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sarahbalick

Danish parliament approves plan to seize assets from refugees | World news | The Guardian - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...-to-seize-assets-from-refugees

danish parliament plan assets refugees world

shared by sarahbalick on 26 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • David Crouch in Copenhagen and Patrick Kingsley in London Tuesday 26 January 2016 12.55 EST Last modified on Tuesday 26 January 2016 14.21 EST Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on Pinterest Share on LinkedIn Share on Google+ Share on WhatsApp Shares 5,011 5011 save-for-later__label sa
  • The bill presented by the centre-right minority government of the prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, was approved after almost four hours of debate by 81 of the 109 lawmakers present, as members of the opposition Social Democrats and two small rightwing parties backed the measures.
  • “There’s no simple answer for a single country, but until the world comes together on a joint solution [to the migrant crisis], Denmark needs to act,” MP Jakob Ellemann-Jensen of Rasmussen’s Venstre party said during the debate.
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  • ocial Democrat Dan Jørgensen addressed opponents of the bill, demanding: “To those saying what we are doing is wrong, my question is: What is your alternative?
  • “The alternative is that we continue to be [one of] the most attractive countries in Europe to come to, and then we end up like Sweden.”
  • We’re simply applying the same rules we apply to Danish citizens who wish to take money from the Danish government,” Knuth said.
  • “Morally it is a horrible way to treat people fleeing mass crimes, war, rapes. They are fleeing from war and how do we treat them? We take their jewellery.”
  • “A Danish citizen could be searched in an extreme case if the municipality has a suspicion of fraud, but you need court permission to do so. For refugees, you would not need a court permission.”
  • The law introduces restrictive measures on asylum seekers that increasingly hinder their ability to apply for asylum in Denmark. We are particularly concerned by reduced social benefits and restricted access to family reunification. We are also concerned that refugees with temporary protection are only allowed to reside in Denmark for one year and yet are only able to apply for family reunification after three years.”
katyshannon

Periodic table's seventh row finally filled as four new elements are added | Science | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...as-four-new-elements-are-added

IFTTT chemistry new elements periodic table discovery history Education science

shared by katyshannon on 06 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Guardian staff Sunday 3 January 2016 22.28 EST Last modified on Tuesday 5 January 2016 11.48 EST Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on Pinterest Share on LinkedIn Share on Google+ Share on WhatsApp Shares 104,402 104k Comments 1,300 rounded-icon inline-bookmark inli
  • Four new elements have been added to the periodic table, finally completing the table’s seventh row and rendering science textbooks around the world instantly out of date.
  • The elements, discovered by scientists in Japan, Russia and America, are the first to be added to the table since 2011, when elements 114 and 116 were added.
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  • The four were verified on 30 December by the US-based International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, the global organisation that governs chemical nomenclature, terminology and measurement.
  • IUPAC announced that a Russian-American team of scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had produced sufficient evidence to claim the discovery of elements 115, 117 and 118.
  • The body awarded credit for the discovery of element 113, which had also been claimed by the Russians and Americans, to a team of scientists from the Riken institute in Japan.
  • Kosuke Morita, who was leading the research at Riken, said his team now planned to “look to the unchartered territory of element 119 and beyond.” Ryoji Noyori, former Riken president and Nobel laureate in chemistry said: “To scientists, this is of greater value than an Olympic gold medal”.
  • The elements, which currently bear placeholder names, will be officially named by the teams that discovered them in the coming months. Element 113 will be the first element to be named in Asia.
  • “IUPAC has now initiated the process of formalising names and symbols for these elements temporarily named as ununtrium, (Uut or element 113), ununpentium (Uup, element 115), ununseptium (Uus, element 117), and ununoctium (Uuo, element 118).”
  • New elements can be named after a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, a property or a scientist.
  • The four new elements, all of which are synthetic, were discovered by slamming lighter ­nuclei into each other and tracking the following decay of the radioactive superheavy elements.
  • Like other superheavy elements that populate the end of the periodic table, they only exist for fractions of a second before decaying into other elements.
criscimagnael

Jan. 6 Committee Subpoenas Twitter, Meta, Alphabet and Reddit - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...jan-6-tech-subpoenas.html

shared by criscimagnael on 14 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued subpoenas on Thursday to four major social media companies — Alphabet, Meta, Reddit and Twitter — criticizing them for allowing extremism to spread on their platforms and saying they have failed to cooperate adequately with the inquiry.
  • In letters accompanying the subpoenas, the panel named Facebook, a unit of Meta, and YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet’s Google subsidiary, as among the worst offenders that contributed to the spread of misinformation and violent extremism.
  • The committee sent letters in August to 15 social media companies — including sites where misinformation about election fraud spread, such as the pro-Trump website TheDonald.win — seeking documents pertaining to efforts to overturn the election and any domestic violent extremists associated with the Jan. 6 rally and attack.
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  • “It’s disappointing that after months of engagement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions,”
  • In the days after the attack, Reddit banned a discussion forum dedicated to former President Donald J. Trump, where tens of thousands of Mr. Trump’s supporters regularly convened to express solidarity with him.
  • In the year since the events of Jan. 6, social media companies have been heavily scrutinized for whether their sites played an instrumental role in organizing the attack.
  • In the months surrounding the 2020 election, employees inside Meta raised warning signs that Facebook posts and comments containing “combustible election misinformation” were spreading quickly across the social network, according to a cache of documents and photos reviewed by The New York Times.
  • Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistle-blower, said the company relaxed its safeguards too quickly after the election, which then led it to be used in the storming of the Capitol.
  • On Twitter, many of Mr. Trump’s followers used the site to amplify and spread false allegations of election fraud, while connecting with other Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists using the site. And on YouTube, some users broadcast the events of Jan. 6 using the platform’s video streaming technology.
  • Meta said that it had “produced documents to the committee on a schedule committee staff requested — and we will continue to do so.”
  • The committee said letters to the four firms accompanied the subpoenas.The panel said YouTube served as a platform for “significant communications by its users that were relevant to the planning and execution of Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol,” including livestreams of the attack as it was taking place.
  • The panel said Facebook and other Meta platforms were used to share messages of “hate, violence and incitement; to spread misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories around the election; and to coordinate or attempt to coordinate the Stop the Steal movement.”
  • “Meta has declined to commit to a deadline for producing or even identifying these materials,” Mr. Thompson wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive.
  • The panel said it was focused on Reddit because the platform hosted the r/The_Donald subreddit community that grew significantly before migrating in 2020 to the website TheDonald.win, which ultimately hosted significant discussion and planning related to the Jan. 6 attack.
  • “Unfortunately, the select committee believes Twitter has failed to disclose critical information,” the panel stated.
  • In recent years, Big Tech and Washington have had a history of butting heads. Some Republicans have accused sites including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter of silencing conservative voices.
  • The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether a number of tech companies have grown too big, and in the process abused their market power to stifle competition. And a bipartisan group of senators and representatives continues to say sites like Facebook and YouTube are not doing enough to curb the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
  • After months of discussions with the companies, only the four large corporations were issued subpoenas on Thursday, because the committee said the firms were “unwilling to commit to voluntarily and expeditiously” cooperating with its work.
  • The panel has interviewed more than 340 witnesses and issued dozens of subpoenas, including for bank and phone records.
Javier E

Opinion | This Is What Happened When the Authorities Put Trump Under a Microscope - The... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ump-mueller-ukraine-jan-6.html

trump reports analysis

shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • The two highest-profile congressional investigations of Trump that followed — the 2019 report by the House Intelligence Committee on Trump’s pressuring of Ukraine as well as the recently released report by the select committee on the Jan. 6 attack — read like deliberate contrasts to the document produced by Robert Mueller and his team.
  • Their presentation is dramatic, not dense; their conclusions are blunt, not oblique; their arguments are political as much as legal. And yet, the Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports seem to follow the cues, explicit or implied, that the Mueller report left behind.
  • The Mueller report also notes in its final pages that “only a successor administration would be able to prosecute a former president,” which is what the Jan. 6 special committee, with its multiple criminal referrals, has urged the Biden administration’s Justice Department to do.
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  • ALL THREE REPORTS INCLUDE quintessentially Trumpian scenes, consistent in their depictions of the former president’s methods, and very much in keeping with numerous journalistic accounts of how he sought to manipulate people, rules and institutions.
  • The three investigations tell different stories, but the misdeeds all run together, more overlapping than sequential
  • Still, each investigation offers a slightly different theory of Trump. In the Mueller report, Trump and his aides come across as the gang that can’t cheat straight — too haphazard to effectively coordinate with a foreign government, too ignorant of campaign finance laws to purposely violate them, often comically naïve about the gravity of their plight.
  • The Ukraine report, by contrast, regards Trump as more strategic than chaotic, and it does not wallow in the netherworld between the president’s personal benefit and his public service. “The president placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security,”
  • All three reports show Trump deploying the mechanisms of government for political gain.
  • The Mueller report argues that viewing the president’s “acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance.” The Ukraine report shows that the conversation that Trump described as “a perfect call” was not the ask; it was the confirmation. When Trump said, “I would like you to do us a favor, though,” Zelensky and his aides had already been notified of what was coming. The Ukraine scandal was never about a single call, just as the Jan. 6 report was not about a single day.
  • The Jan. 6 report takes seriously the admonition to view the president’s actions collectively, not individually; the phrase “multipart plan” appears throughout the report, with Trump as the architect.
  • Even more so than the Ukraine report, the Jan. 6 report repeatedly emphasizes how Trump knew, well, everything
  • There is no room here for the plausible deniability that the Mueller report entertained, for the notion that Trump didn’t know better, or that, in the immortal words of Attorney General William P. Barr when he creatively interpreted the Mueller report to exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice, that the president was “frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency.”
  • This alleged sincerity underscored the president’s “noncorrupt motives,” as Barr put it. In the Jan. 6 report, any case for Trumpian sincerity is eviscerated in a six-page chart in the executive summary, which catalogs the many times the president was informed of the facts of the election yet continued to lie about them. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump told top Department of Justice officials in late December 2020, the report says.
  • Just announce an investigation into the Bidens. Just say the 2020 election was rigged. Trump’s most corrupt action is always the corruption of reality.
  • The studious restraint of the Mueller report came in for much criticism once the special counsel failed to deliver a dagger to the heart of the Trump presidency and once the document was so easily miscast by interested parties
  • for all its diffidence, there is power in the document’s understated prose, in its methodical collection of evidence, in its unwillingness to overstep its bounds while investigating a president who knew few bounds himself.
  • The Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports came at a time when Trump’s misconduct was better understood, when Mueller-like restraint was less in fashion and when those attempting to hold the chief executive accountable grasped every tool at hand. For all their passion and bluntness, they encountered their own constraints, limits that are probably inherent to the form
Javier E

Why Jan. 6 Aftershocks Defy Expectations - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-defy-expectations-11641222500

capitol insurrection effects politics US trump history crisis

shared by Javier E on 05 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • All told, this amounts to a different turn of events than might have been expected. Why?
  • A few potential explanations emerge.
  • First, Republican leaders blocked a serious independent or bipartisan examination of what happened on Jan. 6. That led instead to the creation of a largely partisan congressional committee, with only two renegade Republicans willing to take part alongside Democrats.
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  • An independent review commission by a panel of distinguished Americans might have brought forth what such a commission produced after the 9/11 terrorist attacks: a dispassionate look at what went wrong to allow such a calamity in the first place.
  • Second, Mr. Trump, as is his wont, chose simply to double and triple down on both his election claims and his version of what did and didn’t happen on Jan. 6
  • Third, Jan. 6 revealed the depths of mistrust in the country. The FBI’s official website contains 17 videos of the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, some so gruesome they are age-restricted so young people can’t see them. Yet some continue to insist that there wasn’t really much violence, and that the media and prosecutors are exaggerating the misdeeds of Jan. 6.
anonymous

Prosecutors Share New Evidence In Capitol Riot Conspiracy Case : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...eper-conspiracy-to-storm-capit

shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The founder of the Oath Keepers militia had a 97-second phone call with a senior member of the group who minutes later took part in a military-style "stack" formation with other Oath Keepers to breach the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, according to federal prosecutors.
  • The allegation emerged in court papers the Justice Department filed overnight in the case against 10 alleged members or associates of the Oath Keepers facing conspiracy and other charges in connection with the Capitol riot.
  • Prosecutors allege that the call, along with a series of text messages in an encrypted chat group called "DC OP: Jan 6 21," amount to "substantial evidence" of a conspiracy to try to stop Congress' certification of the Electoral College count.
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  • The filing sheds more light on the actions on Jan. 6 of Stewart Rhodes, who founded the Oath Keepers in 2009. Rhodes is only identified as "Person One" in the document but has been identified as the group's founder in previous court papers.
  • Rhodes has not been charged in connection with the Capitol insurrection, but the latest court document and previous statements by prosecutors suggest investigators are closely scrutinizing his actions on and around Jan. 6.
  • In the latest filing, prosecutors allege that Rhodes called Florida Oath Keeper leader Kelly Meggs at 2:32 p.m. on Jan. 6, just as Meggs and several of his associates were getting into a "stack" formation to push up the steps of the Capitol.
  • It is not clear what the two men spoke about, but prosecutors note that around six minutes later, the militia members who had coalesced into a stack formation "forcibly" entered the Capitol "by pushing past just opened and severely damaged Capitol building doors."
  • The latest government filing was made to oppose the pretrial release of one of the 10 defendants in the case, Jessica Watkins, who the government says was the leader of an Ohio militia and member of the Oath Keepers.
  • Prosecutors allege that Watkins was in a chat group on the encrypted messaging app Signal called "DC OP: Jan 6 21" with Meggs, Rhodes and two other Oath Keepers who have been charged over the Capitol riot.
  • The government says the group used the chat to talk about what weapons to bring to Washington, D.C., about using handheld radios to communicate on Jan. 6 and about the existence of so-called quick reaction forces waiting outside Washington with weapons in case "of worst case scenarios."
  • In the Signal chat on the day of the riot, prosecutors say shortly after 1 p.m. Rhodes messaged the group: "All I see Trump doing is complaining. I see no intent by him to do anything. So the patriots are taking it into their own hands. They've had enough."
  • Prosecutors say around 2:15 p.m., one of the chat participants told the group that ground had been taken at the Capitol and "we need to regroup any members who are not on mission," an apparent reference to Oath Keepers who were providing "security" in Washington during the Trump rally.
  • Around 2:32 p.m., the government says, Rhodes "exchanged a 97 second call with 'stack' member and Florida Oath Keepers leader, Kelly Meggs, as Meggs, Watkins and the rest of the stack embedded themselves among insurgents trying to force open the east side Capitol building double doors that officers were desperately trying to keep shut."
  • The government argues that evidence supports the theory that the defendants stormed the Capitol "with the shared objective of using force to upend the transition of presidential power."
lilyrashkind

Jan. 6 committee subpoenas tech giants after 'inadequate responses' - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...r-inadequate-response-n1287442

tech giants politics us

shared by lilyrashkind on 14 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol subpoenaed Reddit, Twitter and the parent companies of Google and Facebook on Thursday after their "inadequate responses" to requests for information about what they did and didn't do in the lead-up to the deadly attack.
  • "It's disappointing that after months of engagement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions," committee Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in a statement. "The Select Committee is working to get answers for the American people and help ensure nothing like January 6th ever happens again. We cannot allow our important work to be delayed any further."
  • "Additionally, Meta has failed to provide critical internal and external analyses conducted by the company regarding misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation relating to the 2020 election, efforts to challenge or overturn the election, and the use of Meta by domestic violent extremists to affect the 2020 election," the letter said.
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  • Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, responded in a statement saying, "As Chairman Thompson said recently, 'Facebook is working with [the committee] to provide the necessary information we requested.'
  • "To this day, YouTube is a platform on which user video spreads misinformation about the election," the committee said.
  • In a statement, Google said: “We’ve been actively cooperating with the Select Committee since they started their investigation, responding substantively to their requests for documents, and are committed to working with Congress through this process.
  • A Reddit spokesperson said, "We received the subpoena and will continue to work with the committee on their requests."Twitter declined to comment.
  • The panel first sought records from the four companies and others in August, asking for information related to "the spread of misinformation
  • The committee is seeking information dating to the spring of 2020.
  • FBI officials have acknowledged that there were calls for violence at the Jan. 6 "Stop the Steal" rally by Trump supporters, which was held just before the Capitol attack, but they have said the calls did not add up to specific, credible intelligence.
  • Testifying before a Senate committee in March, FBI Director Christopher Wray suggested that the amount of vitriol online makes it difficult to sort out.
anonymous

Prosecutors Allege Oath Keepers, Proud Boys Coordinated On Capitol Riot : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...t-groups-ahead-of-capitol-riot

shared by anonymous on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A member of the Oath Keepers paramilitary group who is charged with conspiracy in connection with the Capitol riot claimed to be coordinating with the Proud Boys and a far-right, self-styled militia to form an "alliance" on Jan. 6, according to court papers filed by the Justice Department.The allegation emerged in a motion federal prosecutors filed overnight in the case against Kelly Meggs, one of 10 alleged members or associates of the Oath Keepers charged with conspiring to interfere in Congress' certification of the Electoral College count.
  • The investigation into the Capitol riot is one of the largest in American history. More than 300 people have been charged so far, and prosecutors have said they could charge at least another 100 more. The conspiracy case against the Oath Keepers is one of the most closely watched, and Meggs' communications are the first that prosecutors have publicly revealed that point to possible coordination among extremist groups in the runup to Jan. 6 and on the day itself.
  • In its new filing, the government said Meggs engaged in "extensive planning and financing" to travel to Washington, D.C., and to "coordinate with his coconspirators and others on how to accomplish his goals of disrupting Congress."Prosecutors presented several of Meggs' Facebook messages and posts that they said document his outreach to and coordination with other groups following the Nov. 3 election.
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  • The government cited another Facebook message exchange from Dec. 25 in which Meggs allegedly told an unidentified individual his plans for Jan. 6.
  • Three days later, Meggs wrote another message that read: "He wants us to make it WILD that's what he's saying. He called us all to the Capitol and wants us to make it wild!!! Sir Yes Sir!!! Gentlemen we are heading to DC pack your sh**!!" Meggs appeared to be echoing the language of former President Donald Trump, who in a Dec. 19 tweet called on his supporters to travel to Washington on Jan. 6 for a rally that the then-president said "will be wild."
  • The government cited another Facebook chat conversation Meggs had with an individual whose name is redacted in the court papers.According to the government, Meggs wrote: "[W]e have made contact with PB and they always have a big group. Force multiplier," in an apparent reference to the Proud Boys.
  • He also told the individual that he or she could meet up with Meggs, although he said he and his contingent would probably be providing security during the day for an individual whose name is blacked out.
  • Several alleged Proud Boys have been charged in separate cases with conspiracy related to the attack on the Capitol.The exact nature of any "alliance" Meggs allegedly struck with other extremist groups is unclear from the text messages. There is also no mention in the communications of a plan to storm the Capitol.
  • On Wednesday, a federal judge ordered one of his co-defendants, Laura Steele, to be released on strict conditions, pending trial.Judge Amit Mehta said there was no evidence before him that Steele engaged in recruiting or planning ahead of Jan. 6, in contrast with some of her co-defendants. Mehta ordered Steele to be restricted to home confinement and barred access to cellphones, computers and other electronic communication devices.
criscimagnael

Ginni Thomas Says She Attended Jan. 6 Rally - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ginni-thomas-jan-6-rally.html

shared by criscimagnael on 14 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, said in an interview published on Monday that she attended the Jan. 6, 2021, rally at the Ellipse in Washington.
  • Ms. Thomas did not answer detailed questions from The Times about its findings. Her comments to The Free Beacon were her first about her participation in the rally. She said she had attended the rally in the morning but left before President Donald J. Trump addressed the crowd.
  • “I was disappointed and frustrated that there was violence that happened following a peaceful gathering of Trump supporters on the Ellipse on Jan. 6,” she said. “There are important and legitimate substantive questions about achieving goals like electoral integrity, racial equality, and political accountability that a democratic system like ours needs to be able to discuss and debate rationally in the political square. I fear we are losing that ability.”
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  • Ms. Thomas has previously pushed back against an ongoing congressional investigation into what took place that day. In December, she co-signed a letter calling for House Republicans to expel Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois from their conference for joining the congressional committee investigating the attacks.
  • Ms. Thomas sits on the nine-member board of CNP Action, a conservative group that helped advance the “Stop the Steal” movement that tried to keep Mr. Trump in office.
  • “As a member of their 501(c)(4) board, candidly, I must admit that I do not attend many of those separate meetings, nor do I attend many of their phone calls they have,” she said. “At CNP, I have moderated a session here and there. I delivered some remarks there once too.”
  • Dustin Stockton, one of the organizers involved in the Jan. 6 rally, told The Times that Ms. Thomas had played a peacemaking role between feuding factions of rally organizers “so that there wouldn’t be any division.” Ms. Thomas disputed that, saying there were “stories saying I mediated feuding factions of leaders for that day. I did not.”
  • She also said she “played no role with those who were planning and leading the Jan. 6 events.”
Javier E

Far Right Pushes a Through-the-Looking-Glass Narrative on Jan. 6 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...jan-6-trump.html

narrative Jan-6 trump politics far right

shared by Javier E on 23 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • More than half, or 58 percent, of self-described conservatives say that Jan. 6 was an act of “legitimate political discourse” rather than a “violent insurrection,” according to a poll three months ago by The Economist/YouGov.
  • Ms. Kelly recounted a meeting she and a fellow supporter of Jan. 6 defendants, Cynthia Hughes, had last September with Mr. Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. She said she told the former president that the defendants felt abandoned by him: “They’re saying to me: ‘We were there for him. Why isn’t he here for us?’” Ms. Hughes informed Mr. Trump that the federal judges he appointed were “among the worst” when it came to the treatment of the riot defendants.
  • Surprised, Mr. Trump replied, “Well, I got recommendations from the Federalist Society.” Ms. Kelly said he then asked, “What do you want me to do?” She replied that he could donate to Ms. Hughes’s organization, the Patriot Freedom Project, which offers financial support to the defendants. Mr. Trump’s Save America PAC subsequently gave $10,000 to the group.
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  • Insha Rahman, the vice president for advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform, agrees, up to a point. Mr. McBride and the others are raising “unfortunately a fact of life for over two million Americans who are behind bars,” said Ms. Rahman, who has visited the D.C. jail several times and concurs that its conditions are inhumane, though no worse, she said, than detention facilities in Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston.
  • Still, she said, the privileges afforded the Jan. 6 pretrial detainees in their particular wing — individual cells, a library, contact visits, the ability to participate in podcasts — “are not at all typical.
  • “But I don’t want to call that special treatment,” Ms. Rahman said. “That’s the floor for what every incarcerated person in America should have a right to expect.”
Javier E

He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump's Failure on the Virus - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oronavirus-trump-response.html

pandemic failure trump policy politics crisis

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”
  • A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.
  • Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.
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  • The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials.
  • Mr. Trump’s response was colored by his suspicion of and disdain for what he viewed as the “Deep State” — the very people in his government whose expertise and long experience might have guided him more quickly toward steps that would slow the virus, and likely save lives.
  • The slow start of that plan, on top of the well-documented failures to develop the nation’s testing capacity, left administration officials with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading. “We were flying the plane with no instruments,” one official said.
  • But dozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:
  • The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.
  • Despite Mr. Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.
  • The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist
  • Mr. Azar publicly announced in February that the government was establishing a “surveillance” system
  • the task force had gathered for a tabletop exercise — a real-time version of a full-scale war gaming of a flu pandemic the administration had run the previous year. That earlier exercise, also conducted by Mr. Kadlec and called “Crimson Contagion,” predicted 110 million infections, 7.7 million hospitalizations and 586,000 deaths following a hypothetical outbreak that started in China.
  • By the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. Trump a new approach that would include warning the American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work.
  • But the White House focused instead on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by the president — time when the virus spread largely unimpeded.
  • When Mr. Trump finally agreed in mid-March to recommend social distancing across the country, effectively bringing much of the economy to a halt, he seemed shellshocked and deflated to some of his closest associates. One described him as “subdued” and “baffled” by how the crisis had played out. An economy that he had wagered his re-election on was suddenly in shambles.
  • He only regained his swagger, the associate said, from conducting his daily White House briefings, at which he often seeks to rewrite the history of the past several months. He declared at one point that he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” and insisted at another that he had to be a “cheerleader for the country,” as if that explained why he failed to prepare the public for what was coming.
  • Mr. Trump’s allies and some administration officials say the criticism has been unfair.
  • The Chinese government misled other governments, they say. And they insist that the president was either not getting proper information, or the people around him weren’t conveying the urgency of the threat. In some cases, they argue, the specific officials he was hearing from had been discredited in his eyes, but once the right information got to him through other channels, he made the right calls.
  • “While the media and Democrats refused to seriously acknowledge this virus in January and February, President Trump took bold action to protect Americans and unleash the full power of the federal government to curb the spread of the virus, expand testing capacities and expedite vaccine development even when we had no true idea the level of transmission or asymptomatic spread,” said Judd Deere, a White House spokesman.
  • Decision-making was also complicated by a long-running dispute inside the administration over how to deal with China
  • The Containment IllusionBy the last week of February, it was clear to the administration’s public health team that schools and businesses in hot spots would have to close. But in the turbulence of the Trump White House, it took three more weeks to persuade the president that failure to act quickly to control the spread of the virus would have dire consequences.
  • There were key turning points along the way, opportunities for Mr. Trump to get ahead of the virus rather than just chase it. There were internal debates that presented him with stark choices, and moments when he could have chosen to ask deeper questions and learn more. How he handled them may shape his re-election campaign. They will certainly shape his legacy.
  • Facing the likelihood of a real pandemic, the group needed to decide when to abandon “containment” — the effort to keep the virus outside the U.S. and to isolate anyone who gets infected — and embrace “mitigation” to thwart the spread of the virus inside the country until a vaccine becomes available.
  • Among the questions on the agenda, which was reviewed by The New York Times, was when the department’s secretary, Mr. Azar, should recommend that Mr. Trump take textbook mitigation measures “such as school dismissals and cancellations of mass gatherings,” which had been identified as the next appropriate step in a Bush-era pandemic plan.
  • The group — including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci of the National Institutes of Health; Dr. Robert R. Redfield of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Mr. Azar, who at that stage was leading the White House Task Force — concluded they would soon need to move toward aggressive social distancing
  • A 20-year-old Chinese woman had infected five relatives with the virus even though she never displayed any symptoms herself. The implication was grave — apparently healthy people could be unknowingly spreading the virus — and supported the need to move quickly to mitigation.
  • The following day, Dr. Kadlec and the others decided to present Mr. Trump with a plan titled “Four Steps to Mitigation,” telling the president that they needed to begin preparing Americans for a step rarely taken in United States history.
  • a presidential blowup and internal turf fights would sidetrack such a move. The focus would shift to messaging and confident predictions of success rather than publicly calling for a shift to mitigation.
  • These final days of February, perhaps more than any other moment during his tenure in the White House, illustrated Mr. Trump’s inability or unwillingness to absorb warnings coming at him.
  • He instead reverted to his traditional political playbook in the midst of a public health calamity, squandering vital time as the coronavirus spread silently across the country.
  • A memo dated Feb. 14, prepared in coordination with the National Security Council and titled “U.S. Government Response to the 2019 Novel Coronavirus,” documented what more drastic measures would look like, including: “significantly limiting public gatherings and cancellation of almost all sporting events, performances, and public and private meetings that cannot be convened by phone. Consider school closures. Widespread ‘stay at home’ directives from public and private organizations with nearly 100% telework for some.”
  • his friend had a blunt message: You need to be ready. The virus, he warned, which originated in the city of Wuhan, was being transmitted by people who were showing no symptoms — an insight that American health officials had not yet accepted.
  • On the 18-hour plane ride home, Mr. Trump fumed as he watched the stock market crash after Dr. Messonnier’s comments. Furious, he called Mr. Azar when he landed at around 6 a.m. on Feb. 26, raging that Dr. Messonnier had scared people unnecessarily.
  • The meeting that evening with Mr. Trump to advocate social distancing was canceled, replaced by a news conference in which the president announced that the White House response would be put under the command of Vice President Mike Pence.
  • The push to convince Mr. Trump of the need for more assertive action stalled. With Mr. Pence and his staff in charge, the focus was clear: no more alarmist messages. Statements and media appearances by health officials like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Redfield would be coordinated through Mr. Pence’s office
  • It would be more than three weeks before Mr. Trump would announce serious social distancing efforts, a lost period during which the spread of the virus accelerated rapidly.Over nearly three weeks from Feb. 26 to March 16, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States grew from 15 to 4,226
  • The China FactorThe earliest warnings about coronavirus got caught in the crosscurrents of the administration’s internal disputes over China. It was the China hawks who pushed earliest for a travel ban. But their animosity toward China also undercut hopes for a more cooperative approach by the world’s two leading powers to a global crisis.
  • It was early January, and the call with a Hong Kong epidemiologist left Matthew Pottinger rattled.
  • Mr. Trump was walking up the steps of Air Force One to head home from India on Feb. 25 when Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, publicly issued the blunt warning they had all agreed was necessary.
  • It was one of the earliest warnings to the White House, and it echoed the intelligence reports making their way to the National Security Council
  • some of the more specialized corners of the intelligence world were producing sophisticated and chilling warnings.
  • In a report to the director of national intelligence, the State Department’s epidemiologist wrote in early January that the virus was likely to spread across the globe, and warned that the coronavirus could develop into a pandemic
  • Working independently, a small outpost of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Center for Medical Intelligence, came to the same conclusion.
  • By mid-January there was growing evidence of the virus spreading outside China. Mr. Pottinger began convening daily meetings about the coronavirus
  • The early alarms sounded by Mr. Pottinger and other China hawks were freighted with ideology — including a push to publicly blame China that critics in the administration say was a distraction
  • And they ran into opposition from Mr. Trump’s economic advisers, who worried a tough approach toward China could scuttle a trade deal that was a pillar of Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign.
  • Mr. Pottinger continued to believe the coronavirus problem was far worse than the Chinese were acknowledging. Inside the West Wing, the director of the Domestic Policy Council, Joe Grogan, also tried to sound alarms that the threat from China was growing.
  • The Consequences of ChaosThe chaotic culture of the Trump White House contributed to the crisis. A lack of planning and a failure to execute, combined with the president’s focus on the news cycle and his preference for following his gut rather than the data cost time, and perhaps lives.
  • the hawks kept pushing in February to take a critical stance toward China amid the growing crisis. Mr. Pottinger and others — including aides to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — pressed for government statements to use the term “Wuhan Virus.”Mr. Pompeo tried to hammer the anti-China message at every turn, eventually even urging leaders of the Group of 7 industrialized countries to use “Wuhan virus” in a joint statement.
  • Others, including aides to Mr. Pence, resisted taking a hard public line, believing that angering Beijing might lead the Chinese government to withhold medical supplies, pharmaceuticals and any scientific research that might ultimately lead to a vaccine.
  • Mr. Trump took a conciliatory approach through the middle of March, praising the job Mr. Xi was doing.
  • That changed abruptly, when aides informed Mr. Trump that a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman had publicly spun a new conspiracy about the origins of Covid-19: that it was brought to China by U.S. Army personnel who visited the country last October.
  • On March 16, he wrote on Twitter that “the United States will be powerfully supporting those industries, like Airlines and others, that are particularly affected by the Chinese Virus.”
  • Mr. Trump’s decision to escalate the war of words undercut any remaining possibility of broad cooperation between the governments to address a global threat
  • Mr. Pottinger, backed by Mr. O’Brien, became one of the driving forces of a campaign in the final weeks of January to convince Mr. Trump to impose limits on travel from China
  • he circulated a memo on Jan. 29 urging Mr. Trump to impose the travel limits, arguing that failing to confront the outbreak aggressively could be catastrophic, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.
  • The uninvited message could not have conflicted more with the president’s approach at the time of playing down the severity of the threat. And when aides raised it with Mr. Trump, he responded that he was unhappy that Mr. Navarro had put his warning in writing.
  • From the time the virus was first identified as a concern, the administration’s response was plagued by the rivalries and factionalism that routinely swirl around Mr. Trump and, along with the president’s impulsiveness, undercut decision making and policy development.
  • Even after Mr. Azar first briefed him about the potential seriousness of the virus during a phone call on Jan. 18 while the president was at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Mr. Trump projected confidence that it would be a passing problem.
  • “We have it totally under control,” he told an interviewer a few days later while attending the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. “It’s going to be just fine.”
  • The efforts to sort out policy behind closed doors were contentious and sometimes only loosely organized.
  • That was the case when the National Security Council convened a meeting on short notice on the afternoon of Jan. 27. The Situation Room was standing room only, packed with top White House advisers, low-level staffers, Mr. Trump’s social media guru, and several cabinet secretaries. There was no checklist about the preparations for a possible pandemic,
  • Instead, after a 20-minute description by Mr. Azar of his department’s capabilities, the meeting was jolted when Stephen E. Biegun, the newly installed deputy secretary of state, announced plans to issue a “level four” travel warning, strongly discouraging Americans from traveling to China. The room erupted into bickering.
  • A few days later, on the evening of Jan. 30, Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff at the time, and Mr. Azar called Air Force One as the president was making the final decision to go ahead with the restrictions on China travel. Mr. Azar was blunt, warning that the virus could develop into a pandemic and arguing that China should be criticized for failing to be transparent.
  • Stop panicking, Mr. Trump told him.That sentiment was present throughout February, as the president’s top aides reached for a consistent message but took few concrete steps to prepare for the possibility of a major public health crisis.
  • As February gave way to March, the president continued to be surrounded by divided factions even as it became clearer that avoiding more aggressive steps was not tenable.
  • the virus was already multiplying across the country — and hospitals were at risk of buckling under the looming wave of severely ill people, lacking masks and other protective equipment, ventilators and sufficient intensive care beds. The question loomed over the president and his aides after weeks of stalling and inaction: What were they going to do?
  • Even then, and even by Trump White House standards, the debate over whether to shut down much of the country to slow the spread was especially fierce.
  • In a tense Oval Office meeting, when Mr. Mnuchin again stressed that the economy would be ravaged, Mr. O’Brien, the national security adviser, who had been worried about the virus for weeks, sounded exasperated as he told Mr. Mnuchin that the economy would be destroyed regardless if officials did nothing.
  • in the end, aides said, it was Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the veteran AIDS researcher who had joined the task force, who helped to persuade Mr. Trump. Soft-spoken and fond of the kind of charts and graphs Mr. Trump prefers, Dr. Birx did not have the rough edges that could irritate the president. He often told people he thought she was elegant.
  • During the last week in March, Kellyanne Conway, a senior White House adviser involved in task force meetings, gave voice to concerns other aides had. She warned Mr. Trump that his wished-for date of Easter to reopen the country likely couldn’t be accomplished. Among other things, she told him, he would end up being blamed by critics for every subsequent death caused by the virus.
Javier E

Opinion | Polling on Jan. 6 shows the vast majority of Americans aren't crazy - The Was... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...polling-jan-6-trump-blame

response insurrection political violence anti-democratic crisis politics culture policy

shared by Javier E on 05 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Two things can be true: 1) Millions of Americans are deluded about Jan. 6 and think violence is acceptable, and 2) a big majority know Trump was responsible, support the Jan. 6 committee and reject violence as a way to settle elections.
  • Once we come to grips with that dichotomy, several responses should follow.
  • First, President Biden should accurately cast the Jan. 6 deniers and pro-violence
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • crowd as a dangerous fringe. When “your side” has 60 percent or more of the public behind it, you should talk about it — a lot.
  • Second, because we have millions of people who are receptive to calls for violence, we need a serious and visible law-enforcement and national-security response.
  • Third, we lack a serious whole-of-society response to the threat of domestic extremism. A proper one should address inroads it has made into the military, and it must include White evangelicals’ recognition of the growing connection between Christian nationalism and violence.
  • actors in civil society and philanthropy should start working to anticipate and prevent violence, reset public leaders’ conduct, strengthen social cohesion and bolster democratic reforms.
  • In sum, we have treated the problem of violent extremism too broadly (causing politicians to cower in fear of a political minority), and too narrowly (focusing too much on legal and political reforms)
  • We need to start acting as though we are under threat from a pernicious, anti-democratic and violent minority — because we are.
Javier E

Senate Report Details Jan. 6 Intelligence and Law Enforcement Failures - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...jan-6-report-senate.html

intelligence law enforcement senate report Jan-6 crisis politics policy

shared by Javier E on 27 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • Aides said Senate staff obtained thousands of additional documents from federal law enforcement agencies, including the Justice Department, before drafting the report. It includes multiple calls for armed violence, calls to occupy federal buildings including the Capitol and some of the clearest threats the F.B.I. received but did little about — including a warning that the far-right group the Proud Boys was planning to kill people in Washington.
  • “Our intelligence agencies completely dropped the ball,” said Senator Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan and the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. He added: “Despite a multitude of tips and other intelligence warnings of violence on Jan. 6, the report showed that these agencies repeatedly — repeatedly — downplayed the threat level and failed to share the intelligence they had with law enforcement partners.”
  • The report determined the F.B.I.’s monitoring of social media threats was “degraded mere days before the attack,” because the bureau changed contracts for third-party social media monitoring. The committee obtained internal emails showing that F.B.I. officials were “surprised” by the timing of the contract change and “lamented the negative effect it would have on their monitoring capabilities in the lead-up to Jan. 6.”
anonymous

Pence Says He And Trump May Never 'See Eye To Eye' On Jan. 6 : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...rump-over-jan-6th-insurrection

shared by anonymous on 04 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Former Vice President Mike Pence said Thursday night that he doubts that he and former President Donald Trump will ever see "eye to eye" over the Jan. 6 insurrection led by a mob of pro-Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol.
  • In a speech to a Republican group in New Hampshire, Pence called Jan. 6 "a dark day in the history of the United States Capitol,
  • Pence was at the Capitol that day to oversee the counting of electoral votes, a normally ceremonial task that was interrupted by the Trump supporters, some of whom shouted "Hang Mike Pence," and forced lawmakers and the vice president to evacuate.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "President Trump and I have spoken many times since we've left office, and I don't know if we'll ever see eye to eye on that day," Pence said, "but I will always be proud of what we accomplished for the American people over the last four years."
  • He tried to turn Jan. 6 onto Democrats, saying their calls for an independent commission to investigate the events of that day and what led up to it were political.
  • Two days after President Biden attended a commemoration marking the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, in which a Black community was torched by a white mob, Pence asserted that "America is not a racist country," and that it was "past time for America to discard the left-wing myth of systemic racism." He also said, "Black lives are not endangered by police. Black lives are saved by police."
  • Pence called Biden "the most liberal president since FDR," and added, "They've proposed trillions of dollars in a so-called infrastructure bill that's just a thinly disguised climate change bill."
anonymous

4 Proud Boys Charged With Conspiracy Over Capitol Attack : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...piracy-over-jan-6-capitol-riot

shared by anonymous on 20 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Four alleged leaders of the Proud Boys have been indicted in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol over allegedly conspiring, including in discussions on encrypted messaging apps, to obstruct the certification of President Biden's Electoral College victory.
  • The indictment unsealed Friday charges the defendants — Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zach Rehl and Charles Donohoe — with six counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, obstruction of law enforcement, destruction of government property and conspiracy.
  • Nordean is the president of his local Proud Boy chapter in Washington state; Biggs is a Proud Boy member and organizer in Florida; Rehl is the president of a local chapter of the group in Philadelphia; and Donohoe is the president of his local Proud Boy chapter in North Carolina. Nordean and Biggs had previously been charged by complaint.
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  • The defendants are the latest with ties to the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group, to face conspiracy charges over their alleged roles in the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters.
  • Two days before Congress met to certify the results, Washington, D.C., police arrested the Proud Boys chairman, Enrique Tarrio.
  • Prosecutors allege that after Tarrio's arrest, Donohoe expressed concern that encrypted communications that included Tarrio were now compromised and in the hands of police.
  • Donohoe then created a new channel, called "New MOSD," on an encrypted messaging app that included his co-defendants. Donohoe also, according to the indictment, "took steps to destroy or 'nuke' the earlier channel."
  • Donohoe posted a message that same day to the new channel in which he says: "Hey have been instructed an listen to me real good!
  • Later that day, an individual identified in court documents only as an unindicted co-conspirator posted: "[W]e had originally planned on breaking the guys into teams. Let's start divvying them up and getting baofeng channels picked out," referring to channels on handheld radios.
  • The following day, the indictment says, a new encrypted messaging channel called "Boots on the Ground" was set up for Proud Boys in Washington.
  • That evening, Biggs posted a message to the channel that said he was trying to get a sense of their numbers so they can "go over tomorrow's plan."
  • Rehl told the channel he was on his way to Washington and was bringing radios with him. He added that there was a person who would program the devices later that evening.
  • That same evening, Biggs allegedly posted a message that read: "We have a plan. I'm with Rufio."
  • The indictment alleges that the members of the encrypted messaging channels were told to meet at the Washington Monument at 10 a.m. on Jan. 6.Proud Boys did show up at the monument at 10, including the defendants, according to the indictment. From there, the group marched to the Capitol with Nordean, Biggs and Rehl near or at the front of the crowd.
  • Once there, the indictment says, the defendants "charged toward the capitol by crossing over the barriers that had been violently disassembled and trampled by the crowd moments before."
  • The Proud Boys are not the only extremist group to see its members charged with conspiracy in connection with the Capitol riot. Members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right paramilitary group, are also facing conspiracy charges. So far, more than 300 people have been charged in connection with the Capitol breach. Prosecutors say at least 100 more could still be charged.
leilamulveny

Opinion | Don't Let QAnon Bully Congress - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...qanon-capitol-security.html

opinion congress new york times Politics Trump US history

shared by leilamulveny on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Allowing the U.S. government to be held hostage by political extremists is unacceptable.
  • While this won’t surprise most people, it likely came as a shock to many QAnon followers. According to that movement’s expediently evolving lore, March 4 — the date on which U.S. presidents were inaugurated until the mid-1930s — was when Mr. Trump was to reclaim the presidency and resume his epic battle against Satan-worshiping, baby-eating Democrats and deep-state monsters.This drivel is absurd. It is also alarming. Violent extremists, obsessed with the symbolism of March 4, were for weeks nattering about a possible attack on Congress, according to law enforcement officials.On March 2, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security issued a joint intelligence bulletin to law enforcement agencies, warning that militia extremists might be plotting to overrun the Capitol complex and “remove Democratic lawmakers.” The details of the possible plot were hazy, but the threat unnerved enough people that House leaders canceled Thursday’s session. The voting schedule was condensed, and lawmakers left town early for the weekend.Although March 4 came and went without a bloody coup attempt — that is, without another bloody coup attempt — damage was still done. Lawmakers abandoned their workplace out of fear of politically motivated violence. This not only disrupted the people’s business. It also sent a dangerous signal that Congress can be intimidated — that the state of American government is fragile.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOf course the safety of lawmakers and other Capitol Hill workers must be a priority. But allowing the government to be held hostage by political extremists is unacceptable.The current security threat is not expected to dissipate any time soon. If anything, the intelligence community has cautioned that the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol may have emboldened extremists. Having sacked the Capitol, the lunatic fringe is now dreaming of a bigger, bloodier encore.
  • Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida delegation’s mini-Trump, is in full froth. “Pelosi hired a bigot to hunt MAGA,” he charged last month. Last Tuesday, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the speaker, arguing that General Honoré’s criticism of the police and lawmakers was “disqualifying.” On Thursday, Tucker Carlson told viewers: “Honoré is an unhinged partisan extremist. He’s nuttier than anyone affiliated with QAnon.”
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  • Of course the safety of lawmakers and other Capitol Hill workers must be a priority. But allowing the government to be held hostage by political extremists is unacceptable.
  • Trump toadies should not be allowed to turn this issue into a partisan game. Steps must be taken to safeguard the seat of government. Going forward, lawmakers cannot be seen as bowing to political thugs, their work upended whenever there is a semi-credible threat. That is not the American way.
  • March 4 was just one target. The acting chief of the Capitol Police, Yogananda Pittman, recently warned that extremists have been talking about possibly blowing up the Capitol during President Biden’s first address to a joint meeting of Congress, which has not yet been scheduled, with an eye toward killing “as many members as possible.”
  • This drivel is absurd. It is also alarming. Violent extremists, obsessed with the symbolism of March 4, were for weeks nattering about a possible attack on Congress, according to law enforcement officials.
  • On Monday, lawmakers were briefed on the findings of the security assessment that the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, requested in the wake of Jan. 6. Russel Honoré, a retired Army lieutenant general who led the task force, recommended a variety of permanent enhancements. These include beefing up the Capitol Police force, in terms of increased staffing, improved training, enhanced authority for its leadership and a new emphasis on intelligence work; creating a quick-reaction force to be on call 24-7 to handle imminent threats; installing a retractable fencing system; and adding protections for rank-and-file members of Congress at home and while they are traveling and back in their districts.
  • Last Thursday was not Donald Trump’s triumphant return to power after all.While this won’t surprise most people, it likely came as a shock to many QAnon followers. According to that movement’s expediently evolving lore, March 4 — the date on which U.S. presidents were inaugurated until the mid-1930s — was when Mr. Trump was to reclaim the presidency and resume his epic battle against Satan-worshiping, baby-eating Democrats and deep-state monsters.
  • This not only disrupted the people’s business. It also sent a dangerous signal that Congress can be intimidated — that the state of American government is fragile.
  • In the wake of Jan. 6, enhanced protections were put in place around Capitol Hill. There is an increased police presence along with thousands of National Guard troops. Last week, Chief Pittman requested that the Guard presence, originally set to expire Friday, be extended 60 days. (The Pentagon has yet to issue a final decision.) Inside the Capitol building, additional metal detectors have been installed. The grounds are ringed by security fencing. Lawmakers from both parties have complained that “the people’s house” now has the grim vibe of an armed camp — or a low-security prison.
  • Republicans, many of them desperate to downplay the Jan. 6 tragedy, are already attacking General Honoré as biased.
  • The general has not been shy about criticizing lawmakers and others he regards as having fed the postelection chaos, and he has suggested that some Capitol Police officers may have been complicit in allowing rioters into the building.
kaylynfreeman

Opinion | The Shame of Jan. 6 Should Reverberate for Generations - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...jan-6-capitol-riots.html

politics crisis trump US

shared by kaylynfreeman on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Impeach we must, Gail, and impeach we shall.
  • You know, there was a time that I thought — hoped, even — that once 2021 came around we’d stop agreeing about things because Donald Trump would be gone and we’d only be talking about Joe Biden.
  • Bret: And he always saves the worst for last. That’s why I don’t think impeachment and conviction are enough. (Alas, removal from office probably won’t happen since the trial is unlikely to finish by Jan. 20, though Congress can also vote to bar him from ever holding federal office in the future.)
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  • Gail: I see your point, but as ex-president Trump could also be indicted in New York, where authorities have long been investigating him for possible bank, insurance and tax fraud. For that, we would welcome him back.
  • Bret: I hope we never forget Jan. 6, 2021, as one of the darkest days in American history. Even though the loss of life was much less, it was, in a moral sense, worse than Dec. 7, 1941, or Sept. 11, 2001, when we were attacked by foreign enemies. On 1/6, we were attacked by domestic enemies, led by the president of the United States. He violated his oath of office. He slandered his vice president. He directed an attack on the Congress. He incited the sacking of the Capitol. He did nothing helpful while the barbarians were inside the gate, and even blew them a kiss on Twitter. He attempted to stop an election for the purposes of stealing it. He kept faith with the most despicable Americans among us: neo-Nazis, Neo-Confederates, the QAnon conspiracy lunatics and the morons in Viking suits. His followers killed a Capitol Police officer, Brian Sicknick.
Javier E

Eastman Spins Wild Tales Of Jan. 6 As A Trap Sprung By Media And FBI | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...a-trap-sprung-by-media-and-fbi

right-wing lawyer insurrection

shared by Javier E on 28 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • John Eastman is sure having trouble keeping his story straight. A week ago, the ex-Trump legal adviser, whose legal memo laid out a path for Mike Pence to thwart the 2020 Electoral College certification, went to great lengths to downplay and minimize his memo.
  • In new video released Wednesday, Eastman took on a more conspiratorial cast, wildly claiming that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a “setup.”
  • “The Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys had not just wallflowers sitting on the side of the organization, but people instigating within the association, FBI plants,” Eastman told the activists. “It was a setup. And unfortunately our guys walked into the trap.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In the latest video, Eastman cited a debunked right-wing conspiracy theory that an “antifa guy” had been paid thousands of dollars by CNN to break into the Capitol for footage of the siege. In reality, the FBI Director Chris Wray has said there is no evidence that antifa (a broad term for anti-fascism that isn’t identified as a solid group) was involved in the Capitol attack, nor is there evidence that CNN or any other outlet paid anyone to ransack the Capitol.
  • The undercover activists Eastman spoke to came from The Undercurrent. They had also filmed the lawyer bragging about the memo at the same event despite him publicly insisting that he thought the legal reasoning in the document was bunk.
Javier E

Conservative Case Emerges to Disqualify Trump for Role on Jan. 6 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nsurrection-conservatives.html

trump eligibility presidency insurrection constitution

shared by Javier E on 12 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • Two prominent conservative law professors have concluded that Donald J. Trump is ineligible to be president under a provision of the Constitution that bars people who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government offic
  • The professors — William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas — studied the question for more than a year and detailed their findings in a long article to be published next year in The University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
  • “When we started out, neither of us was sure what the answer was,” Professor Baude said. “People were talking about this provision of the Constitution. We thought: ‘We’re constitutional scholars, and this is an important constitutional question. We ought to figure out what’s really going on here.’ And the more we dug into it, the more we realized that we had something to add.”
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  • He summarized the article’s conclusion: “Donald Trump cannot be president — cannot run for president, cannot become president, cannot hold office — unless two-thirds of Congress decides to grant him amnesty for his conduct on Jan. 6.”
  • The provision in question is Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Adopted after the Civil War, it bars those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”Congress can remove the prohibition, the provision says, but only by a two-thirds vote in each chamber.
  • There is, the article said, “abundant evidence” that Mr. Trump engaged in an insurrection, including by setting out to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, trying to alter vote counts by fraud and intimidation, encouraging bogus slates of competing electors, pressuring the vice president to violate the Constitution, calling for the march on the Capitol and remaining silent for hours during the attack itself.
  • “It is unquestionably fair to say that Trump ‘engaged in’ the Jan. 6 insurrection through both his actions and his inaction,” the article said.
  • “There are many ways that this could become a lawsuit presenting a vital constitutional issue that potentially the Supreme Court would want to hear and decide,” Professor Paulsen said.
  • The new article examined the historical evidence illuminating the meaning of the provision at great length, using the methods of originalism. It drew on, among other things, contemporaneous dictionary definitions, other provisions of the Constitution using similar language, “the especially strong evidence from 1860s Civil War era political and legal usage of nearly the precise same terms” and the early enforcement of the provision
  • The article concluded that essentially all of that evidence pointed in the same direction: “toward a broad understanding of what constitutes insurrection and rebellion and a remarkably, almost extraordinarily, broad understanding of what types of conduct constitute engaging in, assisting, or giving aid or comfort to such movements.”
carolinehayter

What We Know About Security Response At Capitol on January 6 : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ty-at-the-capitol-on-january-6

capitol politics US trump crisis

shared by carolinehayter on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a security failure, an intelligence failure — or both. How could security forces in the nation's capital be so swiftly and completely overwhelmed by rioters who stated their plans openly on a range of social media sites? President Trump had even tweeted on Dec. 19: "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!"
  • The Metropolitan Police Department arrests Enrique Tarrio, leader of the far-right Proud Boys group. He is charged with destruction of property and possession of high-capacity firearm magazines. He's released the next day and told to leave Washington.
  • And then there is the National Guard. In the 50 states and Puerto Rico, the Guard is under the command of the governor. In Washington, D.C., however, the Guard is under the command of the president, though orders to deploy are typically issued by the secretary of the Army at the request of the mayor.
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  • The Department of Homeland Security produces a threat assessment — but it is an overview, a DHS spokesperson told NPR, focusing on the "heightened threat environment during the 2020-2021 election season, including the extent to which the political transition and political polarization are contributing to the mobilization of individuals to commit violence."
  • This raw intelligence — bits and pieces of information scraped from various social media sites — indicates that there will likely be violence when lawmakers certify the presidential election results on Jan. 6.
  • But the DHS and the FBI do not create an intelligence report focused specifically on the upcoming pro-Trump rally.
  • These threat assessments or intelligence bulletins are typically written as a matter of course ahead of high-profile events. It's not clear why this didn't happen.
  • In a letter to the Justice Department, Bowser says "we are mindful" of events in 2020 — likely referencing the June 1 clearing of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square by Park Police and other federal law enforcement that not answerable to the city.
  • U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund asks permission from House and Senate security officials to request that the D.C. National Guard be placed on standby in case the protest gets out of control. The Washington Post reports: "House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving said he wasn't comfortable with the 'optics' of formally declaring an emergency ahead of the demonstration, Sund said. Meanwhile, Senate Sergeant at Arms Michael Stenger suggested that Sund should informally seek out his Guard contacts, asking them to 'lean forward' and be on alert in case Capitol Police needed their help."
  • The FBI Field Office in Norfolk, Va., issues an explicit warning that extremists have plans for violence the next day, as first reported by the Post. It releases its advisory report after FBI analysts find a roster of troubling information including specific threats against members of Congress, an exchange of maps of the tunnel system under the Capitol complex and organizational plans like setting up gathering places in Kentucky, Pennsylvania and South Carolina so extremists can meet to convoy to Washington.
  • The head of the FBI's Washington Field Office, Steven D'Antuono, later says that information is shared with the FBI's "law enforcement partners" through the bureau's Joint Terrorism Task Force. That includes the U.S. Capitol Police, U.S. Park Police, D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and other agencies.
  • Officials convene a conference call with local law enforcement to discuss the Norfolk warning.
  • Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser announces that the MPD will be the lead law enforcement agency and will coordinate with the Capitol Police, Park Police and Secret Service.
  • The Metropolitan Police Department has jurisdiction on city streets; the U.S. Park Police on the Ellipse, where Trump's rally took place; the U.S. Secret Service in the vicinity of the White House; and the U.S. Capitol Police on the Capitol complex.
  • That day appears to have profoundly influenced the mayor's approach to the Jan. 6 events. In her letter, Bowser describes the difficulty and confusion of policing large crowds while working around other law enforcement personnel without proper coordination and identification.
  • Bowser requests, and receives, a limited force from the D.C. National Guard. The soldiers number 340, though they are unarmed and their job is to help with traffic flow — not law enforcement — which is to be handled by D.C. police.
  • Trump begins to address the crowd at the Ellipse, behind the White House. He falsely claims that "this election was stolen from you, from me, from the country." Trump calls on his supporters at the rally to march on the U.S. Capitol, saying he will walk with them. Instead, he returns to the White House.
  • "We see this huge crush of people coming down Pennsylvania Ave. toward the Capitol," reports NPR's Hannah Allam. "We follow the crowd as it goes up to the Hill, toward the Capitol. There's scaffolding set up for the inauguration already," she adds. "But as far as protection, all we really saw were some mesh barriers, some metal fencing and only a small contingent of Capitol Police. And we watched them being quickly overwhelmed." The FBI says multiple law enforcement agencies receive reports of a suspected pipe bomb at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee. Fifteen minutes later, there are reports of a similar device at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
  • Mayor Bowser asks Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy for additional Guard forces
  • Capitol Police Chief Sund speaks with the commanding general of the D.C. National Guard Maj. Gen. William Walker by phone and requests immediate assistance.
  • Moving to the Senate terrace, they see protesters smashing the door of the Capitol to gain entry, as Capitol Police inside work to push them back.
  • Capitol Police send an alert that all buildings in the Capitol complex are on lockdown due to "an external security threat located on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol Building. ... [S]tay away from exterior windows and doors. If you are outside, seek cover."
  • The House and Senate abruptly go into recess.
  • On a conference call with Pentagon officials, D.C. Mayor Bowser requests National Guard support and Capitol Police Chief Sund pleads for backup.
  • Trump tweets criticism of Vice President Pence: "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!"
  • From inside the House chamber come reports of an armed standoff at the door to the chamber. Police officers have their guns drawn on someone trying to get in.
  • Acting Defense Secretary Miller determines that all available forces of the D.C. National Guard are required to reestablish security of the Capitol complex.
  • Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam tweets that his team is working closely with Mayor Bowser, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to respond to the situation.
  • White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany says on Twitter that the National Guard is on its way at Trump's direction.
  • rump tweets a video downplaying the events of the day, repeating false claims that the election was stolen and sympathizing with his followers, saying: "I know your pain, I know you're hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. ... You're very special. You've seen what happens. You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel, but go home, and go home in peace."
  • Acting Defense Secretary Miller authorizes the mobilization of up to 6,200 National Guard troops from Maryland, Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania, according to the Pentagon.
  • Trump tweets a message to his supporters. "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!"
  • Capitol Police, MPD and the D.C. National Guard establish a perimeter on the west side of the Capitol.
  • The Capitol is declared secure. Members of Congress return to complete the opening and counting of the Electoral College votes.
  • Pence affirms that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have won the Electoral College: "Joseph R. Biden Jr. of the state of Delaware has received for president of the United States, 306 votes. Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida has received 232 votes."
  • The FBI formally warns local law enforcement that armed protests are being planned for all 50 statehouses and the U.S. Capitol. The warning says an unidentified group is calling on others to help it "storm" state, local and federal courthouses, should Trump be removed as president before Inauguration Day.
  • Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, says two Capitol Police officers have been suspended. One of the suspended officers took a selfie with a rioter. The other put on a MAGA hat "and started directing people around," says Ryan.
  • The U.S. Justice Department says it has received more than 100,000 pieces of digital information in response to its call for tips about those responsible for the Capitol riot. The Justice Department says MPD acted on its intelligence to arrest the Proud Boys' Tarrio before the protest, and federal officials interrupted travel of others who planned to go to D.C.
  • The secretary of the Army announces that as many as 20,000 National Guard troops are expected to be deployed to D.C. for the inauguration. Some will be armed, while others will have access to their weapons but will not carry them.
  • FBI Director Christopher Wray says the bureau has identified more than 200 suspects from the Capitol riots and arrested more than 100 others in connection with the violence. "We know who you are if you're out there — and FBI agents are coming to find you," he warns.
  • U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz announces his office will begin "a review to examine the role and activity of DOJ and its components in preparing for and responding to the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021." Horowitz said his review will coordinate with IG reviews in the departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Interior.
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