was for. Look at the technology timeline for that.
This ain’t tin foil hat stuff. All the tech is available to anyone with the know how. Snowden reveled a snippet about the technology, not just what they were doing with it. He made everyone take the batteries out of their phone and put them in a faraday shield (a refrigerator works fine) when they came to visit. The only difference between what he showed and what I suggested is scale. And the Government is very good at scale.
It is tin foil hat time if you think your phone is in anyway secure, especially when the cell tower in the capitol was designed, built and installed by the NSA. And did you realize that a lot of 911 systems in the country can turn on the GPS in a callers phone remotely? Do you not think the NSA can do that as well? Did you ever use a phone finder service that can locate and manipulate data on your lost phone? You have to know that any powered phone will link to the strongest cell tower.
From an electronics viewpoint, if you can turn something on with a button or remotely, it was never actually off. It can’t see a button press if it is actually powered off.
Have you forgotten about the Stingray fake cell tower that even local police use?
But no, they couldn’t be smart enough to actually use existing technology in a massive way to protect the capitol. That’s conspiracy theory stuff. I am sure they stopped progressing in the 80’s when they were doing it in the analog world.
I would love to hear Ms. Wheeler’s take on the reports of and evidence of the meeting between Donald Jr., Eric Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Michael Flynn, Giulianni, et al with 2 Trump loyalists and leaders in the Stop the Steal organizing effort that took place at the Trump DC hotel on January 5 – one day before the insurrection. Has this meeting been brought up by the House managers?
https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/january-5-meeting-at-trump-international
This from @donwinslow twitter, short video with times and footage of the breach of Congress.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1348293638648782851
It was strangely de-emphasized from what I could gather. Why it was not considered important is because there were never going to be actual witnesses under oath in this trial in the Senate. We just saw that this morning. The “fix was in” as one (and more) of the commentators on this blog speculated.
You have a right—and possible an obligation as a patriot—to be upset that meetings like that (and similar meetings by these gangsters over the entire period of Twitler’s stint as President) did not heavily feature in this trial (nor last year’s trial). The impression one might reasonably gather from all this is that ‘accountability’ is mostly the name of a dead dog in Washington DC when it comes to the connected and the powerful.
I commented on this in another thread a couple of days after it was hot, and so it is possible that some may have missed it.
Daniel Beck of Idaho Falls ID, self-identified as having attended that meeting as well. Of course it’s possible that he was merely in the hotel rather than an active participant in the meetings, but let’s take him at his word.
What’s interesting is that he’s the CEO of a small tech firm that has built an sms (text message) broadcast app: One to Many comms called TxtWire.
It’s easy to subscribe, just text 111222 to 889900 (e.g. only, you know what I’m talking about).
What if a simple app like that was used for command and control on Jan 6 for one or more groups?? All it would take would be for each small unit commander to load it up, and suddenly they’re all getting instantaneous info, even though they’re using their own comms internally.
I noticed his company’s business also, and wondered about that.
Now that the impeachment trial is over, I am (perhaps naïvely) pinning my hopes on many criminal prosecutions. I’m sure that meeting will figure in some way.
What does Tip NM mean?
I still don’t understand why Sanford wasn’t charged for hitting all three officers in the head with the fire extinguisher (and he hurled it ~generally into the group of police officers, as they describe it — not like there was a single intended target, or that that would necessarily matter).
NM might be news media (as opposed to social media.) Just a guess, of course.
Thanks, I had initially guessed that too but then saw it by Sanford’s name and knew he was turned in via tip from someone he knew (to whom he had confessed about being ‘Wanted’). Maybe Non-Media?
?
What a Bout
Right wing: wrong wing!
The haywire throng wing,
Bent and broken prong wing,
The not so strong wing.
Wrong wing: right wing,
The full of spite wing,
Dirty joke & dirty fight wing,
Crooked, shady, not quite bright wing.
Left wing, right wing,
Beware the one that will incite wing,
The fire blight that may ignite wing,
Heed the steady warning light wing.
Right wing: wrong wing!
The do not belong wing,
Whistling Dixie song wing,
Goodbye and so long wing!
[taking a moment, as you know I enjoy rapping your rhymes]
Ha, when scrolling before reading regularly my mind’s eye caught _Winn_ Dixie (remember all that branding BS ;) courtesy de tu, and I don’t believe I’ve set foot in one). If you ever have cause to incorporate go Krogering I might fall off my chair.
Perhaps my favorite of what you have written to date !
Nicely done. Poignant and wincingly accurate.
It seems simple, and pure speculation, but this dkos diary shook me up a bit. Immediately strikes me as an accurate reading.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/2/12/2015674/-Trump-Believed-Pence-had-been-Captured-Then-Tweeted-Pence-s-Eulogy
It concerns Tuberville’s celebrated setting of the time line, that Trump tweeted against Pence within minutes of being told by Tuberville that Pence had been taken out by the secret service. A more realistic reading, however, is that Trump thought Pence had been captured by his mob and was tweeting his eulogy.
Tuberville (stated in these words more than once): “I said ‘Mr. President, they just took the vice president out, I’ve got to go.’”
Trump’s tweet: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify, USA demands the truth!”
And the GOP continue to play childish games.
Or it’s possible that Trump understood that Pence had been taken to safety. I don’t see the report of that phone call, in itself, to be quite so damning.
Not that I absolve Trump for a second. The secret service, including Pence’s detail, had to have been keeping the WH informed and someone, e.g. Meadows, must have told Trump about events at the Capitol.
What/when/know etc.
He may have been told, but he sure wasn’t acting like it. Remember, he’s a malignant narcissist, and it’s all about what he wants right then.
Unfortunately, it now appears that we will not see any of this straightened out by the US Senate today.
I was shaking with laughter when I saw that post. No, he did not think that Pence had been captured or killed. The Secret Service has plenty good comms infrastructure and would have kept POTUS well informed of such a thing.
Much is being made of his tweet afterwards, claiming that he did it -while Pence was in danger. I beg to differ. Pence had already been safely removed by then. He sent that tweet, partly to keep the crowd riled up generally, and also as justification for his actions that day. That’s just how his shitty, scheming mind works. But he knew that Pence had left the building by then.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be excoriating him for putting Pence in danger in the first place. Nor, even, continuing to claim that the tweet was terribly dangerous. I’m willing to stretch the truth a little if it makes him look bad. But this scenario where he believed that Pence had been grabbed is too silly.
A fun speculation, but it’s reported that staff members with Pence were in contact with other members of his staff who were actually with the president.
Pence’s former chief of staff has been contacted about providing information in impeachment trial
Kennerly just made a good point, has this issue been pressed [may have missed it] ? :
Max Kennerly: “If we only knew one fact, we’d still know that every Republican Senator recognizes Trump is unfit for office: On January 6, Pence circumvented Trump to order National Guard deployment—and not one Senator has said Pence was wrong to do so. If they acquit, they indict themselves. …”
https://twitter.com/MaxKennerly/status/1360424807637147649
Andrew Feinberg: “Based on conversations w/ several GOP Hill sources, folks are upset by the Trump team’s blatant lying re: Pence. It’s why you’re seeing new reporting from @jdawsey1 & others coming from Pence’s side, as well as some re: Trump/McCarthy. BUT — it’s not likely to change any votes”
Anytime I’ve seen them cover this it’s about Trump doing nothing, without affirmatively stating that Pence called in the NG (much less any query/argument about it).
CNN this evening:
Thank you, I saw that. I perhaps wasn’t clear: I meant did the _Impeachment Managers_ (or a questioning Senator) push that point, that Pence was the one who called in NG. Because anytime I saw the general topic come up, they emphasized that Trump did nothing without affirmatively stating that it was Pence who finally got them help.
“McCarthy insisted that the rioters were Trump’s supporters and BEGGED TRUMP TO CALL THEM OFF.
__________________
Annnnnnd yet McCarthy still goes to Mar-a-Lago to willingly, gladly, enthusiastically, drink the Trump bathwater…
Simply astonishing…
I’d call McCarthy the emptiest suit in American politics but the competition is so damned stiff…
Rubio… Johnson… Cruz… Gohmert… Jordan… Paul… the list goes on and on…
How do you make a choice?
~stiff~ I see what you did there. Also, McCarthy was revealed in an audio recording stating his own personal belief that Rohrabacher and Trump were receiving monies from Russia.
Maybe Kevin’s got a ticket on the ruble-train now.
And this.
Kevin McCarthy should be hiring a really good criminal attorney right about now
The whole Pence-McCarthy-Lee dynamic playing out needs more examination.
If Lee and Tuberville were part of a plan, then they end up part of an asassination plan of Pence? This must have Lee and Tuberville scared.
An assassination plot against the Vice President, involving Senators of his own party? Either party come to that. Are we perhaps getting way ahead of the evidence…
Even though I do not subscribe to this assassination theory, the rolls of all these folks does need to be straightened out. It seems that, whatever the case, the US Senate itself is not interested today in attaining fidelity on most of these matters.
Here’s a little timeline of this episode as close as I could get it this morning:
https://www.emptywheel.net/2021/02/08/in-his-impeachment-defense-trump-spends-five-times-as-long-not-addressing-the-mike-pence-allegations/#comment-882423
LEE is now trying to adjust the timing: Marcy linking to Rosalind Helderman: https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1360517929176096769
4:15 AM · Feb 13, 2021
Helderman saying that the Senators evacuated at 2:30 PM [Was that her own reporting or is that what LEE told her?]
In that timeline I MISTAKENLY conflated the Trump/Tuberville PHONECALL with the Trump/McCarthy call. There’s a correction further down the thread. OY!
This is why McConnell’s email this AM putting the fix back in was so important, because he cited the constitutionality argument as his reason. That came from one of the statements made by the defense team about how Rep. Raskin had overstepped his bounds by telling Senators what grounds were needed to acquit, and the already-decided constitutional question was part of it.
Now as far as the D’s volte-face on witnesses, I see they did get Rep. Herrera-Beutler’s statement read in as evidence as their price, which makes it part of the record for all future legal actions, both criminal and civil in connection with the Twelfth Day Sedition. Let’s remember that the families of all of the officers adversely affected can sue DJT as well as the PBs and the rest of the riff-raff in addition to the DC USA and city staff bringing criminal charges.
While the Senate outcome was a foregone conclusion, this exercise did open up new evidence for others to use. We might even get a formal legal test of the OLC opinion protecting the POTUS from legal liability for actions taken while in office (i.e. an idea floated and rejected WRT E. Jean Carroll’s still-living claim). At the very least the pattern of lawlessness is established for anyone wanting to take advantage of it. I have no doubt that once the litigation comes, DJT will claim he’s shielded by the OLC opinion (remember that’s his in-house lawyer team) and the private citizen defense he used here will become fake news.
We also have the investigations to come from both House and Senate (and both parties have called for them) to look at the events of 06 JAN 2021. As we have seen almost every day, the information coming out about DJT has been steady, inculpatory, and shows no sign of stopping. Perhaps we’ll get another shot at Roger Stone (who was seen at the Capitol that day as well) or Michael Flynn (since he urged a military coup). A win-win if you ask me.
Kyle Cheney reports that Trump’s team is REALLY SCARED that Dems will call witness.
https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1360589325277274115
8:59 AM · Feb 13, 2021
Marcy says BRING IT!, and I agree.
https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1360590413283930114
9:03 AM · Feb 13, 2021
I know it would endanger his life even more, but Pence should just volunteer to provide a statement under oath. Same with McCarthy.
As for Lee and his call fear, is it possible the call time could be confirmed without his phone? Couldn’t a CDR be requested by the Dems?
(IANAL and NOT tech savvy!)
1] VIDEO of Mark MEADOWS blaming BOWSER for the MAGAmob:
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1358802590952267783
10:39 AM · Feb 8, 2021
2] About Lou DOBBS blaming PELOSI for the MAGAmob.
https://www.mediamatters.org/lou-dobbs/lou-dobbs-suggests-speaker-pelosi-and-sen-mcconnell-are-blame-january-6th-capitol-putsch
01/22/21 6:47 PM
Here’s Marcy with documentation of the “spat” between TRUMP and BOWSER from the SUMMER:
https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1267070629238444034
8:29 AM · May 31, 2020
And here’s the Secret Service DIRECTLY CONTRADICTING Trump:
https://twitter.com/ryanjreilly/status/1266769895112441863
12:34 PM · May 30, 2020
Hunter WALKER was walking with the TRUMP crowd from the rally to the Capitol, reporting through SIRENS that DHS COULD NOT GET THROUGH the CROWD!!!
That was JUST AFTER the Capitol had been placed on lockdown.
https://twitter.com/hunterw/status/1358447602094768132
11:08 AM · Feb 7, 2021
I’m pretty sure the Dems would win the timeline war the GOP is trying to play. The GOP disinformation campaign has a distinction footprint.
Subpoena witnesses and documents for trial
55-Yes
45-No
Romney, Sasse, Murkowski, Collins [?]
Graham changes to yes afterwards.
Is this unexpected Harpie?
I thought the final vote was coming up.
Raskin explains the change here:
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1360608832251166729
10:16 AM · Feb 13, 2021
I’ll let harpie answer for themselves, but I thought that this whole thing was supposed to be a done deal by today. What appears to have happened was that the defense was so bad in lying about what the President knew about Mike Pence that the House Managers decided to call them out on their bullshit. I’m not sure that the defense team even knows that Pence was a Congressman for over a decade, so they should have treaded extra-carefully here. I think the House Managers want to show that Trump was on the phone with both Sen Tuberville and Rep McCarthy DURING THE RIOT, so he knew exactly what was going on at the Capitol. They spent yesterday saying that the President knew nothing, and there was no way to find out what he knew (such as, say, ASKING HIM, since he’s their client), and they called his bluff.
Dems will call Herrera-Beutler [GOP Rep] who said this in a statement last night:
Good for Herrera Beutler for speaking up, obviously, though I’m trying to work out when she first mentioned the details of the McCarthy call. I think she discussed it at a town hall (virtual) on 9 Feb. If that was the first time, it might have helped if she’d mentioned it sooner.
Here’s a link to her statement from yesterday. She links to a statement she made on January 12 in support of the Article of Impeachment.
https://jhb.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=402083
Thank you for that. The 17 January article in the link does include the details (“Well I guess these people are just more angry about the election and upset than you are.”). So it blew up on CNN and got Raskin’s attention because Kevin swore?
XX:XX PM TRUMP / McCARTHY call [text in brackets is paraphrased]
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/12/politics/trump-mccarthy-shouting-match-details/index.html
The penultimate quote has been known for weeks, from JHB herself. So the conversation hit the headlines because of the final quote? Something wrong there surely.
There are said to be more details, here, in VIDEO:
Washington Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler confirms Trump’s heated call with House Republican leader during riot Former President Trump allegedly told Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy the rioters ‘are more upset about the election than you are’ when McCarthy asked for help.
https://www.king5.com/article/news/nation-world/trump-mccarthy-riot-call-jaime-herrera-beutler/507-c332259f-a5cb-4b0a-a2e8-b50e58c62b82
Published: 9:23 PM PST February 12, 2021 // Updated: 8:07 AM PST February 13, 2021
What I haven’t seen mentioned yet, and I admit I might be lacking some context…if the capitol is under attack why would the president care who’s attacking? You should still send in the troops in any case.
Capitol under attack?
Send in the the troops in any case?
You might think that… I know I certainly do…
I can’t say I’m disappointed at what I saw today… it was the outcome I had expected all along.
I’m still astonished at how easily the rioters got as close as they did to Pence… to me, the security breach here is jaw-dropping… I can’t help but think the lack of security, and/or at the very least the serious planning for such an event had to have been deliberate on some peoples’ part.
I see a lot of commenters here are talking about what comes next… actual criminal prosecutions of rioters and where all of this could lead… I just hope some of you are right.
Weak attempt at Perry Mason sauce pretty much.
I’m not following this as closely as EW is (I doubt it’s even possible for me to do so.), but I’m still in the camp that thinks that thus far, this looks like a massive investigation that will ultimately lead to a load of plea bargains, a lot of defendants going bankrupt from legal fees, and a fair number of people going to prison for a very long time.
I don’t think the DOJ would act any differently in the first place, but consider the feedback loop here: Congress is going to be VERY aware of what’s happening with the Capitol Police. They got hit pretty hard, and it’s becoming clearer and clearer that there were some fairly close calls that the Capitol Police averted. Congress may not care about “the little people” most of the time, but the Capitol Police took a bit hit defending them. If the rioters involved aren’t prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, Congress should (rightly) be concerned that the Capitol Police may not be as willing to die defending them if something like this happens again. There’s going to be a lot of pressure on the DOJ to investigate and throw the book at a lot of people. The Republicans will probably blame Biden for prosecuting the rioters when the cameras are running, but behind the scenes, I think the vast majority are going to want a lot of people in prison for a long time.
I’d also point out that misdemeanor trespassing charges are likely appropriate for a lot of people who were involved here, but that’s not going to be “just a misdemeanor”. If you haven’t already been fired, there’s good chance that you will be, and you’re going to be radioactive to a lot of companies for quite some time. It’s going to be like being labeled a sexual predator.
Not from the US Senate it seems—the fix does indeed seem to be in there.
When you are seriously mentally ill, you have complete confidence that your reality will be understood to be true by everyone else. If there is testimony, it’ll be ugly for the defense and the GOP won’t understand what happened.
Precious wisdom. Love it!
I now freely admit that the US Senate is not a qualified psychiatrist for the patient.
In addition to Herrera-Beutler I hope the dems confirm the timestamp on Lee’s call. I hope they find out why Trump called Tuberville specifically. I hope Pence’s challenge on what was presented by Trump’s lawyers about not knowing Pence’s safety was at risk is investigated.
Why? How would that change the outcome of the trial?
https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1360637506274918400
12:10 PM · Feb 13, 2021
OH! Please, please, PLEASE LET IT BE!
Yes…hope..hope…hope…..hope…….hope!!!!
The GOP do seem to have a death wish. (Millenarian/millenialist cultists? I get lost in all that madness.) They let this guy ride first time around and he repaid them by nearly getting them killed.
I get that they are terrified of his base but, in the long run for the GOP, is his base more dangerous if they give the cult leader a free pass or if they come down hard on him?
I watched quite a bit of this trial, being stuck at home from work because of snow, and, if I remember correctly, one of the donald’s lawyers said at one point that impeachment wasn’t appropriate, that if he had done something wrong, take it to an actual court.
Okay, then, as the Ramones might say, c’mon let’s go. There seems to be plenty of evidence out there, so let’s do it in an actual court where his lawyers can’t just play cut-up videos of everyone who ever used the word ‘fight’ without any context whatsoever and think that amounts to a legal case.
He can’t claim immunity any more and his executive privilege must be greatly limited. Make him put his mouth where his money is. Put him on the stand in a court of law where truth and facts actually matter.
Am I just dreaming?
I’m pretty sure there will be lots of investigations and criminal prosecutions about a lot of Trump activities. Once impeachment is over, the threat to Trump shifts to real courtrooms
https://twitter.com/feliciasonmez/status/1360639831827709953
12:19 PM · Feb 13, 2021
<<< https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1360640801680728068
12:23 PM · Feb 13, 2021
Listening to Ciclline… I guess even I knew more than the former POTUS:
https://www.emptywheel.net/2021/01/06/dems-in-disarray-as-the-gop-fractures-over-trump/#comment-873979
This all strikes me as a lost opportunity. You shouldn’t try your case before you have your evidence lined up. What we’ve got now is additional, and possibly quite damning, evidence dribbling out. But it won’t make it into the record for this impeachment, so it won’t have the potential to turn anyone toward conviction who is sitting on the fence.
There was already more than enough evidence to convict. But if a probative piece of evidence shows up, it would be foolish not to try and get it in, which they did by having it read into the record.
The frustrating thing for me about the fiasco over witnesses yesterday was that the “new” evidence wasn’t new. Jaime Herrera Beutler had been talking about Trump’s response to McCarthy for weeks.
Part of it was that the House managers wanted that in the record, and they couldn’t come up with another way to do it, as it had hit the media just the night before.
It was in local media 17 January.
THIS MAN LIVES IN A DELUSION.
The man who equates protests against non-existent voter fraud, promoted by the then president, to protests against racism? big lie v big truth? I wouldn’t be so kind to him.
The veil of delusion is apparently not to be lifted today. :(
12/19/20 TRUMP tweets
https://twitter.com/AndrewFeinberg/status/1360680737922498565
3:02 PM · Feb 13, 2021
I have to remind myself that these lawyers are “just” doing their job, with a difficult case and a difficult client, in a not-exactly-a-trial.
Schoen is, and maybe the other guy. Van der Veen – he’s there to scream and pound the table, because they want to give the GQP an excuse to vote for acquittal.
Well, I’ve served on two DUI jury panels in the L.A. courts, and defense counsel in both those cases presented better (though still unconvincing) arguments to the jury. “The reason he failed the FST is because the laces on my client’s high tops were not tied.”
The last time I was on a jury in L.A. (I haven’t had to go in, in the last 15 years), it was something involving special circumstances – I think the accused had used a gun. The couple times I nearly was on a jury before that, in one case the defense lawyer didn’t show up (oops!) and in the other the defendant decided to plead guilty rather than take his chances with the jury.
I am so sorry to all the college students this week who experienced hate crimes during their Black History Month online events. It is about to get worse.
President’s Day Monday could present a MAGA bellwether …
Well that’s it, Republicans have voted for the end of the experiment.
Make America Gag Again.
Dems Swap Witnesses for Baseless Promise Repubs Will Not Obstruct Biden’s Covid Relief. Burr, Cassady,Toomey Discover Vestigial Notochord.
Final Score, 57-43.
Orange Asshole Seen Waving NYT Headline Overhead. Again.
meanwhile, McConnell delivers valedictory — utterly disingenuous & craven.
Having listened to McConnell’s speech just now, in which he excoriated Trump’s actions but grounded his own vote not to convict in an impeachment trial before the Senate solely upon the proposition that a former president cannot be convicted of impeachable offenses after leaving office, I presume that McConnell certainly will be the first to agree that Congress immediately can and should proceed to exercise Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and disqualify Trump from any future office since he plainly has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” as proscribed by that Amendment.
This obviously can proceed through Congress contemporaneously with the criminal and civil proceedings which also may now be directed against Trump, since under no construct is a former president immune from prosecution, not even under the tenuous US Attorney opinion previously invoked to claim a sitting president should not be subject to such proceedings.
Since it has taken Trump about twelve seconds to publicly announce that “he’s back” now and will actively be campaigning, I’d have to say there is plenty of reason to get going on these logical next steps. I mean, Trump’s own lawyers criticized the mere existence of impeachment proceedings on the ground that the US Attorney’s Office can “prosecute” Trump if he broke the law, and even Mitch McConnell’s only stated ground for voting against impeachment is that he considers it to be the wrong remedy once a president is out of office. So let’s get to it, please, United States Government.
I’d like to see McConnell do exactly that, but I am going to make a wild guess he’ll find more excuses to not hold Trump accountable.
Well said, and excellent spelling :)
McConnell’s actions and arguments 1/13/21 for not convicting Trump because Trump is now out of office ignores the Constitutionality of doing exactly that. McConnell’s argument admits in effect that a president can commit High Crimes and Misdemeanors if there is too little time left in a presidential term to transmit the article of impeachment to the Senate for a trial–ignoring his own refusal to bring the Senate back for an emergency session and ignoring as well that we might not HAVE a Congress had Trump’s insurrection succeeded. When would McConnell have held Trump accountable had the insurrection wiped out the line of presidential succession and martial law had been instituted?
TWO TRUMPs HOSTILE TAKEOVER OF THE
GOPGQP:1/6/21
10:22 AM Donald TRUMP, JR.
12:40 PM
And when you’re a star, they let you do it! Grab ’em by the pussy! – Trump, Sr.
Headline at SFGate: “McConnell votes to acquit, then condemns Trump”
Should have voted to convict…in both impeachments. (Mitch is coming across as trying to have it both ways.)
He’s kicking the can to the DOJ and other prosecutors because he figures there’s no political benefit in it for himself and his party.
Nice office building and career you’ve got there, Senator. It would be a shame if anything happened to them. (And don’t think a basement hallway full of National Guard will keep them safe.)
Donald Trump’s use of garbage can lawyers was less relevant than his resort to Roy Cohn and Al Capone-like tactics. He threatened lives, careers, and fund-raising, his victims believed his threats, and he escaped consequence. It would be hard to find more forceful reasons to find Trump guilty – and to pursue later prosecution – because Trump and his successors will continue to go down that path.
Witnesses and Republican Senators stuck their wet thumbs in the air to gauge the wind – and Donald Trump aimed a blowtorch at them. They froze and refused to act, imagining, like Neville Chamberlain, that appeasement would work this time. Moscow Mitch was, as usual, deeply cynical in admitting Trump’s guilt, but in claiming that conviction in the Senate was the wrong process to remedy it. He and his Trump Republicans have broken government – and mean to go on breaking it. Democrats don’t seem too eager to fix it, but they better rethink that. All our lives depend on it.
What a charade. How do they reconcile this shit in their minds?
I heard a psychologist say that some people are born sociopaths because of the structure/function of their brains. Apparently it shows up in behavior patterns and MRI’s as early as 3 or 4 years old. And other sociopaths are taught to be that way through early and repeated experience and circumstances.
But, apparently, there is a 3rd way to become a sociopath that has yet to be discussed or written about. I suspect now that some become sociopaths by choosing it as a preferable lifestyle. And there are way more of these people than we ever imagined.
At least we are better aware now of some of the systemic structural problems in our society. And we do have courageous and committed younger people willing to step up to some of our most difficult challenges. So, there are avenues for change and paths for hope.
From Ruth BenGhiat
“Historian of coups and right-wing authoritarians here. If there are not severe consequences for every lawmaker & Trump govt official who backed this, every member of the Capitol Police who collaborated with them, this “Strategy of Disruption” will escalate in 2021″
EoH, I am with you in tenor. I am always amazed when someone says to someone else “I am going to punch you in the mouth.” and the someone else thinks it’s not going to happen.
Short relevant story. In platoon/company tactics at USMC Basic School, the plan was always in two parts: a scheme of maneuver and a fire support plan. Schemes of maneuver are the sexy elements people seem to remember. They always seem to forget the fire support plan.
The impeachment trial was the Dem’s scheme of maneuver to “fix” government and not a very good a plan at that. Trump has been and is telling Biden and America in so many words “I am going to punch the US in the mouth. Vigilante justice shall rule. I lead the vigilantes.” Biden, if he had an ounce of concern for the US, would create the real fire support plan. He would create an entire division at the Department of Justice devoted to review of every action Trump ever took. Illlegal in the slightest way? Throw the full weight of the US government at him. Coordinate with various states like NY and Georgia. Biden is afraid of not appearing “fair”. Trump doesn’t care about fairness so let him live in Elba/Saint Helena/Mar-a-Lago and defend himself forever. Same goes for his cronies. Take the battle to Trump. Cobra-Kai – no mercy. I don’t think Biden has it in him to fight that hard for America.
Whether he has it in him or not, I don’t believe he thinks that is an America worth fighting for. Either Trump is put down through the normal working of America’s institutions or those institutions will have finally proved themselves inadequate for constraining the lives of America’s citizens in the manner set forth by the founders and sustained by every generation since.
In other words, the die have already been cast; we just can’t yet tally the numbers. Like Cicero believing he had saved the republic, years after the patrician elite had already ensured it’s destruction, Biden may be simply whistling past the graveyard. It is the American people who will have decided the issue, and they may wish to God that the billionaires, and Facebooks, and the patricians of a free-market-uber-alles ideology had been taken seriously in hand before it came to this.
I don’t think the final assessment of what Biden is willing to do about this disgusting mess is able to be made this early. He has been in office three weeks and has been asked to step on board the Titanic and right the ship, provide cocktails for the passengers after rescuing them from the life boats and make sure the band is playing pleasing music.
Let’s get Merrick Garland installed as AG first. I personally am very invested in getting widespread distribution of vaccinations first. If we aren’t alive it doesn’t matter how many Trumps are out there.
Let’s let US institutions, such as the dept. of justice, get to work on fixing this mess? I think we’re in complete agreement here.
I was arguing that if Biden was to take *extraordinary* measures to deal with Trump, that would be a disaster for the nation. Should Trump, the individual, be neutered through existing institutions, then Biden will have to take extraordinary measures to deal with Trumpism (not the man, but the cultivation of an enormous segment of the population as a cult-like group of fanatics that is committed to an alternative reality, and the use of that segment to further the political goals of a despot). Extraordinary in this case because there are new forces of social power in the world that are presently outside of the domain of current US institutions of government. Networked social media, divorced from face-to-face social contact, in particular, is massively corrosive to the common will of a nation.
The reason that social media is so alarmingly effective at spreading disinformation is because it has unwittingly hacked into an innate, biological mechanism of human social processing. Humans are a hyper-social species, despite the dreams of libertarians, and we have evolved to have instinctual mechanisms for managing our social milieu. Our instinct for language acquisition is the best known, but by no means the only such mechanism. Another is the behavior that is colloquially known as gossiping. Although derided as a cant pleasure of busybodies who have nothing better to do, gossip is actually a fundamental mechanism for measuring and maintaining trust relationships within a group. An extension of grooming behavior in apes, gossip involves intimate discussions between individuals about the behavior of other group members who are not present. It is the critical instrument for creating, maintaining, or destroying the social reputation of group members through a consensus that develops as various threads of gossip spread throughout a society. The “will of the people” actually starts with the reputations of individuals within a group.
In order to develop and sustain cooperative efforts within a group, it is necessary to confront the dilemma of cooperation – that the interests of individuals are often at odds with the interests of the group, in the creation of public goods through cooperative efforts. Ideally, each member of the group would spend enough time with each other member of the group to know them well enough to be able to predict exactly how well they could be trusted in any given situation. That’s the ideal, but nobody has that kind of time. Gossip and reputation allows a shortcut so that a large group can still engage in cooperative ventures without the burden of free riders or saboteurs (disruption of cooperation through jealousies and score-settling can be even worse than free-riding). Those initiating sanctions through gossip risk their own reputation if they do so based on false information, so it is a very democratic mechanism for social evaluation. Like everything else, however, some people are just more skillful than others, especially in an environment where humans are highly specialized (i.e. not anything like the environment where human behavior evolved), so we are not all equal and injustices will happen.
Although the purpose of gossip is to continually re-evaluate the reputation of others, one of the primary ways it is carried out is through the spreading of news: a re-telling what some individuals have been getting up to recently and the events that shaped their behavior. Humans are actually hard-wired to concentrate on the facts presented as gossip and commit them to memory since a situational awareness is so crucial to behavioral evaluation. Critically, though, gossip must be conveyed in face-to-face conversation, with all the unnoticed emotional clues that are also communicated in addition to raw speech, for that evaluation to be fair.
Social media co-opts the trust we instinctively give to those who provide gossip while bypassing the checks and balances that evolution has built in to prevent fraudulent or malevolent actors from misusing gossip for their own ends. That misuse is compounded by the ability of social media to target particular messages to individuals in secret, so that there are no backstops where the passing of bad information can be flagged and countered through public rebuttal. A further problem with secrecy is due to the phenomenon of “risky shift”, studied by psychologists in the 60s, whereby isolated groups have a tendency to develop more extreme views than would be expressed by any of the individual group members.
By watching what people decide to share on social media, and who they follow, social media companies are able to measure an individual’s degree of belief in any number of memes or narratives that are circulating through their platform. When people go on to share “gossip” that they have received through social media, cognitive dissonance strongly reinforces their beliefs because they are putting their own reputation on the line by spreading gossip themselves. The whole social media ecosystem becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop for indoctrination, but one where the gods who run the system are able to stick their fingers in and manipulate the beliefs and convictions of people who genuinely believe themselves to be following their own free will.
We need to somehow get back to a place where at least 3/4 of the population can agree on a shared reality for our institutions to once again work toward finding consensus among a large and diverse population. Without that, democracy can not hold out for long.
If I read you correctly, fire support is what enables a plan of maneuver to succeed. Without it, your troops may be on the wrong end of a shooting gallery.
I think Raskin and his team did a good job with what they had to work with. But my impression of this proceeding was that, like Lt. Gorman in Aliens, Democratic leadership left its frontline impeachment troops without ammo and with little more than harsh words.
Pretty much so. I would just add I think the Dems underestimated the Reps as they seemingly always do and so the scheme fell short and the support didn’t exist. Biden has the back-up plan, maneuver and fire support, with DoJ. I just think Biden is going to underestimate the Reps by thinking he doesn’t want to present ammunition to the Reps with a Trump intensive review, a review that would automatically be characterized by the Reps and Trump as revenge for the Biden Hunter attacks. Biden of course should be thinking about the damage to the country and dealing unemotionally in that fashion but I don’t think he is built that way. He is still thinking like a Senator.
As i said above, give the man a chance, he has been in office three weeks.
Biden hasn’t done anything visible about Trmp because *it’s not his job* – it’s now up to DoJ, and they need the AG confirmed soon. (A problem because the Rs don’t want competent leadership there or at Interior. They *know* about the corruption of the last four years, and are afraid of what will come out.)
Via Ted Boutrous: Stacey Plaskett will be on air with Joy Ann Reid tonight at 9PM ET:
https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/1360709848183296005
If you have the time and space then softening enough to weep for America’s failing now is proper and fitting.
Doing so won’t weaken your resolve.
And anger will rise again when needed.
To re-use the sentiments of some S.E. Asian monk, “If you don’t cry for America now then when will you?”
We have an unsurprising but still dismaying result. Could I please suggest some longer term implications. I can’t tell which thread this belongs to, some of yours seem very specific, and while I might want to offer CS Pierce in preference to Dewey, that seems too loose, so it is here and if you want to move it, please do.
What has happened here: this coup attempt and its suppression, seems to me to amount to the USA experiencing, internally, exactly what it has done to other countries across the world for at least a hundred and sixty-five years, and possibly longer. I choose that date because that early example is Cuba. You will know a lot, or all, of the examples, so I don’t need to repeat – relatively recent examples include US collusion with the mafia in opposition to the Italian fascists; collusion with the Greek fascists who fronted the ‘Colonels’ in opposition to the communists; support (or ownership) from 1955, to the Vietnamese ‘empire’, and so on through Chile, etc.
This is not sanctimonious or anti-US. I am British (and half Irish) and I know very well just how much similar stuff there is in my (recent and old) history, and the same activities are an important part of the history and, importantly, the present psychology and institutional memory of, at least, France, Japan, Russia, Turkey, China, Spain, South African, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, and I don’t know where else – maybe Ethiopia, certainly Belgium, but point made.
My point is that all this activity, recruiting and paying for destructive agents, propagandising, murder and smaller kinds of personal ruin, up to overthrowing governments, needs people. Those people are themselves recruited and (in my terms) corrupted, and trained – often intensively, and paid for, and they organise, incite and accumulate followers, most of whom don’t understand how they are being manipulated.
It seems to me no surprise then if there are people on the fringes of our establishments – sanctioned, but still on the fringes, who see governments and institutional structures as contingent, local, temporary and manipulable and who, now, see the US as vulnerable to exactly the same destructive techniques they have applied to El Salvador, or wherever. These are the people who have been trained and funded by your government. That isn’t to say there aren’t people with similar attitudes trained and funded by other governments, especially Russian, but the numbers and power are with your own.
There is a subtle and very difficult business in here, which is that we need, and sometimes desperately need ‘spooks’ – by which I mean people who will actively and sometimes murderously work at overthrowing governments, or at least at disrupting and damaging them, but we don’t want to have them ‘getting above themselves’ and trying to wreck our lives, or even the lives of people we get along with.
The way I feel about it is that people who took part in the ‘Contra’ killings in Nicaragua, or who paid for the murdering regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala (never mind the mass murderers in ‘British’ Kenya, or all those hangings in colonial Egypt), ‘ought’ to die in prison, but I don’t really believe life is that simple, so sod my feelings.
My fear, for all that, and that was the original point of this post, is that the US ‘institutional memory’ has been corrupted by these foreign adventures, so that some, like Michael Flynn, really do believe those same techniques, which were never legitimate in most of the places the were used, but which they have been persuaded were somehow OK ‘out there’, are also appropriate in your capital. If you like, being evil ‘abroad’ just makes us tough for what ‘we’ think we should do ‘at home’. There is an analogy, or even a close comparison, because the US support for the Italian mafia in and after the second world war meant they (your government) made deals with ‘Lucky’ Luciano and his cronies, so ‘abroad’ and ‘at home’ can’t really be separated.
I don’t know how to excise that corruption. Even West Germany did it by tolerating old Nazis in some positions of authority until they died; even Japan did it by breaking up some of the old Zaibatsu and giving the rest to the children of the imperialists. The US, Britain, France, and so on, have never been so corrupt as those countries at their worst (since at least the eighteen sixties), but we all have deep seated institutional memory, including all those techniques for rotting and breaking governments, which you are experiencing and I don’t know how they can be stopped, but I do know, for sure, that when they show up onshore (Britain in the early 1970s, for example) they can kill you.
I don’t think I have been clear enough. I have been trying to think this through for months. I have acquaintances who will go ‘schadenfreude’ – americans got what they deserved, but I DON’T think that, not at all, even though I think some of the present US horror is a consequence of earlier US activity, now internalised. I think we, the world, is better for the good in the USA (and I have Taj Mahal playing behind me), so facing the evil is useful and getting rid of it is a bastard.
Thank you for this thoughtful and thought- provoking comment.
I will say what I’m sure will be very unpopular here. And it’s not a big thing, exactly. But at some point Jamie Raskin was talking about battles the US has fought to keep our (US) Democracy safe. Among those, he put Vietnam on the list. I was horrified, and can’t get it out of my mind. Was he pandering to R Senators? Or does he really believe that? Was that something worth saying in the context? I didn’t think so.
Not unpopular with me Valley Girl, and I was there.
TY. Just so no one has to read my mind, it was this in Christopher Blanchard’s comment that triggered my own comment:
“even though I think some of the present US horror is a consequence of earlier US activity, now internalised.”
Good God, did he really say that?
“His father, Marcus Raskin, was a young aide in John F Kennedy’s White House, a fierce activist against the Vietnam war” and “Marcus was a stalwart of the antiwar movement—he co-edited The Vietnam Reader, which was used at teach-ins across the nation, and he stood trial … for urging resistance to the draft”.
If anyone has a link to that speech of Raskin I’d appreciate it.
Or even a day and time when it was said – C-Span will have it but I’d love a starting point beforehand.
I want to see if Iraq was on the list – though I suppose that Iraq 1 is debatable and that “Vietnam and Iraq” would cover both Iraq 2 and 1 without distinguishing.
skua – I can’t yet find the part I was referring to but I will keep looking. And I may well end up with a very red face. I just couldn’t compute what I thought Raskin said at the time and it’s still bugging me.
And it suddenly hit me that maybe Raskin said “Antietam” NOT “Vietnam”. That makes a whole lot more sense, him being from Maryland.
I don’t have much more to search, and I will report back anon. VG
Cancel that timeline. Turns out I have a lot more to search. b/c I didn’t find it in the session I thought it was in. I’ll have to come back to this later. But, as above…
Yes, I like that possibility much better…
bmaz made a comment and I answered. It covers most of what I wanted to explain to you.
To that I’ll add that I’ve heard or read the word Antietam maybe ?200? times in my life. It seemed to come from nowhere when it popped into my mind today. How many times have I read or heard the word Vietnam? Beyond counting.
I do want to find the part where Raskin used the word. I am guessing it was during one of his streams of words. No insult to him meant at all.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2021/02/14/mike-lee-provides-key-evidence-implicating-trump-in-the-existing-criminal-conspiracy/#comment-882678
I’m sure you know more civil war history than I do, as I’m not American. Good luck in finding the relevant part of his speech (and I’ve mis-heard and mis-remembered many things).
Mind telling me your nationality? Canadian, Brit of some stripe?
Antietam was a bloody horror, and the battlefield there remains a haunted and haunting place. I only visited once but will never forget it. North Carolina, not the site of major CW battles, was still trapped in Lost Cause amber when I lived there as a child; I can only imagine growing up in a state like Maryland where the spilled blood still feeds the taproots.
Correcting myself: The part of North Carolina where we lived (outside Raleigh) never saw battles. I spent a lot of time in our overgrown backyard searching for bullets and things, but to no avail.
I’ve visually scanned the C- Span auto transcripts of days 1-4 where Ruskin was identified by C-Span as the speaker.
C-Span did not name most of the speakers in the “Impeachment Trial, Day 4, Senators’ Questions” transcript.
The start times I noted for Ruskin speaking there were 0:09:50, 0:57:37, 1:00:55, 1:27:40, 1:42:02, 1:56:25, 2:07:12, 2:25:50.
Nothing found yet.
Day 5 will have to wait.
Raskin!
I never replied to this in a timely way because I didn’t turn up any Vietnam reference in my not thorough search. Then I read about Raskin’s dad. Also, the discussion around Julian Bond, who was a particular hero of mine as a young teenager in late sixties, makes Vietnam seem unlikely on that list. Antietam sounds way better. I followed closely, but couldn’t remember at what point Raskin was talking about worthwhile US foreign undertakings, as opposed to the usual BS.
Sorry to have sent you off on a fruitless search.
Julian Bond on Saturday Night Live:
I can’t find the whole skit, this is the last half minute:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2m6cv0
VG: I’m not sure if you’re looking for something specifically from Impeachment. If not, here is Raskin in December:
https://twitter.com/repraskin/status/1337461591156150280
1:17 PM · Dec 11, 2020
In this clip, he notes that this particular statue of LEE had been placed at ANTIETAM [!] in 2003 [!]. He compares that to Trump not being able to accept his LOST ELECTION, and building a new “LOST CAUSE” mythology around it.
The American experiment was set up as a democratic constitutional republic.
That is utterly dependent on ethical propriety.
There was a gauge on the ethical propriety of the nation when a POTUS lying to a court under oath was widely judged as “not a problem”.
The Bush-Cheney violations followed. And now Trump and the GOP have blasted ethical propriety.
Your presentation of the destabilisation as coming from trained destuctors who have brought their work home is useful. It suggests that all high level security and intelligence personel need to be carefully vetted for Trumpist links.
https://twitter.com/AriBerman/status/1360703942255067137
4:34 PM · Feb 13, 2021
Thanks, harpie. I followed your link and think his next tweet brings into focus the imbalance very well:
“…US Senate is:
-split 50-50 but Dems represent 41 million more people
-15 states with 38 million people elect 30 GOP senators
-California with 40 million people elects 2 Dems ”
Unless pioneers from the more populous Democratic states start settling in the less populated and traditionally Republican leaning states, the imbalance in the Senate will continue to grow.
The other option is merging the low-population states: the Dakotas become one state, Wyoming gets merged with Montana…
Wydaho!
Movin’ to Wydaho! soon, gonna be a dental floss tycoon …
Precisely!
Somewhat on-topic: House impeachment Manager Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands) was an effective speaker as were the others in the group.
At the post-Senate vote press conference, Plasket defended her group’s decision to forgo witnesses for several reasons including the potential delay it could have caused.
She cited as an example the subpoena for McGann from the first Trump impeachment, that this subpoena is STILL tied up on the courts through 2021.
I was surprised that the subpoena was not mooted by Trump surviving the first impeachment Senate trial. What keeps the McGann subpoena alive?
Also, wasn’t McGann’s subpoena issued by a House committee during the impeachment “inquiry” phase and not during the fully voted-upon impeachment “investigation?”
I recall bmaz explaining that an “impeachment investigation” would be the firmest footing for overcoming Presidential privilege issues in court. Did the House ever resubmit the subpoena as part of the impeachment investigation? No one from the press asked her to clarify so maybe I am mistaken?
Oh, I misremembered. A full House vote or at least a House Committee vote on a resolution of an impeachment INQUIRY would be a surer footing to overcome legal stonewalling by the executive branch.
No time for any of that, gots to get it all over with!
The inimitable
Charles P Pierce:
bmaz has a screenshot of Trump’s statement here:
https://twitter.com/bmaz/status/1360794413820047364
He is talking to his people,
not WE the PEOPLE.
It’s like they have seceded from US.
Again.
It’s not exactly like they’re guaranteed to be seceding again. This time, as “they” contemplate renewing the same sort of cavalier menacing and brazen lawlessness, this “people” need to factor in what they now know about whether Donald Trump “has their backs”:
First, he doesn’t and he never did. He just proved it. Ask the rioters who woke up without their presumed pardons being granted for their “taking orders”. That’s got to leave a mark.
And second, there’s a new and different president and the likelihood he is going to even tolerate, let alone pardon, any such recurrence of similarly seditious nihilism might be apparent to even the most idiotic of these cultists.
The air is coming out of the balloon a lot faster than Trump will be able to reinflate it. Being a “foot soldier” for this out-of-power demagogue isn’t going to be as fashionable a gig as it was before. Especially while we all wait for him to reenact the recruiting interview scene from Stripes in numerous TV interviews: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGfzWwT-35M
Oh, and assuming that McConnell will have their backs and refuse to allow legislation to get a vote in the Senate is now, officially, a pipe dream. “You don’t have the votes” is the answer to that, not to mention that McConnell has publicly asserted that Trump is guilty, and whether or not that’s just a short term shuck and jive or not, it doesn’t suggest that “the movement” that Trump claims to lead is anything like robust. Sure, it will be noisy and confrontational. But it won’t have the votes.
Next time they won’t have people at the top backing them.
Said the King to the Duke, “Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”
His people have been spoon-fed their victimhood. The religious have been given the gift of righteousness in his cause. They will be glorified in martyrdom. (see Rittenhouse).
Look at the States run by the GQP, laws now in committee to disenfranchise voters by the millions. The heads of the RP are full-on Trump supporters. They hold the purse strings, they find the people to primary current officeholders, they call the shots. GOP Governors have allowed tens of thousands to die so they could prove their loyalty to Trump.
Four years of a sepsis infection killed America yesterday. Our leaders, who had the ability to save us, stood by the bed and watched the grand experiment die.
I think the obituaries for the country are a bit premature.
We’ll see ongoing poll results showing Trump’s level of popularity.
I wouldn’t currently bet the farm on any specific outcome.
And I really hope that the Trump-world-celebrity-figures realise that they are at great risk from violent Trumpists seeking to create an environment conducive to their aims.
He’s lees popular now than he was in November. By a lot.
Could This Video Have Incited the Jan. 6 Rioters?
Little attention has been paid to a video that was shown at the January 6 “March to Save America” rally in Washington, D.C. Jason Stanley, a scholar of fascist propaganda, claims that this video—shown immediately after Rudy Giuliani left the stage, prior to the attack on the Capitol—was full of themes and tactics that threaten liberal democracy. He joins the program to offer his analysis.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/could-video-have-incited-jan-6-rioters-fivtx7/
The whole INTENTION of that rally was to RABBLE ROUSE, and TRUMP was VERY involved in the details.
I did a timeline of the rally the other day at this comment thread:
https://www.emptywheel.net/2021/02/08/in-his-impeachment-defense-trump-spends-five-times-as-long-not-addressing-the-mike-pence-allegations/#comment-882266
The propaganda you mentioned in the PBS story happened just after Giuliani and just before Trump spoke [although it was close to an hour before Trump spoke, which I find curious.]
In that timeline is the link to a Just Security article from 2/4 called
Movie at the Ellipse: A Study in Fascist Propaganda Scholars on the Nazis and anti-Semitism have seen this before
Savage Librarian linked to that article here:
https://www.emptywheel.net/2021/02/04/doj-moves-towards-parallel-conspiracy-threads-on-the-oath-keepers-and-proud-boys/#comment-880916
I responded there, and also brought up that it was NOT the first TIME that VIDEO had been used. [See more info there] Also, see there a thread about Trump using Nazi type propaganda when he returned to the WH from his covid 19 hospitalization.
At Least 9 Far-Right Insurrectionists Have A History Of Violence Against Women
A HuffPost investigation found that multiple men arrested for the U.S. Capitol insurrection have restraining orders against them over domestic violence accusations. Others have faced charges and served prison time for sexual assault.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nine-far-right-insurrectionists-have-a-history-of-violence-against-women_n_60198d1ec5b6bde2f5c35bd6?
harpie, thank you for that link. Reading the article made me conclude that we need to replace the term domestic violence with “domestic terrorism,” as used by the one police report cited. Terrorism in all forms has the same purpose: to intimidate, coerce and silence–to bully others so as to get one’s way. The use of violence to achieve that end is what makes it terrorism. And the saddest of all is the fear of so many to go on the record, not only victims but witnesses too, because terrorism works. That is why Trump and his allies resorted to it, and will do so again.
I know what you mean, and sympathise, but I’m not convinced. If domestic violence becomes domestic terrorism then I assume we need a new term for domestic terrorism. And it’ll take a while for me to get used to my neighbour saying the guy across the street is a terrorist, rather than the guy across the street beats his wife. What’s next, the school yard bully is a ten year old terrorist? Perhaps a bully is, well, a bully. Lastly, witnesses and victims of “traditional” terrorism aren’t that reluctant to come forward, because it’s not usually personal.
NOT o/t:
https://twitter.com/MacFarlaneNews/status/1361338824589275140
10:37 AM · Feb 15, 2021
https://extremism.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs2191/f/Michael%20John%20Lopatic%20Govt%20Motion%20for%20Pretrial%20Detention.pdf
Here, via Laura Rozen, is a link to a local news article about him:
https://twitter.com/hugetinymistake/status/1361339240890707970