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February 13, 2021 – In My Opinion: Capitol Riot and Trump’s role in it WERE NOT INVESTIGATED PROPERLY YET. WHO ARE THE MAIN HIDDEN ACTORS?!

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Michael Novakhov – In My Opinion: Capitol Riot and Trump’s role in it WERE NOT INVESTIGATED PROPERLY YET, just like the circumstances of the First Impeachment. I think humbly, that at the roots of these and many other events are the TOC-MOB, New Abwehr (and Germany), and the KGB (as the collective term for the Russian Intelligence Services). 

I very much doubt that the deeply dysfunctional FBI is able to dig out the real TRUTH, for a variety of reasons. 

I strongly support calls for the Independent Congressional Inquiry and the most comprehensive and in depth Investigations of these and many, many other US Intelligence failures which, if continued, can lead to the Catastrophe. 

The Capitol Riot may have been “PRE-PLANNED” indeed, as the Trump’s defense asserts. However, it does not mean that Trump did not know about these plans and did not take part in this planning and organizing covertly or overtly. 

 

It looks like everything was very carefully coordinated, and for some time. 

 

WHO ARE THE MAIN HIDDEN ACTORS?! 

 

That’s the ($1000K) Question! 

 

9:51 AM 2/13/2021


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Audio Posts in English Audio Reviews Capitol Riot

INVESTIGATE THE INVESTIGATORS!!! The false flags and the very real flagpoles: The Capitol Riot as the focus of the Counterintelligence Investigations – The News And Times – February 13, 2021 – Posts Review

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INVESTIGATE THE INVESTIGATORS!!! 

Michael Novakhov: The false flags and the very real flagpoles: The Capitol Riot as the focus of the Counterintelligence Investigations – The News And Times – February 13, 2021 – Posts Review

Pro-Trump faction within the FBI and Thomas Edward Caldwell. 

Feds need to tell us a lot more about the Capitol riot investigation (opinion).

Former FBI official, a Navy veteran, is ‘key figure’ in Jan. 6 riot, prosecutors allege.

Worldwide coronavirus case count plunges by almost half in last month.

Coronavirus live: ‘all hypotheses still open’ on virus origin, says WHO; Greece extends lockdown. 

Trump impeachment trial: Capitol rioters acted on Trump’s ‘orders,’ Democrats say.

Impeachment: Trump ‘was trying to become king,’ Congressman Cicilline says.

Coronavirus live: ‘all hypotheses still open’ on virus origin, says WHO.

Germany’s Merkel stands by Russia pipeline that US opposes. 

Full Video: Impeachment Managers Show New Graphic Security Footage Of Capitol Riot. 

Biden Signs Mile-Long Executive Order Reversing Everything Trump Did.

Justice Department says an Oath Keepers leader waited for Trumps direction before Capitol attack.

Oath Keepers Plotting Before Capitol Riot Awaited Direction From Trump, Prosecutors Say.

Trumps Lawyers to Present his Defense in Just 1 Day.

Russia ‘ready’ to break ties with EU if sanctions imposed Lavrov.

Coronavirus live updates: Germany to close borders with neighbors; Australia bars fans from Grand Slam tournament over virus fears. 

There are no such things as the “former” FBI agents, regardless of their formal employment status. Thomas Edward Caldwell and his role in Capitol Riot are the indications that the pro-Trump faction within the FBI does exist, and it is very active and aggressive. Investigate the Investigators! Reform the FBI! 

FBI investigates the Counterintelligence aspects of the Capitol Riot. 

February 11, 2021 Michael Novakhov: The false flags and the very real flagpoles: The Capitol Riot as the focus of the Counterintelligence Investigations – Articles. 

The Capitol Riot as the focus of the Counterintelligence Investigations – Tweets. 

Who are the ultimate authors and masterminds of the Capitol Riot plot and who are the Trump’s handlers? Putin? Russia? The New Abwehr? Germany? All of the above? None of the above?

A majority of the people arrested for Capitol riot had a history of financial trouble.

Capitol rioters financial problems as counterintelligence risk. 

The rage, pain, and hurt of the white working and the lower middle class who lost its social status and felt betrayed creates the fertile ground for American Fascism. Right-wing extremism in the United States. The New Abwehr says: the threat and danger of the right wing extremism in America is just as palpable as the birth of fascism in Germany in 1930-s.

Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial begins. 

Investigate The Investigators! How many of the current and former FBI agents participated in the organizing, planning, and the execution of the Capitol Riot?

The News And Times 
4:30 AM 2/13/2021 – INVESTIGATE THE INVESTIGATORS!!! | Pro-Trump faction within the FBI and Thomas Edward Caldwell | Feds need to tell us a lot more about the Capitol riot investigation (opinion) | Former FBI official, a Navy veteran, is ‘key figure’ in Jan. 6 riot, prosecutors allege | Worldwide coronavirus case count plunges by almost half in last month | Coronavirus live: ‘all hypotheses still open’ on virus origin, says WHO; Greece extends lockdown
1:18 PM 2/12/2021 – Trump impeachment trial: Capitol rioters acted on Trump’s ‘orders,’ Democrats say | Impeachment: Trump ‘was trying to become king,’ Congressman Cicilline says | Coronavirus live: ‘all hypotheses still open’ on virus origin, says WHO | Germany’s Merkel stands by Russia pipeline that US opposes
Full Video: Impeachment Managers Show New Graphic Security Footage Of Capitol Riot
11:21 AM 2/12/2021 – Current News: Biden Signs Mile-Long Executive Order Reversing Everything Trump Did. Justice Department says an Oath Keepers leader waited for Trumps direction before Capitol attack. Oath Keepers Plotting Before Capitol Riot Awaited Direction From Trump, Prosecutors Say. Japan-South Korea dispute may get worse. Trumps Lawyers to Present his Defense in Just 1 Day. Russia ‘ready’ to break ties with EU if sanctions imposed Lavrov.
2.12.21 – Selected Articles: Coronavirus live updates: Germany to close borders with neighbors; Australia bars fans from Grand Slam tournament over virus fears posted at 06:52:09 UTC
2.12.21 – Opinions: There are no such things as the “former” FBI agents, regardless of their formal employment status. Thomas Edward Caldwell and his role in Capitol Riot are the indications that the pro-Trump faction within the FBI does exist, and it is very active and aggressive. Investigate the Investigators! Reform the FBI! – 2:43 AM 2/12/2021
12:29 AM 2/12/2021 – Recent Posts
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5:52 PM 2/11/2021 – Podcasts Review – Latest episodes
1:49 PM 2/11/2021 FBI investigates the Counterintelligence aspects of the Capitol Riot
February 11, 2021 Michael Novakhov: The false flags and the very real flagpoles: The Capitol Riot as the focus of the Counterintelligence Investigations – Articles
10:09 AM 2/11/2021 – The Capitol Riot as the focus of the Counterintelligence Investigations – Tweets
Who are the ultimate authors and masterminds of the Capitol Riot plot and who are the Trump’s handlers? Putin? Russia? The New Abwehr? Germany? All of the above? None of the above? – M.N. | A majority of the people arrested for Capitol riot had a history of financial trouble https://www.washingtonpost.com | Capitol rioters financial problems as counterintelligence risk
5:33 AM 2/11/2021 – The rage, pain, and hurt of the white working and the lower middle class who lost its social status and felt betrayed creates the fertile ground for American Fascism | Right-wing extremism in the United States | The New Abwehr says: the threat and danger of the right wing extremism in America is just as palpable as the birth of fascism in Germany in 1930-s.
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8:08 AM 2/10/2021 – Podcasts Review
6:01 AM 2/10/2021 – Podcasts Review – Latest episodes
2:48 PM 2/9/2021 – Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial begins
11:29 – 8:31 AM 2/9/2021 – Podcasts Review
7:39 AM 2/9/2021 Investigate The Investigators! How many of the current and past FBI agents participated in the organizing, planning, and the execution of the Capitol Riot?
5:14 AM 2/9/2021 – Latest Podcasts Episodes
3:58 PM 2/6/2021 – The News And Times Blog on Blogger from Michael Novakhov
6:27 PM 2/8/2021 – Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks
Tweets by @mikenov – 6:07 PM 2/8/20

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February 11, 2021 – FBI investigates the Counterintelligence aspects of the Capitol Riot

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FBI probing if foreign governments, groups funded extremists who helped execute Capitol attack

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WASHINGTON — The FBI is investigating whether foreign governments, organizations or individuals provided financial support to extremists who helped plan and execute the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, one current and one former FBI official told NBC News.

As part of the investigation, the bureau is examining payments of $500,000 in bitcoin, apparently by a French national, to key figures and groups in the alt-right before the riot, the sources said. Those payments were documented and posted on the web this week by a company that analyzes cryptocurrency transfers. Payments of bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, can be traced because they are documented on a public ledger.

 

Separately, a joint threat assessment issued this week by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and various other federal and D.C.-area police agencies noted that since the Jan. 6 riot, “Russian, Iranian, and Chinese influence actors have seized the opportunity to amplify narratives in furtherance of their policy interest amid the presidential transition.”

Russian state and proxy media outlets “have amplified themes related to the violent and chaotic nature of the Capitol Hill incident, impeachment of President Trump, and social media censorship,” the unclassified intelligence report said. “In at least one instance, a Russian proxy claimed that ANTIFA members disguised themselves as supporters of President Trump, and were responsible for storming the Capitol building.”

Chinese media, meanwhile, “have seized the story to denigrate U.S. democratic governance, casting the United States as broadly in decline — and to justify China’s crackdown on protestors in Hong Kong.”

The examination of possible foreign influence related to the Capitol riot, which involves the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, comes after years of what current and former FBI officials say is mounting evidence that Russia and other foreign adversaries have sought to secretly support political extremists on the far right and far left.

Law enforcement officials and terrorism experts say there has long been “a mutual affection between Western white supremacists and the Russian government,” as two scholars put it in a February paper on the JustSecurity web site.

 

Some senators were concerned enough about the issue that they inserted a requirement in the 2021 defense bill that the Pentagon “report to Congress on the extent of Russian support for ‘racially and ethnically motivated violent extremist groups and networks in Europe and the United States’ — and what can be done to counter it.”

The current FBI official told NBC News that the bureau did not necessarily suspect Russian involvement in the bitcoin transfers, which appear to have been made by a French computer programmer who died by suicide on Dec. 8 after triggering the transfers, according to French media.

But the cryptocurrency payments prompted the FBI to examine whether any of the money was used to find illegal acts, which, if true, raises the possibility of money laundering and conspiracy charges, the FBI official said.

On Dec. 8, Chainalysis reported, the donor sent 28.15 BTC — worth about $522,000 at the time of transfer — to 22 separate addresses, many of which belong to far-right activists.

The Chainalysis blog post, first highlighted by Yahoo News, said far-right podcaster Nick Fuentes received the most money, 13.5 BTC — worth approximately $250,000.

Fuentes, who spoke at pro-Trump rallies last year in Michigan and Washington, D.C., told the ProPublica news organization that he was at the “Stop the Steal” rally on Wednesday but didn’t follow the mob into the Capitol.

One group of Fuentes’ supporters, which calls itself the Groyper Army, was filmed running through the Capitol carrying a large blue flag with the America First logo, ProPublica reported.

“We’re looking at and treating this just like a significant international counterterrorism or counterintelligence operation,” Michael Sherwin, the U.S. attorney in D.C., said at a news briefing last week.

“We’re looking at everything: Money, travel records, looking at disposition, movement, communication records.”

Ken Dilanian is a correspondent covering intelligence and national security for the NBC News Investigative Unit.

Read the whole story

 

· · ·

Feds need to tell us a lot more about the Capitol riot investigation (opinion)

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Normally after a major event like this — a terrorist assault on the heart of our government — top federal law enforcement officials would step up to give the most comprehensive account of what they know. They would move quickly to inform and reassure the public — to tell us who did what, how it happened, and what the threat is now.

Not so well.

Perhaps the most notable part of the update was who wasn’t giving it. The top officials from Justice and the FBI — Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Director Christopher Wray — weren’t there. Nor were other senior officials from relevant agencies like the Department of Homeland Security. Instead, we saw the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington office, Steve D’Antuono, and the acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia, Michael Sherwin.

While these two officials are no doubt the ones most closely monitoring the investigations into the insurrection, the absence of their bosses — or even their deputies — was unexpected, given the magnitude of the attack.

The news conference focused almost exclusively on the investigation into the attack — on the crime-solving. It is, of course, the Justice Department’s job to gather evidence, track down suspects and bring perpetrators to justice.

We learned from D’Antuono that the FBI was treating the Capitol attack the same way it would an international terrorist incident, and that it had opened 170 “subject files” (referring to individuals identified as persons who potentially committed crimes), and of those has charged more than 70 individuals.

Sherwin emphasized that each perpetrator will be charged with the most severe crime warranted, including and up to seditious conspiracy.

But both officials appeared to skirt around explaining what federal law enforcement knew and did before that day’s Trump rally and the attack that followed it, in particular how the feds had coordinated with other agencies to prepare for trouble.

Nor did they mention the threat bulletin now issued to all 50 states warning of armed protests planned at every state’s capitol and in Washington in the days leading up to the inauguration on January 20.

Goal #2: Stop misinformation and conspiracy theories by offering facts

Many Americans are wondering how this attack was allowed to happen. Since 9/11, law enforcement has greatly increased its abilities to sniff out and disrupt developing terrorism plots. The FBI most recently thwarted an apparent plan by militia groups to kidnap and kill the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, in October.

It is hard to understand how — particularly in light of the many threats of violence made openly by pro-Trump groups and individuals on social media — the FBI and its law enforcement partners were not better prepared for what took place.

Unfortunately, neither D’Antuono nor Sherwin offered much in the way of explanation. To be sure, law enforcement is often unable to comment on things that might compromise ongoing investigations. But if that is the case, they normally just say that. On Tuesday, however, D’Antuono puzzlingly acknowledged that the FBI had information from its Norfolk field office indicating plans for violence at the Capitol.

This contradicted his earlier claim to reporters

, Friday, that the FBI did not have any such information in its possession at all before the attack. Nor did he explain why the Norfolk tip was not followed up on after the Joint Terrorism Task Force received it.

By not filling in these gaps, or even stating clearly that the FBI was reviewing all of the intelligence that was known beforehand, the officials invited more speculation about whether the government’s flat-footed response to the Capitol assault was caused by negligence or — far worse — an intentional intelligence failure.

They missed an opportunity to be as robust as possible in laying out how law enforcement approached this highly publicized rally, and potentially contributed to a further erosion of trust in law enforcement and the proliferation of unfounded conspiracy theories.

Goal #3: Deter future violence by sending a strong message

Many members of the Capitol mob were undoubtedly watching the news conference to find out what the FBI knew. On this front, both officials sent a clear message that they would use every resource at their disposal to identify and prosecute everyone who attacked the seat of our democracy.

Make no mistake: The people who planned and participated in this atrocity will get a knock on their doors from the FBI soon enough.

But the domestic terror threat is not limited to that one mob. The very fact that the FBI has issued a threat bulletin to all 50 states reveals that the depraved ideology based on the lie about the “rigged” election spreads far and deep.

But neither D’Antuono nor Sherwin addressed this future threat, issued a warning to anyone planning violence, or even referred to the people involved in this violence as domestic terrorists.

This may be because they have seen how the President reacts when such language is used against his defenders and allies. After all, neither the FBI nor the DOJ can afford, in this critical moment, to lose their leadership because Trump decided to fire them. Unfortunately, if that fear is what resulted in the gaps in Tuesday’s remarks, it may embolden the very people they are protecting us against.

Read the whole story

 

· · · ·

Capitol insurrection: Most of the people charged, like Jenna Ryan, showed signs of prior money troubles

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Yet Ryan, 50, is accused of rushing into the Capitol past broken glass and blaring security alarms and, according to federal prosecutors, shouting: “Fight for freedom! Fight for freedom!”

But in a different way, she fit right in.

Despite her outward signs of success, Ryan had struggled financially for years. She was still paying off a $37,000 lien for unpaid federal taxes when she was arrested. She’d nearly lost her home to foreclosure before that. She filed for bankruptcy in 2012 and faced another IRS tax lien in 2010.

Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories.

The group’s bankruptcy rate — 18 percent — was nearly twice as high as that of the American public, The Post found. A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings.

The financial problems are revealing because they offer potential clues for understanding why so many Trump supporters — many with professional careers and few with violent criminal histories — were willing to participate in an attack egged on by the president’s rhetoric painting him and his supporters as undeserving victims.

While no single factor explains why someone decided to join in, experts say, Donald Trump and his brand of grievance politics tapped into something that resonated with the hundreds of people who descended on the Capitol in a historic burst of violence.

“I think what you’re finding is more than just economic insecurity but a deep-seated feeling of precarity about their personal situation,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a political science professor who helps run the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab at American University, reacting to The Post’s findings. “And that precarity — combined with a sense of betrayal or anger that someone is taking something away — mobilized a lot of people that day.”

The financial missteps by defendants in the insurrection ranged from small debts of a few thousand dollars more than a decade ago to unpaid tax bills of $400,000 and homes facing foreclosure in recent years. Some of these people seemed to have regained their financial footing. But many of them once stood close to the edge.

Ryan had nearly lost everything. And the stakes seemed similarly high to her when she came to Washington in early January. She fully believed Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen and that he was going to save the country, she said in an interview with The Post.

But now — facing federal charges and abandoned by people she considered “fellow patriots” — she said she feels betrayed.

“I bought into a lie, and the lie is the lie, and it’s embarrassing,” she said. “I regret everything.”

The FBI has said it found evidence of organized plots by extremist groups. But many of the people who came to the Capitol on Jan. 6 — including Ryan — appeared to have adopted their radical outlooks more informally, consuming baseless claims about the election on television, social media and right-wing websites.

The poor and uneducated are not more likely to join extremist movements, according to experts. Two professors a couple of years ago found the opposite in one example: an unexpectedly high number of engineers who became Islamist radicals.

In the Capitol attack, business owners and white-collar workers made up 40 percent of the people accused of taking part, according to a study by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago. Only 9 percent appeared to be unemployed.

The participation of people with middle- and upper-middle-class positions fits with research suggesting that the rise of right-wing extremist groups in the 1950s was fueled by people in the middle of society who felt they were losing status and power, said Pippa Norris, a political science professor at Harvard University who has studied radical political movements.

Miller-Idriss said she was struck by a 2011 study that found household income was not a factor in whether a young person supported the extreme far right in Germany. But a highly significant predictor was whether they had lived through a parent’s unemployment.

“These are people who feel like they’ve lost something,” Miller-Idriss said.

Going through a bankruptcy or falling behind on taxes, even years earlier, could provoke a similar response.

“They know it can be lost. They have that history — and then someone comes along and tells you this election has been stolen,” Miller-Idriss said. “It taps into the same thing.”

Playing on personal pain

Trump’s false claims about election fraud — refuted by elections officials and rejected by judges — seemed tailored to exploit feelings about this precarious status, said Don Haider-Markel, a political science professor at the University of Kansas who studies political extremism.

“It’s hard to ignore with a Trump presidency that message that ‘the America you knew and loved is going away, and I’m going to protect it,’” Haider-Markel said. “They feel, at a minimum, that they’re under threat.”

While some of the financial problems were old, the pandemic’s economic toll appeared to inflict fresh pain for some of the people accused of participating in the insurrection.

A California man filed for bankruptcy one week before allegedly joining the attack, according to public records. A Texas man was charged with entering the Capitol one month after his company was slapped with a nearly $2,000 state tax lien.

Several young people charged in the attack came from families with histories of financial duress.

The parents of Riley June Williams — a 22-year-old who allegedly helped to steal a laptop from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office — filed for bankruptcy when she was a child, according to public records. A house owned by her mother faced foreclosure when she was a teenager, records show. Recently, a federal judge placed Williams on home confinement with her mother in Harrisburg, Pa. Her federal public defender did not respond to a request for comment.

People with professional careers such as respiratory therapist, nurse and lawyer were also accused of joining in.

One of them was William McCall Calhoun, 57, a well-known lawyer in Americus, Ga., 130 miles south of Atlanta, who was hit with a $26,000 federal tax lien in 2019, according to public records. A woman who knows Calhoun, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly, said he started to show strong support for Trump only in the past year. An attorney for Calhoun declined to comment.

Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by police when she tried to leap through a door’s broken window inside the Capitol, had struggled to run a pool-service company outside San Diego and was saddled with a $23,000 judgment from a lender in 2017, according to court records.

Financial problems were also apparent among people federal authorities said were connected to far-right nationalist groups, such as the Proud Boys.

Dominic Pezzola, who federal authorities said is a member of the Proud Boys, is accused of being among the first to lead the surge inside the Capitol and helping to overwhelm police. About 140 officers were injured in the storming of the Capitol and one officer, Brian D. Sicknick, was killed.

Pezzola, of Rochester, N.Y., also has been named in state tax warrants totaling more than $40,000 over the past five years, according to public records. His attorney declined to comment.

The roots of extremism are complex, said Haider-Markel.

“Somehow, they’ve been wronged, they’ve developed a grievance, and they tend to connect that to some broader ideology,” he said.

The price of insurrection

Ryan, who lives in Frisco, Tex., a Dallas suburb, said she was slow to become a big Trump supporter.

She’s been described as a conservative radio talk show host. But she wasn’t a budding Rush Limbaugh. Her AM radio show each Sunday focused on real estate, and she paid for the airtime. She stopped doing the show in March, when the pandemic hit.

But she continued to run a service that offers advice for people struggling with childhood trauma and bad relationships. Ryan said the work was based on the steps she took to overcome her own rough upbringing.

Twice divorced and struggling with financial problems, Ryan developed an outlook that she described as politically conservative, leaning toward libertarian.

But politics was not her focal point until recently. She recalled being upset when President Barack Obama won reelection in 2012. And she preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton four years later. But she said she wasn’t strident in her support for Trump.

That changed as the 2020 election approached.

She said she started reading far-right websites such as Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit. She began streaming shows such as Alex Jones’s “Infowars” and former Trump chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room: Pandemic.” She began following groundless assertions related to QAnon, a sprawling set of false claims that have coalesced into an extremist ideology. She said she didn’t know whether the posts were true, but she was enthralled.

“It was all like a football game. I was sucked into it. Consumed by it,” Ryan said.

She attended her first-ever protest in April, going to Austin to vent about the state’s pandemic shutdown orders. That was followed by a rally for Shelley Luther, who gained national attention for reopening her beauty salon in Dallas in defiance of the shutdown.

Ryan said she traveled to Trump’s “Save America” rally on a whim. A Facebook friend offered to fly her and three others on a private plane.

They arrived in Washington a day early and got rooms at a Westin hotel downtown, Ryan said.

It was her first trip to the nation’s capital.

The next morning, Jan. 6, the group of friends left the hotel at 6 a.m., Ryan said. She was cold, so she bought a $35 knit snow hat with a “45” emblem from a souvenir shop. They then followed the crowd streaming toward the National Mall.

“My main concern was there were no bathrooms. I kept asking, ‘Where are the bathrooms?’” she said. “I was just having fun.”

They listened to some of the speakers. But mostly they walked around and took photos. She felt like a tourist. They grabbed sandwiches at a Wawa convenience store for lunch. They hired a pedicab to take them back to the hotel.

She drank white wine while the group watched on television as Congress prepared to certify the electoral college votes. They listened to clips of Trump telling rallygoers to walk to the Capitol and saying, “We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

They decided to leave the hotel and go to the Capitol.

Ryan said she was reluctant.

But she also posted a video to her Facebook account that showed her looking into a bathroom mirror and saying, according to an FBI account of her charges: “We’re gonna go down and storm the capitol. They’re down there right now and that’s why we came and so that’s what we are going to do. So wish me luck.”

She live-streamed on Facebook. She posted photos to Twitter. She got closer to the Capitol with each post. She stood on the Capitol’s steps. She flashed a peace symbol next to a smashed Capitol window. The FBI also found video of her walking through doors on the west side of the Capitol in the middle of a packed crowd, where she said into a camera, according to the bureau: “Y’all know who to hire for your realtor. Jenna Ryan for your realtor.”

The FBI document does not state how long Ryan spent inside the building. She said it was just a few minutes. She and her new friends eventually walked back to the hotel, she said.

“We just stormed the Capital,” Ryan tweeted that afternoon. “It was one of the best days of my life.”

She said she realized she was in trouble only after returning to Texas. Her phone was blowing up with messages. Her social media posts briefly made her the infamous face of the riots: the smiling real estate agent who flew in a private jet to an insurrection.

Nine days later, she turned herself in to the FBI. She was charged with two federal misdemeanors related to entering the Capitol building and disorderly conduct. Last week, federal authorities filed similar charges against two others on her flight: Jason L. Hyland, 37, of Frisco, who federal authorities said organized the trip, and Katherine S. Schwab, 32, of Colleyville, Texas.

Ryan remained defiant at first. She clashed with people who criticized her online. She told a Dallas TV station that she deserved a presidential pardon.

Then Trump left for Florida. President Biden took office. And Ryan, at home in Texas, was left to wonder what to do with her two mini-goldendoodle dogs if she goes to prison.

“Not one patriot is standing up for me,” Ryan said recently. “I’m a complete villain. I was down there based on what my president said. ‘Stop the steal.’ Now I see that it was all over nothing. He was just having us down there for an ego boost. I was there for him.”

Read the whole story

 

· · · · · · · · ·

Michael_Novakhov

5 hours ago
REPLY
EDIT
HTTP://MICHAEL_NOVAKHOV.NEWSBLUR.COM/
1 public comment

acdha

23 hours ago
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Just like their leader
WASHINGTON, DC
nocko

4 hours ago
Most of their acute economic problems seemed to mature under Trump’s admin. How was more Trump going to help them? Very confusing.

Capitol riot defendants shared history of financial probelms: WaPo

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  • Many of the Capitol riot defendants have something in common: a history of financial difficulties. 
  • A Washington Post analysis found that a substantial number of defendants had money woes. 
  • The documented financial problems include bankruptcies, debt, foreclosures, and unpaid taxes. 
  • Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories.

The more than 240 defendants charged in the January 6 insurrection on the Capitol siege came to Washington, D.C. from around the United States and from all walks of life, but something in common: a history of financial difficulties. 

new Washington Post analysis of court records and financial documents found that out of 125 defendants who had publicly available financial information, nearly 60% had filed for bankruptcy, had unpaid tax bills and other debts, been sued for unpaid debts, or faced losing their homes through eviction or foreclosure. 

The Post also found that among that group, the bankruptcy rate was 18%, almost double the national average. 

Read more: How Trump’s Senate trial could end with a vote to ban him from ever holding federal office again and kill any chances of a 2024 run

Among them were some of the most infamous accused rioters who have become faces of the insurrection. Jenna Ryan, the Texas real estate agent charged with two misdemeanors in connection with Capitol insurrection who flew to Washington, D.C. on a private jet, had filed for bankruptcy in 2012, almost lost her home before then, and had a history of unpaid federal taxes.

Ryan, who was also banned from PayPal after trying to raise funds for her legal defense on the platform, told the Post that she now fully regrets her participation in the riots and says she “bought into a lie.” 

Riley June Williams, the 22-year-old Pennsylvania woman accused of being involved in the theft of a laptop from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, had herself filed for bankruptcy when she was just a child, according to the Post. 

And Ashli Babbit, who was shot and killed by law enforcement during the insurrection, had been hit with a $23,000 judgment from a lender a few years prior. 

Research shows that low-income people with lower levels of education are not necessarily more likely to fall into extremist movements — but being saddled with debt or other struggles can make some feel as if they have nothing left to lose. 

The Capitol insurrection further displays how outwardly successful and educated people in society’s mainstream can fall into anti-government movements. 

Those arrested so far include people associated with extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, but also people who had never before been charged with a federal crime or had a connection to those movements.

The rise of domestic right-wing extremism and the QAnon conspiracy theory haven’t just targeted low-income or uneducated people, however, but have swept up many well-off, college-educated professionals, too. 

One researcher interviewed by the Post said that middle-class and educated people may be more likely to be lured into extremism when they feel their position in society being jeopardized or threatened. 

Ryan, for example, told the Post that while she had voted for Trump in 2016, she didn’t become politically engaged until 2020, when she started consuming right-wing media like the Gateway Pundit, Infowars, and Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, and fell down the rabbit hole of the QAnon conspiracy. 

Read the whole story

 

· · ·

Dominic Pezzola, Capitol riot defendant, was ‘misled’ and ‘duped’ by Donald Trump: Lawyer

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Dominic Pezzola, a former Marine facing charges for storming the U.S. Capitol, was “duped” by former President Trump into believing it was his duty to act, his lawyer told a federal court Wednesday.


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February 11, 2021 – Michael Novakhov – Shared News Links: The Capitol Riot as the focus of the Counterintelligence Investigations – Articles

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February 11, 2021 – Michael Novakhov – Shared News Links:

The Capitol Riot as the focus of the Counterintelligence Investigations

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German intelligence warns Capitol riot, Covid lockdown fuel right-wing extremism. Alleged Oath Keeper leader Thomas Caldwell was former FBI agent with top-secret clearance, attorney says. Investigate The Investigators! How many of the current and past FBI agents participated in the organizing, planning, and the execution of the Capitol Riot? Capitol riot defendants shared history of financial probelms: WaPo. Dominic Pezzola, Capitol riot defendant, was ‘misled’ and ‘duped’ by Donald Trump: Lawyer. Germany hails Biden’s move to halt Trump-ordered troop cuts

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Capitol insurrection: Most of the people charged, like Jenna Ryan, showed signs of prior money troubles

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Yet Ryan, 50, is accused of rushing into the Capitol past broken glass and blaring security alarms and, according to federal prosecutors, shouting: “Fight for freedom! Fight for freedom!”

But in a different way, she fit right in.

Despite her outward signs of success, Ryan had struggled financially for years. She was still paying off a $37,000 lien for unpaid federal taxes when she was arrested. She’d nearly lost her home to foreclosure before that. She filed for bankruptcy in 2012 and faced another IRS tax lien in 2010.

Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories.

The group’s bankruptcy rate — 18 percent — was nearly twice as high as that of the American public, The Post found. A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings.

The financial problems are revealing because they offer potential clues for understanding why so many Trump supporters — many with professional careers and few with violent criminal histories — were willing to participate in an attack egged on by the president’s rhetoric painting him and his supporters as undeserving victims.

While no single factor explains why someone decided to join in, experts say, Donald Trump and his brand of grievance politics tapped into something that resonated with the hundreds of people who descended on the Capitol in a historic burst of violence.

“I think what you’re finding is more than just economic insecurity but a deep-seated feeling of precarity about their personal situation,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a political science professor who helps run the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab at American University, reacting to The Post’s findings. “And that precarity — combined with a sense of betrayal or anger that someone is taking something away — mobilized a lot of people that day.”

The financial missteps by defendants in the insurrection ranged from small debts of a few thousand dollars more than a decade ago to unpaid tax bills of $400,000 and homes facing foreclosure in recent years. Some of these people seemed to have regained their financial footing. But many of them once stood close to the edge.

Ryan had nearly lost everything. And the stakes seemed similarly high to her when she came to Washington in early January. She fully believed Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen and that he was going to save the country, she said in an interview with The Post.

But now — facing federal charges and abandoned by people she considered “fellow patriots” — she said she feels betrayed.

“I bought into a lie, and the lie is the lie, and it’s embarrassing,” she said. “I regret everything.”

The FBI has said it found evidence of organized plots by extremist groups. But many of the people who came to the Capitol on Jan. 6 — including Ryan — appeared to have adopted their radical outlooks more informally, consuming baseless claims about the election on television, social media and right-wing websites.

The poor and uneducated are not more likely to join extremist movements, according to experts. Two professors a couple of years ago found the opposite in one example: an unexpectedly high number of engineers who became Islamist radicals.

In the Capitol attack, business owners and white-collar workers made up 40 percent of the people accused of taking part, according to a study by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago. Only 9 percent appeared to be unemployed.

The participation of people with middle- and upper-middle-class positions fits with research suggesting that the rise of right-wing extremist groups in the 1950s was fueled by people in the middle of society who felt they were losing status and power, said Pippa Norris, a political science professor at Harvard University who has studied radical political movements.

Miller-Idriss said she was struck by a 2011 study that found household income was not a factor in whether a young person supported the extreme far right in Germany. But a highly significant predictor was whether they had lived through a parent’s unemployment.

“These are people who feel like they’ve lost something,” Miller-Idriss said.

Going through a bankruptcy or falling behind on taxes, even years earlier, could provoke a similar response.

“They know it can be lost. They have that history — and then someone comes along and tells you this election has been stolen,” Miller-Idriss said. “It taps into the same thing.”

Playing on personal pain

Trump’s false claims about election fraud — refuted by elections officials and rejected by judges — seemed tailored to exploit feelings about this precarious status, said Don Haider-Markel, a political science professor at the University of Kansas who studies political extremism.

“It’s hard to ignore with a Trump presidency that message that ‘the America you knew and loved is going away, and I’m going to protect it,’” Haider-Markel said. “They feel, at a minimum, that they’re under threat.”

While some of the financial problems were old, the pandemic’s economic toll appeared to inflict fresh pain for some of the people accused of participating in the insurrection.

A California man filed for bankruptcy one week before allegedly joining the attack, according to public records. A Texas man was charged with entering the Capitol one month after his company was slapped with a nearly $2,000 state tax lien.

Several young people charged in the attack came from families with histories of financial duress.

The parents of Riley June Williams — a 22-year-old who allegedly helped to steal a laptop from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office — filed for bankruptcy when she was a child, according to public records. A house owned by her mother faced foreclosure when she was a teenager, records show. Recently, a federal judge placed Williams on home confinement with her mother in Harrisburg, Pa. Her federal public defender did not respond to a request for comment.

People with professional careers such as respiratory therapist, nurse and lawyer were also accused of joining in.

One of them was William McCall Calhoun, 57, a well-known lawyer in Americus, Ga., 130 miles south of Atlanta, who was hit with a $26,000 federal tax lien in 2019, according to public records. A woman who knows Calhoun, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly, said he started to show strong support for Trump only in the past year. An attorney for Calhoun declined to comment.

Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by police when she tried to leap through a door’s broken window inside the Capitol, had struggled to run a pool-service company outside San Diego and was saddled with a $23,000 judgment from a lender in 2017, according to court records.

Financial problems were also apparent among people federal authorities said were connected to far-right nationalist groups, such as the Proud Boys.

Dominic Pezzola, who federal authorities said is a member of the Proud Boys, is accused of being among the first to lead the surge inside the Capitol and helping to overwhelm police. About 140 officers were injured in the storming of the Capitol and one officer, Brian D. Sicknick, was killed.

Pezzola, of Rochester, N.Y., also has been named in state tax warrants totaling more than $40,000 over the past five years, according to public records. His attorney declined to comment.

The roots of extremism are complex, said Haider-Markel.

“Somehow, they’ve been wronged, they’ve developed a grievance, and they tend to connect that to some broader ideology,” he said.

The price of insurrection

Ryan, who lives in Frisco, Tex., a Dallas suburb, said she was slow to become a big Trump supporter.

She’s been described as a conservative radio talk show host. But she wasn’t a budding Rush Limbaugh. Her AM radio show each Sunday focused on real estate, and she paid for the airtime. She stopped doing the show in March, when the pandemic hit.

But she continued to run a service that offers advice for people struggling with childhood trauma and bad relationships. Ryan said the work was based on the steps she took to overcome her own rough upbringing.

Twice divorced and struggling with financial problems, Ryan developed an outlook that she described as politically conservative, leaning toward libertarian.

But politics was not her focal point until recently. She recalled being upset when President Barack Obama won reelection in 2012. And she preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton four years later. But she said she wasn’t strident in her support for Trump.

That changed as the 2020 election approached.

She said she started reading far-right websites such as Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit. She began streaming shows such as Alex Jones’s “Infowars” and former Trump chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room: Pandemic.” She began following groundless assertions related to QAnon, a sprawling set of false claims that have coalesced into an extremist ideology. She said she didn’t know whether the posts were true, but she was enthralled.

“It was all like a football game. I was sucked into it. Consumed by it,” Ryan said.

She attended her first-ever protest in April, going to Austin to vent about the state’s pandemic shutdown orders. That was followed by a rally for Shelley Luther, who gained national attention for reopening her beauty salon in Dallas in defiance of the shutdown.

Ryan said she traveled to Trump’s “Save America” rally on a whim. A Facebook friend offered to fly her and three others on a private plane.

They arrived in Washington a day early and got rooms at a Westin hotel downtown, Ryan said.

It was her first trip to the nation’s capital.

The next morning, Jan. 6, the group of friends left the hotel at 6 a.m., Ryan said. She was cold, so she bought a $35 knit snow hat with a “45” emblem from a souvenir shop. They then followed the crowd streaming toward the National Mall.

“My main concern was there were no bathrooms. I kept asking, ‘Where are the bathrooms?’” she said. “I was just having fun.”

They listened to some of the speakers. But mostly they walked around and took photos. She felt like a tourist. They grabbed sandwiches at a Wawa convenience store for lunch. They hired a pedicab to take them back to the hotel.

She drank white wine while the group watched on television as Congress prepared to certify the electoral college votes. They listened to clips of Trump telling rallygoers to walk to the Capitol and saying, “We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

They decided to leave the hotel and go to the Capitol.

Ryan said she was reluctant.

But she also posted a video to her Facebook account that showed her looking into a bathroom mirror and saying, according to an FBI account of her charges: “We’re gonna go down and storm the capitol. They’re down there right now and that’s why we came and so that’s what we are going to do. So wish me luck.”

She live-streamed on Facebook. She posted photos to Twitter. She got closer to the Capitol with each post. She stood on the Capitol’s steps. She flashed a peace symbol next to a smashed Capitol window. The FBI also found video of her walking through doors on the west side of the Capitol in the middle of a packed crowd, where she said into a camera, according to the bureau: “Y’all know who to hire for your realtor. Jenna Ryan for your realtor.”

The FBI document does not state how long Ryan spent inside the building. She said it was just a few minutes. She and her new friends eventually walked back to the hotel, she said.

“We just stormed the Capital,” Ryan tweeted that afternoon. “It was one of the best days of my life.”

She said she realized she was in trouble only after returning to Texas. Her phone was blowing up with messages. Her social media posts briefly made her the infamous face of the riots: the smiling real estate agent who flew in a private jet to an insurrection.

Nine days later, she turned herself in to the FBI. She was charged with two federal misdemeanors related to entering the Capitol building and disorderly conduct. Last week, federal authorities filed similar charges against two others on her flight: Jason L. Hyland, 37, of Frisco, who federal authorities said organized the trip, and Katherine S. Schwab, 32, of Colleyville, Texas.

Ryan remained defiant at first. She clashed with people who criticized her online. She told a Dallas TV station that she deserved a presidential pardon.

Then Trump left for Florida. President Biden took office. And Ryan, at home in Texas, was left to wonder what to do with her two mini-goldendoodle dogs if she goes to prison.

“Not one patriot is standing up for me,” Ryan said recently. “I’m a complete villain. I was down there based on what my president said. ‘Stop the steal.’ Now I see that it was all over nothing. He was just having us down there for an ego boost. I was there for him.”

Read the whole story

 

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Michael_Novakhov

2 hours ago
REPLY
EDIT
HTTP://MICHAEL_NOVAKHOV.NEWSBLUR.COM/
1 public comment

acdha

20 hours ago
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Just like their leader
WASHINGTON, DC

nocko

1 hour ago
Most of their acute economic problems seemed to mature under Trump’s admin. How was more Trump going to help them? Very confusing.

Capitol riot defendants shared history of financial probelms: WaPo

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  • Many of the Capitol riot defendants have something in common: a history of financial difficulties. 
  • A Washington Post analysis found that a substantial number of defendants had money woes. 
  • The documented financial problems include bankruptcies, debt, foreclosures, and unpaid taxes. 
  • Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories.

The more than 240 defendants charged in the January 6 insurrection on the Capitol siege came to Washington, D.C. from around the United States and from all walks of life, but something in common: a history of financial difficulties. 

new Washington Post analysis of court records and financial documents found that out of 125 defendants who had publicly available financial information, nearly 60% had filed for bankruptcy, had unpaid tax bills and other debts, been sued for unpaid debts, or faced losing their homes through eviction or foreclosure. 

The Post also found that among that group, the bankruptcy rate was 18%, almost double the national average. 

Read more: How Trump’s Senate trial could end with a vote to ban him from ever holding federal office again and kill any chances of a 2024 run

Among them were some of the most infamous accused rioters who have become faces of the insurrection. Jenna Ryan, the Texas real estate agent charged with two misdemeanors in connection with Capitol insurrection who flew to Washington, D.C. on a private jet, had filed for bankruptcy in 2012, almost lost her home before then, and had a history of unpaid federal taxes.

Ryan, who was also banned from PayPal after trying to raise funds for her legal defense on the platform, told the Post that she now fully regrets her participation in the riots and says she “bought into a lie.” 

Riley June Williams, the 22-year-old Pennsylvania woman accused of being involved in the theft of a laptop from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, had herself filed for bankruptcy when she was just a child, according to the Post. 

And Ashli Babbit, who was shot and killed by law enforcement during the insurrection, had been hit with a $23,000 judgment from a lender a few years prior. 

Research shows that low-income people with lower levels of education are not necessarily more likely to fall into extremist movements — but being saddled with debt or other struggles can make some feel as if they have nothing left to lose. 

The Capitol insurrection further displays how outwardly successful and educated people in society’s mainstream can fall into anti-government movements. 

Those arrested so far include people associated with extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, but also people who had never before been charged with a federal crime or had a connection to those movements.

The rise of domestic right-wing extremism and the QAnon conspiracy theory haven’t just targeted low-income or uneducated people, however, but have swept up many well-off, college-educated professionals, too. 

One researcher interviewed by the Post said that middle-class and educated people may be more likely to be lured into extremism when they feel their position in society being jeopardized or threatened. 

Ryan, for example, told the Post that while she had voted for Trump in 2016, she didn’t become politically engaged until 2020, when she started consuming right-wing media like the Gateway Pundit, Infowars, and Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, and fell down the rabbit hole of the QAnon conspiracy. 

Read the whole story

 

· · ·

Dominic Pezzola, Capitol riot defendant, was ‘misled’ and ‘duped’ by Donald Trump: Lawyer

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Dominic Pezzola, a former Marine facing charges for storming the U.S. Capitol, was “duped” by former President Trump into believing it was his duty to act, his lawyer told a federal court Wednesday.

Mr. Pezzola, of Rochester, New York, “acted out of the delusional belief that he was a ‘patriot’ protecting his country,” attorney Jonathan Zucker wrote in a motion seeking his release from custody.

“Defendant is former military who is sworn to protect his country. He was responding to the entreaties of the then commander in chief, President Trump. The President maintained that the election had been stolen and it was the duty of loyal citizens to ‘stop the steal’,” Mr. Zucker argued on behalf of Mr. Pezzola

“Admittedly there was no rational basis for the claim, but it is apparent defendant was one of millions of Americans who were misled by the President’s deception,” Mr. Pezzola‘s lawyer added.

Mr. Pezzola, 43, also known as “Spaz,” is among roughly 200 people facing charges so far in connection with storming the Capitol as Congress met to count electoral votes on the afternoon of Jan. 6.



In charging documents, federal prosecutors included photographs the government alleges to show Mr. Pezzola using a plastic riot shield to break a window on the Capitol Building prior to entering it.

“The only act that seems to distinguish defendant from thousands of other participants is that he used a shield to break a window and he, along with hundreds if not thousands, actually entered the capital,” his lawyer argued in the court filing.

That footage was played during Wednesday’s impeachment trial of Mr. Trump in the Senate. Mr. Pezzola was mentioned by name as well.

Mr. Pezzola described himself on social media as a member of the Proud Boys, the just-for-men group whose members were among the mobs who violently stormed the building, prosecutors said previously.

In a 15-page motion seeking pretrial detention for Mr. Pezzola, Mr. Zucker does not deny his client has connections to the Proud Boys but claims they are “relatively short lived and minimal.”

Mr. Pezzola has been jailed since mid-January. He has since been charged in an 11-count indictment, including with charges he allegedly conspired with another Proud Boys member from New York.

“The object of the conspiracy was to obstruct, influence, impede and interfere with law enforcement officers engaged in their official duties in protecting the U.S. Capitol and its grounds,” the indictment alleges.

Mr. Pezzola pleaded not guilty to all counts Tuesday. A detention hearing was scheduled for later Wednesday afternoon to determine if he should be released pending the outcome of his trial.

 

· ·

AP News in Brief at 12:04 a.m. EST | National

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Trump trial video shows vast scope, danger of Capitol riot

WASHINGTON (AP) — Prosecutors unveiled chilling new security video in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial on Wednesday, showing the mob of rioters breaking into the Capitol, smashing windows and doors and searching menacingly for Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as overwhelmed police begged on their radios for help.

In the previously unreleased recordings, the House prosecutors displayed gripping scenes of how close the rioters were to the country’s leaders, roaming the halls chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” some equipped with combat gear. Outside, the mob had set up a makeshift gallows.

Videos of the siege have been circulating since the day of the riot, but the graphic compilation amounted to a more complete narrative, a moment-by-moment retelling of one of the nation’s most alarming days. In addition to the evident chaos and danger, it offered fresh details on the attackers, scenes of police heroism and cries of distress. And it showed just how close the country came to a potential breakdown in its seat of democracy as Congress was certifying Trump’s election defeat to Democrat Joe Biden.

“They did it because Donald Trump sent them on this mission,” said House prosecutor Stacey Plaskett, the Democratic delegate representing the U.S. Virgin Islands. “His mob broke into the Capitol to hunt them down.”

The stunning presentation opened the first full day of arguments in the trial as the prosecutors argued Trump was no “innocent bystander” but rather the “inciter in chief” of the deadly Capitol riot, a president who spent months spreading election lies and building a mob of supporters primed for his call to stop Biden’s victory.


Trial highlights: Harrowing footage, focus on Trump’s words

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Democrats opened their first day of arguments in former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial Wednesday with searing footage of the U.S. Capitol riot as they painted Trump as an “inciter in chief” who systematically riled up his supporters and falsely convinced them the election had been stolen, culminating in the deadly attack.

“He assembled, inflamed and incited his followers to descend upon the Capitol,” said the lead impeachment manager, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.

As she presented harrowing footage of the siege, Del. Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat representing the U.S. Virgin Islands and one of the prosecutors, said Trump had “put a target” on the backs of then-Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who were leading the certification of President Joe Biden’s election victory. “His mob broke into the Capitol to hunt them down,” Plaskett said.

Highlights from the first full day of arguments:

TRUMP’S WORDS COME BACK TO HAUNT HIM


Is one day a week enough? Biden’s school goal draws blowback

President Joe Biden is being accused of backpedaling on his pledge to reopen the nation’s schools after the White House added fine print to his promise and made clear that a full reopening is still far from sight.

Biden’s initial pledge in December was to reopen “the majority of our schools” in his first 100 days in office. In January he specified that the goal applied only to schools that teach through eighth grade. And this week the White House said that schools will be considered opened as long as they teach in-person at least one day a week.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended the goal Wednesday, calling it part of a “bold ambitious agenda.” But she also said it’s a bar the administration hopes to exceed.

“Certainly, we are not planning to celebrate at 100 days if we reach that goal,” she said. “We certainly hope to build from that.”

The White House had faced increasing pressure to explain the goal as the reopening debate gains urgency. Biden had never detailed what it meant to be reopened or how he would define success. Pressed on the question Tuesday, Psaki clarified that one day a week of in-person learning would meet the mark.


Georgia prosecutor investigates election after Trump call

ATLANTA (AP) — A Georgia prosecutor said Wednesday that she has opened a criminal investigation into “attempts to influence” last year’s general election, including a call in which President Donald Trump asked a top official to find enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

In a Jan. 2 telephone conversation with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Trump repeatedly argued that Raffensperger could change the certified results of the presidential election, an assertion the secretary of state firmly rejected.

“All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump said. “Because we won the state.”

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat elected to the job in November, did not specifically mention Trump in the letters she sent to state officials Wednesday announcing her investigation. But the former president has been under intense criticism for the call.

Willis spokesman Jeff DiSantis told The Associated Press that while he could not name the subjects under investigation, he confirmed that Trump’s call to Raffensperger was “part of it” and said “the matters reported on over the last several weeks are the matters being investigated.” In her letters, Willis also remarks that officials “have no reason to believe that any Georgia official is a target of this investigation.”


Countries curb diplomatic ties, weigh sanctions on Myanmar

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A growing number of governments are curbing diplomatic ties with Myanmar and increasing economic pressure on its military over the coup last week that erased the fragile democratic progress in the long-oppressed Southeast Asian nation.

President Joe Biden said Wednesday he was issuing an executive order that will prevent Myanmar’s generals from accessing $1 billion in assets in the United States, and he promised more measures were to come.

The U.S. was among many Western governments that lifted most sanctions in the past decade to encourage democratic change as Myanmar’s military rulers were taking gradual steps toward civilian rule — changes that proved temporary with the ousting of the elected government and detentions of Nobel Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and others.

One of the strongest reactions came from New Zealand, which has suspended all military and high-level political contact with the country and pledged to block any aid that could go to its military government or benefit its leaders. It also placed a travel ban on its military leaders.

“We do not recognize the legitimacy of the military-led government and we call on the military to immediately release all detained political leaders and restore civilian rule,” Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta said Tuesday.


Digital siege: Internet cuts become favored tool of regimes

LONDON (AP) — When army generals in Myanmar staged a coup last week, they briefly cut internet access in an apparent attempt to stymie protests. In Uganda, residents couldn’t use Facebook, Twitter and other social media for weeks after a recent election. And in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, the internet has been down for months amid a wider conflict.

Around the world, shutting down the internet has become an increasingly popular tactic of repressive and authoritarian regimes and some illiberal democracies. Digital rights groups say governments use them to stifle dissent, silence opposition voices or cover up human rights abuses, raising concerns about restricting freedom of speech.

Regimes often cut online access in response to protests or civil unrest, particularly around elections, as they try to keep their grip on power by restricting the flow of information, researchers say. It’s the digital equivalent of seizing control of the local TV and radio station that was part of the pre-internet playbook for despots and rebels.

“Internet shutdowns have been massively underreported or misreported over the years,” said Alp Toker, founder of internet monitoring organization Netblocks. The world is “starting to realize what’s happening,” as documenting efforts like his expand, he said.

Last year there were 93 major internet shutdowns in 21 countries, according to a report by Top10VPN, a U.K.-based digital privacy and security research group. The list doesn’t include places like China and North Korea, where the government tightly controls or restricts the internet. Shutdowns can range from all-encompassing internet blackouts to blocking social media platforms or severely throttling internet speeds, the report said.


Government investigating massive counterfeit N95 mask scam

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal authorities are investigating a massive counterfeit N95 mask operation in which fake 3M masks were sold in at least five states to hospitals, medical facilities and government agencies. The foreign-made knockoffs are becoming increasingly difficult to spot and could put health care workers at grave risk for the coronavirus.

These masks are giving first responders “a false sense of security,” said Steve Francis, assistant director for global trade investigations with the Homeland Security Department’s principal investigative arm. He added, “We’ve seen a lot of fraud and other illegal activity.”

Officials could not name the states or the company involved because of the active investigation.

Nearly a year into the pandemic, fraud remains a major problem as scammers seek to exploit hospitals and desperate and weary Americans. Federal investigators say they have seen an increase in phony websites purporting to sell vaccines as well as fake medicine produced overseas and scams involving personal protective equipment. The schemes deliver phony products, unlike fraud earlier in the pandemic that focused more on fleecing customers.

3M, based in Maplewood, Minnesota, is among the largest global producers of the N95 mask, which has been approved by the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and is considered the gold standard in protection against the coronavirus. The company delivered some 2 billion N95 masks in 2020 as the pandemic soared, but in earlier months of the pandemic, when masks were in short supply, fraudsters starting popped up.


Biden in call with China’s Xi raises human rights, trade

Joe Biden on Wednesday held his first call as president with Xi Jinping, pressing the Chinese leader about trade and Beijing’s crackdown on democracy activists in Hong Kong as well as other human rights concerns.

The two leaders spoke just hours after Biden announced plans for a Pentagon task force to review U.S. national security strategy in China and after the new U.S. president announced he was levying sanctions against Myanmar’s military regime following this month’s coup in the southeast Asian country.

A White House statement said Biden raised concerns about Beijing’s “coercive and unfair economic practices.” Biden also pressed Xi on Hong Kong, human rights abuses against Uighur and ethnic minorities in the western Xinjiang province, and its actions toward Taiwan.

“I told him I will work with China when it benefits the American people,” Biden posted on Twitter after the call.

China’s state broadcaster CCTV struck a mostly positive tone about the conversation, saying Xi acknowledged the two sides had their differences, and those differences should be managed, but urged overall cooperation.


Hustler publisher Larry Flynt dies at 78

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Porn purveyor Larry Flynt, who built Hustler magazine into an adult entertainment juggernaut that included casinos, films, websites and other enterprises as he relentlessly championed First Amendment rights, has died at age 78.

Flynt, who had been in declining health, died Wednesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, his longtime attorney, Paul Cambria, told The Associated Press. He had been paralyzed and nearly killed in a 1986 assassination attempt.

“He suffered decades of health issues and you can imagine it was pretty difficult,” said his nephew Jimmy Flynt Jr. He added, “I loved him and may he rest in peace.”

From his beginnings as a fledgling Ohio strip club owner to his reign as founder of one of the most outrageously explicit adult-oriented magazines, Flynt constantly challenged the establishment and was intensely disliked by the religious right and feminist groups that said he demeaned women and put them at risk with pictures of bondage and other controversial acts.

Flynt maintained throughout his life that he wasn’t just a pornographer but also a fierce defender of free-speech rights.


Reports: Mori to resign Tokyo Olympics over sexist remarks

TOKYO (AP) — The long saga of Yoshiro Mori appears to be near the end.

Japan’s Kyodo news agency and others reported on Thursday — citing unnamed sources — that Yoshiro Mori will step down on Friday as the president of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee.

The move follows his sexist comments about women more than a week ago, and an ensuing and rare public debate in Japan about gender equality,

A decision is expected to be announced on Friday when the organizing committee’s executive board meets. The executive board of Tokyo 2020 is overwhelming male, as is the day-to-day leadership.

The 83-year-old Mori, in a meeting of the Japanese Olympic Committee more than a week ago, essentially said that women “talk too much” and are driven by a “strong sense of rivalry.” Mori, a former prime minister, gave a grudging apology a few days later after his opinions were reported, but declined to resign.

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Germany hails Biden’s move to halt Trump-ordered troop cuts

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The German government has welcomed President Joe Biden’s decision to formally halt the planned withdrawal of U.S. troops from Germany

BERLIN — The German government on Friday welcomed President Joe Biden’s decision to formally halt the planned withdrawal of U.S. troops from Germany, arguing that the troops’ stationing there is “in our mutual interest.”

Last year, then-President Donald Trump announced that he was going to pull out about 9,500 of the roughly 34,500 U.S. troops stationed in Germany, but the withdrawal never actually began.

Biden said Thursday that the pullout would be halted until Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reviews America’s troop presence around the globe.

“The German government welcomes this announcement,” Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, told reporters in Berlin. He said that “we will remain in contact with the new American administration on its further plans.”

“We have always been convinced that the stationing of American troops here in Germany serves European and trans-Atlantic security, and so is in our mutual interest,” Seibert said. “We very much value this close, decades-long cooperation with the Americans’ forces that are stationed in Germany.”

Asked whether Germany would make any concrete offers to persuade the U.S. not to withdraw troops, Seibert said that Berlin will follow developments but “how these reviews go is an internal American matter.”

The U.S. has several major military facilities in Germany, including Ramstein Air Base, the headquarters for U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command, and Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, the largest American military hospital outside the United States.

Trump’s order met resistance from Congress as well as from within the military, which has long relied on Germany as a key ally and base of operations.

Trump announced the troop cuts after repeatedly accusing Germany of not paying enough for its own defense, calling the longtime NATO ally “delinquent” for failing to spend 2% of its GDP on defense, a benchmark that alliance members have pledged to work toward.

7:39 AM 2/9/2021 – Investigate The Investigators! How many of the current and past FBI agents participated in the organizing, planning, and the execution of the Capitol Riot?

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Feb. 9, 2021 at 5:04 a.m. EST

Alleged Oath Keeper leader Thomas Caldwell was former FBI agent with top-secret clearance, attorney says

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Those details were revealed in a motion filed Monday asking a judge to let Caldwell out of custody, citing his long military career and ability to pass vetting for the high security clearance. His attorney also claimed that Caldwell has disabilities from his military service that would have prevented him from storming the Capitol.

The FBI did not immediately return an inquiry about Caldwell’s past employment status late Monday.

The claims about Caldwell’s high security clearance and FBI service add to concerns about extremism in the military and law enforcement. The indictments against numerous alleged rioters with military and police ties have led local agencies to launch investigations and the Pentagon to order each military branch to dedicate time to addressing the problem in the coming months.

“The presence of law enforcement officers in the riot reinforces and substantiates the greatest fears many in the public had in the nature of law enforcement in the United States,” Michael German, a former FBI special agent and fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, told The Washington Post.

“It’s incumbent on the Justice Department, if it wants to restore that confidence, to act quickly” to hold the most violent Capitol rioters accountable, he added.

Caldwell lives in Berryman, Va., and had been involved in local GOP politics. He was arrested on Jan. 19 in Virginia on charges of conspiracy, destruction of government property, obstruction of an official proceeding, and violent entry or disorderly conduct.

The government alleges that Caldwell, whom an FBI agent identified as having “a leadership role in the Oath Keepers,” sent Facebook messages coordinating with members of the self-styled militia and sharing video from within the Capitol.

“Us storming the castle,” Caldwell allegedly said in one message that accompanied a video that showed a crowd within the Capitol, according to the criminal complaint. “Please share. Sharon was right with me! I am such an instigator!”

His case is one of several prosecutors are building against Oath Keepers and Proud Boys to make the case that the assault on Congress was premeditated and organized by extremists. Federal prosecutors are considering whether to file sedition charges against some of the accused rioters, the Associated Press reported.

In Monday’s motion for bond, Caldwell denied being a member of the Oath Keepers.

“Caldwell is not a member of the organization, nor has he ever been a member of the organization, and if he were, such membership would be protected activity under the First Amendment,” wrote his attorney, Thomas K. Plofchan.

The motion also questioned whether the Facebook messages allegedly posted by Caldwell prove his involvement in the Jan. 6 riot, arguing that he was “merely relaying news that was circulating through the crowd that some people were inside.”

Plofchan identified Caldwell as a retired lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, and said Caldwell worked as a section chief in the FBI from 2009 to 2010 after retiring from military service. His attorney listed multiple service awards Caldwell earned and also said he has had a “top-secret security clearance” since 1979.

After leaving the FBI, Caldwell founded a consulting firm that has done business with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the U.S. Army Personnel Command, the motion said.

Caldwell has several service-related injuries and other disabilities, his attorney said, including injuries to both shoulders, degenerative lumbar disc disease, and chronic knee pain. He underwent spinal fusion surgery in 2010 that failed, the filing said, and has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Moving, sitting for extended periods of time, lifting, carrying, and other physical activities are extremely painful and Caldwell is limited in his ability to engage in them,” the motion said.

His attorney also claimed that witnesses “will testify that [Caldwell] never entered the U.S. Capitol Building and that his physical limitations would have prevented him from forcibly entering any building or storming past any barrier.”

Plofchan noted that prosecutors did not include photos of Caldwell in the criminal complaint, although two co-defendants in the case are shown in photos.

“The Government has not identified any photo or video that shows Caldwell in the U.S. Capitol Building, on the grounds after overcoming any barrier,” the motion said.

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Alleged Oath Keeper leader Thomas Caldwell was former FBI agent with top-secret clearance, attorney says

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Those details were revealed in a motion filed Monday asking a judge to let Caldwell out of custody, citing his long military career and ability to pass vetting for the high security clearance. His attorney also claimed that Caldwell has disabilities from his military service that would have prevented him from storming the Capitol.

The FBI did not immediately return an inquiry about Caldwell’s past employment status late Monday.

The claims about Caldwell’s high security clearance and FBI service add to concerns about extremism in the military and law enforcement. The indictments against numerous alleged rioters with military and police ties have led local agencies to launch investigations and the Pentagon to order each military branch to dedicate time to addressing the problem in the coming months.

“The presence of law enforcement officers in the riot reinforces and substantiates the greatest fears many in the public had in the nature of law enforcement in the United States,” Michael German, a former FBI special agent and fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, told The Washington Post.

“It’s incumbent on the Justice Department, if it wants to restore that confidence, to act quickly” to hold the most violent Capitol rioters accountable, he added.

Caldwell lives in Berryman, Va., and had been involved in local GOP politics. He was arrested on Jan. 19 in Virginia on charges of conspiracy, destruction of government property, obstruction of an official proceeding, and violent entry or disorderly conduct.

The government alleges that Caldwell, whom an FBI agent identified as having “a leadership role in the Oath Keepers,” sent Facebook messages coordinating with members of the self-styled militia and sharing video from within the Capitol.

“Us storming the castle,” Caldwell allegedly said in one message that accompanied a video that showed a crowd within the Capitol, according to the criminal complaint. “Please share. Sharon was right with me! I am such an instigator!”

His case is one of several prosecutors are building against Oath Keepers and Proud Boys to make the case that the assault on Congress was premeditated and organized by extremists. Federal prosecutors are considering whether to file sedition charges against some of the accused rioters, the Associated Press reported.

In Monday’s motion for bond, Caldwell denied being a member of the Oath Keepers.

“Caldwell is not a member of the organization, nor has he ever been a member of the organization, and if he were, such membership would be protected activity under the First Amendment,” wrote his attorney, Thomas K. Plofchan.

The motion also questioned whether the Facebook messages allegedly posted by Caldwell prove his involvement in the Jan. 6 riot, arguing that he was “merely relaying news that was circulating through the crowd that some people were inside.”

Plofchan identified Caldwell as a retired lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, and said Caldwell worked as a section chief in the FBI from 2009 to 2010 after retiring from military service. His attorney listed multiple service awards Caldwell earned and also said he has had a “top-secret security clearance” since 1979.

After leaving the FBI, Caldwell founded a consulting firm that has done business with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the U.S. Army Personnel Command, the motion said.

Caldwell has several service-related injuries and other disabilities, his attorney said, including injuries to both shoulders, degenerative lumbar disc disease, and chronic knee pain. He underwent spinal fusion surgery in 2010 that failed, the filing said, and has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Moving, sitting for extended periods of time, lifting, carrying, and other physical activities are extremely painful and Caldwell is limited in his ability to engage in them,” the motion said.

His attorney also claimed that witnesses “will testify that [Caldwell] never entered the U.S. Capitol Building and that his physical limitations would have prevented him from forcibly entering any building or storming past any barrier.”

Plofchan noted that prosecutors did not include photos of Caldwell in the criminal complaint, although two co-defendants in the case are shown in photos.

“The Government has not identified any photo or video that shows Caldwell in the U.S. Capitol Building, on the grounds after overcoming any barrier,” the motion said.

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6:27 PM 2/8/2021 – Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

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6:27 PM 2/8/2021

Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠ | In Brief | 

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German intelligence warns Capitol riot, Covid lockdown fuel right-wing extremism
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Tweets by ‎@mikenov – 6:07 PM 2/8/20

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    UK insists AstraZeneca vaccine is effective against South African varian… https://youtu.be/vuHGfEW4_sA  via @YouTube  YouTube ‎@YouTube

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German intelligence warns Capitol riot, Covid lockdown fuel right-wing extremism

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MUNICH — While much of the liberal West watched the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol in horror, right-wing extremism and anti-Semitic ideas are gaining ground in certain corners of the globe.

German officials say the violence in Washington, together with coronavirus skepticism and anti-lockdown sentiment, has emboldened right-wing groups. The rising extremism has prompted the country’s intelligence services to place a number of people under surveillance.

 

“The security services are wide awake and are monitoring all developments,” Alina Vick, a spokeswoman for Germany’s Interior Ministry, said at a news conference Jan. 25 in response to questions from NBC News.

According to provisional police figures released Thursday, the number of crimes committed by right-wing extremists jumped to its highest level in at least four years in 2020.

Suspected coronavirus deniers have attacked a number of people and organizations in recent months. In October, the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s center for disease control, was the target of an arson attack. The same day, an explosive detonated at the Berlin office of the Leibniz Association, a group of research institutes that has also researched the coronavirus.

Anti-lockdown demonstrations have intensified in recent weeks as Germany has tightened coronavirus restrictions, which are in place until at least mid-February.

Intelligence agencies have taken a particular interest in the group Querdenken 711, whose name loosely translates as “thinking outside the box.” The anti-lockdown group, which was founded in Stuttgart, the capital of the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, has inspired similar groups across the country that espouse a mixture of QAnon conspiracy theories, anti-Semitic ideas and frustration at coronavirus restrictions.

 

In December, Baden-Württemberg’s intelligence service placed the group on a watchlist and warned about rising extremism.

“We are dealing with a movement that formed on the occasion of the corona protests and then radicalized further on,” Beate Bube, the president of Baden-Württemberg’s intelligence service, said in a recent interview with a local newspaper. “We see an anti-state attitude at demonstrations and in online activities. Such attitudes are specifically fanned by the organizers.”

She said that the group was not interested in legitimate protest and that it was simply seeking to spread false information about the coronavirus and undermine the rule of law. The riot at the U.S. Capitol has added fuel to those sentiments.

“What we saw in Washington can be a breeding ground for radicalization and violent action in the right-wing scene,” Bube said. “Within the state’s scene, we are currently seeing verbal approval for the violence at the Capitol.”

 

While official national statistics on extremism for 2020 are not yet available, preliminary numbers released by a German lawmaker indicate that police recorded the highest number of far-right crimes since 2016. Police recorded 23,080 crimes with far-right backgrounds, around 700 more than in the previous year.

A report by RIAS Bavaria, a nonprofit organization, documented 46 anti-Semitic incidents related to coronavirus conspiracy theories in the state of Bavaria alone from Jan. 1 to Oct. 31, 2020. Many incidents occurred at demonstrations, while others occurred online or in daily life.

Annette Seidel-Arpaci, the head of RIAS Bavaria, said in an interview that the coronavirus protests have helped promote anti-Semitic beliefs more broadly, raising the possibility of violence.

 

“The danger is that ideas turn into public speech and through that potentially into actions,” Seidel-Arpaci said.

Even before the pandemic, right-wing attacks have shocked Germany in recent years. In 2019, a gunman attacked a synagogue on Yom Kippur, and a man with far-right views shot and killed a politician.

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According to the RIAS Bavaria report, a Jewish pedestrian was accosted in a Munich park last year by a man wearing a T-shirt that read “corona denier” and “anti-vaxxer.” The assailant claimed that Jews had created the coronavirus, according to the report.

In another documented case, a German rapper posted a video to Instagram claiming that the Rothschild family was behind a curfew that had been instituted to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

Seidel-Arpaci said that signs of anti-Semitism were evident in early protests against coronavirus measures last year but that those sentiments have become much more prevalent now.

“Victims are feeling more fear and insecurity,” Seidel-Arpaci said. “Not just because of the coronavirus pandemic, but in general, anti-Semitism is acted out more openly, especially in everyday life.”

Carlo Angerer is a multimedia producer and reporter based in Mainz, Germany. 


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Stavros Atlamazoglou

Security, Europe

Forward-based troops in the Baltics offer a significant deterrent to any Crimea-style aggression from the part of Russia.

Earlier this year, US Special Command-Europe (SOCEUR) and NATO launched a new special operations facility in the Baltics.

The special operations facility includes two helipads, ammunition storage, and a vehicle servicing facility. The main purpose of the new facility is to act as a forward-staged base that would enable the transportation of special operations forces and the maintenance of their equipment close to the front.

The new site is located in Riga, the capital of Latvia.

In addition to this special operations facility, NATO and SOCEUR are building another one in Latvia that will be able to house more troops and equipment.

“This project, along with other important European defense initiatives, represents our continued commitment to our friend and ally, Latvia,” said Lieutenant Colonel Juan Martinez, a spokesman for Special Operations Command-Europe, in a statement to Stars and Stripes.

Through the European Deterrence Initiative, which was introduced in 2014, the Pentagon contributed almost $4 million to the construction of the special operations facility. But that sum is just a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of millions that the US has invested in the Baltic’s military infrastructure.

According to the US European Command (EUCOM), the European Reassurance Initiative enables the US to boost its deterrence posture, increase the readiness and responsiveness of US troops stationed in Europe, support the collective defense and security of NATO allies, and bolster the security and capacity of U.S. allies and partners.

In the 2020 Fiscal Year, EUCOM requested almost $6 billion for the European Deterrence Initiative. Divided into five categories (Increased Presence, Exercises and Training, Enhanced Prepositioning, Improved Infrastructure, and Build Partnership Capacity), the budget aimed to fund a wide variety of capabilities and projects.

For example, the European Deterrence Initiative funded the continued presence of rotational units throughout the European area of operations, like the arctic warfare deployment that the Marine Corps recently conducted in Norway.

Moreover, it financed joint conventional and special operations training, like the joint exercise that involved Swedish commandos and US Navy SEALs, Green Berets, Air Commandos, and Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen (SWCC).

Another key initiative that the European Deterrence Initiative supported was the prepositioning of key equipment, such as tanks and armored personnel carriers, around the European continent.

Investing in infrastructure, like with this new special operations facility, and partnership capacity isn’t the only thing that’s going on in the Baltics lately. Recently, the US Cybercommand held a months-long cyberwarfare event with the Estonian military, which is one of the best when it comes to the cyber domain.

Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia make up the Baltic countries and are all members of NATO. Their strategic importance mainly stems from the proximity to neighboring Russia. In particular, the 40-mile Suwalki Corridor (or Suwalki Gap) that divides the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad and pro-Russian Belarus serves as a link between NATO and US forces in eastern Europe and the Baltics.

Forward-based troops in the Baltics offer a significant deterrent to any Crimea-style aggression from the part of Russia. So, the utility of the new special operations facility is larger than it seems.

Stavros Atlamazoglou is a Greek Army veteran (National service with 575th Marines Battalion and Army HQ).

This article first appeared on Sandboxx News.

Image: Canadian troops of NATO eFP battlegroup attend military drill in Latvia / REUTERS

278402 The National Interest

‘Wild West’: Who regulates social media and what’s Parler?  Sydney Morning Herald

Alexei Navalny: Poisoned Putin critic to return to Russia despite risk of arrest  Sky News

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Watch live coverage as the House of Representatives convenes to vote on an article of impeachment against President Donald Trump for “incitement of insurrection” in urging his supporters to march on the Capitol last week.

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A new study found that children are being hospitalized with the coronavirus at an alarming rate. Researchers at the University of Minnesota discovered the hospitalization rate increased for kids eightfold over the course of six months across 22 states. NBC News’ Sam Brock reports.
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Covid Hospitalization Rate For Children Up 800 Percent In Six Months | NBC News NOW

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State initially told High Court the PA had no vaccines; Palestinians said to have requested as many as 10,000 doses to immunize healthcare workers

President Trump Speaks To Reporters  Yahoo News

Germany will have coronavirus restrictions beyond January – minister  ZAWYA

Biden Will Restore White House Pet Tradition With 2 German Shepherds  NPR

Forest loss ‘hotspots’ bigger than Germany: WWF  Phys.org

Democracy vs. unity? Local House members differ on why they support, or oppose, impeaching Trump  OCRegister

Amazon says violent posts prompted Parler shutdown  Axios

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Biden to nominate Samantha Power to lead foreign aid agency  NBC NewsView Full Coverage on Google News

Putin tells Russian officials to begin mass coronavirus vaccinations next week  Yahoo News

Protester not linked to Capitol police officer’s death, person of interest in separate incident  FOX 5 DC

Police investigating shots fired incident at Ferndale Airbnb  C&G Newspapers

Concerns for hospital staff as violent incidents increase  9News


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Audio Review – 7:45 AM, January 13, 2021: Schumer Brings Pragmatism, Experience and Ego to Role of Senate Majority Leader

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Schumer Brings Pragmatism, Experience and Ego to Role of Senate Majority Leader | Voice of America
Wednesday January 13th, 2021 at 5:58 AM
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WASHINGTON – Capping nearly a half-century in politics, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer is on the verge of taking control as majority leader of a closely divided Senate, placing him at the center of the legislative battles to come when President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated January 20.

Schumer, 70, the first New Yorker and the first Jew to hold the position of Senate Majority Leader, will succeed Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky at a perilous moment: The country is gripped by the deadly COVID-19 epidemic, the economy is in tatters, and the nation is reeling from last Wednesday’s rioting at the U.S. Capitol by a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters.

Indeed, Schumer likely will assume his new leadership role in the midst of another contentious fight to eject Trump from the White House, even as the Republican president’s term nears its end.

With a new Senate controlled by the Democrats unlikely to act on an article of impeachment until after Democratic President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in on January 20, Schumer’s first order of business will be to devise a strategy to simultaneously confirm Biden’s Cabinet and pass critical policy initiatives while conducting an impeachment trial of Trump.

In a letter to Senate colleagues this week, Schumer vowed that impeachment won’t interfere with the Democratic Party agenda, which includes passage of a coronavirus pandemic stimulus package providing $2,000 individual payments and state and local assistance.

He also listed other goals, such as “bold legislation to defeat the climate crisis” and efforts to fix the health care and childcare systems, according to the Associated Press.

Biden has encouraged Schumer and other Democratic leaders to pursue a “bifurcated” approach by dividing legislative days between an impeachment trial and getting his nominees for top government posts confirmed by the Senate.

Although Trump would be out of office by the time the Senate is able to act on the impeachment charge, Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats note that Trump would be barred from running for president again in 2024 if he is convicted of inciting violence against the government.

Timing of Senate handover uncertain

It took an improbable Democratic sweep of two Senate seats in Georgia runoff elections Jan. 5 to shift control of the Senate from the Republicans to the Democrats — and elevate Schumer from minority leader to the top leadership job.

It is currently impossible to pinpoint the specific day on which Schumer will take control of the Senate, because of how closely divided the body is and because of some peculiarities of election law.

The chamber will ultimately be split between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris casting tie-breaking votes in favor of Democrats. However, before that can happen a replacement for Harris, who is currently a senator, and the two senators-elect from Georgia, who won runoff elections last week, must all be seated.

Harris’s appointed replacement, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, can be seated as soon as Harris is inaugurated. But Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, the two incoming senators from Georgia, could have to wait until as late as January 22 to take their positions, depending on when state officials certify their elections.

A history of pragmatism

Although Schumer’s position as his party’s leader inevitably places him at a political flashpoint, his history in state politics and the U.S. Congress over the past 45 years has been marked by a broad streak of pragmatism and a willingness to make deals across the aisle.

In particular, Schumer has served as a bridge between the parties on issues related to the financial services industry, one of the most important sectors, if not the most important, in his state’s economy. He is often criticized by members of his own party for being too solicitous of Wall Street.

He also sought to strike bipartisan deals on contentious issues. He was a member of the “Gang of 8” — a group of senators that in 2013 led a successful bipartisan effort to pass a comprehensive immigration reform law in the Senate. The legislation ultimately died in the House.

Over the years, Schumer has been a reliable supporter of many policy aims associated with the Democratic Party. In particular, he has been a strong advocate for gun control, expansion of access to health insurance, and the right of women to choose to have abortions.

However, he has also been willing to break from his party. He has, at times, resisted efforts to raise taxes on people earning considerably more money than average Americans, pointing out that in high-cost areas like New York, income levels that would be considered very high elsewhere are necessary to maintain a middle-class lifestyle.

Schumer’s strong support for Israel has also left him at odds with his party on occasion. He voted against the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration in 2015, and spoke in favor of President Trump’s controversial decision to move the United States’ embassy in Israel to the contested city of Jerusalem.

A skilled political campaigner and organizer, Schumer has never lost an election in his career. He also headed the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, leading the party in retaking control of the Senate in 2006 by ousting half a dozen Republican incumbents. In the next election, still under Schumer’s leadership, the DSCC helped the party gain an additional eight seats.

His skills as a politician will be fully tested in the tightly controlled Senate, where the “filibuster” rule can make it difficult to pass any legislation with fewer than 60 votes, and where even measures that can be passed with a simple majority will have to please the most conservative Democrats in the body.

“Schumer is constrained both by the filibuster and also the preferences of his least-liberal members,” said Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “That list starts with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

“It seems like the $2,000 stimulus checks will be a very early agenda item for the new Congress. Can Schumer structure it in such a way that he can secure the vote of Manchin, who has said that he doesn’t view the checks as a top priority? Or, if he loses Manchin, could he find Republican votes? How this unfolds is an interesting early test for Schumer as majority leader.”

A son of Brooklyn

Schumer’s elevation to one of the most powerful positions in the country comes as the culmination of a political career that has spanned nearly five decades. Beginning as a state assemblyman in New York in 1975, Schumer worked his way ever upward, spending eighteen years as a member of the House of Representatives before being elected to the Senate for the first time in 1998.

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1950, Schumer still lives in the borough’s Park Slope neighborhood with his wife of more than 40 years, Iris Weinshall. They have two adult daughters. Schumer attended Harvard College and Harvard Law School, passing the bar in the state of New York in 1975, though he never practiced law.

Schumer is the second cousin of comedian and actress Amy Schumer.

Schumer is often the subject of jokes on Capitol Hill because of his sharp elbows and fondness for publicity. Former Senate Majority Leader and Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole once said, “the most dangerous place in Washington is between Charles Schumer and a television camera.”

Read the whole story · · · · ·
Military leaders condemn ‘sedition and insurrection’ at Capitol, say Biden won
Wednesday January 13th, 2021 at 12:02 AM
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Key Points
The nation’s top military commanders condemned Wednesday’s acts of “sedition and insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol.
The message from the Joint Chiefs of Staff comes nearly one week after thousands of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, resulting in at least five deaths, including that of a Capitol Police officer.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, answers a question during a virtual town hall at the Pentagon, May 28, 2020.
Chad J. McNeeley | Department of Defense
WASHINGTON — In an extraordinary letter Tuesday to the U.S. military, the nation’s top commanders condemned last week’s acts of “sedition and insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol, while acknowledging Joe Biden’s election victory.

The message did not mention President Donald Trump by name, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, made it clear that the military intends to stand by the constitutional transfer of power to the next administration.

“As we have done throughout our history, the U.S. military will obey lawful orders from civilian leadership, support civilian authorities to protect lives and property, ensure public safety in accordance with the law, and remain fully committed to protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” wrote the nation’s highest military officers.

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“As Service Members, we must embody the values and ideals of the Nation. We support and defend the Constitution. Any act to disrupt the Constitutional process is not only against our traditions, values and oath; it is against the law,” the chiefs wrote.

The message to the troops comes nearly one week after thousands of the president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, resulting in at least five deaths, including that of a Capitol Police officer.

Earlier on Tuesday, Trump told reporters that people found his comments at a rally that sparked the violence at the Capitol “totally appropriate” and called the fallout “absolutely ridiculous.”

The president also briefly discussed the blowback he said would follow potential impeachment proceedings.

“For [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi and [Senate Democratic leader] Chuck Schumer to continue on this path, I think it’s causing tremendous danger to our country, and it’s causing tremendous anger,” he said.

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Trump: Big Tech making big mistake
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On Wednesday, the House plans to decide whether to make Trump the first president ever impeached twice.

The assault on the Capitol delayed congressional proceedings to tally electors’ votes and confirm Biden’s win in the Nov. 3 election.

Biden’s victory was projected by all major news outlets in mid-November and confirmed by Electoral College votes in mid-December. The Republican president has falsely insisted he won in a “landslide,” baselessly claiming his reelection was stolen through massive electoral fraud.

As protesters besieged the Capitol on Wednesday, Trump told supporters in a tweeted video, “You have to go home now.” The president stopped short of condemning the violence and told the mob, “We love you, you’re very special.”

US President Donald Trump looks on after presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Celtics basketball legend Bob Cousy in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on August 22, 2019.
Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images
On Monday, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., called on acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller to investigate whether active-duty or retired military members took part in the deadly mob.

If such individuals are identified by criminal investigators, Duckworth said, Miller must “take appropriate action to hold individuals accountable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.” Duckworth, an Iraq War veteran who retired as a lieutenant colonel from the Army National Guard, noted that “upholding good order and discipline demands that the U.S. Armed Forces root out extremists that infiltrate the military and threaten our national security.”

A U.S. Army officer resigned Monday after commanders at Fort Bragg confirmed that they were reviewing Capt. Emily Rainey’s involvement in the riot.

In a Tuesday evening statement, the Army said it is working with the FBI to determine whether any participants in last week’s riot have any connection to the Army.

“Any type of activity that involves violence, civil disobedience, or a breach of peace may be punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice or under state or federal law,” an Army spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.

In a nearly three-minute video posted on Thursday, the president called for national “healing and reconciliation.”

“To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay,” Trump said, in his first address to the nation following the violence that rocked Washington.

“Now tempers must be cooled, and calm restored. We must get on with the business of America,” Trump added.

The president also acknowledged that “a new administration will be inaugurated on Jan. 20.”

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President Trump releases video in response to the Capitol riot
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A day later he said that he would skip President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration. Vice President Mike Pence said he will attend Biden’s swearing-in ceremony.

Traditionally, the incoming and outgoing presidents ride from the White House to the U.S. Capitol together for the inauguration ceremony.

Trump is not the first outgoing president to skip the inauguration of his successor. The others were Presidents John Adams, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Johnson, according to the White House Historical Association. Like Trump, Johnson was also impeached.

The National Guard said Monday that it has authorized up to 15,000 troops to support the security of the inauguration. Defense officials added that there were approximately 9,000 National Guard members at former President Barack Obama’s inauguration. For Trump’s ceremony in 2017, more than 7,000 troops were mobilized.

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FBI report warned of ‘war’ at Capitol, contradicting claims there was no indication of looming violence
Tuesday January 12th, 2021 at 2:19 PM
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A situational information report approved for release the day before the U.S. Capitol riot painted a dire portrait of dangerous plans, including individuals sharing a map of the complex’s tunnels, and possible rally points for would-be conspirators to meet up in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and South Carolina and head in groups to Washington.

“As of 5 January 2021, FBI Norfolk received information indicating calls for violence in response to ‘unlawful lockdowns’ to begin on 6 January 2021 in Washington. D.C.,” the document says. “An online thread discussed specific calls for violence to include stating ‘Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa 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. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”

BLM is likely a reference to the Black Lives Matter movement for racial justice. Pantifa is a derogatory term for antifa, a far-left anti-fascist movement whose adherents sometimes engage in violent clashes with right-wing extremists.

Yet even with that information in hand, the report’s unidentified author expressed concern that the FBI might be encroaching on free speech rights.

The warning is the starkest evidence yet of the sizable intelligence failure that preceded the mayhem, which claimed the lives of five people, although one law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid disciplinary action, said the failure was not one of intelligence but of acting on the intelligence.

An FBI official familiar with the document said that within 45 minutes of learning about the alarming online conversation, the Norfolk FBI office wrote the report and shared it with others within the bureau. It was not immediately clear how many law enforcement agencies outside the FBI were told, but the information was briefed to FBI officials at the bureau’s Washington field office the day before the attack, this official said.

The official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss ongoing investigations, added that the report was raw intelligence and that at the time it was written, the FBI did not know the identities of those making the online statements.

The FBI already faces tough questions about why it was not more attuned to what was being discussed in public Internet conversations in the days leading up to the attack, and why the bureau and other agencies seemed to do little to prepare for the possibility of mass violence.

The document notes that the information represents the view of the FBI’s Norfolk office, is not to be shared outside law enforcement circles, that it is not “finally evaluated intelligence,” and that agencies that receive it “are requested not to take action based on this raw reporting without prior coordination with the FBI.”

Multiple law enforcement officials have said privately in recent days that the level of violence exhibited at the Capitol has led to difficult discussions within the FBI and other agencies about race, terrorism, and whether investigators failed to register the degree of danger because the overwhelming majority of the participants at the rally were White conservatives fiercely loyal to the President Trump.

“Individuals/Organizations named in this [situational information report] have been identified as participating in activities that are protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” the document says. “Their inclusion here is not intended to associate the protected activity with criminality or a threat to national security, or to infer that such protected activity itself violates federal law.

“However,” it continues, “based on known intelligence and/or specific historical observations, it is possible the protected activity could invite a violent reaction towards the subject individual or others in retaliation or with the goal of stopping the protected activity from occurring in the first instance. In the event no violent reaction occurs, FBI policy and federal law dictates that no further record to be made of the protected activity.”

The document notes that one online comment advised, “if Antifa or BLM get violent, leave them dead in the street,” while another said they need “people on standby to provide supplies, including water and medical, to the front lines. The individual also discussed the need to evacuate noncombatants and wounded to medical care.”

On Jan. 6, a large, angry crowd of people who had attended a nearby rally marched to the Capitol, smashing windows and breaking down doors to get inside. One woman in the mob was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer; officials said three others in the crowd died from medical emergencies. Another Capitol police officer died after suffering injuries.

On Friday, the head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, Steven D’Antuono, told reporters “there was no indication” of anything planned for the day of Trump’s rally “other than First Amendment-protected activity.” D’Antuono added, “we worked diligently with our partners on this.”

The FBI said in a statement that its “standard practice is to not comment on specific intelligence products,” but added that FBI field offices “routinely share information with their local law enforcement partners to assist in protecting the communities they serve.”

The FBI did not detail specifically who saw the document before the mob attack on Congress or what, if anything, was done in response.

For weeks leading up to the event, FBI officials discounted any suggestion that the protest of pro-Trump supporters upset about the scheduled certification of Joe Biden’s election could be a security threat on a scale with racial justice protests last summer in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody.

While the nation’s capital is one of the most heavily guarded cities on the planet, local and federal law enforcement agencies sought to take a low-key approach to last week’s event, publicly and privately expressing concerns that they did not want to repeat the ugly clashes between protesters and police last year.

Some law enforcement officials took the view that pro-Trump protesters are generally known for over-the-top rhetoric but not much violence, and therefore the event did not pose a particularly grave risk, according to people familiar with the security discussions leading up to Jan. 6.

Even so, there were warning signs, though none as stark as the one from the FBI’s Norfolk office.

FBI agents had in the weeks before the Trump rally visited suspected extremists hoping to glean whether they had violent intentions, a person familiar with the matter said, though it was not immediately clear who was visited or if the FBI was specifically tracking anyone who would later be charged criminally. These visits were first reported Sunday by NBC News.

In addition, in the days leading up to the demonstration, some Capitol Hill staffers were told by supervisors to not come into work that day, if possible, because it seemed the danger level would be higher than a lot of prior protests, according to a person familiar with the warning. Capitol Police did not take the kind of extra precautions, such as frozen zones and hardened barriers, that are typically used in major events around the Capitol.

Now, the Justice Department and federal agents are scrambling to identify and arrest those responsible for last week’s violence, in part because there is already significant online discussion of new potential clashes Sunday and again on Jan. 20 when Biden will be inaugurated.

Federal agents remain in a state of high-alert in the days leading up to the inauguration as authorities brace for possible violence not just in Washington, but around the country, officials said.

The FBI recently issued a different memo saying that “armed protests” were being planned “at all 50 state capitols” and in D.C. in the days leading up to the inauguration, according to an official familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive law enforcement matter.

The memo — first reported on by ABC News and later confirmed by The Washington Post — is a raw intelligence product, compiling information gathered by the bureau and several other government agencies, an official said. Some of it is unverified, and the threat is likely to differ significantly from place to place, the official said.

But the data it highlights to law enforcement are nonetheless troubling — including that there was information suggesting people might storm government offices, or stage an uprising were Trump to be removed from office, the official said.

In a statement, the FBI declined to comment specifically on the memo about state capitols but said: “Our efforts are focused on identifying, investigating, and disrupting individuals that are inciting violence and engaging in criminal activity. As we do in the normal course of business, we are gathering information to identify any potential threats and are sharing that information with our partners.

“The FBI respects the rights of individuals to peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights,” it continues. “Our focus is not on peaceful protesters, but on those threatening their safety and the safety of other citizens with violence and destruction of property.”

Julie Tate contributed to this report.

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Washington Post: FBI warned of violent ‘war’ at Capitol in internal report issued day before deadly riot – CNNPolitics
Tuesday January 12th, 2021 at 2:08 PM
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Washington (CNN)The FBI warned of a violent “war” at the US Capitol in an internal report issued a day before last week’s deadly siege, but it wasn’t acted on urgently enough to prevent the domestic terrorist attack, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The Post said that last Tuesday, an FBI office in Norfolk, Virginia, issued an “explicit internal warning that extremists were preparing to travel to Washington to commit violence and ‘war.'” The report “painted a dire portrait of dangerous plans, including individuals sharing a map of the complex’s tunnels, and possible rally points for would-be conspirators to meet up” in several states before heading to Washington, DC.
The report runs contrary to statements made by law enforcement officials who have indicated to CNN that authorities missed key signs ahead of the siege, which left five dead and ransacked the Capitol. It’s likely to raise additional questions about why authorities were unprepared to respond to the riot and federal readiness to thwart future threats at a time when the FBI is warning of armed protests ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.
New terror threat points to plot to surround Capitol, lawmaker says
New terror threat points to plot to surround Capitol, lawmaker says
The report referenced an online thread in which conspirators discussed their plans, quoting individuals as saying: “‘Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa 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. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.'”
The information was “briefed to FBI officials at the bureau’s Washington field office the day before the attack,” the Post reported. The newspaper, however, said the document is clear that the information presented was not “finally evaluated intelligence,” and that agencies receiving it “are requested not to take action based on this raw reporting without prior coordination with the FBI.”
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The newspaper also reported that the FBI was careful with its description of the individuals and organizations listed in the report, with the bureau writing that the activities they engaged in are protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution and that though they were mentioned in the report, “Their inclusion here is not intended to associate the protected activity with criminality or a threat to national security, or to infer that such protected activity itself violates federal law.”
But the report also warned that “based on known intelligence and/or specific historical observations, it is possible the protected activity could invite a violent reaction towards the subject individual or others in retaliation or with the goal of stopping the protected activity from occurring in the first instance,” according to the Post.
Officials told CNN last week that going into Wednesday, they had no intelligence indicating there was a threat the US Capitol could be overrun. In the wake of the attack, federal and local officials have said they did not have intelligence suggesting any violent mob was preparing to attack the Capitol, even as demonstrators were publicly saying on social media they were not planning a typical protest.
The Post’s report prompted Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat who is a member of the House Judiciary Committee, to call for his panel to open a probe about the matter.
Former Virginia Republican Rep. Denver Riggleman, who is working with several former national security officials to analyze open source information about the attack, also called for an investigation.
“There is a clear breakdown of communications and operational chain of command. It would be interesting to see what the internal intelligence memos were for Capitol Police and support elements. My guess is that the intelligence reports would have had a possible Capitol incursion,” he told CNN.
This story is breaking and will be updated.
CNN’s Zachary Cohen contributed to this report.

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The Capitol, cameras and selfies
Tuesday January 12th, 2021 at 10:09 AM
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NEW YORK (AP) — One of the defining images of the Capitol Hill siege was of a man dangling from the balcony of the Senate chamber. Clad in black and with a helmet over his head, he might have been hard to identify even after he paused to sit in a leather chair at the top of the Senate dais and hold up a fist.

But Josiah Colt made it easy. He posted a video to his Facebook page moments later, bragging about being the first to reach the chamber floor and sit in Nancy’s Pelosi’s chair (he was wrong). He used a slur to describe Pelosi and called her “a traitor.”

A little later the 34-year-old from Boise, Idaho, posted again. This time, he sounded more anxious. “I don’t know what to do,” Colt said in a video he’d soon delete but not before it was cached online. “I’m in downtown D.C. I’m all over the news now.”

Colt was far from the only one documenting the insurrection from within last Wednesday in Washington. Many in the mob that ransacked the Capitol did so while livestreaming, posting on Facebook and taking selfies, turning the United States Capitol into a theater of real-time — and often strikingly ugly and violent — far-right propaganda.

“This extremist loop feeds itself. The folks who are watching and commenting and encouraging and sometimes giving some cash are supporting the individual on the ground. And he’s supporting their fantasies,” says Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.

“Selfie culture,” Segal says, “has become so much part of the norm that it’s almost second nature when you’re carrying out a terrorist insurrection.”

Taken together, the various fragmented feeds from Wednesday’s incursion form a tableau of an ill-conceived insurrection — as full of “I was here” posturing for social media as of ideological revolution — and one that was given far more latitude than most peaceful Black Lives Matters protests were in 2020. In hundreds of images, the fallacy of a far-right brand of “patriotism” was laid bare.

The modern Capitol had previously been besieged before only in Hollywood fiction. Marauding aliens in “Mars Attacks!” Ensnarling ivy in “Logan’s Run.” Blown to bits in “Independence Day.” But the imagery of last week’s siege offered something else: a warped cinema verité of right-wing extremism with waving Confederate flags and white-power poses in Capitol halls.

Though many involved Wednesday in Washington were Trump supporters without designs on violence, the visuals illustrate that some were clearly there to summon mayhem if not outright bloodshed. The call to the Capitol drew many of the right’s extremist factions — some of whom helped lead the charge.

The white nationalist Tim Gionet, known online as “Baked Alaska” and a noted participant in the “Unite the Right” rally at Charlottesville, streamed live from congressional offices, gleefully documenting the break-in for more than 15,000 viewers on the streaming platform Dlive. The service, ostensibly for gamers, has grown into a tool for white nationalists because of its lack of content modulation.

Journalists chronicled the storming of the Capitol, some while being attacked. But the rioters’ self-documentation told another story: the on-the-ground culmination of an online alternative reality fueled by QAnon conspiracies, false claims of fraud in the election and Trump’s own rhetoric.

“In their minds they had impunity. I’m having trouble understanding how these people could believe that,” says Larry Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies and author of the upcoming “Empire of Resentment: Populism’s Toxic Embrace of Nationalism.”

“They’re going to be prosecuted,” he says of those involved, and “they have provided the evidence.”

Federal law enforcement officials have pledged an exhaustive investigation into the rampage that left five people dead, including Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick. They are relying in part on the social media trail many left behind. “The goal here is to identify people and get them,” Ken Kohl, the top deputy federal prosecutor in Washington, told reporters Friday.

Among those arrested so far are Richard Barnett, photographed sitting in Pelosi’s office with his feet on her desk, and Derrick Evans, a newly elected Republican from West Virginia, who had posted video on social media of himself clamoring at the Capitol door. “We’re in! Keep it moving, baby!”

Colt landed on the Senate floor; photos suggested he had actually sat in a chair reserved for Vice President Mike Pence, who is president of the Senate. Colt issued an apology begging forgiveness for his prominent role. “In the moment I thought I was doing the right thing,” he said.

Jessie Daniels, a professor of sociology at Hunter College whose books include “Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights,” expects many of the images from the Capitol breach will reverberate online as far-right propaganda. The woman who died trying to break through a Capitol door, Ashli Babbitt will be made a martyr.

“She’s going to be on all the posters, trying to get people radicalized,” Daniels says.

For those who have been tracking and researching how the far right operates online, the live streams of well-known activists like Gionet were especially telling. Gionet streamed from within the Capitol, interacting with his followers on Dlive as he went. When the number of viewers ticked over 10,000, he cheered, “Shoutout to Germany!” Megan Squire, a professor of computer science at Elon University who has studied Dlive, estimates Gionet made $2,000 in donations while inside the Capitol.

“He’s making an enormous amount of money saying incredibly racist and anti-Semitic and violent things,” Squire says.

Following neo-Fascists from one platform to another, some have said, is a helpless game of catch-up. Daniels disagrees.

“There’s a lot of evidence that deplatforming people who are harmful from these platforms is effective,” Daniels says. “The pushback from tech people is that it’s whack-a-mole, that if they’re not here, they’ll go somewhere else. Fine. Let’s play whack-a-mole. Let’s do this. Let’s chase them off of every platform until they go away.”

___

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

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‘Seditious Conspiracy’ And The Capitol Hill Attackers | Morning Joe | MSNBC – YouTube
Tuesday January 12th, 2021 at 9:04 AM
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Serious Capitol riot charges could be on the way from prosecutors
Tuesday January 12th, 2021 at 8:32 AM
GANNETT Syndication Service
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With a growing number of arrests and charges related to last week’s storming of the U.S. Capitol, multiple law-enforcement agencies are building a sprawling investigation into who participated in the violent event that claimed at least five lives and sent fearful lawmakers into hiding.

Nearly 100 people have been arrested so far for their roles in the attack carried out by thousands of President Donald Trump’s supporters or in unrest surrounding the Capitol that day. Many currently face lesser charges such as unlawful entry, disorderly conduct and defacing public property. Only a few have been accused of more serious crimes such as felony violations of the Riot Act.

In the cases of those who attacked the Capitol, those initial charges could be a precursor of more serious allegations, said University of Texas law professor Bobby Chesney.

It’s common for authorities to make arrests based on readily-proven charges, such as trespassing on federal property, Chesney said. Then, weeks later, prosecutors seek grand-jury indictments on more serious charges.

“It remains to be seen how aggressive the Justice Department will be in terms of going after organizers and ringleaders,” Chesney said. “No doubt the FBI and DOJ would prefer to get past January 20, moreover, both for the sake of general calm and to avoid any prospect of a pardon shutting down a particular case.”

Heading up the task of identifying, locating, arresting and charging offenders falls on the shoulders of acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Michael Sherwin. He told National Public Radio this week that “hundreds” could ultimately face charges. 

No charges are off the table, Sherwin said. Seditious conspiracy, rioting and insurrection will be considered if warranted.

Federal trespassing citations likely will result in fines or probation, experts said. More serious misdemeanors and felony charges related to weapons, conspiracy and assault could incur prison time.

“Prosecutors have a tremendous amount of discretion and this was an unprecedented assault on our seat of government,” said University of Wisconsin Law Professor Keith Findley. “My guess is they’ll take that very seriously… They’ll have many, many options to charge independently, or stack offenses. There’s a lot on the table.”

But some, like Anne Milgram, a New York University law professor and former attorney general of New Jersey, criticized the lack of more serious charges for those accused of ransacking the Capitol.

“What we’ve yet to see is a connection to seditious conspiracy,” Milgram said. “It feels to me, and everyone who watched, that the goal of this mob was to stop Congress from certifying the vote … the charges right now do not match the harm.”

Milgram said she expects the heaviest charges to stem from the slaying of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick. Others have suggested several members of the mob could face felony murder charges in that case similar to a getaway driver in a fatal robbery.

Prosecutors have primarily focused on those caught on camera and identified by tipsters in photos and videos during the riot. Department of Justice officials, for example, have announced the arrests of notable viral participants, including Jacob Chansley, a.k.a. Jake Angeli, the Arizona man who wore a fur hat and horns; Adam Johnson, the Florida man photographed carrying Nancy Pelosi’s lectern; and Eric Munchel, the Tennessee man depicted in tactical gear carrying plastic wrist restraints.

Federal investigators also have the option of serving subpoenas on technology companies to preserve content that perpetrators might try to delete.

Pete Eliadis, president and CEO of Intelligence Consulting Partners, a security firm, faulted Capitol Police for failing to secure the building and make arrests on the scene, making the job harder for investigators.

But he believes the government will try to make an example out of the key figures whose viral images show their role in inciting violence.

“They want to make a statement that this will not be tolerated, so if they can make a plausible arrest, they will,” Eliadis said. “The ones who wanted the attention, they’re going to get the attention. It’s easier to focus on them than the masses coming through.”

Labeling the riot and finding the most accurate charges could be difficult without a domestic terrorism law, which Congress has considered for years, said Chris Bonner, a retired FBI agent who teaches courses on homeland security at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.

“The very first thing people want to do is call something terrorism. There is no federal law covering domestic terrorism,” Bonner said. “If we’re going to decry something and criminalize it, we better have a law to cover it and then it better be equally applied across the ideological spectrum from extreme left to extreme right.”

Summer unrest a backdrop for charges
Federal prosecutions for the Capitol riot will undoubtedly draw parallels to unrest last summer over the killings of Black Americans by police.

Last year, following weeks of unrest in several cities after the death of George Floyd, Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen wrote a memo telling federal prosecutors to consider a sedition charge against protesters who conspired to “take a federal courthouse or other federal property by force.”

And federal prosecutors took over charging cases against more than 100 protestors in two particular hotspots – Portland and Seattle. However, dozens of those charges were low-level citations or misdemeanors. Most of the Portland cases have not gone to trial because the pandemic has backlogged the courts. That trend will likely continue for accused D.C. rioters; many may not see a trial before the end of 2021.

Michael Filipovic, federal public defender for the Western District of Washington state said the U.S. attorney took over several state court charges and sought to send a message with tougher penalties. He said comparing Wednesday’s riot to protests over the summer is difficult.

He anticipated misdemeanor charges for many Capitol trespassers, but more weighty charges to come soon.

“If prosecutors can prove you had a firearm, zip-ties and intent to detain or harm individuals, that’s something they’ll take very seriously where you’ll be looking at some felonies,” Filipovic said.

Edward Maguire, a professor of criminology at Arizona State University and associate director of the school’s Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety, said he would expect to see charges that are more serious than those handed down during protests at President Trump’s inauguration in 2017.

More than 200 people were arrested during protests dubbed “J20” during the 2017 inauguration and charged with more serious felonies, including inciting to riot, rioting, conspiracy to riot, destruction of property and assault on police officers.

Federal prosecutors ultimately dropped charges in all but a handful of cases where people pleaded guilty. They failed to win convictions in others that went to trial.

At the very least, Maguire expects to see felony rioting charges for those confirmed to have breached the Capitol.

“It would be appropriate for them to see jail time,” Maguire said of the Trump rioters who entered Capitol Hill. “This is an insurrection, and it should be charged as one.”

Maguire said social media and video surveillance of the riot would likely give prosecutors stronger cases of intent than the evidence they had from the J20 protests.

Of the early arrests made by D.C.’s Metropolitan Police, all but a handful involved curfew violation and unlawful entry. The remaining others were arrested on more serious weapons charges or for defacing public property.

They included suspects like David Fitzgerald of Illinois who was cuffed as he attempted to exit through the barricades while following news crews that were being escorted out, and Joshua Pruitt, a 39-year-old from D.C. who is one of the few facing felony violations of the Riot Act.

Capitol Police also focused their arrests on unlawful entry, charging more than a dozen suspects for the offense, including Michael Curzio, a 35-year-old Florida man released from prison in February 2019 following an eight-year sentence for attempted first-degree murder.

Charges against Mark Leffingwell were among the first federal charges to roll into D.C.’s District Court on Thursday. A Capitol Police officer wrote in a complaint that Leffingwell attempted to push past him into the Capitol, then began punching repeatedly. While in custody, Leffingwell “spontaneously apologized for striking” him. Leffingwell has been charged with entering a restricted building, assault on a federal law enforcement officer and violent entry or disorderly conduct on capitol grounds.

Some legal defenses would be a stretch
Social media from the accused rioters suggests some may attempt novel legal defenses. Some may claim the President instructed them to march to the Capitol, giving them legal cover, while others have already claimed they “got caught up in the moment.”

Neither will hold much water in court, said UW’s Findley.

“The law recognizes duress, coercion and necessity, but those are limited and require showing that the person had no choice but to commit the criminal act facing violence or death. We’re nowhere close to that,” Findley said.

A “heat of passion” defense would also require protesters to prove that a reasonable person would have been provoked to take the same action, Findley said.

Some Capitol trespassers spoke out on social media and on video after the riot that they believed they hadn’t committed a crime because police let them in — or that they simply walked through open doors. Others chanted outside they had a right to enter because Congress works for the people.

But both federal law and new rules from the pandemic explicitly prohibit members of the public from entering the building. All public tours have been cancelled since March 2020 and only lawmakers, staff, media and their guests with proper credentials are currently allowed in.

Back when tours were available, they did not include access to the Senate and House galleries, which required a separate pass obtained through the office of the visitor’s senators or representatives.

Many of the rioters also broke rules by bringing prohibited items into the building, including water, electric stun guns, guns, ammunition, knives, mace and pepper spray and large bags, according to the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center.

Inside the galleries there is no photography or video recording allowed except by the media and the government’s own cameras.

And smoking, which several rioters filmed themselves doing inside the building, is strictly prohibited.

Contributing: Kristine Phillips, USA TODAY

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The FBI Story: “same old, same old” … #Capitol #Attack was planned openly online for weeks. Why was it not prevented by the #FBI? They were too busy monitoring all those sex chats – they get more kick out of it. Give them their #Medals Of #Freedom, for saving this poor nation!
Tuesday January 12th, 2021 at 7:27 AM
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@MSNBC
The executive director of the Republican Attorneys General Association has resigned amid backlash over a decision to send out robocalls urging people to march to the U.S. Capitol. https://on.msnbc.com/39msgqp

Top official at Republican AGs group resigns amid Capitol robocall controversy
Adam Piper stepped down amid backlash over a decision to send out robocalls urging people to march to the U.S. Capitol.

nbcnews.com

Michael Novakhov
@mikenov
#Capitol #Attack was planned openly online for weeks. Why was it not prevented by the #FBI? They were too busy monitoring all those sex chats – they get more kick out of it. Give them their #Medals Of #Freedom, for saving this poor nation! – Google Search https://www.google.com/search?q=Capitol+Attack+was+planned+openly+online+for+weeks.+Why+was+it+not+prevented+by+the+FBI%3F+They+were+too+busy+monitoring+all+those+sex+chats+-+they+get+more+kick+out+of+it.+Give+them+their+Medals+Of+Freedom%2C+for+saving+this+poor+nation%21&source=lmns&bih=762&biw=1474&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS733US733&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj6g4zQrJbuAhXrlIQIHYrEBGEQ_AUoAHoECAEQAA …

 

Michael Novakhov
@mikenov
Capitol Attack was planned openly online for weeks. Why was it not prevented by the FBI? ? – Google Search https://www.google.com/search?q=Capitol+Attack+was+planned+openly+online+for+weeks.+Why+was+it+not+prevented+by+the+FBI%3F+%3F&source=lmns&bih=762&biw=1474&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS733US733&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjxv56OqpbuAhVMneAKHQVrCNUQ_AUoAHoECAEQAA …

 

Michael Novakhov
@mikenov
Capitol Attack was openly planned online – Google Search https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS733US733&sxsrf=ALeKk02JSpJ3Nhg_iDB_K9ToQoHLSTRJ2w%3A1610451873813&ei=oYv9X4iSMeHO5gLSjZTAAw&q=Capitol+Attack+was+openly+planned+online&oq=Capitol+Attack+was+openly+planned+online&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQDFDkOljkOmDWTGgAcAB4AIABRIgBhAGSAQEymAEAoAEBqgEHZ3dzLXdpesABAQ&sclient=psy-ab&ved=0ahUKEwjI5vbeqJbuAhVhp1kKHdIGBTgQ4dUDCA0 …
https://www.propublica.org/article/capitol-rioters-planned-for-weeks-in-plain-sight-the-police-werent-ready …

Capitol Rioters Planned for Weeks in Plain Sight. The Police Weren’t Ready.
Insurrectionists made no effort to hide their intentions, but law enforcement protecting Congress was caught flat-footed.

propublica.org

Michael Novakhov
@mikenov
Capitol Attack was openly planned online – Google Search https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS733US733&sxsrf=ALeKk02JSpJ3Nhg_iDB_K9ToQoHLSTRJ2w%3A1610451873813&ei=oYv9X4iSMeHO5gLSjZTAAw&q=Capitol+Attack+was+openly+planned+online&oq=Capitol+Attack+was+openly+planned+online&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQDFDkOljkOmDWTGgAcAB4AIABRIgBhAGSAQEymAEAoAEBqgEHZ3dzLXdpesABAQ&sclient=psy-ab&ved=0ahUKEwjI5vbeqJbuAhVhp1kKHdIGBTgQ4dUDCA0 …

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/01/07/capitol-attack-was-planned-openly-online-for-weeks-police-still-werent-ready/ …

Capitol Attack Was Planned Openly Online For Weeks—Police Still Weren’t Ready
Explicit plans for violence were made in plain sight on multiple corners of the internet.

forbes.com

Michael Novakhov
@mikenov
Who paid the Capitol Rioters? – Google Search https://www.google.com/search?q=Who+paid+the+Capitol+Rioters%3F&source=lmns&bih=762&biw=1474&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS733US733&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwidzoqYqJbuAhWFBd8KHZMWAqEQ_AUoAHoECAEQAA …

Michael Novakhov Retweeted

The Hill

@thehill
New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick turns down Medal of Freedom from Trump http://hill.cm/6uSXpCb

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Washington Tense as DHS Chief Quits, FBI Warns of Armed Protests
Tuesday January 12th, 2021 at 5:16 AM
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The abrupt resignation of Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf added to the mounting tension in Washington ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration next week, with thousands of National Guard troops set to be deployed and the FBI warning of armed protests in all 50 state capitals.

As inaugural security preparations intensified, House Democrats accelerated their push to force the ouster of President Donald Trump before his term officially ends, threatening to impeach him for a second time unless he resigns for encouraging the march that led to last Wednesday’s assault on the U.S. Capitol.

But Vice President Mike Pence indicated that he’d reject demands to immediately oust Trump through the 25th Amendment to the Constitution as the two met in the Oval Office and agreed to work together for the remainder of the term, according to a senior administration official.

Investigations continued into the deadly Capitol riot, and Democrats in the House and Senate have said that Republican colleagues who continued to support Trump’s false claims that he won the election even after the insurrectionists had left, must be held to account.

Republicans also found themselves confronting another crisis, being shunned by once-reliable corporate allies who have been essential to financing their campaigns. At the same time, many of the president’s supporters around the country did not waver in their belief that the 2020 election had been stolen.

Earlier: GOP Lawmakers Hit by Boardroom Backlash for Bid to Undo Election

Earlier in the day, Wolf announced that “the evolving security landscape” had led to a decision to begin security for the inauguration on Jan. 13. The efforts were originally scheduled to begin on Jan. 19.

According to the FBI’s warning, the protests in state capitals would begin on Jan. 16 and at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 17, and continue through Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, according to a law enforcement official.

Wolf said the decision came at the recommendation of Secret Service Director James Murray, adding that local, state and federal partners will work together during the extended security operations.

The National Guard has received approval to deploy as many as 15,000 personnel to Washington before and during the inauguration, as law enforcement in the nation’s capital and around the country braced for violence during the transition of power.

Read More: Trump and Pence Signal President Won’t Resign or Be Removed

The lingering sense of anxiety over last week’s violence refused to dissipate as historians struggled to come up with analogous events from the past, and were asked a question that once seemed unthinkable — was the U.S. headed toward a new civil war?

The feeling of disruption did not ease when Wolf announced that he would step down after “recent events,” including court rulings that held he had not been lawfully appointed to the post.

At least five federal judges have ruled that Wolf lacked authority as acting secretary of the department because his nomination in November 2019 was never confirmed by the Senate. Biden has nominated Alejandro Mayorkas to be his Homeland Security secretary.

Last week, in the wake of the riot, Wolf called on “the president and all elected officials to strongly condemn the violence that took place yesterday.” He said then that he wouldn’t step down before Biden is sworn in on Jan. 20.

His sudden departure adds to the confusion surrounding federal and state security preparations for the inauguration. The Homeland Security Department plays a critical role in securing the actual inauguration and assisting state and local officials during times of crisis.

He said he would be replaced in an acting capacity by Pete Gaynor, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Wolf, a Trump loyalist, had been the chief of staff to Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security secretary forced out by Trump in April 2019.

Read More: Democrats to Open Trump Impeachment Wednesday Unless Pence Acts

The National Guard deployment is a significant increase from the 6,200 troops from six states and the District of Columbia that have already been mobilized in the wake of last week’s attack.

Ten thousand of the troops are to arrive by Saturday and will stay through Jan. 20.

“We’ve received support requests from the Secret Service, Capitol Police and Park Police,” Daniel Hokanson, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said Monday. “Our troops have been requested to support security, logistics, liaison and communication missions.”

The meeting between Trump and Pence, in the Oval Office, marked the first time they have spoke since the president’s supporters entered the Capitol while the vice president was presiding over formal affirmation of their re-election defeat, according to two people familiar with the matter.

— With assistance by Sophia Cai, Jennifer Jacobs, and Billy House

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CDC: No sign of homegrown U.S. coronavirus variant, but scientists need to look harder
Tuesday January 12th, 2021 at 3:33 AM
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Infectious-disease experts say there is no evidence the massive winter surge that is killing thousands of people a day in the United States is linked to the U.K. variant or to a homegrown strain. But they acknowledge their battlefield awareness is limited.

Some states have minimal capacity to conduct genomic sequencing that allows scientists to trace the random mutations that could give a virus variant some advantage over other strains. Like any virus, this one mutates randomly, and countless variants are in circulation.

The increase in the rate of new infections in the United States has been so rapid in recent weeks that scientists cannot rule out the possibility that an undetected variant is accelerating the spread. Other factors may be behind the surge, including holiday gatherings and the lack of adherence in some communities to public health guidelines designed to limit transmission, such as social distancing and wearing masks.

“It could be — a possibility — that we have our own mutant that’s being more easily transmissible,” Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Monday. “We don’t know. We’re looking for it. . . . If you look at the slope of our curve, which is very steep, it looks a bit like the curve in the U.K.”

Nearly 198,000 new coronavirus cases and more than 1,600 deaths were reported Monday in the United States. The seven-day running average for daily deaths has topped 3,200. Nearly 375,000 people have died of the virus in the nation since the beginning of the pandemic.

Officials in Indiana announced that the U.K. variant has been identified in their state. More than 60 cases of the variant strain have been identified across nine states since it was first detected stateside two weeks ago in Colorado.

Indiana State Health Commissioner Kristina Box said in a statement Monday that viruses commonly mutate and that the best defense is to practice good hygiene and social distancing.

“Because this strain of the virus can be transmitted more easily, it’s more important than ever that Hoosiers continue to wear their masks, practice social distancing, maintain good hygiene and get vaccinated when they are eligible,” Box said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday its strain surveillance program and its partners are on track to more than double by week’s end the number of genomic sequences being uploaded to public databases compared with the sequencing rate in December. The CDC has organized virtual meetings with scientists and public health experts in an attempt to share information about variants of the virus in circulation.

“The general consensus is there’s no single variant driving current U.S. cases. That said, we need to be on the lookout for these variants of concern,” Duncan MacCannell, chief science officer with the CDC’s Office of Advanced Molecular Detection, said Monday.

Other scientists share that view.

“We don’t see any evidence of a particular variant ‘out running’ others,” Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute, said in an email. “That’s not to say there isn’t one, but we haven’t seen any evidence of it so far and we are looking, just not enough.”

William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in an email that “surveillance is such that we’d not detect any such variant until it was already emerged and well established.”

MacCannell estimated that less than 0.5 percent of current transmission in the United States involves the U.K. variant, known as B.1.1.7. It has a suite of 17 mutations, including eight that affect the spike protein on the surface of the virus. British scientists believe it could be roughly 50 percent more transmissible than the more common coronavirus, which itself contains a mutation that appears to have boosted infectivity.

MacCannell said he expects that B.1.1.7 in coming weeks will make up a greater proportion of cases but said the pace and scale of that emergence is impossible to predict.

Scientists emphasize that these mutations do not appear to change the severity of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. There are multiple lines of evidence supporting the theory that this variant is more transmissible, but no evidence it is deadlier. One study published in Britain found no statistically significant difference in the rate of hospitalization among people infected with the new variant as opposed to the more common coronavirus strain.

But even if the variant doesn’t make an individual sicker, its increased transmissibility could result in more people becoming infected and, thus, increase deaths overall.

“Are the variants that are out there escaping the protection of the vaccine? Yes or no? That’s what they’re working on right now,” Fauci said, referring to scientists funded by his institute. “I need that answer and I need it very quickly.”

Another uncertainty is whether monoclonal antibodies used as therapeutic treatments will be effective against viruses that contain alterations to the portion of the spike protein targeted by those antibodies.

The maker of another medication used by some doctors to treat the coronavirus, remdesivir, said it is likely to be effective against variant strains, the CEO of that company said Monday.

Gilead Sciences is testing the drug on variants first detected in Britain and South Africa to determine its efficacy. Gilead has already found in laboratory tests that remdesivir maintains its effectiveness against 2,000 coronavirus strains, chief executive Daniel O’Day said.

“Remdesivir works at the source in the cell where the virus replicates, and what we know is, in these new variants, that part of the cell is not changing at all, in fact,” O’Day said Monday during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Hospitalized patients with covid-19 can receive remdesivir, which may shorten their recovery time. The Food and Drug Administration approved the drug last year, under an emergency use authorization.

The virus will continue to mutate and, through natural selection, evolve, a fact that does not surprise the scientific community but has taken on new salience amid the recent bulletins about problematic variants.

“I think there is a high level of concern,” MacCannell said, referring to the views of the scientific community. “We don’t know fully the functional implications of these mutations. . . . I would suspect a lot of the mutations that we’re seeing are helping to optimize the virus for increased transmission.”

The rollout of vaccines, he said, “will be another set of pressures on the virus. That is one of the critical reasons why we need to get large-scale national monitoring up and running.”

Andersen said the U.K. variant and another identified initially in South Africa probably will become dominant in the United States within months. “Our mitigation efforts are woefully insufficient to deal with those,” he warned.

That’s a conundrum for policymakers. There are few officials with any appetite for greater restrictions on businesses and personal mobility, even with variants posing a new challenge. But what has happened in the United Kingdom — where much of the country is locked down — is sobering.

There are more than 1 million new infections every week in the United States, and scientists at scattered universities and research institutions are looking at only a few thousand genomic sequences weekly. The CDC is putting out contracts to academic and research institutions in an effort to push that to a goal of 6,500 weekly sequences.

“This is a brand-new virus. We’re learning as we go. There are the unknown unknowns that we have to acknowledge,” said Jeremy Luban, a virologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. “We’re all working on this around-the-clock.”

Fauci said it is critical to suppress the spread of the virus, given that a high number of infections leads to a greater number of chances for mutations.

“The race is to suppress the virus before it mutates to the point where it’s actually going to give you trouble,” Fauci said. “I don’t worry about these things, I just take them very seriously.”

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Trump approves state of emergency declaration in US capital | US Elections 2020 News
Tuesday January 12th, 2021 at 3:30 AM
Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News And Video From Al Jazeera
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Order authorises federal assistance in Washington, DC after officials warned of threats before Joe Biden inauguration.

Donald Trump has approved a state of emergency declaration in the United States capital, the White House press office said late on Monday, after US law enforcement officials warned of threats before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.

The order authorises federal assistance to be extended through January 24 to support efforts in Washington, DC to respond to the emergency situation.

Specifically, it allows the Federal Emergency Management Agency to “identify, mobilise and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency”.

The move comes after pro-Trump rioters overran the US Capitol building on January 6 in support of Trump’s false claims that the US election was stolen from him. Five people were killed in the violence.

Earlier on Monday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in an internal bulletin warned of possible armed protests in all 50 states and in the US capital in the days leading up to Biden’s inauguration on January 20.

Washington, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser sent a letter on the weekend requesting tighter security ahead of the inauguration in light of the “chaos, injury, and death” at the Capitol on January 6.

Bowser asked the Homeland Security Department to extend emergency provisions to allow federal and local agencies to better prepare for the inauguration and requested daily intelligence and threat briefings from the FBI from January 11 to January 24.

Meanwhile, US Senators Chris Murphy, Kirsten Gillibrand and Martin Heinrich sent a letter to Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller on Monday asking for a full account of what happened during the Capitol riot.

The letter states that “over three and a half hours … elapsed between the initial breach of the barriers on the West side of the U.S. Capitol” and the arrival of the National Guard.

“On Jan 6 it took 4.5 hours before the U.S. military arrived to defend the Capitol. That is not acceptable and we request a full accounting of what needs to change,” Murphy tweeted.

Democrats are pushing to impeach Trump for inciting his supporters to storm the Capitol.

The US House of Representatives is expected on Tuesday to take up a measure calling on Vice President Mike Pence and members of Trump’s Cabinet to invoke a process under the 25th Amendment, which allows for the removal of a president deemed unfit to fulfill their duties.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Monday that the president poses an “imminent threat” to the nation and “must be removed from office immediately”.

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2:03 AM 1/12/2021 – Videos: ‘Long COVID’ haunts more patients than thought | COVID-19 Special | Videos: LIVE: The House convenes to begin drive to force Trump from office after Capitol storming | FBI reportedly warned Capitol Police of potential violence
Tuesday January 12th, 2021 at 2:15 AM
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By Michael Novakhov (Mike Nova)

2:03 AM 1/12/2021 – Videos: ‘Long COVID’ haunts more patients than thought | COVID-19 Special | Videos: LIVE: The House convenes to begin drive to force Trump from office after Capitol storming | FBI reportedly warned Capitol Police of potential violence

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deutschewelleenglish’s YouTube Videos: ‘Long COVID’ haunts more patients than thought | COVID-19 Special
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Duration: 12:04
Over a year after the first coronavirus cases, some early patients are still suffering. “Long Covid” refers to symptoms that can last for months or that return after recovery. A new study from Wuhan China has found three quarters of hospitalised patients still experience at least one symptom half a year later. What we’re yet to discover is just how long “long Covid” can last. Survivors know all-too well how damaging the sickness can be – even after they get better. The road to recovery can be long and difficult.

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Trump’s disastrous end to his shocking presidency
Tuesday January 12th, 2021 at 1:56 AM
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President Donald Trump is leaving America in a vortex of violence, sickness and death and more internally estranged than it has been for 150 years.

The disorientating end to his shocking term has the nation reeling from a Washington insurrection. The FBI warned Monday of armed protests by pro-Trump thugs in 50 states, which raise the awful prospect of a domestic insurgency. Health officials fear 5,000 Americans could soon be dying every day from the pandemic Trump ignored. Hospitals are swamped, medical workers are shattered amid a faltering rollout of the vaccine supposed to end the crisis.

It took 200 years for the country to rack up its first two presidential impeachments. Trump’s malfeasance has led the country down that awful, divisive path twice in just more than a year. With House Democrats expected to formally impeach the President for inciting a mob assault on Congress on Wednesday, he will rely on the Republican enablers who refused to rein in his lawlessness to save him from conviction again.

Millions of Americans have bought into the delusional, poisoned fiction that an election Trump lost was stolen, and there are signs that some police and military forces have been radicalized by the grievance he stokes.

The city Trump has called home for four years is being turned into an armed camp incongruous with the mood of joy and renewal that pulsates through most inaugurations. In a symbol of a democracy under siege, the people’s buildings — the White House and the US Capitol — are caged behind ugly iron and cement barriers.

This is the legacy President-elect Joe Biden will inherit in eight days when he swears to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution — an oath that Trump trampled when inciting the Capitol attack last week from behind a bulletproof screen while buckling the cherished US chain of peaceful transfers of power.

With unintended irony, Biden’s team has picked “America United” as the inaugural theme — a motto that is now more apt in defining Biden’s hoped for destination rather than the splintered land he will begin to lead.

Trump’s pattern of violence
It is becoming ever more obvious that the horrific scenes on Capitol Hill on Wednesday were not a one-off. Instead, they now look part of a pattern including the White supremacist marches in Charlottesville that Trump refused to condemn, and the gassing of peaceful anti-racist protesters in the square outside the White House so he could hold an inflammatory photo-op.

In a chilling new warning, the FBI revealed the possible next stage in this now nationwide wave of radicalization, saying armed protests were planned at state Capitols in all 50 states between January 16 and Inauguration Day, January 20. Even as a nationwide sweep widens for the perpetrators of last week’s outrage, the bureau said new protests were planned for Washington for three days around the inauguration.

There are threats of an uprising if Trump is removed by way of the 25th Amendment. The FBI said it was also tracking threats against Biden, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In Washington, two Capitol Police officers were suspended and more are under investigation for allegedly helping the mob.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was shocked by the magnitude of the bureau’s intelligence on possible new violence.

“I don’t think in the entire scope of my career working counter terrorism issues for many, many years, I don’t think I ever saw a bulletin go out that concerned armed protest activity in 50 states in a three or four day period,” McCabe said on CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.”

Biden told reporters that despite the warnings, he was not afraid of taking the oath of office outside next week — but the combination of a massive security effort to protect him from Trump’s supporters and social distancing amid the Covid-19 pandemic mean his will be the most hollowed out inauguration in years.

Trump’s acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf resigned on Monday, in a yet another sign that the country lacks effective government at a moment of stark danger. By contrast, senior officials from the outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration worked closely together in the Situation Room on January 20, 2009, when there was concern about the authenticity of terror threat to the inauguration.

So far, after a massive domestic terror attack on the citadel of US democracy, there has been no major public briefing by any major federal law enforcement agency or the White House, an omission that fosters a sense of an absent government.

The current atmosphere of fear and wild political insurrection are a lesson in what happens when a figure as powerful as a President deliberately tears at America’s deep racial and social fault lines as a tool of his own power. Trump’s presidency revealed a new insight about the all-powerful modern presidency — the character of the person in the Oval Office chair really matters.

A Congress that can’t constrain a President
Momentum towards impeachment is now all but unstoppable in the House after Pelosi rejected a suggestion from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of some kind of censure motion.

McCarthy did acknowledge to Republican caucus members Monday that the President bore some responsibility for last week’s insurrection, according to a person familiar with the call. But some of his other responses to the outrage — an overhaul to the electoral certification process and legislation to promote voter confidence hinted at the insincerity of the Republican approach.

With a few exceptions, Republicans — who indulged and in many cases supported Trump’s blatantly false claims of electoral fraud for weeks — have responded to the uproar over last week’s Capitol attack by complaining that by pushing impeachment, Democrats are fracturing national unity. It’s as if the last four years never happened.

There are also questions over whether Republicans understand the seriousness of last week’s events. Remarks by Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt are still reverberating through the Capitol.

“My personal view is that the President touched the hot stove on Wednesday and is unlikely to touch it again,” Blunt said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

His comment eerily recalled the rationalizations of Republicans who declined to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial after he tried to get Ukraine to interfere in the election to damage Biden.

America has emerged from many dark periods since the Civil War. The country was torn by resistance to the Civil Rights movement. And the Vietnam War turned generations against one another. But the fact that millions of people now appear to deeply mistrust the electoral system that is the basis of US democracy means that the country’s internal political cohesion is now being tested as it has rarely been in the last century-and-a-half.

And the Republican indulgence of the President’s repeated political arson has revealed a massive constitutional blindspot. When one party’s lawmakers are in thrall to a strongman leader, their duty to ensure checks and balances to constrain presidential power is soon forgotten.

Trump to reemerge
Trump has not appeared in public for days. And the suspension of his social media accounts amid concern that he could stir up more violence mean the country has been unable to assess his mood.

But the President is due to make a trip to visit the border wall that he said Mexico would pay for but instead saddled the taxpayers with the bill. White House sources said that the President is determined to spend his last full week in office touting his achievements and is expected to release another round of controversial pardons. CNN reported Monday that former Attorney General William Barr and White House counsel Pat Cipollone have advised the President not to attempt what would be yet another epic abuse of power — an attempt to pardon himself.

The virus is meanwhile running rampant. Eleven states and Washington, DC, just recorded their highest 7-day average of new cases of Covid-19 since the pandemic began. For the first time, the country is averaging over 3,000 deaths from the pandemic per day. Trump’s outgoing head of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention Dr. Robert Redfield warned in a recent interview with McClatchy newspapers that the pandemic would get worse for the rest of January and parts of February and that the country could see 5,000 deaths a day.

And hopes that the nation could soon turn a corner are being tempered by the glitches in the vaccine roll out. Just as with the early stages of the crisis, poor coordination between federal and local and state authorities and the overall lack of a broader distribution plan are hampering the effort.

Like everything else, it will be up to Biden to fix it.

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Russian FSB Possibly Tied to SolarWinds Hack
Monday January 11th, 2021 at 1:18 PM
Edge
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Emergency and disaster management briefing for January 11, 2021: Naval divers have found aircraft debris and human body parts from the crash of Flight SJ182 in Indonesia; Central Texas received up to six inches of snow on Sunday; new information allegedly points to the Russian FSB in the SolarWinds hack; ensuring the well-being of people with disabilities is critical during disaster response; 20 people, include 12 children, were rescued after their sailboats capsized off Santa Cruz Harbor; vog is forecast as trade winds return amid the ongoing eruption of the Kilauea Volcano; an earthen dam in Berea, Ohio, is undergoing emergency repairs to prevent its possible failure; and record high temperatures forecast for Southern California increase fire weather concerns.

1) Four minutes after takeoff out of Pontianak, West Kalimantan, Indonesia, Flight SJ182 disappeared off radar. The Sriwijara Air flight, operated by a Boeing 737-500, departed Soekarno-Hatta International Airport on Saturday and was carrying 62 souls on board when it crashed into the Java Sea. Naval search teams have located debris, along with human body parts, that are suspected to be from the downed aircraft.

2) Central Texas received several inches of snow Sunday afternoon, which knocked out power to thousands of customers across the region. The National Weather Service (NWS) issued a winter storm warning through midnight on Sunday, for at least six counties, noting that up to six inches of snow could fall in the region. The unusual snowfall prompted school closures on Monday, although warming temperatures beginning on Monday are likely to melt the snow quickly.

3) New information regarding the SolarWinds hack suggests that the malware used may be tied to a hacking group known as “Turla.” According to Kaspersky — a Moscow-based cybersecurity firm — the backdoor used by the hackers was likely done on behalf of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). Estonian authories pointed out the connection, and Kaspersky noted that three characteristics of a hacking tool, “Kazuar,” appear to have been present in the SolarWinds hack.

4) When disasters strike, those with disabilities may face life-threatening circumstances, such as a loss of power for life-sustaining medical equipment. Ensuring their well-being is critical during response efforts, and research shows that they are disproportionately affected by a disaster. It is imperative to ensure planning efforts include listening to the needs of those with disabilities, and also to bring community, health, and support workers to disaster planning tables, as they have a wealth of information on how to best support those with disabilities.

5) Multiple sailboats capsized outside the Santa Cruz Harbor on Sunday afternoon amid dangerous and rough surf. The incident occurred when four boats were struck by a large wave, tossing 20 people — including 12 children — into the ocean. Rescue crews and surfers were able to quickly rescue everyone from the dangerous waters, and no injuries or deaths were reported.

6) Increased vog from the Kilauea Volcano is expected over West Hawaii areas due to trade winds that have returned to the region. According to the Vog Measurement and Prediction Project at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the vog will affect North and South Kona districts, along with Ka’u. SO2 (sulphur dioxide) emissions also remain elevated, and lava activity is ongoing, but confined within the Haleamaumau crater.

7) An earthen dam in Berea, Ohio, is undergoing emergency repairs to prevent its possible failure. The Coe Lake dam has been eroding slowly over time, and a 100-foot section recently opened up, allowing water to flow back and forth between Baldwin Creek and Coe Lake. The back-and-forth flow has increased the erosion, which has reduced the lake by nearly 14 inches or about 10 million gallons. The reservoir is the backup water supply for the city, and the emergency repairs will be followed up by a more extensive repair at a later date.

8)Record high temperatures are set to move into Southern California later in the week, increasing the fire danger risk. Mild Santa Ana winds moved into the area on Sunday and were expected to last into Tuesday, slightly elevating the fire risk. Offshore winds are predicted through the end of the week with the temperature increase, which is likely to elevate fire concerns throughout the region once again.

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Schumer Brings Pragmatism, Experience and Ego to Role of Senate Majority Leader | Voice of America

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WASHINGTON – Capping nearly a half-century in politics, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer is on the verge of taking control as majority leader of a closely divided Senate, placing him at the center of the legislative battles to come when President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated January 20.

Schumer, 70, the first New Yorker and the first Jew to hold the position of Senate Majority Leader, will succeed Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky at a perilous moment: The country is gripped by the deadly COVID-19 epidemic, the economy is in tatters, and the nation is reeling from last Wednesday’s rioting at the U.S. Capitol by a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters.

Indeed, Schumer likely will assume his new leadership role in the midst of another contentious fight to eject Trump from the White House, even as the Republican president’s term nears its end.

With a new Senate controlled by the Democrats unlikely to act on an article of impeachment until after Democratic President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in on January 20, Schumer’s first order of business will be to devise a strategy to simultaneously confirm Biden’s Cabinet and pass critical policy initiatives while conducting an impeachment trial of Trump.

In a letter to Senate colleagues this week, Schumer vowed that impeachment won’t interfere with the Democratic Party agenda, which includes passage of a coronavirus pandemic stimulus package providing $2,000 individual payments and state and local assistance.

He also listed other goals, such as “bold legislation to defeat the climate crisis” and efforts to fix the health care and childcare systems, according to the Associated Press.

Biden has encouraged Schumer and other Democratic leaders to pursue a “bifurcated” approach by dividing legislative days between an impeachment trial and getting his nominees for top government posts confirmed by the Senate.

Although Trump would be out of office by the time the Senate is able to act on the impeachment charge, Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats note that Trump would be barred from running for president again in 2024 if he is convicted of inciting violence against the government.

Timing of Senate handover uncertain

It took an improbable Democratic sweep of two Senate seats in Georgia runoff elections Jan. 5 to shift control of the Senate from the Republicans to the Democrats — and elevate Schumer from minority leader to the top leadership job.

It is currently impossible to pinpoint the specific day on which Schumer will take control of the Senate, because of how closely divided the body is and because of some peculiarities of election law.

The chamber will ultimately be split between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris casting tie-breaking votes in favor of Democrats. However, before that can happen a replacement for Harris, who is currently a senator, and the two senators-elect from Georgia, who won runoff elections last week, must all be seated.

Harris’s appointed replacement, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, can be seated as soon as Harris is inaugurated. But Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, the two incoming senators from Georgia, could have to wait until as late as January 22 to take their positions, depending on when state officials certify their elections.

A history of pragmatism

Although Schumer’s position as his party’s leader inevitably places him at a political flashpoint, his history in state politics and the U.S. Congress over the past 45 years has been marked by a broad streak of pragmatism and a willingness to make deals across the aisle.

In particular, Schumer has served as a bridge between the parties on issues related to the financial services industry, one of the most important sectors, if not the most important, in his state’s economy. He is often criticized by members of his own party for being too solicitous of Wall Street.

He also sought to strike bipartisan deals on contentious issues. He was a member of the “Gang of 8” — a group of senators that in 2013 led a successful bipartisan effort to pass a comprehensive immigration reform law in the Senate. The legislation ultimately died in the House.

Over the years, Schumer has been a reliable supporter of many policy aims associated with the Democratic Party. In particular, he has been a strong advocate for gun control, expansion of access to health insurance, and the right of women to choose to have abortions.

However, he has also been willing to break from his party. He has, at times, resisted efforts to raise taxes on people earning considerably more money than average Americans, pointing out that in high-cost areas like New York, income levels that would be considered very high elsewhere are necessary to maintain a middle-class lifestyle.

Schumer’s strong support for Israel has also left him at odds with his party on occasion. He voted against the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration in 2015, and spoke in favor of President Trump’s controversial decision to move the United States’ embassy in Israel to the contested city of Jerusalem.

A skilled political campaigner and organizer, Schumer has never lost an election in his career. He also headed the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, leading the party in retaking control of the Senate in 2006 by ousting half a dozen Republican incumbents. In the next election, still under Schumer’s leadership, the DSCC helped the party gain an additional eight seats.

His skills as a politician will be fully tested in the tightly controlled Senate, where the “filibuster” rule can make it difficult to pass any legislation with fewer than 60 votes, and where even measures that can be passed with a simple majority will have to please the most conservative Democrats in the body.

“Schumer is constrained both by the filibuster and also the preferences of his least-liberal members,” said Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “That list starts with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

“It seems like the $2,000 stimulus checks will be a very early agenda item for the new Congress. Can Schumer structure it in such a way that he can secure the vote of Manchin, who has said that he doesn’t view the checks as a top priority? Or, if he loses Manchin, could he find Republican votes? How this unfolds is an interesting early test for Schumer as majority leader.”

A son of Brooklyn

Schumer’s elevation to one of the most powerful positions in the country comes as the culmination of a political career that has spanned nearly five decades. Beginning as a state assemblyman in New York in 1975, Schumer worked his way ever upward, spending eighteen years as a member of the House of Representatives before being elected to the Senate for the first time in 1998.

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1950, Schumer still lives in the borough’s Park Slope neighborhood with his wife of more than 40 years, Iris Weinshall. They have two adult daughters. Schumer attended Harvard College and Harvard Law School, passing the bar in the state of New York in 1975, though he never practiced law.

Schumer is the second cousin of comedian and actress Amy Schumer.

Schumer is often the subject of jokes on Capitol Hill because of his sharp elbows and fondness for publicity. Former Senate Majority Leader and Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole once said, “the most dangerous place in Washington is between Charles Schumer and a television camera.”

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Military leaders condemn ‘sedition and insurrection’ at Capitol, say Biden won

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Key Points
  • The nation’s top military commanders condemned Wednesday’s acts of “sedition and insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol.
  • The message from the Joint Chiefs of Staff comes nearly one week after thousands of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, resulting in at least five deaths, including that of a Capitol Police officer.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, answers a question during a virtual town hall at the Pentagon, May 28, 2020.
Chad J. McNeeley | Department of Defense

WASHINGTON — In an extraordinary letter Tuesday to the U.S. military, the nation’s top commanders condemned last week’s acts of “sedition and insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol, while acknowledging Joe Biden’s election victory.

The message did not mention President Donald Trump by name, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, made it clear that the military intends to stand by the constitutional transfer of power to the next administration.

“As we have done throughout our history, the U.S. military will obey lawful orders from civilian leadership, support civilian authorities to protect lives and property, ensure public safety in accordance with the law, and remain fully committed to protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” wrote the nation’s highest military officers.

VIDEO2:1002:10
A federal emergency declaration is in place to boost security ahead of Biden’s inauguration

“As Service Members, we must embody the values and ideals of the Nation. We support and defend the Constitution. Any act to disrupt the Constitutional process is not only against our traditions, values and oath; it is against the law,” the chiefs wrote.

The message to the troops comes nearly one week after thousands of the president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, resulting in at least five deaths, including that of a Capitol Police officer.

Earlier on Tuesday, Trump told reporters that people found his comments at a rally that sparked the violence at the Capitol “totally appropriate” and called the fallout “absolutely ridiculous.”

The president also briefly discussed the blowback he said would follow potential impeachment proceedings.

“For [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi and [Senate Democratic leader] Chuck Schumer to continue on this path, I think it’s causing tremendous danger to our country, and it’s causing tremendous anger,” he said.

VIDEO0:4700:47
Trump: Big Tech making big mistake

On Wednesday, the House plans to decide whether to make Trump the first president ever impeached twice.

The assault on the Capitol delayed congressional proceedings to tally electors’ votes and confirm Biden’s win in the Nov. 3 election.

Biden’s victory was projected by all major news outlets in mid-November and confirmed by Electoral College votes in mid-December. The Republican president has falsely insisted he won in a “landslide,” baselessly claiming his reelection was stolen through massive electoral fraud.

As protesters besieged the Capitol on Wednesday, Trump told supporters in a tweeted video, “You have to go home now.” The president stopped short of condemning the violence and told the mob, “We love you, you’re very special.”

US President Donald Trump looks on after presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Celtics basketball legend Bob Cousy in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on August 22, 2019.
Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images

On Monday, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., called on acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller to investigate whether active-duty or retired military members took part in the deadly mob.

If such individuals are identified by criminal investigators, Duckworth said, Miller must “take appropriate action to hold individuals accountable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.” Duckworth, an Iraq War veteran who retired as a lieutenant colonel from the Army National Guard, noted that “upholding good order and discipline demands that the U.S. Armed Forces root out extremists that infiltrate the military and threaten our national security.”

A U.S. Army officer resigned Monday after commanders at Fort Bragg confirmed that they were reviewing Capt. Emily Rainey’s involvement in the riot.

In a Tuesday evening statement, the Army said it is working with the FBI to determine whether any participants in last week’s riot have any connection to the Army.

“Any type of activity that involves violence, civil disobedience, or a breach of peace may be punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice or under state or federal law,” an Army spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.

In a nearly three-minute video posted on Thursday, the president called for national “healing and reconciliation.”

“To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay,” Trump said, in his first address to the nation following the violence that rocked Washington.

“Now tempers must be cooled, and calm restored. We must get on with the business of America,” Trump added.

The president also acknowledged that “a new administration will be inaugurated on Jan. 20.”

VIDEO3:2503:25
President Trump releases video in response to the Capitol riot

A day later he said that he would skip President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration. Vice President Mike Pence said he will attend Biden’s swearing-in ceremony.

Traditionally, the incoming and outgoing presidents ride from the White House to the U.S. Capitol together for the inauguration ceremony.

Trump is not the first outgoing president to skip the inauguration of his successor. The others were Presidents John Adams, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Johnson, according to the White House Historical Association. Like Trump, Johnson was also impeached.

The National Guard said Monday that it has authorized up to 15,000 troops to support the security of the inauguration. Defense officials added that there were approximately 9,000 National Guard members at former President Barack Obama’s inauguration. For Trump’s ceremony in 2017, more than 7,000 troops were mobilized.

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FBI report warned of ‘war’ at Capitol, contradicting claims there was no indication of looming violence

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A situational information report approved for release the day before the U.S. Capitol riot painted a dire portrait of dangerous plans, including individuals sharing a map of the complex’s tunnels, and possible rally points for would-be conspirators to meet up in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and South Carolina and head in groups to Washington.

“As of 5 January 2021, FBI Norfolk received information indicating calls for violence in response to ‘unlawful lockdowns’ to begin on 6 January 2021 in Washington. D.C.,” the document says. “An online thread discussed specific calls for violence to include stating ‘Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa 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. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”

BLM is likely a reference to the Black Lives Matter movement for racial justice. Pantifa is a derogatory term for antifa, a far-left anti-fascist movement whose adherents sometimes engage in violent clashes with right-wing extremists.

Yet even with that information in hand, the report’s unidentified author expressed concern that the FBI might be encroaching on free speech rights.

The warning is the starkest evidence yet of the sizable intelligence failure that preceded the mayhem, which claimed the lives of five people, although one law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid disciplinary action, said the failure was not one of intelligence but of acting on the intelligence.

An FBI official familiar with the document said that within 45 minutes of learning about the alarming online conversation, the Norfolk FBI office wrote the report and shared it with others within the bureau. It was not immediately clear how many law enforcement agencies outside the FBI were told, but the information was briefed to FBI officials at the bureau’s Washington field office the day before the attack, this official said.

The official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss ongoing investigations, added that the report was raw intelligence and that at the time it was written, the FBI did not know the identities of those making the online statements.

The FBI already faces tough questions about why it was not more attuned to what was being discussed in public Internet conversations in the days leading up to the attack, and why the bureau and other agencies seemed to do little to prepare for the possibility of mass violence.

The document notes that the information represents the view of the FBI’s Norfolk office, is not to be shared outside law enforcement circles, that it is not “finally evaluated intelligence,” and that agencies that receive it “are requested not to take action based on this raw reporting without prior coordination with the FBI.”

Multiple law enforcement officials have said privately in recent days that the level of violence exhibited at the Capitol has led to difficult discussions within the FBI and other agencies about race, terrorism, and whether investigators failed to register the degree of danger because the overwhelming majority of the participants at the rally were White conservatives fiercely loyal to the President Trump.

“Individuals/Organizations named in this [situational information report] have been identified as participating in activities that are protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” the document says. “Their inclusion here is not intended to associate the protected activity with criminality or a threat to national security, or to infer that such protected activity itself violates federal law.

“However,” it continues, “based on known intelligence and/or specific historical observations, it is possible the protected activity could invite a violent reaction towards the subject individual or others in retaliation or with the goal of stopping the protected activity from occurring in the first instance. In the event no violent reaction occurs, FBI policy and federal law dictates that no further record to be made of the protected activity.”

The document notes that one online comment advised, “if Antifa or BLM get violent, leave them dead in the street,” while another said they need “people on standby to provide supplies, including water and medical, to the front lines. The individual also discussed the need to evacuate noncombatants and wounded to medical care.”

On Jan. 6, a large, angry crowd of people who had attended a nearby rally marched to the Capitol, smashing windows and breaking down doors to get inside. One woman in the mob was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer; officials said three others in the crowd died from medical emergencies. Another Capitol police officer died after suffering injuries.

On Friday, the head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, Steven D’Antuono, told reporters “there was no indication” of anything planned for the day of Trump’s rally “other than First Amendment-protected activity.” D’Antuono added, “we worked diligently with our partners on this.”

The FBI said in a statement that its “standard practice is to not comment on specific intelligence products,” but added that FBI field offices “routinely share information with their local law enforcement partners to assist in protecting the communities they serve.”

The FBI did not detail specifically who saw the document before the mob attack on Congress or what, if anything, was done in response.

For weeks leading up to the event, FBI officials discounted any suggestion that the protest of pro-Trump supporters upset about the scheduled certification of Joe Biden’s election could be a security threat on a scale with racial justice protests last summer in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody.

While the nation’s capital is one of the most heavily guarded cities on the planet, local and federal law enforcement agencies sought to take a low-key approach to last week’s event, publicly and privately expressing concerns that they did not want to repeat the ugly clashes between protesters and police last year.

Some law enforcement officials took the view that pro-Trump protesters are generally known for over-the-top rhetoric but not much violence, and therefore the event did not pose a particularly grave risk, according to people familiar with the security discussions leading up to Jan. 6.

Even so, there were warning signs, though none as stark as the one from the FBI’s Norfolk office.

FBI agents had in the weeks before the Trump rally visited suspected extremists hoping to glean whether they had violent intentions, a person familiar with the matter said, though it was not immediately clear who was visited or if the FBI was specifically tracking anyone who would later be charged criminally. These visits were first reported Sunday by NBC News.

In addition, in the days leading up to the demonstration, some Capitol Hill staffers were told by supervisors to not come into work that day, if possible, because it seemed the danger level would be higher than a lot of prior protests, according to a person familiar with the warning. Capitol Police did not take the kind of extra precautions, such as frozen zones and hardened barriers, that are typically used in major events around the Capitol.

Now, the Justice Department and federal agents are scrambling to identify and arrest those responsible for last week’s violence, in part because there is already significant online discussion of new potential clashes Sunday and again on Jan. 20 when Biden will be inaugurated.

Federal agents remain in a state of high-alert in the days leading up to the inauguration as authorities brace for possible violence not just in Washington, but around the country, officials said.

The FBI recently issued a different memo saying that “armed protests” were being planned “at all 50 state capitols” and in D.C. in the days leading up to the inauguration, according to an official familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive law enforcement matter.

The memo — first reported on by ABC News and later confirmed by The Washington Post — is a raw intelligence product, compiling information gathered by the bureau and several other government agencies, an official said. Some of it is unverified, and the threat is likely to differ significantly from place to place, the official said.

But the data it highlights to law enforcement are nonetheless troubling — including that there was information suggesting people might storm government offices, or stage an uprising were Trump to be removed from office, the official said.

In a statement, the FBI declined to comment specifically on the memo about state capitols but said: “Our efforts are focused on identifying, investigating, and disrupting individuals that are inciting violence and engaging in criminal activity. As we do in the normal course of business, we are gathering information to identify any potential threats and are sharing that information with our partners.

“The FBI respects the rights of individuals to peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights,” it continues. “Our focus is not on peaceful protesters, but on those threatening their safety and the safety of other citizens with violence and destruction of property.”

Julie Tate contributed to this report.

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Washington Post: FBI warned of violent ‘war’ at Capitol in internal report issued day before deadly riot – CNNPolitics

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Washington (CNN)The FBI warned of a violent “war” at the US Capitol in an internal report issued a day before last week’s deadly siege, but it wasn’t acted on urgently enough to prevent the domestic terrorist attack, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The Post said that last Tuesday, an FBI office in Norfolk, Virginia, issued an “explicit internal warning that extremists were preparing to travel to Washington to commit violence and ‘war.'” The report “painted a dire portrait of dangerous plans, including individuals sharing a map of the complex’s tunnels, and possible rally points for would-be conspirators to meet up” in several states before heading to Washington, DC.
The report runs contrary to statements made by law enforcement officials who have indicated to CNN that authorities missed key signs ahead of the siege, which left five dead and ransacked the Capitol. It’s likely to raise additional questions about why authorities were unprepared to respond to the riot and federal readiness to thwart future threats at a time when the FBI is warning of armed protests ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.
The report referenced an online thread in which conspirators discussed their plans, quoting individuals as saying: “‘Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa 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. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.'”
The information was “briefed to FBI officials at the bureau’s Washington field office the day before the attack,” the Post reported. The newspaper, however, said the document is clear that the information presented was not “finally evaluated intelligence,” and that agencies receiving it “are requested not to take action based on this raw reporting without prior coordination with the FBI.”
The newspaper also reported that the FBI was careful with its description of the individuals and organizations listed in the report, with the bureau writing that the activities they engaged in are protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution and that though they were mentioned in the report, “Their inclusion here is not intended to associate the protected activity with criminality or a threat to national security, or to infer that such protected activity itself violates federal law.”
But the report also warned that “based on known intelligence and/or specific historical observations, it is possible the protected activity could invite a violent reaction towards the subject individual or others in retaliation or with the goal of stopping the protected activity from occurring in the first instance,” according to the Post.
Officials told CNN last week that going into Wednesday, they had no intelligence indicating there was a threat the US Capitol could be overrun. In the wake of the attack, federal and local officials have said they did not have intelligence suggesting any violent mob was preparing to attack the Capitol, even as demonstrators were publicly saying on social media they were not planning a typical protest.
The Post’s report prompted Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat who is a member of the House Judiciary Committee, to call for his panel to open a probe about the matter.
Former Virginia Republican Rep. Denver Riggleman, who is working with several former national security officials to analyze open source information about the attack, also called for an investigation.
“There is a clear breakdown of communications and operational chain of command. It would be interesting to see what the internal intelligence memos were for Capitol Police and support elements. My guess is that the intelligence reports would have had a possible Capitol incursion,” he told CNN.
This story is breaking and will be updated.
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The Capitol, cameras and selfies

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NEW YORK (AP) — One of the defining images of the Capitol Hill siege was of a man dangling from the balcony of the Senate chamber. Clad in black and with a helmet over his head, he might have been hard to identify even after he paused to sit in a leather chair at the top of the Senate dais and hold up a fist.

But Josiah Colt made it easy. He posted a video to his Facebook page moments later, bragging about being the first to reach the chamber floor and sit in Nancy’s Pelosi’s chair (he was wrong). He used a slur to describe Pelosi and called her “a traitor.”

A little later the 34-year-old from Boise, Idaho, posted again. This time, he sounded more anxious. “I don’t know what to do,” Colt said in a video he’d soon delete but not before it was cached online. “I’m in downtown D.C. I’m all over the news now.”

Colt was far from the only one documenting the insurrection from within last Wednesday in Washington. Many in the mob that ransacked the Capitol did so while livestreaming, posting on Facebook and taking selfies, turning the United States Capitol into a theater of real-time — and often strikingly ugly and violent — far-right propaganda.

“This extremist loop feeds itself. The folks who are watching and commenting and encouraging and sometimes giving some cash are supporting the individual on the ground. And he’s supporting their fantasies,” says Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.

“Selfie culture,” Segal says, “has become so much part of the norm that it’s almost second nature when you’re carrying out a terrorist insurrection.”

Taken together, the various fragmented feeds from Wednesday’s incursion form a tableau of an ill-conceived insurrection — as full of “I was here” posturing for social media as of ideological revolution — and one that was given far more latitude than most peaceful Black Lives Matters protests were in 2020. In hundreds of images, the fallacy of a far-right brand of “patriotism” was laid bare.

The modern Capitol had previously been besieged before only in Hollywood fiction. Marauding aliens in “Mars Attacks!” Ensnarling ivy in “Logan’s Run.” Blown to bits in “Independence Day.” But the imagery of last week’s siege offered something else: a warped cinema verité of right-wing extremism with waving Confederate flags and white-power poses in Capitol halls.

Though many involved Wednesday in Washington were Trump supporters without designs on violence, the visuals illustrate that some were clearly there to summon mayhem if not outright bloodshed. The call to the Capitol drew many of the right’s extremist factions — some of whom helped lead the charge.

The white nationalist Tim Gionet, known online as “Baked Alaska” and a noted participant in the “Unite the Right” rally at Charlottesville, streamed live from congressional offices, gleefully documenting the break-in for more than 15,000 viewers on the streaming platform Dlive. The service, ostensibly for gamers, has grown into a tool for white nationalists because of its lack of content modulation.

Journalists chronicled the storming of the Capitol, some while being attacked. But the rioters’ self-documentation told another story: the on-the-ground culmination of an online alternative reality fueled by QAnon conspiracies, false claims of fraud in the election and Trump’s own rhetoric.

“In their minds they had impunity. I’m having trouble understanding how these people could believe that,” says Larry Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies and author of the upcoming “Empire of Resentment: Populism’s Toxic Embrace of Nationalism.”

“They’re going to be prosecuted,” he says of those involved, and “they have provided the evidence.”

Federal law enforcement officials have pledged an exhaustive investigation into the rampage that left five people dead, including Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick. They are relying in part on the social media trail many left behind. “The goal here is to identify people and get them,” Ken Kohl, the top deputy federal prosecutor in Washington, told reporters Friday.

Among those arrested so far are Richard Barnett, photographed sitting in Pelosi’s office with his feet on her desk, and Derrick Evans, a newly elected Republican from West Virginia, who had posted video on social media of himself clamoring at the Capitol door. “We’re in! Keep it moving, baby!”

Colt landed on the Senate floor; photos suggested he had actually sat in a chair reserved for Vice President Mike Pence, who is president of the Senate. Colt issued an apology begging forgiveness for his prominent role. “In the moment I thought I was doing the right thing,” he said.

Jessie Daniels, a professor of sociology at Hunter College whose books include “Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights,” expects many of the images from the Capitol breach will reverberate online as far-right propaganda. The woman who died trying to break through a Capitol door, Ashli Babbitt will be made a martyr.

“She’s going to be on all the posters, trying to get people radicalized,” Daniels says.

For those who have been tracking and researching how the far right operates online, the live streams of well-known activists like Gionet were especially telling. Gionet streamed from within the Capitol, interacting with his followers on Dlive as he went. When the number of viewers ticked over 10,000, he cheered, “Shoutout to Germany!” Megan Squire, a professor of computer science at Elon University who has studied Dlive, estimates Gionet made $2,000 in donations while inside the Capitol.

“He’s making an enormous amount of money saying incredibly racist and anti-Semitic and violent things,” Squire says.

Following neo-Fascists from one platform to another, some have said, is a helpless game of catch-up. Daniels disagrees.

“There’s a lot of evidence that deplatforming people who are harmful from these platforms is effective,” Daniels says. “The pushback from tech people is that it’s whack-a-mole, that if they’re not here, they’ll go somewhere else. Fine. Let’s play whack-a-mole. Let’s do this. Let’s chase them off of every platform until they go away.”

___

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

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‘Seditious Conspiracy’ And The Capitol Hill Attackers | Morning Joe | MSNBC – YouTube

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Serious Capitol riot charges could be on the way from prosecutors

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With a growing number of arrests and charges related to last week’s storming of the U.S. Capitol, multiple law-enforcement agencies are building a sprawling investigation into who participated in the violent event that claimed at least five lives and sent fearful lawmakers into hiding.

Nearly 100 people have been arrested so far for their roles in the attack carried out by thousands of President Donald Trump’s supporters or in unrest surrounding the Capitol that day. Many currently face lesser charges such as unlawful entry, disorderly conduct and defacing public property. Only a few have been accused of more serious crimes such as felony violations of the Riot Act.

In the cases of those who attacked the Capitol, those initial charges could be a precursor of more serious allegations, said University of Texas law professor Bobby Chesney.

It’s common for authorities to make arrests based on readily-proven charges, such as trespassing on federal property, Chesney said. Then, weeks later, prosecutors seek grand-jury indictments on more serious charges.

“It remains to be seen how aggressive the Justice Department will be in terms of going after organizers and ringleaders,” Chesney said. “No doubt the FBI and DOJ would prefer to get past January 20, moreover, both for the sake of general calm and to avoid any prospect of a pardon shutting down a particular case.”

Heading up the task of identifying, locating, arresting and charging offenders falls on the shoulders of acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Michael Sherwin. He told National Public Radio this week that “hundreds” could ultimately face charges.

No charges are off the table, Sherwin said. Seditious conspiracy, rioting and insurrection will be considered if warranted.

Federal trespassing citations likely will result in fines or probation, experts said. More serious misdemeanors and felony charges related to weapons, conspiracy and assault could incur prison time.

“Prosecutors have a tremendous amount of discretion and this was an unprecedented assault on our seat of government,” said University of Wisconsin Law Professor Keith Findley. “My guess is they’ll take that very seriously… They’ll have many, many options to charge independently, or stack offenses. There’s a lot on the table.”

But some, like Anne Milgram, a New York University law professor and former attorney general of New Jersey, criticized the lack of more serious charges for those accused of ransacking the Capitol.

“What we’ve yet to see is a connection to seditious conspiracy,” Milgram said. “It feels to me, and everyone who watched, that the goal of this mob was to stop Congress from certifying the vote … the charges right now do not match the harm.”

Milgram said she expects the heaviest charges to stem from the slaying of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick. Others have suggested several members of the mob could face felony murder charges in that case similar to a getaway driver in a fatal robbery.

Prosecutors have primarily focused on those caught on camera and identified by tipsters in photos and videos during the riot. Department of Justice officials, for example, have announced the arrests of notable viral participants, including Jacob Chansley, a.k.a. Jake Angeli, the Arizona man who wore a fur hat and horns; Adam Johnson, the Florida man photographed carrying Nancy Pelosi’s lectern; and Eric Munchel, the Tennessee man depicted in tactical gear carrying plastic wrist restraints.

Federal investigators also have the option of serving subpoenas on technology companies to preserve content that perpetrators might try to delete.

Pete Eliadis, president and CEO of Intelligence Consulting Partners, a security firm, faulted Capitol Police for failing to secure the building and make arrests on the scene, making the job harder for investigators.

But he believes the government will try to make an example out of the key figures whose viral images show their role in inciting violence.

“They want to make a statement that this will not be tolerated, so if they can make a plausible arrest, they will,” Eliadis said. “The ones who wanted the attention, they’re going to get the attention. It’s easier to focus on them than the masses coming through.”

Labeling the riot and finding the most accurate charges could be difficult without a domestic terrorism law, which Congress has considered for years, said Chris Bonner, a retired FBI agent who teaches courses on homeland security at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.

“The very first thing people want to do is call something terrorism. There is no federal law covering domestic terrorism,” Bonner said. “If we’re going to decry something and criminalize it, we better have a law to cover it and then it better be equally applied across the ideological spectrum from extreme left to extreme right.”

Summer unrest a backdrop for charges

Federal prosecutions for the Capitol riot will undoubtedly draw parallels to unrest last summer over the killings of Black Americans by police.

Last year, following weeks of unrest in several cities after the death of George Floyd, Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen wrote a memo telling federal prosecutors to consider a sedition charge against protesters who conspired to “take a federal courthouse or other federal property by force.”

And federal prosecutors took over charging cases against more than 100 protestors in two particular hotspots – Portland and Seattle. However, dozens of those charges were low-level citations or misdemeanors. Most of the Portland cases have not gone to trial because the pandemic has backlogged the courts. That trend will likely continue for accused D.C. rioters; many may not see a trial before the end of 2021.

Michael Filipovic, federal public defender for the Western District of Washington state said the U.S. attorney took over several state court charges and sought to send a message with tougher penalties. He said comparing Wednesday’s riot to protests over the summer is difficult.

He anticipated misdemeanor charges for many Capitol trespassers, but more weighty charges to come soon.

“If prosecutors can prove you had a firearm, zip-ties and intent to detain or harm individuals, that’s something they’ll take very seriously where you’ll be looking at some felonies,” Filipovic said.

Edward Maguire, a professor of criminology at Arizona State University and associate director of the school’s Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety, said he would expect to see charges that are more serious than those handed down during protests at President Trump’s inauguration in 2017.

More than 200 people were arrested during protests dubbed “J20” during the 2017 inauguration and charged with more serious felonies, including inciting to riot, rioting, conspiracy to riot, destruction of property and assault on police officers.

Federal prosecutors ultimately dropped charges in all but a handful of cases where people pleaded guilty. They failed to win convictions in others that went to trial.

At the very least, Maguire expects to see felony rioting charges for those confirmed to have breached the Capitol.

“It would be appropriate for them to see jail time,” Maguire said of the Trump rioters who entered Capitol Hill. “This is an insurrection, and it should be charged as one.”

Maguire said social media and video surveillance of the riot would likely give prosecutors stronger cases of intent than the evidence they had from the J20 protests.

Of the early arrests made by D.C.’s Metropolitan Police, all but a handful involved curfew violation and unlawful entry. The remaining others were arrested on more serious weapons charges or for defacing public property.

They included suspects like David Fitzgerald of Illinois who was cuffed as he attempted to exit through the barricades while following news crews that were being escorted out, and Joshua Pruitt, a 39-year-old from D.C. who is one of the few facing felony violations of the Riot Act.

Capitol Police also focused their arrests on unlawful entry, charging more than a dozen suspects for the offense, including Michael Curzio, a 35-year-old Florida man released from prison in February 2019 following an eight-year sentence for attempted first-degree murder.

Charges against Mark Leffingwell were among the first federal charges to roll into D.C.’s District Court on Thursday. A Capitol Police officer wrote in a complaint that Leffingwell attempted to push past him into the Capitol, then began punching repeatedly. While in custody, Leffingwell “spontaneously apologized for striking” him. Leffingwell has been charged with entering a restricted building, assault on a federal law enforcement officer and violent entry or disorderly conduct on capitol grounds.

Some legal defenses would be a stretch

Social media from the accused rioters suggests some may attempt novel legal defenses. Some may claim the President instructed them to march to the Capitol, giving them legal cover, while others have already claimed they “got caught up in the moment.”

Neither will hold much water in court, said UW’s Findley.

“The law recognizes duress, coercion and necessity, but those are limited and require showing that the person had no choice but to commit the criminal act facing violence or death. We’re nowhere close to that,” Findley said.

A “heat of passion” defense would also require protesters to prove that a reasonable person would have been provoked to take the same action, Findley said.

Some Capitol trespassers spoke out on social media and on video after the riot that they believed they hadn’t committed a crime because police let them in — or that they simply walked through open doors. Others chanted outside they had a right to enter because Congress works for the people.

But both federal law and new rules from the pandemic explicitly prohibit members of the public from entering the building. All public tours have been cancelled since March 2020 and only lawmakers, staff, media and their guests with proper credentials are currently allowed in.

Back when tours were available, they did not include access to the Senate and House galleries, which required a separate pass obtained through the office of the visitor’s senators or representatives.

Many of the rioters also broke rules by bringing prohibited items into the building, including water, electric stun guns, guns, ammunition, knives, mace and pepper spray and large bags, according to the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center.

Inside the galleries there is no photography or video recording allowed except by the media and the government’s own cameras.

And smoking, which several rioters filmed themselves doing inside the building, is strictly prohibited.

Contributing: Kristine Phillips, USA TODAY 

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The FBI Story: “same old, same old” … #Capitol #Attack was planned openly online for weeks. Why was it not prevented by the #FBI? They were too busy monitoring all those sex chats – they get more kick out of it. Give them their #Medals Of #Freedom, for saving this poor nation!

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    The executive director of the Republican Attorneys General Association has resigned amid backlash over a decision to send out robocalls urging people to march to the U.S. Capitol. https://on.msnbc.com/39msgqp 

    Top official at Republican AGs group resigns amid Capitol robocall controversy

    Adam Piper stepped down amid backlash over a decision to send out robocalls urging people to march to the U.S. Capitol.

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    New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick turns down Medal of Freedom from Trump http://hill.cm/6uSXpCb

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Washington Tense as DHS Chief Quits, FBI Warns of Armed Protests

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The abrupt resignation of Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf added to the mounting tension in Washington ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration next week, with thousands of National Guard troops set to be deployed and the FBI warning of armed protests in all 50 state capitals.

As inaugural security preparations intensified, House Democrats accelerated their push to force the ouster of President Donald Trump before his term officially ends, threatening to impeach him for a second time unless he resigns for encouraging the march that led to last Wednesday’s assault on the U.S. Capitol.

But Vice President Mike Pence indicated that he’d reject demands to immediately oust Trump through the 25th Amendment to the Constitution as the two met in the Oval Office and agreed to work together for the remainder of the term, according to a senior administration official.

Investigations continued into the deadly Capitol riot, and Democrats in the House and Senate have said that Republican colleagues who continued to support Trump’s false claims that he won the election even after the insurrectionists had left, must be held to account.

Republicans also found themselves confronting another crisis, being shunned by once-reliable corporate allies who have been essential to financing their campaigns. At the same time, many of the president’s supporters around the country did not waver in their belief that the 2020 election had been stolen.

Earlier: GOP Lawmakers Hit by Boardroom Backlash for Bid to Undo Election

Earlier in the day, Wolf announced that “the evolving security landscape” had led to a decision to begin security for the inauguration on Jan. 13. The efforts were originally scheduled to begin on Jan. 19.

According to the FBI’s warning, the protests in state capitals would begin on Jan. 16 and at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 17, and continue through Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, according to a law enforcement official.

Wolf said the decision came at the recommendation of Secret Service Director James Murray, adding that local, state and federal partners will work together during the extended security operations.

The National Guard has received approval to deploy as many as 15,000 personnel to Washington before and during the inauguration, as law enforcement in the nation’s capital and around the country braced for violence during the transition of power.

Read More: Trump and Pence Signal President Won’t Resign or Be Removed

The lingering sense of anxiety over last week’s violence refused to dissipate as historians struggled to come up with analogous events from the past, and were asked a question that once seemed unthinkable — was the U.S. headed toward a new civil war?

The feeling of disruption did not ease when Wolf announced that he would step down after “recent events,” including court rulings that held he had not been lawfully appointed to the post.

At least five federal judges have ruled that Wolf lacked authority as acting secretary of the department because his nomination in November 2019 was never confirmed by the Senate. Biden has nominated Alejandro Mayorkas to be his Homeland Security secretary.

Last week, in the wake of the riot, Wolf called on “the president and all elected officials to strongly condemn the violence that took place yesterday.” He said then that he wouldn’t step down before Biden is sworn in on Jan. 20.

His sudden departure adds to the confusion surrounding federal and state security preparations for the inauguration. The Homeland Security Department plays a critical role in securing the actual inauguration and assisting state and local officials during times of crisis.

He said he would be replaced in an acting capacity by Pete Gaynor, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Wolf, a Trump loyalist, had been the chief of staff to Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security secretary forced out by Trump in April 2019.

Read More: Democrats to Open Trump Impeachment Wednesday Unless Pence Acts

The National Guard deployment is a significant increase from the 6,200 troops from six states and the District of Columbia that have already been mobilized in the wake of last week’s attack.

Ten thousand of the troops are to arrive by Saturday and will stay through Jan. 20.

“We’ve received support requests from the Secret Service, Capitol Police and Park Police,” Daniel Hokanson, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said Monday. “Our troops have been requested to support security, logistics, liaison and communication missions.”

The meeting between Trump and Pence, in the Oval Office, marked the first time they have spoke since the president’s supporters entered the Capitol while the vice president was presiding over formal affirmation of their re-election defeat, according to two people familiar with the matter.

— With assistance by Sophia Cai, Jennifer Jacobs, and Billy House

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CDC: No sign of homegrown U.S. coronavirus variant, but scientists need to look harder

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Infectious-disease experts say there is no evidence the massive winter surge that is killing thousands of people a day in the United States is linked to the U.K. variant or to a homegrown strain. But they acknowledge their battlefield awareness is limited.

Some states have minimal capacity to conduct genomic sequencing that allows scientists to trace the random mutations that could give a virus variant some advantage over other strains. Like any virus, this one mutates randomly, and countless variants are in circulation.

The increase in the rate of new infections in the United States has been so rapid in recent weeks that scientists cannot rule out the possibility that an undetected variant is accelerating the spread. Other factors may be behind the surge, including holiday gatherings and the lack of adherence in some communities to public health guidelines designed to limit transmission, such as social distancing and wearing masks.

“It could be — a possibility — that we have our own mutant that’s being more easily transmissible,” Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Monday. “We don’t know. We’re looking for it. . . . If you look at the slope of our curve, which is very steep, it looks a bit like the curve in the U.K.”

Nearly 198,000 new coronavirus cases and more than 1,600 deaths were reported Monday in the United States. The seven-day running average for daily deaths has topped 3,200. Nearly 375,000 people have died of the virus in the nation since the beginning of the pandemic.

Officials in Indiana announced that the U.K. variant has been identified in their state. More than 60 cases of the variant strain have been identified across nine states since it was first detected stateside two weeks ago in Colorado.

Indiana State Health Commissioner Kristina Box said in a statement Monday that viruses commonly mutate and that the best defense is to practice good hygiene and social distancing.

“Because this strain of the virus can be transmitted more easily, it’s more important than ever that Hoosiers continue to wear their masks, practice social distancing, maintain good hygiene and get vaccinated when they are eligible,” Box said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday its strain surveillance program and its partners are on track to more than double by week’s end the number of genomic sequences being uploaded to public databases compared with the sequencing rate in December. The CDC has organized virtual meetings with scientists and public health experts in an attempt to share information about variants of the virus in circulation.

“The general consensus is there’s no single variant driving current U.S. cases. That said, we need to be on the lookout for these variants of concern,” Duncan MacCannell, chief science officer with the CDC’s Office of Advanced Molecular Detection, said Monday.

Other scientists share that view.

“We don’t see any evidence of a particular variant ‘out running’ others,” Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute, said in an email. “That’s not to say there isn’t one, but we haven’t seen any evidence of it so far and we are looking, just not enough.”

William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in an email that “surveillance is such that we’d not detect any such variant until it was already emerged and well established.”

MacCannell estimated that less than 0.5 percent of current transmission in the United States involves the U.K. variant, known as B.1.1.7. It has a suite of 17 mutations, including eight that affect the spike protein on the surface of the virus. British scientists believe it could be roughly 50 percent more transmissible than the more common coronavirus, which itself contains a mutation that appears to have boosted infectivity.

MacCannell said he expects that B.1.1.7 in coming weeks will make up a greater proportion of cases but said the pace and scale of that emergence is impossible to predict.

Scientists emphasize that these mutations do not appear to change the severity of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. There are multiple lines of evidence supporting the theory that this variant is more transmissible, but no evidence it is deadlier. One study published in Britain found no statistically significant difference in the rate of hospitalization among people infected with the new variant as opposed to the more common coronavirus strain.

But even if the variant doesn’t make an individual sicker, its increased transmissibility could result in more people becoming infected and, thus, increase deaths overall.

“Are the variants that are out there escaping the protection of the vaccine? Yes or no? That’s what they’re working on right now,” Fauci said, referring to scientists funded by his institute. “I need that answer and I need it very quickly.”

Another uncertainty is whether monoclonal antibodies used as therapeutic treatments will be effective against viruses that contain alterations to the portion of the spike protein targeted by those antibodies.

The maker of another medication used by some doctors to treat the coronavirus, remdesivir, said it is likely to be effective against variant strains, the CEO of that company said Monday.

Gilead Sciences is testing the drug on variants first detected in Britain and South Africa to determine its efficacy. Gilead has already found in laboratory tests that remdesivir maintains its effectiveness against 2,000 coronavirus strains, chief executive Daniel O’Day said.

“Remdesivir works at the source in the cell where the virus replicates, and what we know is, in these new variants, that part of the cell is not changing at all, in fact,” O’Day said Monday during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Hospitalized patients with covid-19 can receive remdesivir, which may shorten their recovery time. The Food and Drug Administration approved the drug last year, under an emergency use authorization.

The virus will continue to mutate and, through natural selection, evolve, a fact that does not surprise the scientific community but has taken on new salience amid the recent bulletins about problematic variants.

“I think there is a high level of concern,” MacCannell said, referring to the views of the scientific community. “We don’t know fully the functional implications of these mutations. . . . I would suspect a lot of the mutations that we’re seeing are helping to optimize the virus for increased transmission.”

The rollout of vaccines, he said, “will be another set of pressures on the virus. That is one of the critical reasons why we need to get large-scale national monitoring up and running.”

Andersen said the U.K. variant and another identified initially in South Africa probably will become dominant in the United States within months. “Our mitigation efforts are woefully insufficient to deal with those,” he warned.

That’s a conundrum for policymakers. There are few officials with any appetite for greater restrictions on businesses and personal mobility, even with variants posing a new challenge. But what has happened in the United Kingdom — where much of the country is locked down — is sobering.

There are more than 1 million new infections every week in the United States, and scientists at scattered universities and research institutions are looking at only a few thousand genomic sequences weekly. The CDC is putting out contracts to academic and research institutions in an effort to push that to a goal of 6,500 weekly sequences.

“This is a brand-new virus. We’re learning as we go. There are the unknown unknowns that we have to acknowledge,” said Jeremy Luban, a virologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. “We’re all working on this around-the-clock.”

Fauci said it is critical to suppress the spread of the virus, given that a high number of infections leads to a greater number of chances for mutations.

“The race is to suppress the virus before it mutates to the point where it’s actually going to give you trouble,” Fauci said. “I don’t worry about these things, I just take them very seriously.”

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Trump approves state of emergency declaration in US capital | US Elections 2020 News

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Order authorises federal assistance in Washington, DC after officials warned of threats before Joe Biden inauguration.

Donald Trump has approved a state of emergency declaration in the United States capital, the White House press office said late on Monday, after US law enforcement officials warned of threats before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.

The order authorises federal assistance to be extended through January 24 to support efforts in Washington, DC to respond to the emergency situation.

Specifically, it allows the Federal Emergency Management Agency to “identify, mobilise and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency”.

The move comes after pro-Trump rioters overran the US Capitol building on January 6 in support of Trump’s false claims that the US election was stolen from him. Five people were killed in the violence.

Earlier on Monday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in an internal bulletin warned of possible armed protests in all 50 states and in the US capital in the days leading up to Biden’s inauguration on January 20.

Washington, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser sent a letter on the weekend requesting tighter security ahead of the inauguration in light of the “chaos, injury, and death” at the Capitol on January 6.

Bowser asked the Homeland Security Department to extend emergency provisions to allow federal and local agencies to better prepare for the inauguration and requested daily intelligence and threat briefings from the FBI from January 11 to January 24.

Meanwhile, US Senators Chris Murphy, Kirsten Gillibrand and Martin Heinrich sent a letter to Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller on Monday asking for a full account of what happened during the Capitol riot.

The letter states that “over three and a half hours … elapsed between the initial breach of the barriers on the West side of the U.S. Capitol” and the arrival of the National Guard.

“On Jan 6 it took 4.5 hours before the U.S. military arrived to defend the Capitol. That is not acceptable and we request a full accounting of what needs to change,” Murphy tweeted.

Democrats are pushing to impeach Trump for inciting his supporters to storm the Capitol.

The US House of Representatives is expected on Tuesday to take up a measure calling on Vice President Mike Pence and members of Trump’s Cabinet to invoke a process under the 25th Amendment, which allows for the removal of a president deemed unfit to fulfill their duties.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Monday that the president poses an “imminent threat” to the nation and “must be removed from office immediately”.

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2:03 AM 1/12/2021 – Videos: ‘Long COVID’ haunts more patients than thought | COVID-19 Special | Videos: LIVE: The House convenes to begin drive to force Trump from office after Capitol storming | FBI reportedly warned Capitol Police of potential violence

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2:03 AM 1/12/2021 – Videos: ‘Long COVID’ haunts more patients than thought | COVID-19 Special | Videos: LIVE: The House convenes to begin drive to force Trump from office after Capitol storming | FBI reportedly warned Capitol Police of potential violence

From: deutschewelleenglish
Duration: 12:04

Over a year after the first coronavirus cases, some early patients are still suffering. “Long Covid” refers to symptoms that can last for months or that return after recovery. A new study from Wuhan China has found three quarters of hospitalised patients still experience at least one symptom half a year later. What we’re yet to discover is just how long “long Covid” can last. Survivors know all-too well how damaging the sickness can be – even after they get better. The road to recovery can be long and difficult.

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Trump’s disastrous end to his shocking presidency

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President Donald Trump is leaving America in a vortex of violence, sickness and death and more internally estranged than it has been for 150 years.

The disorientating end to his shocking term has the nation reeling from a Washington insurrection. The FBI warned Monday of armed protests by pro-Trump thugs in 50 states, which raise the awful prospect of a domestic insurgency. Health officials fear 5,000 Americans could soon be dying every day from the pandemic Trump ignored. Hospitals are swamped, medical workers are shattered amid a faltering rollout of the vaccine supposed to end the crisis.

It took 200 years for the country to rack up its first two presidential impeachments. Trump’s malfeasance has led the country down that awful, divisive path twice in just more than a year. With House Democrats expected to formally impeach the President for inciting a mob assault on Congress on Wednesday, he will rely on the Republican enablers who refused to rein in his lawlessness to save him from conviction again.

Millions of Americans have bought into the delusional, poisoned fiction that an election Trump lost was stolen, and there are signs that some police and military forces have been radicalized by the grievance he stokes.

The city Trump has called home for four years is being turned into an armed camp incongruous with the mood of joy and renewal that pulsates through most inaugurations. In a symbol of a democracy under siege, the people’s buildings — the White House and the US Capitol — are caged behind ugly iron and cement barriers.

This is the legacy President-elect Joe Biden will inherit in eight days when he swears to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution — an oath that Trump trampled when inciting the Capitol attack last week from behind a bulletproof screen while buckling the cherished US chain of peaceful transfers of power.

With unintended irony, Biden’s team has picked “America United” as the inaugural theme — a motto that is now more apt in defining Biden’s hoped for destination rather than the splintered land he will begin to lead.

 

Trump’s pattern of violence

 

It is becoming ever more obvious that the horrific scenes on Capitol Hill on Wednesday were not a one-off. Instead, they now look part of a pattern including the White supremacist marches in Charlottesville that Trump refused to condemn, and the gassing of peaceful anti-racist protesters in the square outside the White House so he could hold an inflammatory photo-op.

In a chilling new warning, the FBI revealed the possible next stage in this now nationwide wave of radicalization, saying armed protests were planned at state Capitols in all 50 states between January 16 and Inauguration Day, January 20. Even as a nationwide sweep widens for the perpetrators of last week’s outrage, the bureau said new protests were planned for Washington for three days around the inauguration.

There are threats of an uprising if Trump is removed by way of the 25th Amendment. The FBI said it was also tracking threats against Biden, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In Washington, two Capitol Police officers were suspended and more are under investigation for allegedly helping the mob.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was shocked by the magnitude of the bureau’s intelligence on possible new violence.

“I don’t think in the entire scope of my career working counter terrorism issues for many, many years, I don’t think I ever saw a bulletin go out that concerned armed protest activity in 50 states in a three or four day period,” McCabe said on CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.”

Biden told reporters that despite the warnings, he was not afraid of taking the oath of office outside next week — but the combination of a massive security effort to protect him from Trump’s supporters and social distancing amid the Covid-19 pandemic mean his will be the most hollowed out inauguration in years.

Trump’s acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf resigned on Monday, in a yet another sign that the country lacks effective government at a moment of stark danger. By contrast, senior officials from the outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration worked closely together in the Situation Room on January 20, 2009, when there was concern about the authenticity of terror threat to the inauguration.

So far, after a massive domestic terror attack on the citadel of US democracy, there has been no major public briefing by any major federal law enforcement agency or the White House, an omission that fosters a sense of an absent government.

The current atmosphere of fear and wild political insurrection are a lesson in what happens when a figure as powerful as a President deliberately tears at America’s deep racial and social fault lines as a tool of his own power. Trump’s presidency revealed a new insight about the all-powerful modern presidency — the character of the person in the Oval Office chair really matters.

 

A Congress that can’t constrain a President

 

Momentum towards impeachment is now all but unstoppable in the House after Pelosi rejected a suggestion from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of some kind of censure motion.

McCarthy did acknowledge to Republican caucus members Monday that the President bore some responsibility for last week’s insurrection, according to a person familiar with the call. But some of his other responses to the outrage — an overhaul to the electoral certification process and legislation to promote voter confidence hinted at the insincerity of the Republican approach.

With a few exceptions, Republicans — who indulged and in many cases supported Trump’s blatantly false claims of electoral fraud for weeks — have responded to the uproar over last week’s Capitol attack by complaining that by pushing impeachment, Democrats are fracturing national unity. It’s as if the last four years never happened.

There are also questions over whether Republicans understand the seriousness of last week’s events. Remarks by Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt are still reverberating through the Capitol.

“My personal view is that the President touched the hot stove on Wednesday and is unlikely to touch it again,” Blunt said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

His comment eerily recalled the rationalizations of Republicans who declined to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial after he tried to get Ukraine to interfere in the election to damage Biden.

America has emerged from many dark periods since the Civil War. The country was torn by resistance to the Civil Rights movement. And the Vietnam War turned generations against one another. But the fact that millions of people now appear to deeply mistrust the electoral system that is the basis of US democracy means that the country’s internal political cohesion is now being tested as it has rarely been in the last century-and-a-half.

And the Republican indulgence of the President’s repeated political arson has revealed a massive constitutional blindspot. When one party’s lawmakers are in thrall to a strongman leader, their duty to ensure checks and balances to constrain presidential power is soon forgotten.

 

Trump to reemerge

 

Trump has not appeared in public for days. And the suspension of his social media accounts amid concern that he could stir up more violence mean the country has been unable to assess his mood.

But the President is due to make a trip to visit the border wall that he said Mexico would pay for but instead saddled the taxpayers with the bill. White House sources said that the President is determined to spend his last full week in office touting his achievements and is expected to release another round of controversial pardons. CNN reported Monday that former Attorney General William Barr and White House counsel Pat Cipollone have advised the President not to attempt what would be yet another epic abuse of power — an attempt to pardon himself.

The virus is meanwhile running rampant. Eleven states and Washington, DC, just recorded their highest 7-day average of new cases of Covid-19 since the pandemic began. For the first time, the country is averaging over 3,000 deaths from the pandemic per day. Trump’s outgoing head of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention Dr. Robert Redfield warned in a recent interview with McClatchy newspapers that the pandemic would get worse for the rest of January and parts of February and that the country could see 5,000 deaths a day.

And hopes that the nation could soon turn a corner are being tempered by the glitches in the vaccine roll out. Just as with the early stages of the crisis, poor coordination between federal and local and state authorities and the overall lack of a broader distribution plan are hampering the effort.

Like everything else, it will be up to Biden to fix it.

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· · · · · ·

Russian FSB Possibly Tied to SolarWinds Hack

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Emergency and disaster management briefing for January 11, 2021: Naval divers have found aircraft debris and human body parts from the crash of Flight SJ182 in Indonesia; Central Texas received up to six inches of snow on Sunday; new information allegedly points to the Russian FSB in the SolarWinds hack; ensuring the well-being of people with disabilities is critical during disaster response; 20 people, include 12 children, were rescued after their sailboats capsized off Santa Cruz Harbor; vog is forecast as trade winds return amid the ongoing eruption of the Kilauea Volcano; an earthen dam in Berea, Ohio, is undergoing emergency repairs to prevent its possible failure; and record high temperatures forecast for Southern California increase fire weather concerns.

1) Four minutes after takeoff out of Pontianak, West Kalimantan, Indonesia, Flight SJ182 disappeared off radar. The Sriwijara Air flight, operated by a Boeing 737-500, departed Soekarno-Hatta International Airport on Saturday and was carrying 62 souls on board when it crashed into the Java Sea. Naval search teams have located debris, along with human body parts, that are suspected to be from the downed aircraft.

2) Central Texas received several inches of snow Sunday afternoon, which knocked out power to thousands of customers across the region. The National Weather Service (NWS) issued a winter storm warning through midnight on Sunday, for at least six counties, noting that up to six inches of snow could fall in the region. The unusual snowfall prompted school closures on Monday, although warming temperatures beginning on Monday are likely to melt the snow quickly.

3) New information regarding the SolarWinds hack suggests that the malware used may be tied to a hacking group known as “Turla.” According to Kaspersky — a Moscow-based cybersecurity firm — the backdoor used by the hackers was likely done on behalf of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). Estonian authories pointed out the connection, and Kaspersky noted that three characteristics of a hacking tool, “Kazuar,” appear to have been present in the SolarWinds hack.

4) When disasters strike, those with disabilities may face life-threatening circumstances, such as a loss of power for life-sustaining medical equipment. Ensuring their well-being is critical during response efforts, and research shows that they are disproportionately affected by a disaster. It is imperative to ensure planning efforts include listening to the needs of those with disabilities, and also to bring community, health, and support workers to disaster planning tables, as they have a wealth of information on how to best support those with disabilities.

5) Multiple sailboats capsized outside the Santa Cruz Harbor on Sunday afternoon amid dangerous and rough surf. The incident occurred when four boats were struck by a large wave, tossing 20 people — including 12 children — into the ocean. Rescue crews and surfers were able to quickly rescue everyone from the dangerous waters, and no injuries or deaths were reported.

6) Increased vog from the Kilauea Volcano is expected over West Hawaii areas due to trade winds that have returned to the region. According to the Vog Measurement and Prediction Project at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the vog will affect North and South Kona districts, along with Ka’u. SO2 (sulphur dioxide) emissions also remain elevated, and lava activity is ongoing, but confined within the Haleamaumau crater.

7) An earthen dam in Berea, Ohio, is undergoing emergency repairs to prevent its possible failure. The Coe Lake dam has been eroding slowly over time, and a 100-foot section recently opened up, allowing water to flow back and forth between Baldwin Creek and Coe Lake. The back-and-forth flow has increased the erosion, which has reduced the lake by nearly 14 inches or about 10 million gallons. The reservoir is the backup water supply for the city, and the emergency repairs will be followed up by a more extensive repair at a later date.

8)Record high temperatures are set to move into Southern California later in the week, increasing the fire danger risk. Mild Santa Ana winds moved into the area on Sunday and were expected to last into Tuesday, slightly elevating the fire risk. Offshore winds are predicted through the end of the week with the temperature increase, which is likely to elevate fire concerns throughout the region once again.

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January 13, 2021, 7 AM – Selected Articles Review

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January 13, 2021, 7 AM – Selected Articles Review

» Glenn Beck on social media crackdowns: ‘This is like the Germans with the Jews’ – Yahoo Sports
» Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny says, despite facing arrest, he’s returning to Russia on Sunday
» AssociatedPress’s YouTube Videos: Trump: Wants ‘no violence’ as impeachment nears
» The FBI is also tracking money, travel records, movements of people and communications in addition to following tips from the public and footage and photos from the scene last Wednesday. Investigation into Capitol attack
» Russia Starts Mass Vaccinations in Cosmonaut Center – The Moscow Times
» US counter-intelligence chief worries about China, Russia threats to vaccine supply chain – ABS-CBN News
» Gillette Stadium to become first mass COVID-19 vaccination site in Massachusetts – Yahoo News
» Trump Says He’s at ‘Zero’ Risk of Removal Under 25th Amendment – Bloomberg
» YouTube takes action against Trump, bans uploads for at least 7 days – NBC News
» VIDEO: Heckler interrupts Schumer’s midtown press conference – RADIO.COM
» Opinion | Are you an anti-Fascist? (Hint: the answer should be yes) – NiagaraFallsReview.ca
» Tickle The Wire » James Comey Thinks FBI Christopher Wray is Trying to Avoid Agitating Trump in Final Days – ticklethewire.com
» Tickle The Wire » James Comey Thinks FBI’s Christopher Wray is Trying to Avoid Agitating Trump in Final Days – ticklethewire.com
» Trump says riot remarks were ‘totally appropriate,’ takes no responsibility for his supporters attacking Capitol – Yahoo Entertainment
» Former Berlin maestro Simon Rattle will quit UK to return to Germany – Reuters
» Germany’s confirmed coronavirus cases rise by 19600 – RKI – Reuters
» Rep. Himes: Impeachment Process Necessary For Trump’s ‘Incitement Of Insurrection’ | The Last Word
» «Вы не представляете, на что он способен». Тихановский в письме рассказал о встрече с Лукашенко
» Can Trumpism endure without Trump?
» ‘Totally Appropriate’: Trump Takes No Responsibility for Capitol Riot
» Vaccine Rollout Begins in Madrid
» Watch live coverage: House considers article of impeachment against President Trump
» Covid-19: English variant found in about 1% of positive tests in France (Véran) | AFP
» WATCH LIVE: Acting U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin and FBI provide update on Capital attack charges
» “counterintelligence” – Google News: U.S. Counter-Intelligence Chief Says Worried About China, Russia Threats to Vaccine Supply Chain – U.S. News & World Report
» “counterintelligence” – Google News: Accountability needed for Capitol Hill attackers and law … – Thomson Reuters Foundation
» Fauci blames ‘rigid’ rules for slowing US vaccine rollout
» City of Alamo officials say they were not contacted about President Donald Trump’s visit – KSAT San Antonio
» The Latest FBI Capitol Report: Live Updates – The New York Times
» Trump and FBI – News Review from Michael_Novakhov (10 sites): FBI from Michael_Novakhov (35 sites): Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠: FBI report warned of ‘war’ at Capitol, contradicting claims there was no indication of looming violence
» Trump News TV from Michael_Novakhov (10 sites): msnbcleanforward’s YouTube Videos: House Readies Impeachment Vote Amid Capitol Security Concerns | MTP Daily | MSNBC
» 1. Trump from Michael_Novakhov (197 sites): “trump as danger to National Security” – Google News: Trump ‘accountable?’ Easier said than done | TheHill – The Hill
» “trumpism” – Google News: Can Trumpism endure without Trump? – WHBY
» Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠: FBI report warned of ‘war’ at Capitol, contradicting claims there was no indication of looming violence
» Washington Post: FBI warned of violent ‘war’ at Capitol in internal report issued day before deadly riot – CNNPolitics
» “Russia international behavior” – Google News: New malware found in SolarWinds’ Orion. Mimecast warns of compromised cert. Ubiqiti discloses breach. DarkMarket taken down. – The CyberWire
» “Russia” – Google News: Federal Task Force Will Investigate Russia-Led Cyberattack – GovTech
» “Trump” – Google News: U.S. Chamber CEO says Trump undermined U.S. democratic institutions – Reuters
» Biden’s Immigration Plans Will Undermine Our Safety & Security | Lora Ries on David Webb Show
» ‘Seditious Conspiracy’ And The Capitol Hill Attackers | Morning Joe | MSNBC
» “cia” – Google News: Lindsey Graham praises Biden’s CIA director nominee: ‘I have known him for years’ – Fox News
» “International Security” – Google News: Grand Gambits: On Empire and Geopolitics in the Asia-Pacific – The Diplomat
» “International Security” – Google News: UN Security Council addresses threats to peace due to terrorist acts – Prensa Latina
» Sweden records 17,395 new COVID-19 cases to take total above 500,000 – Yahoo News
» A theater of propaganda: The Capitol, cameras and selfies
» NPR News Now: NPR News: 01-12-2021 8AM ET
» Google Alert – fbi reform: CT Prepares After FBI Memo Warns Of Armed State Capitol Protests
» “fbi reform” – Google News: CT Prepares After FBI Memo Warns Of Armed State Capitol Protests – Patch.com
» Google Alert – fbi reform: FBI internal memo warns of plans for armed protests nationwide
» “fbi and trump” – Google News: Trump backers made Capitol mob, say records, FBI – Arkansas Online
» Sheldon Adelson, casino magnate who influenced policy from D.C. to Jerusalem, dies at 87
» Will Biden succeed in rebuilding bridges in Latin America? – CGTN
» G20 Policy Actions in the time of COVID-19 – UNDP
» Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson dies
» Trump backers made Capitol mob, say records, FBI – Arkansas Online
» Germany set to tighten travel rules to limit spread of Covid-19 variants – The Local Germany
» ‘Corona-dictator’ named one of Germany’s ugliest words of the year – The Local Germany
» Germany’s Scholz upbeat on transatlantic ties with Biden – Reuters
» German investigators shut down big darknet marketplace – KLBK | KAMC | EverythingLubbock.com
» One day until Trump’s second impeachment vote: What happens now
» Navalny Says Russian Prison Authority Asks Court To Change Suspended Sentence To Jail Time – Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty
» Russia Seeks to Jail Navalny Upon Return – The Moscow Times
» Holding Fast to Trump, Pompeo Angers Diplomats, Foreign and Domestic
» Israel’s Netanyahu removes Trump from his Twitter banner photo
» Adam Christian Johnson, seen carrying lectern at Capitol riot, won’t attend inauguration: lawyer
» California Tries to Speed Up Vaccinations
» Twitter bans Trump’s account, citing risk of further violence – The Washington Post
» Parler, a Platform Favored by Trump Fans, Struggles for Survival – The Wall Street Journal
» How much money was President Trump’s Twitter account worth? – MarketWatch
» President Erdoğan urges EU for positive agenda
» Trump administration to expand Covid vaccination guidelines to everyone 65 and older – CNBC
» Israeli leaders remember Sheldon Adelson
» Pompeo Accuses Iran Of Being Major Al-Qaeda State Sponsor
» “Sunset Park Brooklyn” – Google News: ‘I just don’t want to give up:’ Mother continues search for person who killed her daughter in East New York – News 12 Bronx
» New York Daily News: Federal judge blocks execution of the only woman on death row
» French gyms, sports clubs protest against Covid closures | AFP
» Want to understand the Capitol rioters? Look at the inflamed hate-drunk mobs painted by Goya
» Trump Takes One Last Look At His Border Wall As Congress Considers Impeachment
» Chinese start-up leaks 400GB of scraped data exposing over 200 million Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn users
» Russian historian gets 12.5 years in prison for butchering lover – India Today
» 3:05 AM 1/12/2021 – Michael Novakhov – @mikenov – In My Opinion
» france24english’s YouTube Videos: Democratic drive to impeach Trump after Capitol siege speeds ahead
» france24english’s YouTube Videos: Trump heads to Texas border in final days to showcase wall
» france24english’s YouTube Videos: Coronavirus pandemic: Japans widens state of emergency as virus surges
» france24english’s YouTube Videos: Uganda accuses Facebook of ‘interfering’ in tense polls
» ReutersVideo’s YouTube Videos: Mike Pompeo to accuse Iran of al Qaeda links, sources say
» AssociatedPress’s YouTube Videos: On This Day: 12 January 1966
» ReutersVideo’s YouTube Videos: Social media firms put profit above principle, Singapore minister says
» france24english’s YouTube Videos: French gastronomy: The origins of haute cuisine
» China spokesman: History will punish Pompeo’s legacy as Trump’s Secretary of State – Stars and Stripes
» 3:05 AM 1/12/2021 – Michael Novakhov – @mikenov: Much more than any internal divisions, these are the planned, calculated actions by the “Bad Players”: The New Abwehr – German Russian Intelligence Services that traditionally rule the TOC – Russian Jewish
» Proud Boys and neo-Nazis: Who are the protesters who stormed the US Capitol?
» US Capitol riots: Everything we know about what happened when Trump’s supporters stormed Washington
» New Covid strain: how dangerous is it, and could it hamper a vaccine?
» Democratic Strategist Launches ‘Worker-Owned’ Digital Agency
» Pelosi proceeding with impeachment; Biden picks CIA director; PGA cuts ties with Trump – Mooresville Tribune
» deutschewelleenglish’s YouTube Videos: ‘Long COVID’ haunts more patients than thought | COVID-19 Special
» CNN’s YouTube Videos: New video from Capitol riot shows mob threatening CNN crew
» ReutersVideo’s YouTube Videos: LIVE: The House convenes to begin drive to force Trump from office after Capitol storming
» FBI reportedly warned Capitol Police of potential violence
» German Chancellor Merkel sees Twitter ban on Trump as ‘problematic’: report – MarketWatch
» Supreme Court rejects fast track for Trump election cases – KCRG
» Parler squeezed as Trump seeks new online megaphone – ABC News
» “trump electorate” – Google News: House Democrats ready Trump impeachment vote: Live updates – CNN
» “Abedin” – Google News: Live updates: Lawmakers may have been exposed to coronavirus while sheltering from Capitol mob – The Washington Post
» 1. All The News (That Fit To Web) from Michael_Novakhov (18 sites): 1. Digests from Michael_Novakhov (44 sites): All News Topics Alerts: Futures Movers: Oil prices fall as U.S. dollar bounces, COVID sparks lockdown fears
» “Trump Investigations” – Google News: Melania Trump Breaks Silence, Condemns Capitol Riots – Spectrum News NY1
» Trump News TV from Michael_Novakhov (10 sites): FoxNewsChannel’s YouTube Videos: Hilton: ‘Cruel culture of class contempt’ something you only see from left
» “trump, russia and the mob” – Google News: William J. Burns is Biden’s nominee for CIA director – CBC.ca
» “trump and russia” – Google News: Democrats to pressure Pence to remove Trump using 25th amendment – live updates – The Guardian
» “Trump’s and Putin’s connections with organized crime” – Google News: World War 3: Russia and China could spark ‘uncontrollable war’ across globe – UK warning – Daily Express
» “trump as danger to National Security” – Google News: Live Updates: House to Consider Resolution Urging Pence to Use 25th Amendment – The New York Times
» “Trumpism” – Google News: Only Democracy Reform Can Stop Trumpism – Crooked
» “trump, russia and the mob” – Google News: Live updates: Lawmakers may have been exposed to coronavirus while sheltering from Capitol mob – The Washington Post
» Melania Trump mourns lost lives but places no responsibility for Capitol riot – CNN
» NYT > Top Stories: A Stark Divide in California’s Surge
» Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠: William Burns, a career diplomat, is Biden’s choice to head the C.I.A.
» Just Security: Impeachment, Incitement and What (Nearly) Happened on January 6th
» Activista urge a las autoridades investigar asesinatos miembros comunidad gay – EFE – Noticias
» Gobernador de Puerto Rico hace nuevas designaciones, entre ellas, a Turismo – EFE – Noticias
» ‘Young Settlement’ Forum: Netanyahu continues to spit in our faces
» Moderna is developing three new mRNA-based vaccines for seasonal flu, HIV and Nipah virus – TechCrunch
» India’s quick nod to homegrown COVID-19 vaccine seeds doubt
» Netanyahu orders hundreds of new settler homes in West Bank – South China Morning Post
» Netanyahu advances construction of hundreds of housing units in Judea and Samaria – Cleveland Jewish News
» Police officer hailed for steering Capitol mob from Senate chamber
» The FBI arrest two men who had carried plastic restraints into the Capitol.
» Two Men Charged in Connection with Events at US Capitol
» Arnold Schwarzenegger compares US Capitol protestors to Nazis
» Capitol police were overrun, ‘left naked’ against rioters
» Network Correspondents Recall The Mob Attack On The Capitol And The Threat To News Media
» Seattle man charged in federal court following US Capitol siege
» JPMorgan and Citigroup join US corporations halting political donations after Capitol riot
» Pope Prays For US Capitol Victims, Urges Americans To Protect Democratic Values
» ‘Zip tie guy’ arrested in Nashville in connection to US Capitol riot, FBI says
» At least 25 people under investigation for terrorism in connection with Capitol riot
» Police Reassess Security for Inauguration and Demonstrations After Capitol Attack
» The Capitol mob: a raging collection of grievances and disillusionment
» Stripe payment processor boots Trump campaign after Capitol riot
» Dozens Arrested For Capitol Riot After Feds Find Guns, Violent Threats and Molotov Cocktails
» DOD’s timeline gives insight into what led up to chaos at the Capitol
» Italy’s 2021 G20 presidency – a transatlantic reset? – EUobserver
» Ушла из жизни мать Сергея Скрипаля – ИА Красная Весна
» Cockfight in Germany: Three Men Want to Succeed Angela Merkel – The Berlin Spectator
» Texas to speed COVID-19 shots by devoting more to fewer sites – Reuters
» Rush to save NYC music venues from pandemic
» After Unused Vaccines Are Thrown in Trash, Cuomo Loosens Rules
» NYC small landlords say new eviction moratorium gives tenants excuse to skip rent
» Boy, 16, fatally shot in Brooklyn apartment building
» Is The Russian Cyber Attack An Act Of War? – The Organization for World Peace
» Populist, Prisoner, President: A Convicted Kidnapper Wins Kyrgyzstan Election – The New York Times
» Counterintelligence from Michael_Novakhov (51 sites): Eurasia Review: The Unequivocal Case For Trump’s Removal – OpEd
» FBI from Michael_Novakhov (35 sites): NPR News Now: NPR News: 01-10-2021 3PM ET
» 1. US Security from Michael_Novakhov (88 sites): Stars and Stripes: White House flag, joining Capitol, at half-staff for Brian Sicknick
» An early Republican Trump critic feels vindicated
» Ocasio-Cortez: Every minute Trump stays in office ‘represents a clear and present danger’
» Schwarzenegger compares Capitol riot to rise of Nazi Germany – Business Insider
» 2 Virginia police officers are on administrative leave after attending event at Capitol last Wednesday
» Pelosi: ‘I like the 25th Amendment’ because it ‘gets rid’ of Trump | TheHill – The Hill
» Articles of impeachment to be presented Monday
» Capitol Police Officer Who Responded To Mob Attack Dies Off Duty
» Voice of America – English: US Lawmakers Likely Exposed to Coronavirus During Riot Lockdown, Official Warns
» David Friedman hints at Trump 2024 presidential run
» Capitol rioter to CNN: We could absolutely f***ing destroy you
» Iran tells S.Korea not to politicize seized vessel; demands $7 billion
» The Little-Known Story of the US and Soviet Pursuit of Radiological Weapons – The Wire Science
» MSNBC Top Stories: New video shows rioters attacking Capitol police
» Upstract | Syndicated: Parler shutdown by Amazon might not be fatal to the social network – Business Insider
» Upstract | Syndicated: Days After Capitol Siege, Police Officer Who Protected Senate Dies Off Duty
» So much for America
» Republicans pushed election lies and armed protests, but say their rhetoric didn’t spur U.S. Capitol chaos
» The left has decided that this is the opporutnity to ‘destroy’ the right: Rubio
» Gunman, 32, goes on shooting spree in Chicago area, killing four before being shot dead by police – Daily Mail
» Kenosha police, tactical response team make arrests following gunfire incident; multiple weapons recovered – Kenosha News
» GOP senator: Trump should ‘finish’ remainder of presidency without further incident | TheHill – The Hill
» Puerto Rico oversight board prevails in latest dispute over local statutes – Reuters
» Biden taps Jewish Orthodox woman to new senior National Security Council position – European Jewish Press
» Greece names first openly gay minister – WBOC TV 16
» Trumpism And Trump – trumpismandtrump.com: mikenov on Twitter: RT @haaretzcom: Jake Angeli, otherwise known as QAnon cult figure ‘Q Shaman,’ turned himself in to authorities haaretz.com/us-news/capito…
» FBI Reform – fbireform.org: mikenov on Twitter: RT @haaretzcom: Jake Angeli, otherwise known as QAnon cult figure ‘Q Shaman,’ turned himself in to authorities haaretz.com/us-news/capito…
» Gab gaining 10,000 users per hour, CEO claims, after Trump’s permanent Twitter suspension
» Capitol Hill violence was not a ‘victory’ for Putin: In reality, Russian fears consequences of ongoing US political instability – RT
» Twitter’s censorship double standard is the ‘height of hypocrisy’: Rep Mace
» “Conspiracy Against US” – Google News: How Ireland can stop the rise of the far-right – Irish Examiner
» Google Alert – Jared Kushner: Ivanka Trump and Kids Celebrate Jared Kushner’s 40th Birthday Amid Chaotic Week in DC
» Saudi Arabia tries to lure multinationals from Dubai
» New York Daily News: Black boxes located at site of Indonesia plane crash
» Police officer arrested in Ahuvya Sandak case released
» Spain paralyzed by snowstorm, sends out vaccine, food convoys – CNN
» Travel security tightened for members of Congress after harassment – NBC News
» Biden presidency could be boosted by Georgia results – Washington Post
» Lockdown violators include COVID carriers who visited friends
» 1. Russia from Michael_Novakhov (114 sites): “russia and the west” – Google News: MOSCOW BLOG: The storm of the US’ Capitol was not a coup, but the shelling of the Russian White House in 1993 was – bne IntelliNews
» Google Alert – coronavirus new york: Impeachment, Coronavirus, NFL Playoffs: Your Weekend Briefing
» Google Alert – Coronavirus in brooklyn: New COVID-19 Vaccine Hubs Open in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens
» “Brooklyn Ballet” – Google News: Toll Brothers CEO on How COVID-19 Has Changed Housing – TIME
» “Sunset Park Brooklyn” – Google News: COVID NYC Update: 5 New York City vaccination sites to open Sunday, including two 24-hour locations – WABC-TV
» Nancy Pelosi, in ‘60 Minutes’ interview, slams Trump as ‘deranged,’ calls for ‘prosecution’ – Fox News
» Coming to a black market near you: Covid-19 vaccine – NBC News
» Squelched by Twitter, Trump seeks new online megaphone – WITN
» Trump pressured Georgia to ‘find the fraud’ in earlier call – PBS NewsHour
» Internet Guide USA – News Reviews – iguideusa.com: 1. Russia from Michael_Novakhov (114 sites): “russia and the west” – Google News: MOSCOW BLOG: The storm of the US’ Capitol was not a coup, but the shelling of the Russian White House in 1993 was – bne In
» Lockdown violators include COVID carriers who visited friends
» Trump pressured Georgia to ‘find the fraud’ in earlier call – PBS NewsHour
» Grand Ol’ Prospects: Republicans plan their future – New York Daily News
» The Iowa Legislature starts the 2021 session Monday. Here’s what Story and Boone County lawmakers are saying. – Ames Tribune
» Squelched by Twitter, Trump seeks new online megaphone – Belleville News-Democrat
» Investigations of Donald Trump and his circles – trumpinvestigations.org
» 1. Podcasts from Michael_Novakhov (17 sites): NPR News Now: NPR News: 01-10-2021 12AM ET
» Audio Posts
» Audio Posts
» Kicked off Twitter, Donald Trump seeks new online megaphone – WJW FOX 8 News Cleveland
» ‘I Don’t Know How You Can Live With Yourself’: Hawley, Cruz Increasingly Shunned After Capitol Attack – Forbes
» Dems’ momentum builds to impeach Trump, Pelosi hits rioters – OCRegister
» Cuba tightens COVID-19 measures as visitors fuel record contagion – Pacifica Tribune
» US lifts self-imposed restrictions with Taiwan – CNN
» Biden Inaugural Committee donors include Google, Microsoft, Boeing – POLITICO
» Man Seen Carrying Lectern During Capitol Riot Arrested in Florida – NBC4 Washington
» Samsung Galaxy S21 lineup’s marketing renders surface ahead of announcement – GSMArena.com
» Here’s how to spot the rare conjunction of Jupiter, Mercury and Saturn in the sky tonight – WGN TV Chicago
» Galaxy S21 price: Samsung’s next phone could cost $100 less than the S20 – CNET
» Major Technology Companies Join List of Biden Inaugural Donors – The New York Times
» Body parts, debris found after Indonesia plane crash – USA TODAY
» Lindsey Graham calls Twitter’s Trump ban a mistake: ‘Ayatollah can tweet, but Trump can’t’ – Fox News
» Armed protesters gather outside Ky. capitol – WYMT
» Who has been charged in the deadly Capitol riot? – CTV News
» Earth spinning faster than it has in 5 decades, scientists say – WGN TV Chicago
» Historic showdown in Congress as GOP members challenge Biden’s electoral vote win – ABC News
» Coronavirus update: Latest vaccine and world news – CNN
» Browns-Steelers playoff tickets come with a big price tag… and risk – cleveland.com
» $2,000 stimulus checks could become a reality as Democrats lead Georgia elections – The Washington Post
» Live: Trump supporters rally in Washington to decry Biden’s victory
» Imagining Germany without Angela Merkel has got harder – Financial Times
» Prince William and Prince Harry’s Feud Was “Very Real, Very Ugly, and Incredibly Intense”
» ‘Do it Mike’: Trump leans on Pence to reject Biden’s Electoral College certification
» National Guard deployed | Washington DC braces for MAGA rally
» New York Daily News: D.C. arrests precede expected wild day of pro-Trump protests as Congress meets to certify presidential race
» New York Daily News: Rep. Liz Cheney calls Trump’s calls to overturn the election as ‘politically convenient’
» The Spy in Your Phone | Al Jazeera World
» NYC fisherman reels in corpse near Brooklyn pier – TribLIVE
» Israel turned into a mafia state – Google Search google.com/search?q=Israe… – blogs.timesofisrael.com/israel-is-turn…
» If Trump pardons himself now, he’ll be walking into a trap – The Washington Post
» Diehard Trump Supporters Gather In The Nation’s Capital To Protest Election Results – NET Nebraska
» Trump backers rally in DC – Arkansas Online
» Washington girds for a pro-Trump rally, as local officials warn of possible violence.
» A joint session of Congress is expected to last into the night as Republicans try to subvert the election.
» Analysis: Eric Trump just threatened every GOP member of Congress


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