An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Embattled social media platform Parler is offline after Apple, Google and Amazon pulled the plug on the site after the violent riot at the U.S. Capitol last week that left five people dead. But while the site is gone (for now), millions of posts published to the site since the riot are not. A lone hacker scraped millions of posts, videos and photos published to the site after the riot but before the site went offline on Monday, preserving a huge trove of potential evidence for law enforcement investigating the attempted insurrection by many who allegedly used the platform to plan and coordinate the breach of the Capitol.
The hacker and internet archivist, who goes by the online handle @donk_enby, scraped the social network and uploaded copies to the Internet Archive, which hosts old and historical versions of web pages. In a tweet, @donk_enby said she scraped data from Parler that included deleted and private posts, and the videos contained "all associated metadata." The scraped videos from Parler appear to also include the precise location data of where the videos were taken. That metadata could be a gold mine of evidence for authorities investigating the Capitol riot, which may tie some rioters to their Parler accounts or help police unmask rioters based on their location data.
CNN anchor Don Lemon obviously didn't have time for the usual Fox News claims of President Donald Trump's superiority on Monday, less than a week after Trump instigated an attempted coup at the Capitol because he lost an election. Lemon called Trump the "biggest snowflake" and the "biggest loser" after the president's campaign spokesman Hogan Gidley gave a ridiculous answer to a question about whether Trump felt "emasculated" after Twitter banned him. “Look, I wouldn’t say emasculated. I mean, the most masculine person I think to ever hold the White House is the president of the United States,” Hogan said.
Lemon paused, then annihilated Trump and his enablers.
"I‘ve heard a lot of pathetic things from this White House, this one really takes the cake," Lemon said. “A big tough guy who incited a riot and then hid in the White House for five days, and still refuses to take responsibility.” Lemon told Hogan to “shut up” in a word of simple yet brilliant advice. "He is the biggest snowflake of them all, the biggest one," Lemon said then mocked Hogan. "’I don’t want to hear about your feelings. Give me facts and not feelings.’ Why are you coddling his feelings all the time? Why are you coddling all of these people's feelings?”
Lemon cited as an example of Republicans coddling their supporters’ feelings one of the rioters who wore costume horns complaining through his mother that he’s not eating in lockup because staff members won’t serve him an all organic meal. Jacob Anthony Chansley, of Arizona, was arrested Saturday on federal charges of “knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority” and violent entry, and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.
“It is alleged that Chansley was identified as the man seen in media coverage who entered the Capitol building dressed in horns, a bearskin headdress, red, white and blue face paint, shirtless, and tan pants,” the Department of Justice said in a news release. “This individual carried a spear, approximately 6 feet in length, with an American flag tied just below the blade.”
“Snowflakes,” Lemon called him and others. “Cowards. The president’s legacy will be not the most masculine president but the biggest loser we have ever had as president. Maybe that should’ve been the name of his show instead of The Apprentice, The Biggest Loser. Look where he has led the Republican party. Look where he has led this country. Look where we are right now. This country is in flames.”
Trump told his supporters just moments before they violently stormed the Capitol to "fight much harder," to "walk down to the Capitol" and "show strength." He hung his own vice president, Mike Pence, out to dry, claiming, “when you catch somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules.” It's no wonder the angry mob that attacked the Capitol reportedly yelled: "Hang Mike Pence." It got its marching orders from Trump.
“We will never give up,” the president told supporters. “We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that is what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal.”
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is spending its final days under the Trump administration continuing to protect agents who were part of the racist and vile Facebook group exposed by ProPublica a year and a half ago. House Oversight and Reform Chair Carolyn Maloney said this week that the agency has continued to fail to fully comply with a subpoena demanding agency documents.
“The committee remains extremely concerned by the lengths to which the Trump administration is going—even in its final days—to place the interests of employees who made racist and sexually depraved posts ahead of the wellbeing of the children and families they interact with every day,” Maloney wrote to Acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan. Her office warned that because the subpoena is now expired, “a new subpoena would be issued this Congress if CBP continues to refuse to comply.”
ProPublica had reported that CBP had been refusing to provide probe findings to congressional investigators including who was behind the gross posts, or even the names of the few agents who were disciplined for their participation in this group where members mocked the death of a teenaged boy in the agency’s custody in 2019, among many other vile and sickening acts. Of the nearly 140 employees who were ultimately investigated, only a handful were fired.
An internal document revealed by the House Oversight Committee also showed the agency in fact negotiated a deal to protect agents who had been recommended for termination. “In one case, an employee who was recommended for removal had their penalty reduced to a seven-day suspension,” Maloney said at the time.
“CBP concealed the identities of employees who were disciplined, the specific abuses they committed, their roles and responsibilities, and other critical information,” she slammed in her letter to Morgan this week. “As a result, the committee is unable to determine who was fired, who was suspended, who had their punishments reduced or eliminated entirely and why, and whether any of these employees continue to work with immigrant children or families.”
“There is no legitimate basis for CBP’s position that Congress may not know the identity of federal employees—paid with taxpayer funds—who engage in abuses for which they are fired, suspended, or otherwise disciplined,” she continued. She’s absolutely correct, and the fact is that federal immigration agencies like CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have felt unaccountable to no one in the Trump era.
That must change when the new administration takes office next week. In his immigration plan released during this campaign, President-elect Joe Biden said that he’ll “increase resources for training and demand transparency in and independent oversight over ICE and CBP’s activities. Under a Biden administration, there will be responsible, Senate-confirmed professionals leading these agencies, and they will answer directly to the president.”
But as aggressive as CBP has been, the Biden administration must be as aggressive—and then double that—in demanding accountability. Trump is continuing to rile up the agency by visiting the border as his administration is set to end in just a few days—and as his supporters, egged on by him, ransacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
“This final calling card from Trump should be a wake up call for President-elect Biden to end CBP’s role in detention and in processing of people seeking asylum, limit CBP’s use of force, and create new mechanisms to ensure that CBP’s abuses are promptly investigated,” American Civil Liberties Union Director of Border Strategies Jonathan Blazer said in a statement received by Daily Kos. “We need a reckoning on the role and power of CBP, now.”
Contradicting numerous administration claims, The Washington Post reports that the FBI did indeed have advance information that attendees at the Jan. 6 rally promoted by Donald Trump were planning violence, and in fact shared their plans to attack the U.S. Capitol. The Norfolk, Virginia, FBI office assembled a report describing those plans, based on communications between extremists, and officials at the bureau's head office were briefed of those dangers one day before the attacks.
"Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa [sic] slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die."
Planners also shared maps of the inside of the Capitol, and of the tunnels underneath the building that lawmakers could potentially escape to.
Again, then, we have confirmation that top FBI officials were aware of a threat to Congress posed by the assembling far-right extremists—confirmation that goes against Trump administration claims that the violence was not foreseen. There is no question that top administration officials were aware of plans for violence, because those plans were being publicly made, extremism experts were warning of them, and law enforcement was collecting evidence of them.
Despite all these warnings, Capitol Police forces received no backup from federal law enforcement or the Department of Defense. Not the standard backup provided during far smaller planned protests. Not any.
Defenses from Trump administration officials have ranged from flatly lying about the incident, as with claims that the violence was not predicted, to racist claims that because the assembled crowd was white Trump supporters, it was thought that the risk of violence was lower than during other protests. But Trump and his top officials conspicuously filled top ranks of each department with only the most trusted of allies, and conducted wholesale purges of the disloyal inside the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and other key federal posts responsible for responding to this violence. It was not subtle, and it escalated in recent months.
The simplest explanation for why agencies under the control of Trump's own vetted allies would ignore even cursory safety precautious as the most violent extremists in America flocked to a protest at the U.S. Capitol, one specifically demanding the overthrow of U.S. government, is that Trump's installed loyalists conspired to do so. This is not a shocking conspiracy theory; it is what Trump's installed loyalists have done as Trump has committed all number of other crimes and manipulations. Trump's top officials stonewalled Congress, refusing to provide testimony after they witnessed Trump attempting to extort a foreign leader for his own benefit, and assisted him afterward in purging from government those that did testify.
The lack of security at the Capitol was an intentional act. We do not yet know how many officials participated, but it required the cooperation of at least several. All the others should be investigated for gross incompetence. It is one thing to be caught unaware by a violent planned attack that was widely being warned of beforehand. It is another to refuse to provide rescue during the attack, as congressional leaders and the vice president hid in safe rooms and called various agencies warning that there were injuries, possibly deaths, and that many other lives were now in danger.
That is treason, and should result in more than mere resignations.
Fixing VOA is going to be a nightmare, but very important
The White House Correspondents’ Association on Tuesday condemned Voice of America’s move to reassign a White House reporter who questioned Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday after a speech.
The taxpayer-funded media organization reassigned Patsy Widakuswara after she asked Pompeo if he regretted saying there will be a second Trump administration, WHCA President Zeke Miller, said in a statement. Widakuswara also asked Pompeo what he was doing to improve the United States’ reputation. Pompeo did not respond to Widakuswara’s questions in a video she posted.
Miller said the reassignment gave “comfort” to attempts to inhibit freedom of the press.
“At a moment when the world already has watched an assault on our democratic institutions, the Trump administration has chosen to send another message — with an assault on the First Amendment,” Miller said in the statement. “The move, mere hours before Widakuswara was to fly with the president as a member of the travel pool on Air Force One, harms the interests of all Americans who depend on the free press to learn about the actions of their government and gives comfort to efforts to restrict press freedom around the world.”
A VOA spokesperson declined to respond to the WHCA statement, saying the organization “does not comment on internal personnel matters.”
Pompeo’s speech Monday at Voice of America's headquarters in Washington on "Reclaiming America's Voice for Freedom” included remarks that VOA’s mission was to be “accurate, objective, and comprehensive.”
“Your mission is to promote democracy, freedom, and American values all across the world,” Pompeo said. “It’s a U.S. taxpayer-funded institution aimed squarely at that. Indeed, this is what sets VOA apart from MSNBC and Fox News and the like.”
“It is not fake news for you to broadcast that this is the greatest nation in the history of the world and the greatest nation that civilization has ever known,” Pompeo said.
The Pentagon is confronting a resurgence of white supremacy and other right-wing ideologies in the ranks and is scrambling to track how acute the problem has become in the Trump era.
It's an issue that has simmered in the military for years, but is now front and center following signs that former military personnel played a role in the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol last week.
Tackling the influence of hate groups, racist propaganda and anti-government sentiment in the officer corps and enlisted ranks must be an immediate task for Joe Biden’s pick for secretary of Defense, retired Gen. Lloyd Austin, according to lawmakers, retired military leaders and experts on extremism. If confirmed, Austin would be the first Black defense secretary.
“There is a crisis issue: the rise of extremism and white supremacy in the ranks,” Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), a retired Army officer and member of the House Armed Services Committee, said in an interview. “That has been fueled by President [Donald] Trump, unfortunately. So that has to be dealt with right away and unequivocally. That’s top of the list.”
The overall problem of right-wing extremism has dogged the military for decades and tends to be more severe when there is a rise in wider society.
It has gained new attention in the wake of the revelation that a retired senior Air Force officer allegedly took part in last Wednesday's riot in the U.S. Capitol and a Navy veteran who also played a leading role was arrested over the weekend. Meanwhile, a rioter who was killed while trying to break into Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office suite was also an Air Force veteran who espoused far-right and QAnon conspiracies.
The recent events are coming less than a month after the acting Defense secretary directed a review of Pentagon policies meant to address hate groups in the military, which will include recommendations for punishing those who take part in extremist activity.
A 2020 survey found that more than one-third of all active-duty troops and more than half of minority service members reported witnessing first-hand examples of white nationalism or other ideologically-driven racism.
“To an even greater degree than in previous surges of extremism," he added, "the Internet has played a role in the present one, with extremist content found on websites, discussion forums, chat rooms, social media, messaging apps, gaming and streaming sites, and other platforms."
Pitcavage recounted a litany of incidents involving right-wing extremists in the ranks over the past few years, including: troops offering to teach how to make explosives and target left-wing activists, joining pro-Nazi organizations and traveling to Ukraine without orders to train with a right-wing militia. A Florida National Guardsman even founded a neo-Nazi group.
But the military’s record of detecting such elements is “haphazard” at best, Pitcavage told POLITICO.
“That almost all of the extremists in these examples were initially exposed by journalists or anti-racist activists is another troubling sign that the military branches may not be engaged in sufficient self-scrutiny,” he said.
The Pentagon maintains that it hasn't let its guard down. “We don’t tolerate extremists in our ranks. That’s the bottom line," said chief spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman. "And we haven’t."
"Any effort and any opportunity we have to identify individuals that have extremist behaviors or extremist tendencies they will be addressed and they will be referred to appropriate authorities for addressing that," he added. "That has been the premise of the Department as long as it has been in place and we will continue to do so.”
Crow, in a call over the weekend with Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, requested the "expedited investigation and courts-martial against those involved" in last week's riot. The military could also try former personnel in military courts.
The Congress member also said he asked McCarthy to direct the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division to review the backgrounds of all troops who will be deployed at Biden’s inauguration next week “to ensure that deployed members are not sympathetic to domestic terrorists,” his office said in a statement.
And on Monday, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat and Iraq War veteran, also demanded the Pentagon investigate the allegations that troops and military retirees played a role in the storming of the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
Pitcavage said extremist infiltration of the military commonly comes in two forms: those with extreme ideologies who attempt to join the military, and military personnel who join or become sympathetic to an extremist movement.
He said in an interview he believes “the vast majority of them actually became extremist after they were in the military.”
A number of right-wing extremists groups, such as the Oath Keepers, expressly recruit members from the military, he notes.
Such elements constitute only a small percentage of the estimated 20 million Americans who have served in the armed forces. But extremists are seen as having far-reaching consequences for the military itself, including posing security threats, undermining morale and damaging recruitment and retention.
They also present a mortal threat to civil-military relations, said George Reed, a retired Army colonel and military policeman who investigated white supremacists for Army CID.
"The basic currency for the United States military is faith and confidence of the American people," said Reed, who is now dean of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. "When these incidents of racial and ethnic extremism take place, it goes directly to that question."
The Pentagon says it is well aware it has a problem.
In a memo last month, acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller directed a review of "current policy, laws, and regulations concerning active participation by service members in extremist or hate group activity."
He also requested two separate reports: a set of recommendations on "initiatives to more effectively prohibit extremist or hate group activity," which is due at the end of June, and one from the Pentagon's General Counsel to propose any changes to the Uniform Code of Military Justice "to address extremist activity within the military," which is due a month later.
A number of researchers who track hate groups insist that the Pentagon lacks the necessary training and procedures to adequately police the problem.
“This is an empirical question,” Reed said. “How many extremist incidents occur, how many people identified, how many crimes committed? All those things are countable. The question to ask is, ‘are they being counted in such a way? And is that being tracked over time?'"
“These questions are answerable,” he added, "but when they get up in front of a congressional hearing those questions can't be answered.”
He also noted that in nearly every instance in which extremists have been identified, the individuals exhibited warning signs.
“In every case that I've been aware of, there were plenty of signals that there were problems,” Reed said. “Those signals range from statements to tattoos and symbology and subscriptions to certain publications to internet activity.”
But there is no uniform or sustained process for tracking such behavior. “We don’t have an accurate grasp other than to say it is clear, it is growing," Crow said. "That's why we need the data."
The potential role of current and former military personnel in last week's riot is particularly alarming to those who have been raising concerns about the issue and hope the Pentagon leadership will finally take more aggressive action.
Jones, who also served as national security adviser under former President Barack Obama, said he plans to bring up his concerns about growing extremism in the military in a call on Tuesday with Marine Commandant Gen. David Berger.
"That is one of the questions I tend to ask," he said on Monday. "In society, I have seen a rise. If it exists in society, it exists in the military."
Of paramount importance, Pitcavage added, is “the military’s ability to detect people who are extremist trying to get into the military."
But that might not be the biggest worry. “Some people are not extremists when they go into the military, but become extremists at some point while they are in the military," he said.
Only to be proven a liar when Trump opens his mouth
GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy told House Republicans Monday that President Donald Trump bears some blame for last week’s deadly Capitol riots and has accepted some responsibility, according to four Republican sources on a private call.
McCarthy’s remarks came during a House GOP-wide conference call — their first meeting since a mob of pro-Trump rioters assaulted the Capitol building and left five people dead in an attempt to halt the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. McCarthy also told members that he urged Trump to call up Biden and congratulate him for his win, sources said.
The California Republican’s description of his conversation with Trump runs counter to the public stance held by the president, who hasn’t accepted any blame for encouraging his supporters to go to the Capitol and pressure lawmakers into overturning his 2020 loss.
The GOP meeting, which lasted over two hours,offered Republicans an opportunity to air their safety concerns, ask questions about the attack, and discuss ways other than impeachment to hold Trump accountable for his role in inciting the violent mob. Democrats are aiming to bring impeachment articles to the floor this week and are expecting to get some bipartisan support.
McCarthy — who is one of Trump’s closest allies and is opposed to impeachment — acknowledged that they have some serious work to do in uniting the GOP conference, which is now bitterly divided.
“Now is a far greater and more urgent task,” McCarthy told members on the call, according to one source familiar with the remarks.
To the outrage of many Republicans, it took Trump nearly 24 hours to release a video condemning the violence and lawlessness that overtook Capitol Hill. Trump acknowledged emotions were running “high” and said he was turning his focus to “ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power.” But the president avoided taking any personal blame for urging his followers to go to the Capitol on Wednesday to protest the election being taken from them.
“To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country,” Trump said. “And to those who broke the law, you will pay.”
To address members' lingering safety concerns about returning to the Capitol, McCarthy gave Republicans his blessing to use the Democrats' proxy voting system that allows members to cast votes without being physically present. The GOP is challenging the proxy system in court, so McCarthy encouraged any Republicans who wish to use the voting mechanism to remove themselves from the lawsuit if they are a co-sponsor.
Before the conference call, McCarthy — who has been hearing out members in one-on-one conversations in the days since the riots — sent a letter to his Republican colleagues saying he is opposed to impeachment, though he didn’t mention Trump by name.
Instead, McCarthy outlined a number of other options that some members have expressed interest in pursuing, including censuring Trump and forming a commission to investigate the Capitol attack. Some of those options were discussed on the conference call, with Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, speaking out in support of a censure resolution.
But even with those choices up for debate, there are still as many as 10 House Republicans who are seriously considering backing impeachment, including GOP Conference Chair Liz Cheney of Wyoming and frequent Trump critic Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois.
During the call, Cheney did not tip her hand on her impeachment stance, but framed it as a "vote of conscience" and "not a political vote," according to a source.
Kinzinger and freshman Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.), who is also open to supporting impeachment, both spoke up on the call as well. No Republicans, however, have made any announcements about their position.
The meeting came after multiple House Republicans privatelyexpressed anger and frustration with McCarthy and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) for failing to show leadership during the crisis and not publicly pushing back harder on Trump. Members were also incensed that the pair, along with over 120 of their GOP colleagues, carried on with the election challenges after the riots temporarily derailed floor action and forced members, staffers and reporters to hunker down in safe rooms.
With emotions still running high in the conference, there was at least one tense moment during Monday’s call.It started when freshman Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) suggested the Capitol Police may have been involved in the riot.
Then, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) — another GOP member who is weighing impeachment — confronted Boebert for live tweeting the speaker’s whereabouts during the Capitol siege, saying she put all their lives at risk.
Another freshman, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), also chimed in, saying she is "disappointed" that the "QAnon conspiracy theorists" are not only leading the party, but also led the election objection effort after members had to walk by a crime scene to get to the House floor.
But Boebert defended herself on the call, saying that was not her intent and asking her colleagues not to accuse her of anything.
This would be the black hole calling the kettle black?
Former national security adviser turned Trump critic John Bolton urged his party to "purge the taint of Trumpism," saying Monday that President Donald Trump was a dangerous historical anomaly for Republicans.
"There has to be a serious conversation in the Republican Party about how to remove the taint of what Trump has done, how to repair the damage," Bolton told MSNBC's Katy Tur. "And while I think the damage is considerable, I think it can be repaired, and it should be repaired. And it should be — from the purely limited perspective of the party, it should be the highest priority going forward."
Bolton also predicted Trump's influence will decline substantially following last week's storming of the Capitol. The veteran Republican official added he felt his views on removing Trumpism from the party was widely shared among his peers.
Bolton called Trump an "aberration in American politics," and pushed back on the idea that the whole Republican Party was responsible for Trump's behavior and repeated dismantling of norms.
"I don't think you can attribute Trump to everybody else," Bolton said. "To try and blame everybody else, I think, is simply more Washington politics. The focus here should be on the real problem, the center of the problem, and that's Donald Trump.
Bolton urged Republicans to be more stringent in selecting their presidential nominees, ensuring they have "real character" and "a real philosophy, as opposed to people like Donald Trump."
When asked if he felt Republicans who supported Trump's false claims of widespread election malfeasance — the driving ideology behind Wednesday's Capitol attack — Bolton said he doesn't "see any reason why they shouldn't be held accountable." Tur asked specifically about Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, who led the Senate efforts to challenge the Electoral College results, but Bolton demurred on issuing individual judgments.
"I think individual Republicans are going to have to make decisions whether they support individuals who have participated in this effort to stop the election from being certified. And I think there's a lot that remains to be seen from their behavior," Bolton said.
Bolton has been vocal about his dismay at his time in the Trump White House. In his post-mortem book, "The Room Where it Happened," Bolton portrayed Trump as unfamiliar with basic facts and driven above all by reelection — often leading to instances that Bolton said warranted investigating by the 2019 House impeachment probe. The White House tried to stop the book's publication in the courts at the time, but were unsuccessful. The book was released last June.
After years of targeted efforts to suppress the Black vote in Georgia, the state’s Republicans are looking to give new life to President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, this time by changing state law when the legislative session starts Monday. Republicans are suggesting legislation to eradicate "no excuse" absentee voting, ban mailers with unrequested absentee ballot applications, and banish drop boxes, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This move comes after 1.3 million Georgia voters opted to cast absentee ballots in the presidential election, helping to flip a state that hasn’t backed a Democrat for president since former President Bill Clinton in 1992.
GOP Georgia Sen. Burt Jones actually claimed that voting during a pandemic is safer in person than using drop boxes or voting by mail. “When you don’t have a secure chain of custody, particularly with drop boxes, there’s no reason for that to be in the process,” he told the newspaper. “You’ve got three weeks of early voting and Saturday voting. You’ve given ample time and opportunities for people to get the effort to go in to vote.”
Georgia House Minority Leader James Beverly translated for the wider public. “They lost, and now they want to change the rules to give themselves a competitive advantage,” the Democrat told the AJC. “The pendulum swings, and people can see through this foolishness in the truest sense of suppression and disenfranchisement.”
Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has repeatedly supported calls to end “no excuse” absentee voting despite a 2005 law that has legalized the practice for more than 15 years. "This cycle has shown, we need to move to an excuse-based system for absentee voting," Raffensperger said last month at a virtual hearing on voting security. "The no-excuses system voted into law in 2005—long before most of you, if not all of you, long before I was in the General Assembly—it makes no sense when we have three weeks of in-person, early voting available. It opens the door to potential illegal voting."
Somehow, he managed to make this claim while also assuring Georgia voters that the widespread election fraud Trump has repeatedly alluded to is all but nonexistent, with Raffensperger’s office only investigating isolated examples. "Everything we've done for the last 12 months follows the Constitution, the state of Georgia, follows the United States Constitution, follows state law," he told ABC News after facing threats from the president to “find” his votes to win the election. “We were having to adapt to a pandemic, and that did propose challenges.”
Georgia Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger tells @GStephanopoulos that the data Pres. Trump cited to him throughout an hour-long phone call Saturday to claim there was rampant voter fraud in the state's presidential election "is just plain wrong." https://t.co/rCKKVu2l1Npic.twitter.com/elklrk5WET
Raffensperger pointed out that although he doesn’t support it, David Shafer, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, voted for "no excuse" absentee voting in 2005 when he was president pro tempore of the state Senate. Come December, however, he switched gears to pushing for restrictions on absentee voting. “Moving forward we should require photo identification for absentee balloting like we do for in-person voting. I think it’s pretty clear that the verification system has failed,” Shafer told NPR-affiliated WABE.
If by “failed,” he means failed to produce a GOP win, he would be correct. Not only did Trump lose his reelection bid to President-elect Joe Biden, but a majority of Georgia voters backed Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in their runoff Senate challenges of David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, according to election results from the Raffensperger’s office. "Better days are coming," Ossoff tweeted the same day terrorists attempted a coup in the nation’s Capitol on Wednesday. Warnock similarly tweeted that "joy comes in the morning." "The four most powerful words in a Democracy: The People Have Spoken. Thank you, Georgia. Now it's time to get to work,” he added in another tweet Thursday.
Loeffler and Perdue offered concession speeches highlighting what they perceive as achievements last week. “Unfortunately, we came up slightly short in the runoff election, and earlier today I called Reverend Warnock to congratulate him and to wish him well in serving this great state,” Loeffler said in her videotaped concession speech Thursday.
Serving our great state has been the honor of my lifetime. Thank you, Georgia! pic.twitter.com/MQc0rFS208
Perdue conceded the next day. "Although we won the general election, we came up just short of Georgia's 50% rule, and now I want to congratulate the Democratic Party and my opponent for this runoff win," Perdue wrote in a statement CNN obtained. "(His wife) Bonnie and I will continue to pray for our wonderful state and our great country. May God continue to bless Georgia and the United States of America."
Former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, who helped deliver Democrats a triple-victory by registering voters in overlooked and underserved communities, celebrated with a Twitter thread naming all the grassroots, nonprofits, and advocacy organizations who helped secure the victory. “Nine weeks of hustle & outreach. Nine weeks of believing we are in this together. Decades of strategy, grit + building. Wednesday’s terrorism seeks to distract us from what has been & what will be. So let’s take today to celebrate the orgs that brought us Tuesday’s victory,” she tweeted Friday.
Nine weeks of hustle & outreach. Nine weeks of believing we are in this together. Decades of strategy, grit + building. Wednesday’s terrorism seeks to distract us from what has been & what will be. So let’s take today to celebrate the orgs that brought us Tuesday’s victory: 1/
Fox News’ yelling person Judge Jeanine Pirro is someone who has said that the real problem with civility in American discourse is feminists. In general, she’s not a particularly good person. She’s famously Islamophobic and racist, anti-immigrant, and pro Trump. With the absence of a real position to have on Trump’s incitement of an insurgency in our nation’s capital on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, Pirro and other right-wingers have gone on new networks to say that while there’s a dead Capitol police officer and our current leadership is trying to overthrow the government, the real issue is that one of their revenue streams has been shut down.
Of course, having to make the case that conservatives are the real victims of history in this case is difficult since they have so clearly aligned themselves with literal Nazis. So when Fox News decided to have Pirro on, you knew things were going to be a little bit Nazi. Pirro didn’t disappoint … anyone except all of humanity.
Asked to give her thoughts on the shutdown of right-wing social media platform Parler, Pirro said that she could see this coming: “Well, look, they gave us a taste of this pre-election when they suppressed the Hunter Biden story.” That’s right, they did! Luckily, every right-wing platform like Fox News only ran the evidence-free Hunter Biden story 24/7 instead of discussing stuff like Trump’s disastrous handling of both our public health policy and our economy. Pirro goes on to explain what this devilish censorship of fake stories about Hunter Biden portends: “Now that they've won, what we're seeing is the kind of censorship that is akin to a Kristallnacht where they decide what we can communicate about.”
That’s quite a thing to say. Pirro seems to clearly hope that she can grab some of the thunder away from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s viral video over the weekend that analogized Germany’s Kristallnacht to the terror brought to Americans by insurgents attacking the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.
Kristallnacht, if you don’t know, means “Night of Broken Glass.” That’s because over a 48-hour period in November of 1938, “violent mobs, spurred by antisemitic exhortations from Nazi officials, destroyed hundreds of synagogues, burning or desecrating Jewish religious artifacts along the way. Acting on orders from Gestapo headquarters, police officers and firefighters did nothing to prevent the destruction. All told, approximately 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses, homes, and schools were plundered, and 91 Jews were murdered. An additional 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps.”
The broken glass refers to the shattered windows of Jewish businesses, schools, synagogues, and homes. It was a tragic and awful prelude to what would become one of the worst tragedies the world has ever seen. Parler is a social media platform filled with assholes making up bullshit conspiracies to protect their egos from the sham they’ve believed for far too long.
Maybe Pirro is thinking about how to protect herself for her part in inciting violence. I recall before the 2016 election the disgraced judge told Americans to arm themselves for a coming civil war.
The responses to Pirro’s loathsome statement came fast and furiously, but this is the only one I’ll post:
In the last Congress, 43 Democratic senators co-sponsored legislation making D.C. a U.S. state. Four Democrats or independents who caucused with the Democrats did not join them—West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, Alabama’s Doug Jones, and Maine’s Angus King. It didn’t mean they opposed Washington statehood, they just weren’t going to go on the record as a co-sponsor. They didn’t need to, the legislation was never going to get anywhere with Republicans in charge of the Senate and the White House.
Today, the picture has changed dramatically.
Democrats now have a pro-statehood president in the White House with Joe Biden. The Senate will be in Democratic hands, as soon as the two Democratic victories in Georgia are certified (within the next two weeks).
Doug Jones is gone, a victim of his state’s rabid conservatism. So that leaves two questions:
1. Will Democrats get rid of the filibuster? D.C. statehood isn’t getting 60 votes.
2. Would anyone in the Democratic caucus oppose statehood? Democrats couldn’t suffer any defections.
Starting with the second question first, West Virginia’s conservative Democratic senator shocked the political world by leaving the door open to D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood. Well, he might’ve shocked the political world if we weren’t in the middle of an insurrection, but it was still dramatic news. Speaking to Jake Tapper on CNN, Manchin said he was open to adding two states to the country.
Tapper: Statehood for Washington D.C.?
Manchin: I don’t know enough about that yet. I want to see the pros and cons, so I’m waiting to see all the facts. I’m open up to see everything.
Tapper: Statehood for Puerto Rico?
Manchin: Same thing.
While I couldn’t find anything concrete from Sinema or King, Manchin would likely be the hardest get. Sinema has been a political chameleon, morphing from a liberal state legislator to a conservative U.S. senator, doing what she needed to do to win her statewide race. However, the state is shifting rapidly. Remember, Joe Biden won it by adding 500,000 new Democratic votes compared to 2016—a 43% increase in just four years. Democrat Mark Kelly won the state’s second Senate seat on an unapologetically liberal platform. Sinema has room to maneuver.
As for King? The independent senator from Maine can be quirky, but would he really stand in the way of statehood as the deciding “no” vote?
Meanwhile, on the Republican side, the chances of getting any “yes” votes are almost zero, but everyone’s eyes would be on Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski. Ideologically, she has a foot planted on the Democratic side, and while she recently claimed that she isn’t pondering a party change, politicians often change their minds (gasp!). She certainly laid the foundation by saying, “If the Republican Party has become nothing more than the party of Trump, I sincerely question whether this is the party for me.”
Spoiler alert—the Republican Party is nothing more than the party of Trump. And that party is gunning for her. Trump himself tweeted last year, “Few people know where they’ll be in two years from now, but I do, in the Great State of Alaska (which I love) campaigning against Senator Lisa Murkowski.”
In 2016, she lost the Republican primary and won the general election as a write-in independent—with Democratic votes. She won't even have to worry about primaries in 2022. Alaska changed its election system to a top-four runoff, meaning that the top four candidates, regardless of party, advance to the general election, further insulating her from electoral danger if she goes independent.
But consider that a long shot. If Manchin can be convinced, we would very likely have the necessary votes … but only if the filibuster is gone.
Manchin was very clear in that same interview with Jake Tapper that he was a “no” on eliminating the filibuster. However, it’s also clear that absolutely nothing will happen in the Senate without the end of the filibuster, and Biden himself will be anxious to see progress on his legislative agenda, and won’t want to see it dead in the Senate.
Still, we need 51 votes to get rid of the filibuster, and without Manchin, we’re stuck. So what then? Do we have to wait until 2022 and hope that Democrats don’t suffer the dreaded curse of a new president’s first midterm elections? (In short, the incumbent party almost always gets walloped.) Unfortunately, that may be the case. (And to be clear, Manchin isn’t the only Democrat to express reluctance at eliminating the filibuster.)
The irony, of course, is that Manchin would have more power in a filibuster-free Senate, than one in which he doesn’t get to play kingmaker on every single vote. Perhaps that, plus pressure from Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer might lead to a reassessment.
But all that said, Manchin’s openness to D.C. statehood (and Puerto Rico too, though that’s a whole different conversation) is noteworthy, and gets us one baby step closer to enfranchising hundreds of thousands of Americans, while also slightly correcting the Senate’s rank bias toward small, rural, and white states.
Yep, GOP goes on a murderous white supremacist rampage, so cut off donations to Dems too...fuck you.
Facebook said Monday it’s freezing political donations and revisiting its policies in the aftermath of the rioting at the Capitol last week by President Donald Trump’s supporters.
“Following last week’s awful violence in DC, we are pausing all of our PAC contributions for at least the current quarter, while we review our policies,” Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement. The news was first reported by Axios.
Key context: Facebook is the latest major corporation to announce changes to its political contributions in the wake of the violence in Washington, D.C., which left at least five dead.
Business giants including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup have said they will temporarily freeze all political contributions through their political action committees, while others such as Marriott have announced more targeted pauses for donations to officials who voted against certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.
What it means for tech: The social media giant is also the latest tech company to rethink its approach to political donations. Twitter last year shut down its PAC altogether, in a sign that some Silicon Valley companies are questioning whether that sort of political engagement is worth the potential headaches involved.
Facebook’s move also comes as tech companies are facing heightened scrutiny from Democratic lawmakers for their platforms’ roles in fomenting the violence that took place in Washington last Wednesday. The pro-Trump protest that descended into a full-blown riot through both chambers of Congress was planned across social media platforms, and rioters live-streamed the events in real time.
After the attack, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday that the company would block Trump indefinitely, at least until Biden is sworn in, writing that it believes "the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great."
Seems...unlikely to succeed. The antitrust claims are just bizarre
Social networking service Parler sued Amazon on Monday, accusing its web hosting service of breaking anti-trust laws in taking off the platform that is popular with many right-leaning social media users. You can read the court document here.
This headline was almost a reality in 2020. | Via Getty
The GOP’s Electoral College advantage grew in 2020, even as Republicans lost the presidency.
In 2019, a team of economic researchers from the University of Texas released a shocking finding. Republicans, they predicted, would win nearly one in six presidential races where the GOP lost the popular vote by three points. Thus, there was a significant likelihood that Republicans would capture the White House even when a clear majority of the public preferred to elect a Democrat.
As it turns out, this 2019 study wasn’t nearly pessimistic enough about the Democratic Party’s chances of prevailing in the Electoral College.
One underrated thing about the 2020 election is that the partisan bias of the electoral college, already at it's largest point in nearly a century, got substantially larger.
Democrats now need 52% of the vote in order to have a 50/50 chance of winning the presidency. pic.twitter.com/wTWIbxOGxS
The bottom line is that Trump received a four-point boost from the Electoral College in 2020 — or, as Shor puts it, Democrats needed to win 52 percent of the national electorate in order to have an even chance of winning the presidency. (Trump received about a three-point boost from the Electoral College in 2016, when he lost the national popular vote by 2.1 points.)
As recently as 2012, the Electoral College gave a slight advantage to Democrats. As Shor writes, “this big change in bias happened because white voters without a college degree *in large midwestern states* switched their votes en-masse from Obama to Trump in 2016.”
In 2012, President Barack Obama won the national popular vote by just under 4 percentage points. But he overperformed his national margins in midwestern swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Obama won Michigan by nearly 10 points.
In 2020, by contrast, Democratic President-elect Joe Biden defeated Trump by a larger margin than Obama’s victory in 2012 — Biden won the national popular vote by 4.5 percentage points. But Biden also underperformed his national margin in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Biden won Wisconsin by less than a full percentage point.
Indeed, while Biden won a commanding victory in the national popular vote — his 4.5 percentage point victory is the second-largest margin in a 21st-century presidential contest — Biden barely eked out a victory in the Electoral College.
Nearly 160 million voters cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election, but if a total of 43,000 Biden voters had stayed at home in the states of Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, Trump would have won a second term.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi laid out the week's efforts to dislodge Donald Trump from the Oval Office in a Sunday letter. The House will be in a pro forma session Monday, during which Majority Leader Steny Hoyer will introduce a resolution directing Vice President Mike Pence to "convene and mobilize the Cabinet to activate the 25th Amendment to declare the President incapable of executing the duties of his office." Since Pence hasn't even bothered to return her phone call from Thursday, they do this with no expectation that he will act.
They are also doing it with the expectation that a Republican will reject Hoyer's request for unanimous consent to bring up the resolution. The plan as of now is for the resolution to be brought to the floor Tuesday for a vote, giving Pence 24 hours for a response. Which they won't get but which would trigger the impeachment vote. "In protecting our Constitution and our Democracy, we will act with urgency, because this President represents an imminent threat to both," Pelosi wrote. "As the days go by, the horror of the ongoing assault on our democracy perpetrated by this President is intensified and so is the immediate need for action," she continued.
NEW: Rep. ALEXANDER X. MOONEY blocks HOYER unanimous consent request for the House resolution calling on Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment. Vote could happen tomorrow.
The impeachment vote is expected by Wednesday, and as of Sunday night there were 210 Democrats, out of 222 in the caucus, who signed on to one of the impeachment resolutions. The impeachment resolution asserts that Trump would "remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution" if he is not removed. It will charge him with inciting an insurrection. "In all this, President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of Government," the resolution says. "He threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of Government. He thereby betrayed his trust as President, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States."
House members have been instructed to return to D.C. by Tuesday, and leaders are working with the Federal Air Marshal Service and Capitol police on a plan to keep members safe as they return to D.C. and move back into the Capitol and their offices after Wednesday's attack.
In her letter, Pelosi also announced a Caucus call for Monday, during which she expects to discuss "the 25th Amendment, 14th Amendment Section 3 and impeachment." It's that middle bit—the 14th Amendment Section 3—that is significant:
"No Person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability."
That's how the Congress expels insurrectionists, which is now the majority of House Republicans and eight Senate Republicans who voted to overturn election results even after Trump' mob invaded and vandalized the People's House, intent on hunting down and assassinating congressional leadership. Freshman Democratic Rep. Cori Bush will introduce a resolution to expel those members Monday.
The first order, however is getting rid of Trump, Rep. Jim Clyburn said on Fox News Sunday. "If we are the people's house, let's do the people's work and let's vote to impeach this president. … The Senate will decide later what to do with that—an impeachment." What happens after that vote isn't entirely clear. Clyburn argued on CNN, also on Sunday, that the Senate should wait until after President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration. "Let's give President-elect Biden the 100 days he needs to get his agenda off and running," he said.
Senate Majority Leader (for the next 10 days or so) Mitch McConnell hasn't spoken about plans, but his former chief of staff Josh Holmes, who also runs his PACs, tweeted Sunday "The more time, images, and stories removed from Wednesday the worse it gets. If you're not in a white hot rage over what happened by now you're not paying attention." Whether or not that translates into McConnell acting, who knows.
The third branch of government, the courts, have also weighed in—or more aptly declined to do so. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied a motion from Trump to fast-track consideration of the multiple lawsuits he has seeking to overturn the election. The court is not going to hear his cases before the inauguration, if ever, making this the 63rd time Trump has lost in court.
Last Wednesday’s storming of the U.S. Capitol looked really, really bad as it was happening. Over the weekend, as more videos and information came out, it looked worse and worse. From video of the Trump-supporting terrorists beating a police officer with flag poles and crushing an officer in a door to the authorities’ refusal to hold a briefing to tell the nation what they know about what happened, how many people are injured, and what they’re doing to prevent this from happening again, the assault on the Capitol increasingly looks like an organized and serious coup attempt with some level of complicity in Congress and at the Pentagon. That’s one reason it’s so important for the House to impeach Donald Trump now, first, right away—because there’s good reason to believe other shoes are going to drop. When that happens, Democrats need to be ready to move.
House Democrats are planning to introduce an article of impeachment Monday morning: “incitement of insurrection.” That’s good—but it would have been better to do it over the weekend, in line with the urgency of the moment. We know now how close we came to members of Congress being publicly beaten to death by a mob whipped up by Trump. Even allowing for the trauma members of Congress are dealing with, that’s not a “take a weekend off” situation.
Wednesday we saw pictures of bros milling around giving thumbs up and grinning as they put their feet on a desk in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office or carried away a lectern. Since then, we’ve seen more evidence of how many were wearing tactical gear and moving in coordinated ways, of members of hate groups in the Capitol, of preparation for serious violence.
“That was a heavily trained group of militia terrorists that attacked us,” a Black officer who has been in the Capitol Police for more than a decade told BuzzFeed. “They had radios, we found them, they had two-way communicators and earpieces. They had bear spray. They had flash bangs ... They were prepared. They strategically put two IEDs, pipe bombs, in two different locations. These guys were military trained. A lot of them were former military.”
Every detail that emerges shows how serious this was, and how seriously the government should be taking it. That is not what’s happening, with Trump-appointed Pentagon officials giving the coup a name that actively downplays it and—it cannot be emphasized enough—law enforcement not having given one briefing of the sort that would be absolutely standard after any significant event.
One Republican member of Congress who did condemn the coup attempt claimed some of his Republican colleagues voted to overturn the election results out of fear for themselves and their families. “One of the saddest things is I had colleagues who, when it came time to recognize reality and vote to certify Arizona and Pennsylvania in the Electoral College, they knew in their heart of hearts that they should've voted to certify, but some had legitimate concerns about the safety of their families. They felt that that vote would put their families in danger,” Rep. Peter Meijer said.
But even if that’s true, it’s a reason to act firmly now, before things get worse. They won’t have less to fear if they allow Trump’s insurrection to continue growing.
The weekend also brought news of yet another attempt by Trump to coerce an official into overturning Georgia's election results. But one amazing thing about this weekend was that, following Trump’s permanent Twitter suspension on Friday night, we didn’t get a blow by blow of Trump’s moods and whims all weekend. It’s kind of weird and disorienting, to be honest, but also freeing and wonderful.
The Verge reports:
The CEO of the conservative-friendly social app Parler said that all of its vendors have abandoned the company following recent bans from Google, Apple, and Amazon. "Every vendor, from text message services to email providers to our lawyers, all ditched us too, on the same day," Parler CEO John Matze said in an interview with Fox News on Sunday...
Matze said that it was having difficulties finding a new vendor to work with. "We're going to try our best to get back online as quickly as possible, but we're having a lot of trouble because every vendor we talk to says they won't work with us. Because if Apple doesn't approve and Google doesn't approve, then they won't."
But the app also has another problem, reports Mashable:
The number two most downloaded free app in both Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store is an app called Parlor. That's Parlor with an "o," not an "e."
Coincidence? We think not.
Parlor is a "social talking app" in which people can get on and talk with strangers about different topics. It's been around for 10 years according to the app listing, and, Sensor Tower data indicates it had 40,000 downloads as of December 2020. Its reviews are not great to say the least, and it looks, well, pretty porn-y.
Toast. Breaking into the Capitol with an insurrectionist mob isn't "in the wrong place at the wrong time" asshole.
"Turning digital data into profit," is the slogan of Cognesia, a data analytics company whose client list includes Visa, Rolls-Royce, and Toys 'R' Us.
Now Variety reports:
Brad Rukstales, the chief executive of a Chicago-area company that provides data-marketing solutions, said he was arrested Wednesday after he entered the U.S. Capitol alongside a mob of pro-Trump rioters seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential election...
"Our CEO, Brad Rukstales, participated in the recent Washington DC protests," Schaumburg, Illinois-based Cognesia said in a statement Thursday. "Those actions were his own and [and he was] not acting on behalf [of] Cogensia nor do his actions in any way reflect the policies or values of our firm..."
Rukstales, in his own statement posted on Twitter, apologized for what he called "the single worst personal decision of my life."
"In a moment of extremely poor judgment following the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, I followed hundreds of others through an open set of doors to the Capitol building to see what was taking place inside," Rukstales wrote. "I was arrested for the first time in my life and charged with unlawful entry." He continued, "My decision to enter the Capitol was wrong, and I am deeply regretful to have done so," adding that he "condemn[ed] the violence and destruction that took place in Washington."
Twitter now reports that Cognesia's account "no longer exists." (This after their tweeted statement received dozens of unrelentingly negative comments.) Their LinkedIn profile includes a link to a more recent announcement that CEO Rukstales "has been terminated by the company's Board of Directors effective immediately," with their new CEO saying Rukstales' actions "were inconsistent with the core values of Cogensia. Cogensia condemns what occurred at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, and we intend to continue to embrace the values of integrity, diversity and transparency in our business operations, and expect all employees to embrace those values as well."
Thursday CEO Rukstales shared his memory of Wednesday's events with a local news crew. "It was great to see a whole bunch of people together in the morning and hear the speeches, but it turned into chaos... I had nothing to do with charging anybody or anything or doing any of that. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I regret my part in that."
And Rukstales' written apology is still online.
"Without qualification and as a peaceful and law-abiding citizen, I condemn the violence and destruction that took place in Washington," Rukstales wrote. "I offer my sincere apologies for my indiscretion, and I deeply regret that my actions have brought embarrassment to my family, colleagues, friends and fellow countrymen..."
"I have no excuse for my actions and I wish I could take them back."
Yep, there must be consequences. It's clear DoD is running defense for Trump on this and cannot be trusted.
Twenty years after 9/11, when part of the Pentagon itself was destroyed in a terrorist attack intended to decapitate United States military leaders, the federal reaction to a new act of terrorism on American soil proved so incompetent as to defy description. As mobs chanted demands that the vice president be killed and hunted congressional leaders like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Capitol Police officers were left on their own, without help, and no word on when help would arrive.
A large part of that was due to what appears to be no substantive response from the Department of Defense as this nation's top lawmakers hid from terrorists in the halls of the U.S. Capitol. And it now appears that that inaction, by Trump Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, very nearly caused the fall of the U.S. government. And that, regardless of intent, is an inexcusable failure. Miller has proven unfit for his office, at best. His failure to respond to a terrorist attack in any substantive way endangered the entire country; during a national crisis, he proved at best incompetent.
He must be removed from his post immediately for that failure alone. It may be more important to remove "acting" Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller from his post than it is to remove Trump himself; while Trump worked to provoke the attack, during an assembly of known-violent extremists known to law enforcement as potential domestic terrorists, it is Miller that decapitated the nation's response to the insurrection as terrorists hunted officials inside the breached halls of Congress.
A later investigation will determine whether Miller's intent was treasonous. There is no interpretation of the facts, however, that can justify Miller's disgraceful failure to mount a response to an ongoing terrorist act. He cannot remain in his post.
As we learn the true events of last Wednesday's attempted coup, the true nature of both the attack and the horrific lack of federal response are becoming clear. We now know that the attack was not spontaneous; within the larger crowd of willingly violent Trump allies, a subset was armed, knew where they were going, and intended to execute Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and other Trump opponents. As calls for backup from Capitol Police, lawmakers, and congressional staff went unanswered, the assassins came very close to succeeding.
We also know that top Trump administration officials knew in advance of the threat to the Capitol, but downplayed threat assessments given to the Capitol Police and to Congress so as to justify a far weaker law enforcement presence than for any other major (or even minor) planned mass protest. This lack of preparation comes after a Trump administration gutting of Department of Homeland Security intelligence officials, part of a larger purge of officials deemed insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump.
But perhaps the most consequential actions were by newly appointed Trump Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller—the same Christopher Miller that President-elect Joe Biden called out for blocking national security briefings to the incoming administration. The timeline now makes clear that even long after Capitol Police had reported multiple officers injured and the Capitol building being overrun, Miller still took no significant action.
According to the timeline of the Wall Street Journal, officer injuries were reported at 1:18pm. By 1:41, Capitol Police were overrun. Capitol Police chief requested National Guard support at 2:22pm, one of numerous officials to do so—many hiding inside the building awaiting immediate help.
It was not until 5:45pm formally approved the dispatch of the Maryland National Guard. The delay in response? Hours.
“By around 4pm, Gov. Hogan said, he learned that Acting Defense Sec. Chris Miller had yet to grant the necessary approval for Guardsmen to enter Washington. “We were repeatedly being told by the National Guard at the national level that we did not have authorization,” Hogan said https://t.co/QKDTHt3DcY
It is difficult to imagine that, after two decades of security theater and an unending list of curtailed public freedoms after 9/11, the federal response to an actual terrorist assault on the U.S. Capitol could consist of exactly nothing, for hours, as congressional security forces fought by themselves to protect national leaders from execution. It is impossible to imagine—and yet it happened, and many days after the attack, neither Miller nor any other executive branch appointee has deigned to so much as brief the public on how such a massive failure could have taken place. We were under the impression federal forces were competent enough to defend from even far larger terrorist attacks. We were wrong.
Even with ample advance notice of the threat, even after the attackers had used social media to publicly plan their assault, brag about their weaponry, and announce their intent, the terrorists remained unimpeded by federal forces for hours.
We were told that the security precautions that have justified the aggressive paramilitary treatment of American protesters for decades was for security purposes, to keep the nation safe: Met with an actual terrorist attack, the same forces stood down.
Either we have been lied to, and for decades, or Chris Miller and other administration leaders willingly looked the other way as an attack on this nation's capital unfolded. It is almost certain to be both.
Acting Secretary of Defense Miller must answer for his apparent role in defeating a timely response to an insurrection. He, and his Department of Justice counterparts, must answer for the lack of backup outside and inside the designated target of a mass gathering of known insurrectionists—and, especially, for the inability to muster such backup even as McConnell, Pelosi, Pence, and other leaders hid in offices as their own security teams made clear that inaction could lead to executions.
It is not forgivable, or recoverable. Miller operated either with an assumption that the terrorists were not who they plainly self-identified to be—and remember, there was no reason to believe that foreign actors could not have been mingling with the crowd, carrying out their own missions or assisting American counterparts in identifying routes and strategies—or Miller willingly sat on his hands as the attempted coup unfolded.
In prior remarks, Joe Biden singled out the Department of Justice and Department of Defense as the two agencies where political hires were continuing to stonewall national security briefings of the incoming administration. It should not go without notice that these were the two agencies responsible for assessing the risk to the Capitol in advance and providing backup and rescue services when it became necessary—and that both of those teams failed, spectacularly and perhaps deliberately, in both tasks. In a recent open letter, all living ex-secretaries of defense condemned Trump's attempt to overturn the election results and warned, specifically, that military leaders could be charged with crimes for abetting them. It was an unprecedented warning amid a sea of unprecedented warnings. And it was prescient.
It is now necessary to ask whether Chris Miller mounted an incompetent response to a terrorist attack because he truly is incapable of his job, or whether he did so in a conspiracy siding with the terrorists. That is how horrific his response is. That is how unthinkable the actions of top federal leaders are. We need not await an answer before acting: Whatever may have occurred, it was so damaging to the nation that Miller cannot remain in his post another moment. He must be removed.
Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) in a Senate committee meeting on December 10. | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc./Getty Images
Sen. Josh Hawley says he will “never apologize” for objecting to Biden electors.
Republican Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are facing mounting criticism for their role in inciting Wednesday’s deadly riot at the US Capitol, with their Senate colleagues and majornewspapers alike calling for their resignation — or expulsion.
Hawley, the junior senator from Missouri, has also been disavowed by a former mentor, and publisher Simon & Schuster has abandoned plans to publish Hawley’s upcoming book. On Thursday, a prominent Hawley donor called for him to be formally censured for his actions.
Both senators helped lead a Republican effort in the Senate to object to the certification of electors from key states President-elect Joe Biden won in the 2020 presidential election — arguing, despite all evidence proving otherwise, that there were irregularities in the vote count which required further investigation. And they continued their efforts Wednesday night, even after pro-Trump insurgents stormed the Capitol earlier the same day.
Ultimately, Biden’s victory — 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232 — was certified over objections by Hawley and Cruz. But their decision to join six other senators in delaying the process with objections to electors from Arizona and Pennsylvania was sharply condemned, even by some Republican colleagues, for sustaining the baseless election fraud narrative that inspired Wednesday’s attack on the Capitol and left at least five people dead.
Hawley in particular has been excoriated for a Wednesday morning photo showing him raising his fist in solidarity with supporters of President Donald Trump, who later stormed the Capitol.
“Sen. Hawley was doing something that was really dumbass,” Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse told NPR in an interview Friday. “This was a stunt. It was a terrible, terrible idea. And you don’t lie to the American people. And that’s what’s been going on.”
Former Missouri Sen. John Danforth, an influential Hawley mentor prior to this week, went further, telling the Kansas City Star that Hawley was responsible for the riot and that supporting him was “the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life.”
“I don’t know if he was always like this and good at covering it up or if it happened,” Danforth said Thursday. “I just don’t know.”
Cruz, the junior senator from Texas, has also been under fire in his home state.
“Senator, those terrorists wouldn’t have been at the Capitol if you hadn’t staged this absurd challenge to the 2020 results in the first place,” the editorial board of the Houston Chronicle wrote Friday. “So, we call for another consequence, one with growing support across Texas: Resign.”
“We’re done with the drama. Done with the opportunism. Done with the cynical scheming that has now cost American lives,” the editorial concludes. “Resign, Mr. Cruz, and deliver Texas from the shame of calling you our senator.”
Three Senate Democrats — Sens. Chris Coons of Delaware, Patty Murray of Washington state, and Ron Wyden of Oregon, have also called for Hawley and Cruz to resign.
Unsurprisingly, Cruz rebuffed calls for his resignation in an interview Friday, and Hawley likewise has shown no inclination to offer his.
“I will never apologize for giving voice to the millions of Missourians and Americans who have concerns about the integrity of our elections,” Hawley said Thursday, though there is no evidence to support any of his voter fraud allegations.
After Wednesday, Hawley and Cruz face questions over 2024 aspirations
The bipartisan furor over Hawley and Cruz’s decisions to stay the course with their objections, even though the same sentiment driving them helped incite the storming of the Capitol, has also sparked a discussion about their political futures.
Support for Trump was reaffirmed at the highest levels of the Republican Party this week with the unopposed reelection of Ronna McDaniel, a Trump loyalist, to continue serving at the head of the Republican National Committee.
And Trump, for his part, has signaled that he wants to run — but between the outside possibility of his being formally barred from holding elected office again and the extensive legal jeopardy he’ll face when he leaves office in just 11 days, there’s a real chance that the way will be clear for Hawley and Cruz, both of whom will likely be gunning to shore up as much support as possible with Trump’s base.
That part might not be difficult: For now, polling suggests that they both remain popular with the president’s most diehard supporters.
Specifically, according to a new tracking poll from Morning Consult that was taken January 6 and 7, 68 percent of those with a “very favorable” view of Trump also feel favorably toward Cruz, with 37 percent of strong Trump backers feeling favorably about Hawley.
Hawley suffers from substantially lower name recognition than Cruz — 32 percent of respondents who say they hold a “very favorable” view of Trump say they have never heard of Hawley, compared to just 6 percent for Cruz — but only 11 percent of respondents who view Trump very favorably have a negative opinion of Hawley. Slightly more of those respondents hold a negative opinion of Cruz, at 13 percent.
Current support, however, may prove ephemeral by the time 2024 rolls around. One Trump 2016 campaign aide told Politico this week that many Trump supporters “saw through [Hawley’s] blind ambitious act” and didn’t view it as genuine.
“They don’t think he’s a real MAGA supporter,” the aide, Bryan Lanza, said. “He just comes across as insincere.”
Meanwhile, at least one editorial board — that of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch — has already deemed Hawley’s presidential hopes dead on arrival.
“Hawley’s presidential aspirations have been flushed down the toilet because of his role in instigating Wednesday’s assault on democracy,” the Post-Dispatch editorial board wrote Thursday. “He should do Missourians and the rest of the country a big favor and resign now.”
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) also disavowed Hawley, Cruz, and their Republican allies in objecting to the electoral vote certification in a floor speech Wednesday night.
“Those who choose to continue to support [Trump’s] dangerous gambit by objecting to the results of a legitimate, democratic election will forever be seen as being complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy,” Romney said.
Mitt Romney: “What happened today was an insurrection incited by the president of the United States. Those who continue to support his dangerous gambit... will forever be seen as being complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy." https://t.co/hxrZh9PRvtpic.twitter.com/V3hDAz57Xf
In most scenarios, that complicity in an outright attack on US democracy might prove to be a political deal-breaker. But if it remains Trump’s GOP — and Trump himself takes a pass, voluntarily or involuntarily, on the 2024 race — Hawley and Cruz might still find a future in the Republican Party.
Correction, January 10, 2021: An earlier version of this article misstated which Texas editorial board called for Sen. Ted Cruz’s resignation; it was the editorial board of the Houston Chronicle.
It's precisely the kind of person you are...that's why it happened lol
World #3 golfer Justin Thomas responded to missing a putt at the Sentry Tournament of Champions in Hawaii on Saturday by yelling the word “faggot.” Thomas, the defending champion of the tournament according to Reuters, was heard on his microphone and the slur broadcast on NBC.
Thomas later apologized: “It’s inexcusable. First off I just apologize. There’s no excuse. I’m a grown man. There’s absolutely no reason for me to say anything like that. It’s terrible. I’m extremely embarrassed. It’s not who I am. It’s not the kind of person that I am. …. I need to do better. … I deeply apologize to everybody and anybody who I offended and I’ll be better because of it.”
Yeah it looks likely that this is only the beginning unless it's put down properly.
My first Donald Trump campaign rally was memorable in all the wrong ways. I can’t recall anything Trump said that night in Pennsylvania during the 2016 race, but I won’t forget a tense exchange with one of his supporters. Minutes after I walked in, a man who looked to be in his 20s spotted the press pass pinned to my jacket: “Are you Jewish?” he asked. I bristled and, for the first time covering a political rally, wondered if I’d make it home safely.
That wasn’t paranoia. Nearly every Trump rally invariably has an undercurrent of menace fed by the candidate. Two years ago in El Paso, Texas, a man in a red MAGA hat “violently pushed and shoved” a BBC cameraperson who was covering the rally from the press section. As a protester was led out of his rally in Las Vegas during the ’16 campaign, Trump told the crowd that the guards were too “gentle” and that he would have liked to “punch him in the face.”
How do these things happen? When the MAGA movement leader employs martial rhetoric to describe even the mundane rituals of American politics—warning that he’s the victim of a “coup,” fearmongering about treasonous rivals and disloyal staff and “fake news”—it’s not all that surprising that his aggrieved base seeks vengeance.
For that reason, shocking though it was to see an insurrectionist mob storm the U.S. Capitol this week, it also seemed as if the Trump train had reached its final destination. Previewing the rally that took place before the assault, Trump tweeted that it would be “wild.”
So much for his campaign theme celebrating “law and order.” A rally can be “wild” or it can be lawful and orderly, but it’s tough to see how it can be both. (On Friday night, Twitter took the extraordinary step of permanently suspending his account.)
Speaking to his supporters at the rally Wednesday morning, Trump said: “We’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and -women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”
What did he believe might happen once they reached the seat of government? Congress was inside counting the final votes formalizing Joe Biden’s victory—votes that would uphold what Trump has baselessly told them was a fraudulent election. A more combustible situation would be hard to fathom. He could have instead told them to disperse, because what many of them want is something the U.S. political system can’t possibly deliver. They’re not tethered to democratic norms that call for compromise and conciliation. What they’re asking for can’t be accommodated in a lawful government serving one nation.
Outside the Capitol on Wednesday, I watched as a line of police in riot gear marched single file toward the melee. “Traitors get the rope!” one man shouted at them. Another stood near the west front and screamed: “They stole your election, and now they’re going to kill you! So you better stand up! I’m going to get my reinforcements!” A man shouted epithets at a television cameraperson, who patiently tried to explain that he was a reporter covering a story. “We’re the news!” another shouted at him. A 34-year-old who’d come up from Florida told me he had gotten inside the Capitol and spent an hour there before police escorted him out. “Why did you come?” I asked. I figured he’d say he wanted to somehow block Biden from becoming president and usher in a second term for Trump. The demands went well beyond even that antidemocratic outcome. He wanted to see a “peaceful separation of the country.” (Someone else who might want to see the United States splinter: Vladimir Putin.)
I’d been hearing similar fantasies long before the MAGA army overran Capitol Police and flooded inside. In September, two months before the election, I spoke with Trump supporters at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. One man parroted a claim that Trump has been making: that he could lose the election to Biden only if it were rigged.
That’s ludicrous, of course. Biden won the election because he got more votes. But if you accept the president’s heads-I-win, tails-you-lose scenario, you might be prone to the delusion that armed rebellion is the only patriotic remedy. That seems to be where we are today.
“People are not going to stand for it,” the man told me. “People aren’t stocking up on ammunition just to fill up their shelves … Patriots are buying weapons for a reason.”
A battle for the MAGA movement in the post-Trump era is now under way. Two ambitious Republican senators, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas, seem bent on inheriting Trump’s core supporters. Both objected to the vote Wednesday certifying Biden as the winner. That may impress Trump’s base, if no one else. Yet in the end, Trump’s base may prove to be his undoing: His actions at the rally are sparking calls for his immediate removal from office. If the base devours its champion, it won’t spare Trump’s imitators.
Until the assault on the Capitol, Trump was poised to be a Republican kingmaker. Even in exile, he figured to be the party’s marquee draw, dispensing endorsements and campaign money from his home at Mar-a-Lago. Now he’s forever linked to one of the darkest episodes in U.S. history, one with a clear through line from his rhetoric to the hostility it ignites. Trump faces postpresidency with a diminished megaphone, while the party he left in tatters casts about for an identity. He seems to understand the depths of his isolation. Reading from a teleprompter, he gave a statement Thursday calling for “healing and reconciliation,” scripted sentiments at odds with every instinct he’s shown.
“He doesn’t care what you did for him yesterday; he cares what you do for him right now,” Brendan Buck, a former aide to the Republican House Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner, told me. “That’s something that every Republican who is building a political brand around this one person should keep in mind. He’s completely unreliable. You can’t count on him to be there for you, so why should you be there for him?”
It was all fun and games on Wednesday. In an extraordinary display of white privilege, a mob of fascists celebrated as they overran U.S. Capitol Police, smashed windows, terrorized staff, trashed the place, left pipe bombs outside of offices on Capitol grounds, and assaulted people with metal pipes while hunting for House representatives, senators, and most of all, Vice President Mike Pence.
They took selfies, stole sensitive items from representatives’ offices, and livestreamed the carnage. Y’know, super fun stuff! It’s not like anyone got hurt—there was “no violence in the crowd,” according to the Trumpist leader of the Chicago’s police union, John Catanzara. Well, except for Capitol Police, several whom are still in critical condition, as well as USCP Officer Brian Sicknick, who died from his wounds Thursday. Oh, and the death of several Trumpists must not count, either.
But other than that it was hilarious and fun, right? Those pictures show the terrorists all having a ball. It was all good, they told themselves, because Trump literally told them, while they were violently wreaking havoc, that he ” loves” them and that they were “special!” Of course, he also told them he would march with them to the Capitol, right after he told them to head over there and make problems for “weak” Republicans. Trump isn’t good at keeping his word. He didn’t go with them—he got out of dodge. And 24 hours later, Trump did a 180: The very same mob he incited to riot, which he praised as patriots? He now says they must “be made to pay.” Oh crap. No pardons, huh?
Their cult leader just turned on them to save his own skin. (Too late.) Let’s be real: The president was trying to stage a coup. He resisted sending in troops to quell his own mob. He knows the mountain of corruption and sexual assault charges that await him at noon on Jan. 20, if not sooner. The events of Jan. 6 were Trump’s last-ditch effort. It failed, so he’s cut his MAGA morons loose.
Now those idiots realize they aren’t going to be facing simple breaking and entering charges. Instead, they might be indicted for serious federal crimes, like:
Seditious conspiracy
Damage to federal property
Use of explosives
Crossing state lines to commit crimes
Rebellion and Insurrection
Double crap. Any thoughts of, “Maybe they won’t find me?” are immediately followed by, “Oh wait. I posted it all on Parler. Damn.”
Right now, the live-streaming insurrectionists are already losing their jobs. A boatload of them. Yet that’s nothing compared to what is coming. Facing 20 years in prison or worse, that traitorous and celebratory fun suddenly doesn’t seem like so much fun. Especially for those who participated and still have a lot to lose.
Full statement tonight from northwestern suburban Trump backer and CEO who says he’s “deeply regretful” for entering the US Capitol during Wednesday’s violent pro-Trump riot pic.twitter.com/HWN0PVjetd
I guess that CEO—whose name is Brad Rukstales—is hoping he’ll be given a mulligan for his role in the failed coup, much like the one Lindsey Graham wants to offer Trump. But no dice. A new administration is coming in just days, and the guy that insurgents like Rukstales were willing to throw away their lives for just called them “criminals.”
That guy who invaded Nancy Pelosi’s office, who wrote a note to her that read “Nancy, Bigo was here, you bitch!”? Well, it turns out he was innocent in all this. He was just looking for the bathroom, see.
“I didn't do anything. I didn't breach the doors. I got shoved in. I didn't mean to be there. Hell. I was walking around looking for a bathroom.
We went to peacefully protest and that's what we were doing. They started it. Our own police started it."
Even people who didn’t enter the Capitol building and are not facing any charges are now trying to apologize, because, it turns out, supporting the attempted overthrow of the government is bad for business. Donald Rouse, Sr. co-owns a Gulf Coast grocery store chain and apologized after he was identified in the crowd, launching the current boycott of his stores.
“I’m horrified by the violence and destruction we saw yesterday and the pain it has caused so many. Our country desperately needs to come together to heal, and I will do everything I can to be a part of that process.”
Expect many more people who stormed the Capitol to suddenly say they were “pushed” in or just looking for the bathroom, and that they are super-duper sorry about participating in that whole violent coup attempt thing.
The FBI is trying to identify insurrectionists. If you have any information, go to fbi.gov/uscapitol
