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The false GOP claim that Pelosi turned down National Guard before Jan. 6 attack
Fact Checker Analysis
By Salvador Rizzo Reporter Today at 3:00 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/28/false-gop-claim-that-pelosi-turned-down-national-guard-before-jan-6-attack/
“There’s questions into the leadership within, the structure of the speaker’s office, where they denied the ability to bring the National Guard here. ... We start with a committee chair who will tell you, ‘Everything’s on the table except the speaker’s office.’ How can you ever get to the bottom of the questions? How can you ever get to the solutions to make sure the Capitol is never put in this position again?”
— House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), at a news conference, July 27, 2021
“It is a fact that ... in December of 2020, Nancy Pelosi was made aware of potential security threats to the Capitol and she failed to act. It is a fact that the U.S. Capitol Police raised concerns and rather than providing them with the support and resources they needed and they deserved, she prioritized her partisan political optics over their safety.”
— House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), at the news conference, July 27, 2021
Republicans accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) of failing to protect the U.S. Capitol from the attack on Jan. 6, claiming she ignored warnings about potential threats and denied a request to bring in reinforcements from the National Guard.
Many fact-checkers have rated these claims false. In March, we gave Four Pinocchios to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a close ally of former president Donald Trump, for leveling the same accusation at Pelosi without proof.
Five months later, it’s not just Jordan anymore. In a news conference held moments before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol held its first hearing, McCarthy and Stefanik, two top Republican leaders, said Pelosi failed to act on warning signs leading up to the riot.
“The American people deserve to know the truth that Nancy Pelosi bears responsibility as speaker of the House for the tragedy that occurred on January 6th,” Stefanik said.
We asked representatives for McCarthy and Stefanik what proof they had. Just like Jordan five months earlier, they had none.
The Facts
Before leaving office, Trump held a rally outside the White House on Jan. 6 and repeatedly urged attendees to march on Congress as lawmakers were certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. For months, Trump had been making false claims that rampant electoral fraud had cost him a winning margin of victory in key states.
“I said something’s wrong here, something is really wrong,” Trump said at the close of his Jan. 6 speech. “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
A mob stormed the Capitol, delaying the vote certification for hours. Many of the rioters have saiBefore leaving office, Trump held a rally outside the White House on Jan. 6 and repeatedly urged attendees to march on Congress as lawmakers were certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. For months, Trump had been making false claims that rampant electoral fraud had cost him a winning margin of victory in key states.
The riot led to five deaths, assaults on about 140 police officers and the evacuation of Congress. Authorities have estimated that about 10,000 people descended on the Capitol campus and that about 800 broke into the building. To date, about 550 have been charged with crimes.
The Democratic-controlled House passed a resolution in March to create a bipartisan commission styled after the 9/11 Commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack, but the proposal did not get enough Republican support to advance in the Senate. The House then established a select committee to investigate the events of Jan. 6, led by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.
The accusations that Pelosi was aware of intelligence reports of a potential threat to the Capitol on Jan. 6, or that she turned down a request for reinforcements from the National Guard, have never been backed by proof.
There are three key players here: Steven A. Sund, the U.S. Capitol Police chief; Paul D. Irving, the House sergeant-at-arms, and Michael C. Stenger, the Senate sergeant-at-arms. All three resigned under pressure after the Jan. 6 insurrection. Sund said he ran the National Guard request by Irving and Stenger on Jan. 4 and neither supported the idea.
In a Feb. 1 letter to Pelosi, Sund wrote that he “approached the two Sergeants at Arms to request the assistance of the National Guard, as I had no authority to do so without an Emergency Declaration by the Capitol Police Board (CPB).” He said he spoke first to Irving, who “stated that he was concerned about the ‘optics’ and didn’t feel that the intelligence supported it.” Irving suggested Sund check in with Stenger, at the time chair of the CPB, and get his thoughts. “Instead of approving the use of the National Guard, however, Mr. Stenger suggested I ask them how quickly we could get support if needed and to ‘lean forward’ in case we had to request assistance on January 6,” Sund wrote.
Sund said he then contacted Gen. William Walker, commanding officer of the D.C. National Guard. Walker “advised that he could repurpose 125 National Guard and have them to me fairly quickly, once approved. I asked General Walker to be prepared in the event that we requested them.”
Note that there is no indication that Pelosi was at all involved. Irving supposedly had made a vague reference to “optics,” but there is no indication what that means. Moreover, Stenger, the Senate sergeant-at-arms, was also reluctant to support an immediate dispatching of National Guard troops. So there is little reason to suggest Irving, acting under Pelosi’s direction, alone was responsible. It appeared to have been a joint decision.
At a Senate hearing Jan. 23, Irving said that the proposed National Guard troops were to be unarmed and only to “work traffic control near the Capitol.” He included an explanation of the term optics: “My use of the word optics has been mischaracterized in the media. Let me be clear. Optics as portrayed in the media played no role whatsoever in my decisions about security. And any suggestion to the contrary is false. Safety was always paramount when making security plans for January 6th.”
In his questioning, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) tried to drill down deeper in the conversations among Sund, Irving and Stenger. He asked Irving: “Were you concerned that having the Guard present would look like it was to militarize? Were you concerned about the criticism of the Guard being deployed in Washington … earlier this summer?”
In this question, Hawley was getting at the heart of the question about “optics” — the belief among some Republicans that Pelosi somehow had communicated to Irving that she did not want images of National Guard troops at the Capitol, given what had happened during the criminal justice protests after the George Floyd killing.
Irving, in his response to Hawley, threw cold water on such speculation.
“Senator, I was not concerned about appearance whatsoever. It was all about safety and security,” Irving said. “Any reference would have been related to appropriate use of force, display of force. And ultimately, the question on the table, when we look at any security asset, is: Does the intelligence warrant it? Is the security plan [a] match with the intelligence? And again, the collective answer was yes.”
Later in the hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) asked whether Irving or Stenger had communicated the Jan. 4 decision on National Guard troops to congressional leadership.
“On Jan. 4, no, I had no follow-up conversations,” Irving said. “And it was not until the 6th that I alerted leadership that we might be making a request. And that was the end of the discussion.”
“For myself, it was Jan. 6 that I mentioned it to Leader [Mitch] McConnell’s staff,” Stenger said.
Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Pelosi, previously told us there had been no discussions between Irving and either Pelosi or her staff about National Guard deployment before Jan. 6. “We are not involved in the day-to-day operations of that office at all,” he said. “We expect security professionals to make security decisions.”
In a statement on Tuesday that linked to fact-checks of similar claims over the last few months, Pelosi’s office said “every single lie uttered by the Republicans this morning has been debunked time and again.”
A Senate report into the Jan. 6 attack found: “The entities responsible for securing and protecting the Capitol Complex and everyone onsite that day were not prepared for a large-scale attack, despite being aware of the potential for violence targeting the Capitol. …
“The failures leading up to and on January 6 were not limited to legislative branch entities. As has been made clear in the Committees’ two public hearings on the subject, failures extended to a number of executive branch agencies. A key contributing factor to the tragic events of January 6 was the failure of the Intelligence Community to properly analyze, assess, and disseminate information to law enforcement regarding the potential for violence and the known threats to the Capitol and the Members present that day.”
In response to our questions, Stefanik issued a statement that falsely claimed “the sergeant-at-arms is a political appointee of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and can be fired by Pelosi at any time.” Irving, a former Secret Service supervisor, had been appointed in 2012 by then-House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).
Stefanik added that throughout December, “multiple intelligence reports” had been “shared with the Capitol Police, raising concerns about January 6th.” “The speaker’s office was aware of these concerns as reported by The Washington Post and chose not to act,” she said. In support of that claim, a Stefanik spokesman linked to a report in The Post that does not say Pelosi failed to act on intelligence reports about potential threats.
A spokesman for McCarthy said, “Evidence shows that then-Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving reported to Speaker Pelosi and he denied approval to bring in the National Guard (when asked by Chief Sund) prior to January 6.”
The spokesman, Mark Bednar, added: “The allegation is not that Nancy Pelosi said no National Guard. The concern is that the speaker, as the highest-ranking individual on the Capitol complex, had security responsibility for the Capitol, the security apparatus reported to her — and they said no, prior to the 6th.”
That’s different from what McCarthy said at the news conference, claiming that Pelosi (in his words, “the structure of the speaker’s office”) somehow stumped the request for the National Guard.
McCarthy also made another claim at this news conference suggesting Democrats were asleep at the wheel when it came to securing the Capitol.
He suggested that Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a Pelosi ally on the select committee investigating Jan. 6 and the chair of the House Administration Committee, which supervises the Capitol Police, had not held hearings into security matters since a report was issued by the Capitol Police’s inspector general.
“You had a chair of House administration with responsibility that did not come to the Capitol for more than six months,” McCarthy said. “First time showing back up? On January 3rd to vote for the speaker. No hearings about the IG report, no movement of Rodney Davis’s bill.”
McCarthy’s office did not say which inspector general report he was referring to, but the House Administration Committee has held five hearings on the Jan. 6 attack since the Capitol Police inspector general issued its first report and recommendations in February.
One of the hearings, titled “Reforming the Capitol Police and Improving Accountability for the Capitol Police Board,” was held weeks after Republicans on the committee, including the ranking Republican, Rep. Rodney Davis (Ill.), called for such reforms to the Capitol Police’s oversight structure. (The House Administration Committee did not take a six-month hiatus. It held virtual hearings during the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.)
The Pinocchio Test
Repeating a false claim does not make it truer. No evidence has emerged to suggest that Pelosi ignored intelligence reports about potential threats or turned down a request for reinforcements from the National Guard as officials prepared for Jan. 6.
Under pointed questioning in the Senate on Jan. 23, security officials did not say Pelosi blocked requests for backup. Irving, the former House sergeant-at-arms, testified: “It was not until the 6th that I alerted leadership that we might be making a request. And that was the end of the discussion.”
McCarthy, Stefanik and all the others leveling this baseless charge earn Four Pinocchios.
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By Salvador Rizzo
Salvador Rizzo is a reporter for The Fact Checker. He previously covered New Jersey politics and Gov. Chris Christie, with stints at the Star-Ledger, the Bergen Record and the New York Observer. Twitter
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/28/false-gop-claim-that-pelosi-turned-down-national-guard-before-jan-6-attack/
DC Attorney General Moves Ahead With Trump Inauguration Suit
NO DEAL
An investigation into alleged self-dealing continues, now that court-ordered mediation between the district’s attorney general and the Trump inaugural committee has failed.
Jose Pagliery
Political Investigations Reporter
Updated Jul. 28, 2021 7:06AM ET / Published Jul. 28, 2021 4:07AM ET
https://www.thedailybeast.com/dc-attorney-general-moves-ahead-with-trump-inauguration-suit
The attorney general for the District of Columbia will continue investigating whether Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration committee misspent more than $1 million, after discussions to resolve the matter out of court stalled this month.
The AG’s office has a civil lawsuit against the inaugural committee and the Trump Organization. And this month, the case was forced into mediation, a deal-making session in which a neutral negotiator tries to get different sides to come to an agreement.
While lawyers met on July 14 to discuss resolving the case out of court, the meeting went nowhere.
According to court records, the closed-door meeting resulted in “no agreement reached.” The reason: Investigators are dead set on seeing this case through to the very end, a source with knowledge of the case told The Daily Beast.
That means the case will proceed, as all sides wait to see whether D.C. Superior Court Judge José M. López rules that the local law enforcement agency has already proven its case before trial. The office of the local attorney general, Karl Racine, has a pending motion for summary judgment arguing that the evidence already presented weighs that heavily in his favor.
The local attorney general claims the Trump Organization and Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C. were “unjustly enriched” by overbilling the nonprofit inauguration committee. The office wants the judge to force the return of $1.08 million in “misspent charitable funds.” (The AG’s office wants to award that money to another civic-minded nonprofit of its choosing.)
Racine’s office is seeking a similar outcome to the victory that New York’s attorney general had in 2018 over the Trump Foundation, forcing it to disband and hand over money to other charities.
The D.C. Attorney General’s Office did not respond to questions. And the inaugural committee’s lawyers—K. Lee Blalack II and David J. Leviss—declined an interview through a spokesman who cited “the confidentiality obligations that the Court required of all parties not to disclose any information about the mediation.”
The probe is examining how Trump’s company and his own family members enriched themselves with the 58th presidential inauguration, a weeklong string of events that are supposed to be a national celebration of the country’s transfer of power.
Every incoming presidential administration puts together a committee for the event planning. In this case, the district attorney’s lawyers are looking into the way Trump’s own children blurred the lines between the family business and what’s supposed to be a nonprofit. Investigators suspect that Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and others bilked the inaugural celebration by funneling events to the Trump International Hotel in Washington—where the nonprofit committee was allegedly overbilled on services by the incoming president’s own company.
Although this court case is civil in nature—and must remain so to stay within the D.C. attorney general’s jurisdiction—Racine’s investigators could still refer any evidence of criminal behavior to other law enforcement agencies.
If the D.C. attorney general doesn’t score a .summary judgment win, it intends to continue pursuing additional testimony from key witnesses
As The Daily Beast reported last month, the D.C. Attorney General’s Office wants to question under oath longtime Trump family confidants who may have important information about recent discoveries in the case. At the top of the list is the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, who acted outside his company role and reviewed the independent committee’s finances. Weisselberg is already in the hot seat—he was arrested last month for criminal tax fraud in New York City, as part of a separate investigation.
Government lawyers also want to interview Texas financier Gentry Beach, who was Don Jr.’s friend in college and served on the inaugural group’s finance committee.
According to investigators, Beach was behind the Trump Organization’s plan to reserve a block of hotel rooms at the Madison Washington D.C.—an arrangement that’s now under scrutiny because the Trump Organization never paid the tab. When the hotel sent it to a collections agency, then-Trump campaign official Rick Gates directed the bill collectors to change the name on the invoice to the inauguration committee. The nonprofit ended up paying $49,358.
As part of their probe of that hotel deal, investigators also want to interview Kara Hanley, who court documents identify as “a former executive assistant” at the Trump Organization.
Judge López has yet to rule on whether he will grant special permission to conduct these depositions, now that the deadline to conduct these kinds of interviews has passed.
Adding another dynamic entirely to this case is the fact that a central figure in the probe, Tom Barrack, who led the inaugural committee as its chairman, was arrested on a separate matter last week. Barrack, a wealthy investor and personal friend of Donald Trump, appeared in Brooklyn federal court on Monday to plead not guilty to charges that he used his access to the incoming president to secretly lobby for the United Arab Emirates.
When Barrack was deposed in November 2020 by Leonor Miranda, an assistant attorney general with the office’s public advocacy division, he claimed that he wasn’t involved in the Trump family’s initial selection of venues—and that he didn’t know about the block of hotel rooms that were eventually paid by his committee.
This D.C. case is one of several investigations into Trump and his company that were initiated by local prosecutors and have heated up since his departure from the White House. The most advanced probe seems to be the criminal tax fraud case in New York against the Trump Organization. Another is taking place in Fulton County, Georgia, where Trump and his political associates are accused of meddling with the state’s tabulation of 2020 election results.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/dc-attorney-general-moves-ahead-with-trump-inauguration-suit
Republicans voice opposition to Jan. 6 investigation as police officers call for accountability
By Jacqueline Alemany, Marianna Sotomayor and John Wagner
Today at 7:36 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/january-6-republicans-trump/2021/07/27/79a29e38-eef4-11eb-bf80-e3877d9c5f06_story.html
House Republicans began Tuesday morning by calling the upcoming inaugural hearing of the chamber’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol a “sham” and a “political charade.” After it concluded in the early afternoon, they provided myriad reasons for why they did not tune in to the harrowing testimony provided by four police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol that day against a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said he was “booked in all these different meetings.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told reporters he was tied up with a committee hearing.
Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who rose to her position after her predecessor was sacked for criticizing Trump’s role in the attack, declined to say whether she watched.
Rep. Matthew M. Rosendale (R-Mont.) said he did watch — but only the opening statement from Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who has joined the panel in defiance of her party, not the officers’ testimony.
“I was quite disappointed,” he told ABC News.
The seeming disinterest in learning the details of an attack prompted by their party’s president that featured calls to find and hang the vice president was all the more bracing given the dramatic testimony from the four police officers about the threat posed by attackers they cast as “terrorists” seeking to overthrow democracy.
Republicans have consistently opposed establishing a special commission or committee to investigate the insurrectionists who attempted to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election results by breaking into the halls of Congress, threatening the safety of lawmakers who were evacuated to secure locations.
But their reasoning has vacillated between warnings that it would be too partisan, to it would impede law enforcement investigations, to it should also look into violence at racial justice protests in several cities last summer.
The struggle to explain their near-blanket opposition to having Congress examine the causes and ramification of the insurrection, has left the party open to charges that it is avoiding a thorough investigation of the worst attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812 because of its ties to Trump’s false claims about the election and the political damage that could reap in the 2022 midterm elections.
On Tuesday, the officers who testified expressed disgust at the attempt by many Republicans to downplay the severity of the attack.
“I feel like I went to hell and back to protect them, and too many in this room .... are now telling me that hell doesn’t exist or hell actually wasn’t that bad,” said D.C. police officer Michael Fanone, who suffered a heart attack and concussion from being beaten and hit with a stun gun by rioters, while furiously slamming his fist on the dais. “The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful.”
Other officers made clear they hold Trump partially responsible for the attack and resent what they described as his coddling of the rioters.
“To me, it’s insulting, just demoralizing because of everything that we did to prevent everyone in the Capitol from getting hurt,” said Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell. “And what he was doing, instead of sending the military, instead of sending the support or telling his people, his supporters, to stop this nonsense, he begged them to continue fighting.”
“I’m still recovering from those hugs and kisses that day that he claimed,” Gonell added.
He said that members of the mob on Jan. 6 repeatedly told him that “Trump sent us.”
Heroes on Jan. 6, law officers became truth seekers about who was responsible for the Capitol attacks
Republican leaders focused most of their comments Tuesday on attempting to blame House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for the events of Jan. 6, arguing that she was responsible for officers not being sufficiently prepared to repel the pro-Trump mob.
“January 6 should have never happened,” McCarthy said at a news conference outside the Capitol. “We should have prepared and been prepared for the officers, made sure they have the training and the equipment that they needed”.
McCarthy and other House GOP leaders also took aim at Pelosi for removing from the select committee Reps. Jordan and Jim Banks (Ind.), two of the five Republican members McCarthy selected. McCarthy later withdrew his three other picks in protest. McCarthy suggested that the two were removed because they wanted to explore the role of the speaker’s office in the security breakdown.
He said Pelosi would put on the committee only people who “will ask the questions she wants asked.”
The Capitol Police Board controls security at the Capitol. On Jan. 6, the board consisted of the House sergeant-at-arms, Paul D. Irving, who was hired under Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), and the Senate sergeant-at-arms, Michael Stenger, who was hired in 2018 when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was majority leader.
McCarthy did not say whether he felt McConnell had also failed to protect the Capitol in his role as Senate leader at the time.
He later tweeted out a list of questions he said “Pelosi’s sham committee won’t answer.”
“Why was the Capitol left so vulnerable that day? Why wasn’t the National Guard here? Why didn’t we have a better security posture? What changes are needed to make sure it never happens again?” he wrote
But McCarthy’s comments sidestepped the fact that many of the questions he raised about the security of the Capitol could have been addressed by an independent commission modeled on the panel created to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks that he and many Republicans opposed despite it being the product of deal between the bipartisan leaders of the House Homeland Security Committee. It’s also not clear that the select committee will not address those questions as part of its probe.
House Republicans have said they plan to conduct their own parallel investigation of Jan. 6, but it’s unclear what they will do. McCarthy offered no further details on timing nor structure of the investigation Tuesday.
Some members in McCarthy’s conference appeared indifferent to the idea of pursing their own investigation and shrugged off the police officers’ condemnation of lawmakers who have downplayed the events of Jan. 6.
“I don’t know of anybody that’s tried to downplay it and other than, you know, their gross exaggeration that it’s the worst attack on democracy since the Civil War,” said Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), who has downplayed the severity of the attack.
Gohmert joined other Republican lawmakers, including Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida, at a news conference outside the Justice Department on Tuesday where they attempted to call out what they claimed is unjust treatment of defendants detained after the attack at the U.S. Capitol. They accused the department of withholding information on detention conditions and treating the defendants unfairly.
The news conference ended quickly due to hecklers.
Several Republicans voiced their anger at Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) for the apostasy by opposing Trump and accepting spots on the committee from Pelosi against the wishes of leadership.
Inside the weekly meeting of House Republicans, the far-right flank of McCarthy’s caucus homed in on ways to penalize Cheney and Kinzinger.
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), a member of the House Freedom Caucus, stood and offered a rule change that would not allow any Republican to continue to remain officially in the conference if they ever accepted committee assignments from the Democrats, according to three Republicans familiar with the meeting.
The proposal from Biggs, if adopted, would effectively expel Cheney and Kinzinger from the conference, taking away their committee assignments and other honorifics that come through such membership.
McCarthy has suggested that Cheney could face some punishment for working with Pelosi on this issue, but he has declined to say if he would actively support such an effort. Biggs’s proposal will be referred to a committee of Republicans to study it, giving GOP leaders time to let the matter be handled.
Both Cheney and Kinzinger dismissed their Republican critics, saying they are focused on an attack they have characterized as a serious threat to democracy.
“Do we hate our political adversaries more than we love our country and revere our Constitution? I pray that is not the case,” Cheney said during her opening statement. “I pray that we all remember our children are watching as we carry out this solemn and sacred duty entrusted to us. Our children will know who stood for truth and they will inherit a nation. We hand to them a republic if we can keep it.”
Some GOP members expressed little appetite for retaliating against Cheney and Kinzinger. Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.), who was initially appointed by McCarthy to the select committee, said he didn’t support expelling them from the conference or stripping his two colleagues of their committee assignments.
“Political retribution and political consequences come in the second Tuesday of November every other year,” said Armstrong. “And I just think that they’re elected to represent a constituency and they have every right to do it.”
Armstrong, along with Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), were some of the few Republicans to publicly sympathize with and come out in support of the police officers who delivered testimony Tuesday. Davis referred to U.S. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn as “a friend,” and heralded the officers for telling their stories and reminding the American public that “those who wanted to hurt our officers, and hurt people inside this Capitol need to be held to the fullest extent of the law accountable for the crimes committed.”
The top two Senate Republicans, McConnell and Minority Whip John Thune (S.D.) both said Tuesday they were busy and did not watch the hearing. Asked about the officers’ testimony, they did not engage in the same whataboutism and blame-deflecting as top House Republicans, but neither man expressed regret for their party’s handling of the aftermath.
McConnell pointed reporters to his previous statements condemning the riot and Trump’s role in fomenting it. “I don’t see how I could have expressed myself more forthrightly than I did on that occasion, and I stand by everything I said,” he said.
Thune praised the four officers — “I have great respect for what they went through, what they did, what they do, and I think what they say needs to be taken very seriously” — but also blamed Pelosi for politicizing the probe without answering a question about whether Senate Republicans regret not backing a bipartisan commission that would have given GOP appointees equal representation.
Asked at the hearing what he wanted the committee to achieve through its investigation, Dunn expressed his belief that people beyond the attackers should be held responsible, comparing the mob to a hit man.
“If a hit man is hired and he kills somebody, the hit man goes to jail,” he said. “But not only does the hit man go to jail, but the person who hired them does. It was an attack carried out on Jan. 6 and a hit man sent them. I want you to get to the bottom of that,” he said.
Kim Bellware, Paul Kane, Mike DeBonis and Mariana Alfaro contributed to this report.
By Jacqueline Alemany
Jacqueline Alemany is the author of Power Up, an early morning newsletter featuring news critical to the nation’s many power centers, including the White House, Capitol Hill, government agencies, the Pentagon and more. She joined The Washington Post in 2018 after six years at CBS News. Twitter
By Marianna Sotomayor
Marianna Sotomayor covers the House of Representatives, primarily focusing on Democratic and Republican leadership, for The Washington Post. Sotomayor joined The Post in 2021 from NBC News. Twitter
By John Wagner
John Wagner is a national reporter on The Post's new breaking political news team. He previously covered the Trump White House. During the 2016 presidential election, he focused on the Democratic campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley. He also chronicled Maryland government for more than a decade. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/january-6-republicans-trump/2021/07/27/79a29e38-eef4-11eb-bf80-e3877d9c5f06_story.html
Racism of rioters takes center stage in Jan. 6 hearing
By AARON MORRISON
today
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-government-and-politics-riots-race-and-ethnicity-capitol-siege-b3eb4a7f1a0d183c9db89a08c84a70cb
It had only been hinted at in previous public examinations of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection: Scores of rioters attacked police officers not just with makeshift weapons, stun guns and fists, but with racist slurs and accusations of treason.
Four officers, two from the U.S. Capitol Police and two from the D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department, on Tuesday detailed the racism and bigotry they encountered during the violent assault on the Capitol. Their direct, harrowing accounts laid out the hours when the pro-police sentiment of supporters of former President Donald Trump was pushed aside, consumed by the fury of wanting to keep him in the White House.
Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn told lawmakers about an exchange he had with rioters, who disputed that President Joe Biden defeated Trump in the last presidential election. When Dunn, who is Black, argued with the rioters that he voted for Biden and that his vote should be counted, a crowd began hurling the N-word at him.
“One woman in a pink ‘MAGA’ (Make America Great Again) shirt yelled, ‘You hear that, guys, this n——— voted for Joe Biden!’” said Dunn, who has served more than a dozen years on the Capitol Police force.
“Then the crowd, perhaps around 20 people, joined in, screaming “Boo! F——— n—— !” he testified. He said no one had ever called him the N-word while he was in uniform. That night, he sat in the Capitol Rotunda and wept.
Ahead of Tuesday’s hearing, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, a member of the panel, said the Capitol and D.C. officers would provide insight into “what it was like to be on the front lines.”
However, Dunn was also speaking to the experience of being an African American police officer, who make up 29% of roughly 2,300 officers and civilians serving on the Capitol Police force.
Dunn said another Black male officer told him that, while confronting the rioters on Jan. 6, he was told to “Put your gun down and we’ll show you what kind of n—— you really are!”
The panel’s chairman, Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, pressed Dunn further about how he felt being an African American officer facing down racists and enduring racial slurs in the halls of democracy.
“It’s just so disheartening that people like that will attack you just for the color of your skin,” Dunn replied. “Once I was able to process it, it hurt. My blood is red. I’m an American citizen. I’m a police officer. I’m a peace officer.”
While Black Americans make up roughly 13% of the U.S. population, they were roughly 11% of all police officers in 2016 across a sampling of 18,000 local law enforcement agencies in the U.S., according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Over 71% of officers were white in 2016.
It’s this kind of treatment endured by Black men and women in law enforcement that policing experts say makes recruitment and diversity among U.S. police forces challenging. The law enforcement profession has also struggled with its origins in America, dating back to the slave patrols in the early 1700s formed to capture people who escaped slavery and terrorize the enslaved into submission. Although many African Americans have served valiantly on local and federal police forces since the civil rights movement, data shows Black Americans are still arrested in disproportionate numbers and more likely to be fatally shot by police.
Another Capitol Police officer, Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, wiped away tears as he recalled the story of his immigration to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic, only to face fellow Americans who considered him a traitor for defending the Capitol on Jan. 6.
“It was very disappointing,” Gonell said. “I saw many officers fighting for their lives against people, rioters (and) citizens, turning against us.”
Gonell, an Iraq War veteran, also called out the disparate law enforcement response to the overwhelmingly white crowd of rioters and the response to racial justice protests in 2020 that followed the murder of George Floyd and the police involved deaths of other Black Americans.
“As America and the world watched in horror what was happening to us at the Capitol, we did not receive timely reinforcements and support we needed,” he said. “In contrast, during the Black Lives Matter protest last year, U.S. Capitol Police had all the support we needed and more. Why the different response?”
Indeed, law enforcement agencies in dozens of cities last year showed overwhelming force toward BLM demonstrators. Many used chemical dispersants, rubber bullets and hand-to-hand combat with largely peaceful crowds and some unruly vandals and looters. By the end of 2020, police had made more than 14,000 arrests.
In January, as images and video emerged from the attacks on the Capitol, a racist and anti-Semitic element among the rioters became apparent. One man was pictured inside of the Capitol building carrying a Confederate battle flag.
And in the nearly seven months since the attacks, more video investigations revealed several rioters had flashed white supremacist gang signs and “white power” hand signals during the insurrection.
Gonell also called out the hypocrisy he perceived from many of the rioters who profess to support law enforcement — “the thin blue line” — but did not agree with those protesting over Floyd last summer.
“There are some who expressed outrage when someone simply kneeled for social justice during the national anthem,” Dunn said. “Where are those same people expressing outrage to condemn the violent attack on law enforcement officers, the U.S. Capitol, and our American democracy?”
“I’m still waiting for that,” he said.
___
Morrison reported from New York. He is a member of AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow him on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/aaronlmorrison.
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-government-and-politics-riots-race-and-ethnicity-capitol-siege-b3eb4a7f1a0d183c9db89a08c84a70cb
Turn off, turn on: Simple step can thwart top phone hackers
By ALAN SUDERMAN
19 minutes ago
https://apnews.com/article/technology-government-and-politics-hacking-752db867fafbaba1f9cc34f7588944c5
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — As a member of the secretive Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Angus King has reason to worry about hackers. At a briefing by security staff this year, he said he got some advice on how to help keep his cellphone secure.
Step One: Turn off phone.
Step Two: Turn it back on.
That’s it. At a time of widespread digital insecurity it turns out that the oldest and simplest computer fix there is — turning a device off then back on again — can thwart hackers from stealing information from smartphones.
Regularly rebooting phones won’t stop the army of cybercriminals or spy-for-hire firms that have sowed chaos and doubt about the ability to keep any information safe and private in our digital lives. But it can make even the most sophisticated hackers work harder to maintain access and steal data from a phone.
“This is all about imposing cost on these malicious actors,” said Neal Ziring, technical director of the National Security Agency’s cybersecurity directorate.
The NSA issued a “best practices” guide for mobile device security last year in which it recommends rebooting a phone every week as a way to stop hacking.
King, an independent from Maine, says rebooting his phone is now part of his routine.
“I’d say probably once a week, whenever I think of it,” he said.
Almost always in arm’s reach, rarely turned off and holding huge stores of personal and sensitive data, cellphones have become top targets for hackers looking to steal text messages, contacts and photos, as well as track users’ locations and even secretly turn on their video and microphones.
“I always think of phones as like our digital soul,” said Patrick Wardle, a security expert and former NSA researcher.
The number of people whose phones are hacked each year is unknowable, but evidence suggests it’s significant. A recent investigation into phone hacking by a global media consortium has caused political uproars in France, India, Hungary and elsewhere after researchers found scores of journalists, human rights activists and politicians on a leaked list of what were believed to be potential targets of an Israeli hacker-for-hire company.
The advice to periodically reboot a phone reflects, in part, a change in how top hackers are gaining access to mobile devices and the rise of so-called “zero-click” exploits that work without any user interaction instead of trying to get users to open something that’s secretly infected.
“There’s been this evolution away from having a target click on a dodgy link,” said Bill Marczak, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, an internet civil rights watchdog at the University of Toronto.
Typically, once hackers gain access to a device or network, they look for ways to persist in the system by installing malicious software to a computer’s root file system. But that’s become more difficult as phone manufacturers such as Apple and Google have strong security to block malware from core operating systems, Ziring said.
“It’s very difficult for an attacker to burrow into that layer in order to gain persistence,” he said.
That encourages hackers to opt for “in-memory payloads” that are harder to detect and trace back to whoever sent them. Such hacks can’t survive a reboot, but often don’t need to since many people rarely turn their phones off.
“Adversaries came to the realization they don’t need to persist,” Wardle said. “If they could do a one-time pull and exfiltrate all your chat messages and your contact and your passwords, it’s almost game over anyways, right?”
A robust market currently exists for hacking tools that can break into phones. Some companies like Zerodium and Crowdfence publicly offer millions of dollars for zero-click exploits.
And hacker-for-hire companies that sell mobile-device hacking services to governments and law enforcement agencies have proliferated in recent years. The most well known is the Israeli-based NSO Group, whose spyware researchers say has been used around the world to break into the phones of human rights activists, journalists, and even members of the Catholic clergy.
NSO Group is the focus of the recent exposés by a media consortium that reported the company’s spyware tool Pegasus was used in 37 instances of successful or attempted phone hacks of business executives, human rights activists and others, according to The Washington Post.
The company is also being sued in the U.S. by Facebook for allegedly targeting some 1,400 users of its encrypted messaging service WhatsApp with a zero-click exploit.
NSO Group has said it only sells its spyware to “vetted government agencies” for use against terrorists and major criminals. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
The persistence of NSO’s spyware used to be a selling point of the company. Several years ago its U.S.-based subsidy pitched law enforcement agencies a phone hacking tool that would survive even a factory reset of a phone, according to documents obtained by Vice News.
But Marczak, who has tracked NSO Group’s activists closely for years, said it looks like the company first starting using zero-click exploits that forgo persistence around 2019.
He said victims in the WhatsApp case would see an incoming call for a few rings before the spyware was installed. In 2020, Marczak and Citizen Lab exposed another zero-click hack attributed to NSO Group that targeted several journalists at Al Jazeera. In that case, the hackers used Apple’s iMessage texting service.
“There was nothing that any of the targets reported seeing on their screen. So that one was both completely invisible as well as not requiring any user interaction,” Marczak said.
With such a powerful tool at their disposal, Marczak said rebooting your phone won’t do much to stop determined hackers. Once you reboot, they could simply send another zero-click.
“It’s sort of just a different model, it’s persistence through reinfection,” he said.
The NSA’s guide also acknowledges that rebooting a phone works only sometimes. The agency’s guide for mobile devices has an even simpler piece of advice to really make sure hackers aren’t secretly turning on your phone’s camera or microphone to record you: don’t carry it with you.
https://apnews.com/article/technology-government-and-politics-hacking-752db867fafbaba1f9cc34f7588944c5
Laurence Tribe @tribelaw Consider this:
Jodie is @HeyJudejo28
@HeyJudejo28 Replying to
@ProjectLincoln
10:40 AM · Jul 28, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
Consider this: https://t.co/hpcOUbS2tE
— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) July 28, 2021
DOJ declines to back Mo Brooks's defense against Swalwell's Capitol riot lawsuit
BY HARPER NEIDIG - 07/27/21 09:03 PM EDT
https://thehill.com/regulation/565175-doj-declines-to-back-mo-brookss-defense-against-swalwells-capitol-riot-lawsuit
The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Tuesday declined to back a Republican lawmaker's legal defense against a lawsuit accusing him of helping to foment the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
DOJ lawyers said in a court filing that they were declining to certify Rep. Mo Brooks's (R-Ala.) claim that he was acting within the scope of his official duties as a member of Congress when he delivered a speech to Trump supporters at the Jan. 6 "Stop the Steal" rally.
"The record indicates that Brooks’s appearance at the January 6 rally was campaign activity, and it is no part of the business of the United States to pick sides among candidates in federal elections," the filing reads.
Brooks has argued that his conduct at the center of the case falls squarely within his scope of official employment and is thus legally protected from such civil suits.
"In sum and substance, Brooks drafted, practiced and gave his Ellipse Rally Speech at the request of the White House and pursuant to Brooks’ duties and job as a congressman concerning presidential election dispute resolution obligations imposed on Congress by the U.S. Constitution," Brooks wrote in a court filing earlier this month.
The lawsuit was filed earlier this year by Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) against Brooks, former President Trump and Rudy Giuliani, accusing them of inciting the riot that overran the Capitol.
Had the DOJ agreed with Brooks and convinced a court that he was acting within his official duties, the Alabama Republican would have effectively been immune from the lawsuit.
Trump critics had worried in the weeks leading up to the DOJ's Tuesday deadline that the department would endorse Brooks's argument and insulate him from accountability for what they see as incitement.
But in a 30-page filing Tuesday night, the DOJ roundly rejected Brooks's arguments.
"Indeed, although the scope of employment related to the duties of a Member of Congress is undoubtedly broad and there are some activities that cannot be neatly cleaved into official and personal categories, Brooks’s request for certification and substitution of the United States for campaign-related conduct appears to be unprecedented," the filing reads. "And in a variety of contexts involving state and local elected officials, courts have routinely rejected claims that campaigning and electioneering activities fall within the scope of official employment."
One section of the legal brief has a heading that reads, "Instigating an attack on the United States Capitol would not be within the scope of a Member of Congress’s employment."
A spokesman for Brooks did not immediately respond when asked for comment.
https://thehill.com/regulation/565175-doj-declines-to-back-mo-brookss-defense-against-swalwells-capitol-riot-lawsuit
The Trump wing just keeps sinking deeper into conspiracy theories
Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large
Updated 1813 GMT (0213 HKT) July 27, 2021
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/27/politics/donald-trump-joe-biden-mike-lindell-ronny-jackson/index.html
(CNN) Did you know that Joe Biden is probably going to resign as president sometime in the next month? Maybe, specifically, on August 13? While that's totally ridiculous -- Biden isn't resigning and, in fact, all signs point to him running for a second term in 2024 -- talk of Biden resigning has taken off among some of former President Donald Trump's most prominent supporters of late.
Here's MyPillow founder Mike Lindell in an interview Monday with none other than Steve Bannon:
"Once we have this symposium, how are the pathways of Donald Trump coming back? The first one would be, once we have the symposium, by the night of the 12th or the morning of the 13th, if everyone has seen it, including the administration that's in there now that didn't win, maybe, you know, Biden and Harris would say, hey, we're here to protect the country and resign!"
Lindell is hosting a cyber-symposium that ends on August 12 aimed at looking into various debunked theories about election fraud. And yes, he is trying to pump up interest in said symposium with these outlandish claims.
Then there's Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, Trump's former physician in the White House, who is irresponsibly speculating that either Biden will be forced to resign or will have the 25th Amendment invoked against him due to his health.
"There's something seriously going on with this man right now, and, you know, I think that he's either going to resign, they're going to convince him to resign from office at some point in the near future for medical issues or they're going to have to use the 25th Amendment to get rid of this man right now," Jackson told Fox News' Sean Hannity last week.
(Sidebar: How does the American Medical Association allow Jackson, a licensed physician, to make outrageous and false claims about the health of the sitting president of the United States? But I digress...)
What to make of these laughable predictions of imminent resignation?
Simply this: The Republican Party has enabled Trump at every turn as he spent the last six years encouraging and fomenting conspiracy theories -- from Ted Cruz's father being involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the 2020 Iowa caucuses somehow being stolen to Donald Trump's phones in Trump Tower being tapped by the Obama administration to the Big Lie that Trump actually won the 2020 election -- somehow.
Meanwhile, an utter lack of trust among Trump supporters in the mainstream media, as well as a general collapse of a shared reality that stretches beyond partisan lines, have also played key roles in allowing such fantasies to fester.
Need evidence of how dangerous the promulgation of conspiracy theories actually is? Look no further than today's hearing of the House select committee to examine what happened during the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. That insurrection, pushed by Trump, led to more than 100 police officers injured, five people killed and more than 500 charged by the Justice Department.
When the soil has been tilled for so long -- and so fruitfully by conservative media and some of the president's most outspoken supporters -- is it any surprise that we see ridiculous claims like Biden's resignation gain oxygen among the Trump base?
It is not. Which doesn't make it any better. But does reveal that Trump's influence within the GOP -- and the country at large -- remains vast in spite of the fact that he no longer holds any elected office.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/27/politics/donald-trump-joe-biden-mike-lindell-ronny-jackson/index.html
First Lincoln Project ad on funders of the coup attempt
Lazar has been featured in at least half a dozen photos with Doug Mastriano, a Pennsylvania state senator who helped spread Trump’s lies about a stolen election and even chartered buses to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 using campaign cash. Mastriano and Lazar were pictured together on numerous occasions before the Capitol attack and were most recently photographed posing together at an event for Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani in May (at that time, Lazar’s photograph was featured on the FBI’s website).
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/samuel-lazar-fbi-doug-mastriano-trump-capitol-attack-jan-6_n_60be410be4b099fb31ca9350?ri18n=true
Lazar has been featured in at least half a dozen photos with Doug Mastriano, a Pennsylvania state senator who helped spread Trump’s lies about a stolen election and even chartered buses to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 using campaign cash. Mastriano and Lazar were pictured together on numerous occasions before the Capitol attack and were most recently photographed posing together at an event for Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani in May (at that time, Lazar’s photograph was featured on the FBI’s website).
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/samuel-lazar-fbi-doug-mastriano-trump-capitol-attack-jan-6_n_60be410be4b099fb31ca9350?ri18n=true
Ryan J. Reilly @ryanjreilly BREAKING: Trump fanatic Samuel Lazar has been arrested for attacking cops at the Capitol on Jan. 6. #FacePaintBlowhard
POLITICS
27/07/2021 16:01 BST | Updated 19 minutes ago
Trumper Who Wore ‘Back The Blue’ Shirt To Rally Arrested For Assaulting Officers On Jan. 6
Donald Trump supporter Samuel Lazar was FBI Capitol suspect no. 275 and was known to online sleuths as #FacePaintBlowhard.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/samuel-lazar-fbi-doug-mastriano-trump-capitol-attack-jan-6_n_60be410be4b099fb31ca9350?ri18n=true
4:03 PM · Jul 27, 2021·TweetDeck
THREAD
BREAKING: Trump fanatic Samuel Lazar has been arrested for attacking cops at the Capitol on Jan. 6. #FacePaintBlowhard https://t.co/PZqZtjcMyk
— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) July 27, 2021
MeidasTouch.com @MeidasTouch· 9h Breaking: In leaked TikTok videos, Matt Gaetz's future sister-in-law says Gaetz is attracted to girls as young as age 15, tried to set her up with much older men, and gaslighted her when she confronted him about his behavior.
VIDEO
Breaking: In leaked TikTok videos, Matt Gaetz's future sister-in-law says Gaetz is attracted to girls as young as age 15, tried to set her up with much older men, and gaslighted her when she confronted him about his behavior. pic.twitter.com/LDU5MfJuZz
— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) July 27, 2021
Breaking: In leaked TikTok videos, Matt Gaetz's future sister-in-law says Gaetz is attracted to girls as young as age 15, tried to set her up with much older men, and gaslighted her when she confronted him about his behavior. pic.twitter.com/LDU5MfJuZz
— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) July 27, 2021
Inside a KKK murder plot: Grab him up, take him to the river
By JASON DEAREN
an hour ago
https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-business-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-only-on-ap-2b4106de3ebcbfae85948439a7056031
PALATKA, Fla. (AP) — Joseph Moore breathed heavily, his face slick with nervous sweat. He held a cellphone with a photo of a man splayed on the floor; the man appeared dead, his shirt torn apart and his pants wet.
Puffy dark clouds blocked the sun as Moore greeted another man, who’d pulled up in a metallic blue sedan. They met behind an old fried chicken shack in rural north Florida.
“KIGY, my brother,” Moore said. It was shorthand for “Klansman, I greet you.”
Birds chirped in a tree overhead and traffic whooshed by on a nearby road, muddling the sound of their voices, which were being recorded secretly.
Moore brought the phone to David “Sarge” Moran, who wore a camouflage-print baseball hat emblazoned with a Confederate flag patch and a metal cross. His arms and hands were covered in tattoos.
A nervous, giddy chuckle escaped Moran’s mouth.
“Oh, shit. I love it,” he said. “Motherf----- pissed on himself. Good job.”
“Is that what y’all wanted?”
“Yes, hell yeah,” Moran said, his voice pitched high.
It was 11:30 a.m. on March 19, 2015, and the klansmen were celebrating what they thought was a successful murder in Florida.
But the FBI had gotten wind of the murder plot. A confidential informant had infiltrated the group, and his recordings provide a rare, detailed look at the inner workings of a modern klan cell and a domestic terrorism probe.
That investigation would unearth another secret: An unknown number of klansmen were working inside the Florida Department of Corrections, with significant power over inmates, Black and white.
___
Thomas Driver took a pull off a cigarette, and exhaled the smoke at Warren Williams. Driver, a white prison guard, and Williams, a Black inmate, faced each other.
It was a humid August day in 2013, about a year and a half before the clandestine murder photo reveal.
The two men stood in a sweltering prison dorm room in rural north Florida’s Reception and Medical Center, a barbed wire-encircled complex built among farmland an hour south of the Georgia state line. The RMC is the state’s prison hospital where new inmates are processed.
Williams, a quiet, 6-foot-1, 210-pound inmate, suffered from severe anxiety and depression. He was serving a year, records show, for striking a police officer. Williams agreed to plead no contest in exchange for a reduced sentence, and an order to receive a mental health evaluation and treatment under county supervision.
He found himself in front of Driver after he lost his identification badge, a prison infraction.
Williams told Driver to stop blowing smoke at him, he’d report later. Driver blew more, and Williams told him to stop again.
When Driver continued, Williams jumped him and they hit the ground. As they struggled, Williams bit Driver and gained an advantage, according to both men’s accounts of the fight.
A group of guards responded, and beat Williams so badly that he required hospitalization, his mother and lawyer said.
Driver, in turn, needed a battery of precautionary tests for HIV and hepatitis C because of the bite. They would all be negative, but the ordeal enraged him.
He wanted revenge.
– VIDEO: Inside a KKK plot to kill a Black man
___
More than a year later, in December 2014, a wooden cross ignited in a field hidden by tall trees.
Dozens of hooded klansmen gathered around for a “klonklave,” a meeting of the Florida Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Members of a biker club were being “naturalized” as citizens into the Invisible Empire of the Klan.
Security was tight. The bikers were worried about recording devices, and were checking people.
Driver, known by his fellow klansmen as “Brother Thomas,” was there with Sarge Moran, who was also a prison guard. Moran had worked for the Florida Department of Corrections for decades; he’d also been a klansman for years. He had been disciplined more than once by the corrections department for violent incidents, according to records obtained by The AP. Despite this, Moran had been kept in a position of power over inmates.
Moran and Driver wanted to discuss an urgent matter with Joseph Moore, the group’s “Grand Night Hawk,” in charge of security.
Moore was a U.S. Army veteran. When not in his klan “helmet,” he often wore a baseball hat pinned with military medals, including a Purple Heart. He commanded respect and fear from his klan brothers, and often regaled them with stories of his work killing targets overseas as part of an elite U.S. military squad.
The three men moved away for a private talk, and had another klansman keep watch nearby so they weren’t overheard.
The guards gave Moore a paper with a picture of Williams, his name and other information. Driver described the fight, and how he and his family had worried for weeks about a false positive test for hepatitis C.
“Do you want him six feet under?” Moore asked.
Driver and Moran looked at each other, then said yes.
The very existence of a plot to murder a Black man by Ku Klux Klan members working in law enforcement evokes past tragedies like the 1964 ”Mississippi Burning? case, where three civil rights workers were slain by klansmen. Sheriff’s deputy Cecil Price Sr. was implicated in the deaths and was convicted of violating the young men’s civil rights.
Today, researchers believe that tens of thousands of Americans belong to groups identified with white supremacist extremism, the klan being just one. These groups’ efforts to infiltrate law enforcement have been documented repeatedly in recent years and called an “epidemic” by legal scholars.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said at a March Senate hearing that “racially motivated violent extremism,” mostly by white supremacists, accounts for the most rapidly rising share of domestic terrorism cases.
“That same group of people ... have been responsible for the most lethal attacks over the last, say, decade,” Wray added.
During the Jan. 6 insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, “Thin Blue Line” flags flew alongside white supremacist signs and banners, and more than 30 current and former police officers from a number of departments around the nation were identified as attendees.
“White supremacist groups have historically engaged in strategic efforts to infiltrate and recruit from law enforcement,” said an FBI document released by a congressional committee in September, about four months before the Capitol riots. In the intelligence assessment, written in 2006, the FBI said some in law enforcement were volunteering “professional resources to white supremacist causes with which they sympathize.”
While the FBI would not confirm if it had produced a more recent assessment of the ongoing threat, recent cases have confirmed that the problem the agency described in 2006 continues.
In November, a Georgia deputy was caught on an FBI wiretap boasting about targeting Black people for felony arrests so they couldn’t vote, and recruiting colleagues into a group called “Shadow Moses.” In 2017, an interim police chief in Oklahoma was found to have ties to an international neo-Nazi group. In 2014, two officers in Fruitland Park, Florida, were outed as klansmen and forced to quit.
Despite repeated examples, white supremacists who are fired from law enforcement jobs after being discovered can often find jobs with other agencies. There is no database officials can check to see if someone’s been identified as an extremist.
In 2020, an officer in Anniston, Alabama, was hired by a county sheriff’s department just a few years after the Southern Poverty Law Center posted a video of him speaking at a white nationalist League of the South meeting.
“There’s no trail that follows them even if they’re fired. It’s spreading the problem around,” said Greg Ehrie, former chief of the FBI’s New York domestic terrorism squad, who now works with the Anti-Defamation League.
Domestic terrorism experts have been calling for better screening to help identify extremists before they’re hired. Some states, such as California and Minnesota, have tried to pass new screening laws, only to be prevented by police unions, whose legal challenges argued successfully that such queries violate free speech rights.
Without screening, white supremacists who get inside can operate with impunity, targeting Black and other people of color, and recruiting others who share their views.
“Unless your name ends up in an FBI wiretap” an officer will go undetected, said Fred Burton, a former special agent with the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service. “There are loopholes in the background investigative process.”
___
..
MUCH MORE
https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-business-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-only-on-ap-2b4106de3ebcbfae85948439a7056031
Trump officials can testify in Jan. 6 inquiries, Justice Dept. says.
By Katie Benner
July 27, 2021, 8:17 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/27/us/politics/trump-officials-jan-6-testify.html
The Justice Department notified former Trump administration officials this week that they could testify to the various committees investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, according to a letter obtained by The New York Times.
Witnesses can give “unrestricted testimony” to the House Oversight and Reform Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, the department said in a letter this week. Both panels are scrutinizing the Trump administration’s efforts to overturn the election in its final days and the events leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The decision runs counter to the views of former President Donald J. Trump, who has argued that his decisions and deliberations are protected by executive privilege. It also sets up a potential court battle if Mr. Trump sues in a bid to block any testimony.
In that case, the courts could be forced to decide the extent to which a former president can be protected by privilege. Mr. Trump’s supporters have argued that a president cannot function if privilege can be taken away by a successor, exposing sensitive decision-making and opening up the previous administration to scrutiny.
But others say that the matter is settled law, and that privilege does not apply to extraordinary circumstances.
In his last weeks in office, Mr. Trump pressured Justice Department officials to help him overturn the results of the election, asking them to open investigations into claims of vote tampering that investigators said they had already looked into and determined to be untrue.
“Department lawyers, including those who have left the department, are obligated to protect nonpublic information they learned in the course of their work,” the Justice Department said in a letter signed by Bradley Weinsheimer, a top ranking career official in the deputy attorney general’s office.
“The extraordinary events in this matter constitute exceptional circumstances warranting an accommodation to Congress,” he wrote, noting that the information sought by Congress was directly related to the question of whether Mr. Trump tried to use the Justice Department to advance his “personal political interests” by subverting the results of the election.
Katie Benner covers the Justice Department. She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @ktbenner
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/27/us/politics/trump-officials-jan-6-testify.html
Richard Tofel @dicktofel Starting this morning, @propublica is posting all the videos introduced in the DC federal criminal cases against the January 6 insurrectionists. Thanks to our 15 press co-litigants who joined us in getting these videos released.
Video Evidence Shown in the Capitol Insurrection Criminal Cases
by ProPublica, July 27, 2021
ProPublica and a coalition of 15 other news organizations including The Washington Post, The Associated Press, CBS and NBC have been suing for access to the video exhibits shown in the criminal cases against the accused Jan. 6 rioters. The coalition has been arguing for access before a series of federal judges in the District of Columbia, and the Department of Justice has been sending us new videos as we win our applications. Below we’ve organized these videos by case, and they are shown exactly as given to us by the DOJ. We’ll add more videos as we get them. Related: What Parler Saw During the Attack on the Capitol
https://projects.propublica.org/jan-6-video-evidence/
11:12 AM · Jul 27, 2021·Twitter for iPad
THREAD
Starting this morning, @propublica is posting all the videos introduced in the DC federal criminal cases against the January 6 insurrectionists. Thanks to our 15 press co-litigants who joined us in getting these videos released. https://t.co/mXyFBMAaFG
— Richard Tofel (@dicktofel) July 27, 2021
"Isn't Paxton under indictment?"
#SaveOurDemocracy @cindycrum ·44m Replying to @LarrySabato
Isn't Paxton under indictment?
Show replies
S. B. Roberts
@maravillage44
·
1h
Replying to @LarrySabato
Of course. A state grand jury indicted Paxton on 3 two counts of securities fraud and 1 count of failing to register with state securities regulators. Paxton's indictment marked the first such criminal indictment of a Texas Attorney General in thirty-two years.
2:16 PM · Jul 27, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
Donald Trump just endorsed incumbent Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) over the GOP primary challenger, George P. Bush—who sold out his own family to kiss Trump’s ass. No hero in this tale, just a reminder that there’s no honor among thieves—and a deal with the devil can backfire. https://t.co/sRUg0qQpg4
— Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) July 27, 2021
Larry Sabato @LarrySabato·13h Donald Trump just endorsed incumbent Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) over the GOP primary challenger, George P. Bush—who sold out his own family to kiss Trump’s ass. No hero in this tale, just a reminder that there’s no honor among thieves—and a deal with the devil can backfire.
George P. Bush
@georgepbush
· Jul 12
The left’s out of control policies are eroding the fabric of our nation. It was great to see Pres. Trump today & discuss how we must come together as a party to restore America First Priorities. I appreciate his friendship & kind words as we work together to Keep America Great.
1:33 AM · Jul 27, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
Donald Trump just endorsed incumbent Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) over the GOP primary challenger, George P. Bush—who sold out his own family to kiss Trump’s ass. No hero in this tale, just a reminder that there’s no honor among thieves—and a deal with the devil can backfire. https://t.co/sRUg0qQpg4
— Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) July 27, 2021
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also had Secret Service Protection during the "Save America" rally of Trump loyalists on 6 JAN....
Texas Attorney General advances antifa conspiracy theory after Capitol riot
By Brandon Mulder
January 8, 2021
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jan/08/ken-paxton/texas-attorney-general-falsely-states-antifa-storm/
Not long after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton addressed a large "Save America" rally of Trump loyalists outside the White House on Wednesday, they marched on the Capitol and breached the building as Congress sought to ratify President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
But Paxton had his own ideas about the mob carrying pro-Trump flags and signs.
On Thursday morning, he took to Facebook to advance a conspiracy theory that the people who overtook the Capitol were not Trump supporters, but members of antifa.
"Those who stormed the capitol yesterday were not Trump supporters. They have been confirmed to be Antifa," Paxton wrote. "Violence is not the answer."
Paxton’s post cited two sources: a screenshot of a tweet by right-wing journalist Paul Sperry and a screenshot of a Washington Times article with the headline, "Facial recognition firm claims antifa infiltrated Trump protestors who stormed capitol."
On Wednesday, as Capitol Hill police removed the rioters from the Capitol, Paxton published something similar. People who stormed the building following a Trump rally "are not Trump supporters," he tweeted, citing the screenshot of Sperry’s tweet.
"BREAKING: Former F.B.I. agent on the ground at U.S. Capitol just texted me and confirmed that at least 1 ‘bus load’ of Antifa thugs infiltrated peaceful demonstrators as part of a false Trump flag ops," Sperry’s tweet reads.
Sperry's tweet has since been deleted. Sperry, a former Washington bureau chief for Investor's Business Daily, has authored several anti-Muslim books with titles like, "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington," and "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America." He has not responded to questions sent to him via email.
Paxton’s second source alleging that Wednesday’s mob is "confirmed to be Antifa," the Washington Times article, was published about 8:15 p.m. Wednesday by news and opinion writer Rowan Scarborough. The story sources an unnamed "retired military officer" who told the Times "that the firm XRVision used its software to do facial recognition of protesters and matched two Philadelphia Antifa members to two men inside the Senate."
The newspaper has since retracted the report, but not before Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Florida, cited it later that day on the House floor, saying that "some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters, they were masquerading as Trump supporters and were in fact members of the violent terrorist group antifa."
XRVision, a facial recognition technology company based in Singapore, issued a statement to PolitiFact and BuzzFeed News Thursday morning saying that the company sent the Washington Times a cease and desist letter asking it to retract the story and issue an apology. XRVision’s software identified two members of a Neo-Nazi organization and a Q-Anon supporter, not members of antifa. The company said it distributed that imagery to a handful of individuals for private consumption only.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jan/08/ken-paxton/texas-attorney-general-falsely-states-antifa-storm/
When Ransomware Group REvil Vanished, Its Victims Were Stranded
By Kartikay Mehrotra
27 July 2021, 11:45 BST
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-07-27/when-ransomware-group-revil-vanished-its-victims-were-stranded
Hi, this is Kartikay on the cyber team. Ransomware attacks always hurt—but perhaps never more so than when the victim is compromised through the very company they pay for IT and security services.
That’s what happened to the nearly 1,500 targets attacked through a vulnerability at Kaseya Ltd., an IT management and antivirus software provider. Eastern European hackers compromised Kaseya in early July, and then went on to infect its customers and, in turn, their customers en masse with ransomware made by the REvil hacking group.
The breach was ironic, but typical of the ransomware attacks that have increasingly roiled global business in recent months. Usually, after hackers take control of company networks, those networks are restored only when the company is able to tap its backup servers, or when it pays the hackers for a decryption key.
It was the aftermath of the Kaseya case where things got unusual. Two weeks after the initial attack, the REvil ransomware gang vanished from the internet. It’s still unclear exactly what happened to REvil. They may have been asked to cease operations by Russia at President Joe Biden’s insistence. Or maybe western law enforcement toppled their infrastructure. Or maybe they realized they’d bitten off more than they could chew and decided to lay low.
But while some celebrated the disappearance as a victory against cybercrime, many of REvil’s recent victims were left in purgatory, said John Hammond, senior security researcher at the cybersecurity firm Huntress.
Multiple recent victims, including some compromised in the Kaseya attack, were still waiting for REvil to help them restore access to their networks when the group went offline, Hammond said. They had either paid but were waiting for their decryption key when REvil went missing, or they very much wanted to pay, but by the time they negotiated a price, there was no one on the other end of the line to receive the cash.
“People that were in that unfortunate situation, it just really sucks,” Hammond said. “They reached out to anyone who could help, but it’s tough because they all came up empty handed.”
According to two people familiar with REvil’s targets, at least three victimized companies that were left in the lurch when the group went offline were able to fully restore operations using still-accessible backup files. Six others have partially restored services, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous discussing private information. But many of the rest of the victims—including manufacturers healthcare providers and private schools—were left to frantically reach out to their MSPs, competitors and cyber research firms in what was ultimately a fruitless hunt for a functional decryption key. Unfortunately, landing a key that works on multiple victim networks is extremely rare.
But all was not lost. Last week, about three weeks after the first attack, Kaseya announced that it had obtained a “universal decryptor key”—a tool the company said it has offered to all victims compromised by REvil malware via access to Kaseya. REvil had earlier offered this key for $70 million. On Monday, Kaseya said that it did not pay REvil or any other hacker group a ransom for access to it.
The company says it has since distributed the key widely, including to many of its 54 clients compromised in the attack. Those 54 have since been authorized to share the key with their own clients to connect as many of the nearly 1,500 victims as necessary, said Dana Liedholm, a spokesperson for Kaseya. She could not offer an estimate for the number of victims who have used the decryptor.
While Kaseya's clients may get some relief, the attack underscores deeper vulnerabilities in corporate America and beyond. By hacking an IT firm and cyber defender with special access to clients, bad actors were able to create a mass cyber-casualty event, the effects of which are still playing out. That could provide a blueprint for future, even more dangerous attacks—whether or not the hackers are there to collect. —Kartikay Mehrotra
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-07-27/when-ransomware-group-revil-vanished-its-victims-were-stranded
Twitter ignored Hitler and holocaust denial tweets as abuse ‘didn’t break rules’, antisemitism charity claims
By Rhiannon Williams
Technology Correspondent
July 27, 2021 12:07 pm (Updated 12:08 pm)
https://inews.co.uk/news/technology/twitter-campaign-against-antisemitism-1121733
Twitter is “neither capable or interested” in fighting antisemitism after allowing hundreds of abusive tweets including posts saying ‘Hitler was right’ and denying the holocaust to remain on its platform, its former charity partner has claimed.
The charity Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) accused the social media company of using it as “some sort of fig leaf” by briefly partnering with it after grime artist Wiley posted a stream of anti-Jewish tweets in July last year.
The CAA, which reported Wiley to the police at the time, said it was invited to become a ‘Twitter partner’ shortly after the incident.
Twitter partners are able to report abuse and other forms of problematic materials directly through the company’s ‘partner portal’ for review by human moderators instead of AI systems.
The charity compiled 1,000 antisemitic tweets, some of which featured the hashtag #HitlerWasRight, the phrase “Holohoax” and references to “fake Jewish Holocaust” and calls to “Gas the Jews” across a series of monthly reports submitted in December, January and February.
...
MORE
https://inews.co.uk/news/technology/twitter-campaign-against-antisemitism-1121733
Ryan Goodman @rgoodlaw Replying to @rgoodlaw 5. Why did Giuliani receive Secret Service protection on Jan. 6?
A little know fact revealed thanks to #FOIA release via
@CREWcrew
cc:
@WhitneyWReports
https://justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/January-6-Clearinghouse-US-Secret-Service-FOIA-CREW-June-29-2021-2.pdf
3:17 PM · Jul 26, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
5. Why did Giuliani receive Secret Service protection on Jan. 6?
— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) July 26, 2021
A little know fact revealed thanks to #FOIA release via @CREWcrew
cc: @WhitneyWReports https://t.co/C39JvX4lZW pic.twitter.com/NsVeGAlsVr
5. Why did Giuliani receive Secret Service protection on Jan. 6?
— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) July 26, 2021
A little know fact revealed thanks to #FOIA release via @CREWcrew
cc: @WhitneyWReports https://t.co/C39JvX4lZW pic.twitter.com/NsVeGAlsVr
Barb McQuade @BarbMcQuade Here are the questions the Jan 6 Committee should ask when it starts its hearings tomorrow.
@rgoodlaw, @JoyceWhiteVance , and I put this list together in @just_security.
Questions the January 6 Select Committee Should Ask Its Witnesses
https://www.justsecurity.org/77588/questions-the-january-6-select-committee-should-ask-its-witnesses/
1:53 PM · Jul 26, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
Here are the questions the Jan 6 Committee should ask when it starts its hearings tomorrow. @rgoodlaw, @JoyceWhiteVance, and I put this list together in @just_security. https://t.co/IWSaoIpFCG
— Barb McQuade (@BarbMcQuade) July 26, 2021
Trump friend Tom Barrack pleads not guilty in UAE lobbying case after being heckled as ‘traitor’
PUBLISHED MON, JUL 26 202111:29 AM EDTUPDATED 7 MIN AGO
Dan Mangan @_DANMANGAN
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/26/trump-friend-tom-barrack-set-for-arraignment-on-uae-lobbying-charges.html
KEY POINTS
*Private equity investor Thomas Barrack and a co-defendant pleaded not guilty in Brooklyn to federal charges of illegally lobbying his friend ex-President Donald Trump on behalf of the United Arab Emirates.
* As he entered the courthouse, Barrack was met by a man hoisting a sign saying “Traitor” in big black letters.
*Last Friday, Falcon Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company backed by Barrack, withdrew its registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, saying it was abandoning planned transactions.
Private equity investor Thomas Barrack and a business associate pleaded not guilty Monday through their lawyers in Brooklyn, New York, to federal charges of illegally lobbying his friend ex-President Donald Trump on behalf of the United Arab Emirates.
Barrack’s $250 million release bond was maintained by a judge during the arraignment.
The judge ordered Barrack, 74, to refrain from traveling on private aircraft and from conducting any foreign financial transactions, and to limit his domestic financial transactions to $50,000 or less.
Barrack, who will live in his residence in Aspen, Colorado, is allowed under the bond to travel only to southern California to visit his children, and to New York for court appearances.
As he entered the courthouse before his arraignment, Barrack was met by a man hoisting a sign saying “Traitor” in big black letters.
That’s the same message — wielded by what appeared to be the same person — that often greeted Trump’s 2016 campaign chief Paul Manafort and his ally Roger Stone during their federal criminal cases, which ended in convictions.
Those convictions later were voided when Trump pardoned both men shortly before leaving office.
Asked by a reporter how he would plead at this arraignment, Barrack replied, “Guys, I know you’re just doing your job — I’ll talk to you on the way out.”
Barrack had been jailed without bond until Friday, when a federal judge ordered him released on the $250 million bond, one of the largest criminal bails in history.
The bond is secured by $5 million cash, more than $21 million in securities, and by four properties owned by Barrack.
Since Barrack’s release, a judge ordered him to stay in the company of his lawyers. He also was fitted with an electronic bracelet with GPS monitoring.
Prosecutors in a detention memo last week had raised concerns that Barrack might flee to avoid the charges, given his holding of Lebanese citizenship and his access to a private jet.
Barrack, who chaired Trump’s inauguration committee, was arrested in Los Angeles Tuesday with a 27-year-old business associate, Matthew Grimes, on an indictment accusing them of secretly working to advance the interests of UAE with Trump’s 2016 campaign and then during his presidency.
Grimes was released on a $5 million bond on Friday, and was arraigned with Barrack on Monday.
Barrack, who never registered with the American government as an agent for the oil-rich UAE, is also charged with obstruction of justice and making multiple false statements during a June 2019 interview with federal law enforcement agents.
Prosecutors have said that as Barrack was promoting UAE’s interests with the Trump administration, he was informally advising U.S. officials on Middle East policy and was seeking appointment to a senior role in the U.S. government, including as special envoy to the Middle East.
The indictment also charges another man, UAE national Rashid Sultan Rashid Al Malik Alshahhi, 43, who remains at large.
Last Friday, Falcon Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company backed by Barrack, withdrew its registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, saying it was abandoning planned transactions.
The transactions had included an initial public offering of 25 million shares to raise $250 million for Falcon Acquisition, which was formed by Barrack’s family office Falcon Peak and TI Capital. The SPAC had planned to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange.
Barrack stepped down in 2020 as CEO of Colony Capital, a private equity firm he founded. He resigned as the firm’s executive chairman in April.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/26/trump-friend-tom-barrack-set-for-arraignment-on-uae-lobbying-charges.html
5 die, including deputy, in shootings at California home
32 minutes ago
https://apnews.com/article/shootings-california-439e0efa22a0cc6d94cb3ede6de675ff
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (AP) — A California sheriff’s deputy and four other people were killed in a weekend shooting in a San Joaquin Valley home, authorities said Monday.
The dead also include the suspected shooter and three people in the home who were apparently victims of the gunman, Kern County sheriff’s Lt. Joel Swanson told The Associated Press.
Several deputies were also wounded by shrapnel during the violence Sunday afternoon in Wasco, a small community in the middle of farm fields northwest of Bakersfield.
The slain deputy’s name was not immediately released but Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood was expected to hold a press conference to release further details.
According to initial reports, deputies who responded to a report of a shooting at the home came under fire but they were not harmed. A SWAT team was called in and its members were shot at as they approached the home, fatally wounding one of them.
https://apnews.com/article/shootings-california-439e0efa22a0cc6d94cb3ede6de675ff
Sedition Track @seditiontrack [UPDATE] Ryan Suleski has been indicted by a federal grand jury on *FIVE COUNTS*
#SeditionHasConsequences #SeditionHunters
Ryan Suleski charged on March 5, 2021
Click for latest case details. Suspects innocent until proven guilty.
seditiontracker.com
https://seditiontracker.com/suspects/ryan-suleski
5:19 PM · Jul 26, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
https://twitter.com/seditiontrack/status/1419693907600941058
Ryan S. Suleski
Age: 37
Arrested or charged on: March 10, 2021
Home state: Virginia
Charges
Violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds; obstruction of justice/Congress; knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds; theft of government property
What happened
In a TikTok video, Suleski said he was in the "initial wave of people" that forced their way into the Capitol, and that he was tear gas "grenaded" and hit by rubber bullets, according to the FBI. He also stated in a video "we got our point across. We showed how weak their defense was," the agency stated. Acting on tips, the FBI identified Suleski and interviewed him at his home on Jan. 18. The FBI stated Suleski admitted being inside the Capitol, but insisted he didn't take anything. However, court documents indicate agents who watched security video saw Suleski pick some documents up off the floor and put them into his backpack. The agents identified Suleski in the security footage by the clothing he was wearing in a video interview with the BBC at the Capitol.
Capitol riot arrests: See who's been charged across the U.S.
Dinah Pulver, Rachel Axon, Josh Salman, Katie Wedell and Erin Mansfield
Updated: 11:04 p.m., July 13, 2021
https://eu.usatoday.com/storytelling/capitol-riot-mob-arrests/
Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein calls Donald Trump an ‘American war criminal’
Louise Hall
Mon, July 26, 2021, 3:35 PM·2 min read
https://news.yahoo.com/watergate-reporter-carl-bernstein-calls-143529000.html
Veteran reporter Carl Bernstein has accused former President Donald Trump of being an “American war criminal” for his actions while in office.
Mr Bernstein, who did much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal that eventually led to the resignation of then President Richard Nixon, spoke with Brian Stelter on CNN on Sunday.
“When you’re talking about Trump you’re obviously talking about a kind of delusional madness … that is on a scale and a scope that we have never experienced in an American president in our history,” he said.
Mr Bernstein continued: “I think we need to calmly step back and maybe look at Trump in a different context. He is … our own American war criminal of a kind we’ve never experienced before.”
The host of Reliable Sources then quickly asked Mr Bernstein to explain what he meant by the accusation, and the reporter went on to list aspects of Mr Trump’s presidency that he believes are “criminal”.
“I think when we’re talking about Trump’s crime as an American war criminal in his own country that he has perpetrated upon our people,” he explained.
Mr Bernstein went on to reference the pandemic, saying “tens of thousands of people” died “because of his homicidal negligence”.
The reporter accused the former president of putting his own electoral interest above the health of Americans “as they were slaughtered” by the novel virus.
He also made reference to Mr Trump’s attempts to undermine the 2020 election and the 6 January riots, mentioning his “actions in terms of fermenting a coo to hold on to office”.
The Watergate reporter has been a vocal critic of the former president over the last year, having called him a “homicidal president” amid Mr Trump’s 2020 presidential election campaign.
At the time, in response to the comments, Mr Trump called Mr Bernstein “a nut job”, saying that he “has been a nut job for many years”.
At an event in Arizona over the weekend, the former president once again reiterated his baseless claims of election fraud in a bid to insert himself into an Arizona audit.
A number of officials have ruled there is no evidence there was any serious fraud in the 2020 election despite a host of lawsuits from Mr Trump’s team.
“Trump is not just political he transcends the political and we need to start looking at his crimes in that context,” Mr Bernstein said on Sunday.
The Independent has contacted the Office of Donald J Trump for comment.
Additional reporting by the Associated Press
https://news.yahoo.com/watergate-reporter-carl-bernstein-calls-143529000.html
Trump Inaugural Committee Chair Accused of Being UAE Agent to Be Arraigned Monday
Tom Barrack, 74, will be subject to electronic monitoring and largely confined to his residence after he is arraigned Monday in a New York courtroom
Published 4 hours ago • Updated 4 hours ago
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/trump-inaugural-committee-chair-accused-of-being-uae-agent-to-be-arraigned-monday/3174622/
The chair of former President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee is expected to be arraigned Monday in a New York courtroom.
Tom Barrack, 74, was ordered freed last week on $250 million bail to face charges he secretly worked as an agent for the United Arab Emirates to influence Trump’s foreign policy and he was subjected to electronic monitoring. He was arrested Tuesday in Los Angeles near his home.
Barrack is expected to plead not guilty to conspiring to influence U.S. policy on the UAE’s behalf during Trump’s 2016 campaign and while Trump was president. Barrack, the founder of private equity firm Colony Capital, was among three men charged in the case.
Prosecutors said Barrack used his long personal friendship with Trump to benefit the UAE without disclosing his ties to the U.S. government.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Patricia Donahue in Los Angeles ordered strict conditions for Barrack's release. He must surrender his passport, wear a GPS-monitor to track his whereabouts, limit travel between Southern California and New York City and obey a curfew.
Barrack is charged with conspiracy, obstruction of justice and making multiple false statements during a June 2019 interview with federal agents. Matthew Grimes, 27, a former executive at Barrack’s company from Aspen, Colorado, and Rashid al Malik, 43, a businessman from the United Arab Emirates who prosecutors said acted as a conduit to that nation’s rulers, were also charged in the seven-count indictment.
Grimes was ordered released on $5 million bail. Al Malik fled the U.S. three days after an April 2018 interview by law enforcement and remains at large, authorities said. He and is believed to be living somewhere in the Middle East.
Barrack is one of several of the former president’s associates to face criminal charges, including his former campaign chair, his former deputy campaign chair, his former chief strategist, his former national security adviser, his former personal lawyer and his company’s longtime chief financial officer.
Barrack was an informal adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign before becoming the inaugural committee chair.
He raised $107 million for the lavish celebration scrutinized both for its spending and for attracting numerous foreign officials and businesspeople looking to lobby the new administration. The inaugural committee was not implicated in the indictment.
After Trump took office, Barrack informally advised senior U.S. government officials on Middle East foreign policy. He also sought appointment as special envoy to the Middle East or U.S. ambassador to the UAE, prosecutors said.
He relayed sensitive information about developments within the Trump administration to UAE officials— including how senior U.S. officials felt about a yearslong boycott of Qatar conducted by the UAE and other Middle Eastern countries, prosecutors said.
He told al Malik that landing an official position within the administration would enable him to advance UAE interests, prosecutors said.
Such an appointment "would give ABU DHABI more power!” he wrote to al Malik, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors originally sought to detain Barrack because they said he owned a private jet and was a flight risk. They also noted he has citizenship in Lebanon, a country with no extradition treaty with the U.S.
Copyright AP - Associated Press
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/trump-inaugural-committee-chair-accused-of-being-uae-agent-to-be-arraigned-monday/3174622/
Merrick Garland, don’t politicize the pursuit of justice
Opinion by Jennifer Rubin Columnist
Today at 7:45 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/26/merrick-garland-dont-politicize-prosecutions/
On Tuesday, the Justice Department and the House of Representatives will file briefs explaining to a federal court whether each believes that Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) was acting within the scope of his employment when he allegedly incited the violent attack on the Capitol and sought to subvert the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6. This sounds absurd, but in effect Brooks is asking the Justice Department to certify that he was acting in the scope of his duties when he tried to overthrow the government. If he succeeds, he would be immune from suit, and the Justice Department would step in on behalf of the government in civil suits arising from the violent insurrection.
It would be a gross error and invitation for future insurrections if either the House or Justice Department agreed that Brooks is protected. How can encouraging a mob to disrupt the electoral college tabulation possibly be within Brooks’s duties? That would be akin to saying Gen. Robert E. Lee was acting within the scope of his duties in the U.S. Army when he attacked Union troops. Sedition is not within the scope of any official’s duties.
Constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe wrote last week, “If the attorney general decides to treat such action as merely one way of discharging official duties, then self-government will become a mirage, and those who are guilty of trashing it will have been placed beyond the reach of legal accountability to those they injure.” He argued, “That would mean that popular sovereignty is dead and the twin principles that no one is above the law and that every legal wrong deserves a remedy might as well be tossed into history’s dust heap.”
Tribe concluded:
* If [Attorney General Merrick] Garland comes even close to suggesting that the elected head of the executive branch and those members of Congress so beholden to him that they will join him in his crusade to “stop the steal,” as the president put it, are to be shielded by the Justice Department from liability — whether civil or criminal — for seeking to prevent Congress from peacefully certifying an election replacing that chief executive with a successor, our system of government will be in mortal peril. And it would be folly for Garland to pretend that saying Brooks was acting within his authority still leaves open the possibility of denying that Donald Trump was acting within his when that question is teed up for decision, as it shortly will be in all three cases. Brooks’s basic defense, after all, is that he — like the mob he was addressing — was just doing Trump’s bidding. If suing Brooks amounts to suing the federal government, then suing Trump does too. But to embrace that proposition is to embrace the quintessential dictatorial premise that the chief executive is the state. And to do that is to bring the American experiment in self-government to a tragic end.*
Rather than ignoring ample evidence of incitement, both the House and Garland should emphatically deny that either Brooks or Trump were acting in the scope of their duties. Brooks should be held responsible for any actionable conduct leading up to the Jan. 6 attack.
This issue comes to a head at a time when legal scholars and democracy advocates’ patience with Garland’s unwillingness to hold Trump and his cronies responsible for wrongdoing is wearing thin. Attorneys general are not invested with authority to satisfy political resentments or to return us to some perceived sense of “normal.” If Attorney General William P. Barr was wrong to base prosecutorial decisions on political considerations (protecting his boss), then it would be equally wrong for Garland to decide that for political reasons he should also protect the Trump team and avoid meritorious investigations and indictments.
We are not talking only about Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 or about possible misconduct (e.g., obstruction of justice, misleading courts) in the Justice Department that Garland seems determined to sweep under the rug. Trump’s attempts to strong-arm Michigan and Georgia election officials after he lost the 2020 election were not only a violation of his oath but also may have violated state and federal law prohibiting election fraud and manipulation.
In the case of Georgia, we have Trump on tape telling the secretary of state to “find” enough votes for him to win. What stronger indication of a serious election crime could possibly exist? So far the Justice Department seems to have left any investigation to the Fulton County prosecutor, who unsurprisingly has more pressing priorities. There is no legitimate reason for the feds’ refusal to investigate and, if warranted, prosecute Trump for conduct that no other president in history ever contemplated. If any other American’s participation in this set of facts would prompt a serious federal investigation, Garland must not exempt the former president. That is the meaning of “no one is above the law.”
Garland may think he is attempting to avoid politics by refusing prosecution of controversial cases stemming from the Trump years. If so, he has it backward. If the current president wants to pardon individuals from the previous administration for political reasons, that is his prerogative — not Garland’s. Especially when it comes to any post-election conduct abetting sedition and attempting to corrupt the ballot tabulation, we need an attorney general to aggressively pursue facts and bring actions against Trump and his supporters where warranted. If not, Garland would have inadvertently affirmed Trump’s argument that he was above the law.
Opinion by Jennifer Rubin
Jennifer Rubin writes reported opinion for The Washington Post. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/26/merrick-garland-dont-politicize-prosecutions/
Laurence Tribe @tribelaw·1m “There is no legitimate reason for the feds’ refusal to investigate and, if warranted, prosecute Trump for conduct that no other president in history ever contemplated.”
Opinion: Merrick Garland, don’t politicize the pursuit of justice
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/26/merrick-garland-dont-politicize-prosecutions/
THREAD
“There is no legitimate reason for the feds’ refusal to investigate and, if warranted, prosecute Trump for conduct that no other president in history ever contemplated.”https://t.co/ofWVRL2eUj
— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) July 26, 2021
Doctors, nurses and other health groups call for mandatory coronavirus vaccinations for health workers
The health and safety of the nation 'depends on it,’ says statement signed by 57 groups.
By Dan Diamond
Today at 8:33 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/07/26/mandatory-vaccinations-urged-health-workers/
Medical groups representing millions of doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other health workers on Monday called for mandatory vaccinations of all U.S. health personnel against the coronavirus, framing the move as a moral imperative as new infections mount sharply.
“We call for all health care and long-term care employers to require their employees to be vaccinated against covid-19,” the American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association and 55 other groups wrote in a joint statement shared with The Washington Post. “The health and safety of U.S. workers, families, communities, and the nation depends on it.”
The statement — issued by many groups calling for a mandate for the first time — represents an increasingly tough stance by the medical and public health establishment amid the sluggish pace of national vaccinations. It comes as new cases rip through the nation, driven by the hyper-transmissible delta variant. Confirmed coronavirus infections have nearly quadrupled during July, from about 13,000 cases per day at the start of the month to more than 50,000 now, according to The Post’s tracking. Hospital leaders in states such as Alabama, Florida and Missouri have implored holdouts to get vaccinated, citing data that the shots prevent hospitalizations and even death.
But many workers in the health field remain unvaccinated, despite having priority access to coronavirus vaccines, which first became available in December. More than 38 percent of nursing home staff were not fully vaccinated as of July 11, despite caring for patients at elevated risk from the coronavirus, according to data collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and analyzed by LeadingAge, which represents nonprofit nursing homes and other providers of elder care.
An analysis by WebMD and Medscape Medical News estimated that about 25 percent of hospital workers who had contact with patients had not been vaccinated by the end of May.
Health leaders said that the slowed pace of vaccinations, coupled with the threat of the delta variant, compelled them to act.
“We feel that it’s important to sign our name onto this,” said Rachel Villanueva, an OB/GYN and the president of the National Medical Association, which represents more than 50,000 Black physicians and is calling for a vaccination mandate for the first time.
Villanueva added that new coronavirus cases could disproportionately affect front-line workers — many of whom are African American — and communities of color that continue to lag behind Whites on vaccination rates. “We want to continue to dispel myths, educate, increase confidence and increase vaccination rates in our communities,” she said.
Ezekiel Emanuel, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist who organized Monday’s statement, said he believes that requiring vaccinations could boost uptake of the shots, beginning with health workers.
“Despite everything — cajoling, making access readily available at any pharmacy, making it free, having the president plead — all of this hasn’t really moved the needle very much in the nation,” said Emanuel, who spent two weeks organizing the joint statement and praised the buy-in from so many groups.
“One of the things that resonated with people is, ‘Look, we’re the medical community. This is a health problem. We need to lead — and we need to have the courage of our convictions,’” Emanuel added.
About 60 percent of all U.S. adults are fully vaccinated, with the rate of new immunizations slowing since mid-April, according to The Post’s tracking.
Health-care facilities generally have hesitated to mandate coronavirus vaccines for employees, noting the vaccines have yet to receive full approval from the Food and Drug Administration and citing the threat of lawsuits. Fewer than 9 percent of hospitals have required their workers to get vaccinated, according to tracking by the American Hospital Association, which announced separately last week that it supported such mandates.
Emanuel cited the example of Houston Methodist, which has said it was the nation’s first health system to impose a coronavirus vaccination mandate. Some staff vocally opposed the rule — including more than 150 workers who refused to get vaccinated and left the organization. But 97 percent of Houston Methodist workers complied, with about 2 percent obtaining exemptions or deferrals. A federal judge also dismissed a lawsuit filed by former staff who refused to get vaccinated, ruling that Houston Methodist was “trying to do their business of saving lives without giving [patients] the covid-19 virus.”
Emanuel said that the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which imposed its own coronavirus vaccination mandate two months ago, also has seen a similar uptake in shots.
“The sky didn’t fall,” Emanuel said. “When we do it, and we have a good justification, people respond.”
Hundreds of colleges and universities also have imposed vaccination mandates, which are expected to move forward after a federal judge last week upheld Indiana University’s mandate. The White House has said it will not impose mandates but supports private employers doing so.
Americans’ opinions on requiring coronavirus vaccines vary by industry. A Politico-Harvard poll released this month found that 66 percent of adults supported health-care organizations requiring employees to get the shots, but Americans were about evenly divided over whether other workers or schoolchildren should be required to do so.
“Our take is that there is a substantial opposition to workers and schoolchildren being required to be vaccinated. It may be getting slightly better over time, but that is a lot of employed people who do not want a requirement,” said Robert J. Blendon, a professor of health policy and political analysis at Harvard University who studies public attitudes. “If I were a legislator looking at our findings, I would be very cautious of forcing a mandate for employed people and parents of kids over 12, particularly in Republican-oriented states.”
Health-care leaders frame vaccinations in their industry as a shared responsibility. Ernest Grant, president of the American Nurses Association (ANA), said his members are reeling from the prospect of another surge of coronavirus cases, many of which might be prevented.
“I get phone calls and emails and conversations on a daily basis from nurses across the country that are saying, ‘I just reached my limit, I’m exhausted,’” Grant said. “It is very frustrating when you know there are vaccines out there that are effective and can drive down the spread.”
‘Patience has worn thin’: Frustration mounts over vaccine holdouts
About 83 percent of nurses were vaccinated as of early May, according to an ANA survey — a figure Grant said was heartening, citing data that about two-thirds of nurses in March 2020 said they had no immediate desire to get vaccinated or else were opposed.
“Nurses are people, too,” he said, conceding that some were still raising questions about the vaccines’ effectiveness.
Other health leaders acknowledged that the statement could draw criticism from some of their own members who oppose the effort, adding that it may require several more months to address workers’ questions and give them time to get vaccinated.
“As our members consider a vaccine mandate, they’ll do it thoughtfully. They’ll do it with lots of education. And the ones that have [already] done it, they’ve done it with kind of an on-ramp,” said Katie Smith Sloan, president and chief executive of LeadingAge, which also signed on to the statement. “It’s not something that happens overnight.”
“What we’ve been living through is this tension between the moral imperative to do this to save lives, and the concerns of those who have not yet gotten vaccinated, which are very real,” she added. “I don’t dismiss vaccine hesitancy at all.”
“As an organization, we really have to act in the best interest of public health,” said Villanueva of the National Medical Association. “While we respect everybody’s opinion, and there may be pushback, knowing what has happened to our patients — and even to our own physician community — during the pandemic, I don’t think we can do anything else but to support mandatory vaccination for health-care workers.”
By Dan Diamond
Dan Diamond is a national health reporter for The Washington Post. He joined The Post in 2021 after five years at Politico, where he won a George Polk award for investigating the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/07/26/mandatory-vaccinations-urged-health-workers/
I Tried to Buy a Car from Carvana and It Was Worse Than Going to a Dealer
JOSH HENDRICKSON
@canterrain
JUL 25, 2021, 9:00 AM EDT | 10 min read
https://www.reviewgeek.com/91815/i-tried-to-buy-a-car-from-carvana-and-it-was-worse-than-going-to-a-dealer/
The YouTubers who blew the whistle on an anti-vax plot
By Charlie Haynes and Flora Carmichael
BBC Trending
Published 1 day ago
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-57928647
The YouTubers who blew the whistle on an anti-vax plot
By Charlie Haynes and Flora Carmichael
BBC Trending
Published 1 day ago
A mysterious marketing agency secretly offered to pay social media stars to spread disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines. Their plan failed when the influencers went public about the attempt to recruit them.
"It started with an email" says Mirko Drotschmann, a German YouTuber and journalist.
Mirko normally ignores offers from brands asking him to advertise their products to his more than 1.5 million subscribers. But the sponsorship offer he received in May this year was unlike any other.
An influencer marketing agency called Fazze offered to pay him to promote what it said was leaked information that suggested the death rate among people who had the Pfizer vaccine was almost three times that of the AstraZeneca jab.
The information provided wasn't true.
It quickly became apparent to Mirko that he was being asked to spread disinformation to undermine public confidence in vaccines in the middle of a pandemic.
"I was shocked," says Mirko "then I was curious, what's behind all that?"
In France, science YouTuber Léo Grasset received a similar offer. The agency offered him 2000 euros if he would take part. Fazze said it was acting for a client who wished to remain anonymous.
"That's a huge red flag" says Léo.
Both Léo and Mirko were appalled by the false claims.
They pretended to be interested in order to try to find out more and were provided with detailed instructions about what they should say in their videos.
In stilted English, the brief instructed them to "Act like you have the passion and interest in this topic."
It told them not to mention the video had a sponsor - and instead pretend they were spontaneously giving advice out of concern for their viewers.
Social media platforms have rules that ban not disclosing that content is sponsored. In France and Germany it's also illegal.
Fazze's brief told influencers to share a story in French newspaper Le Monde about a data leak from the European Medicines Agency.
The story was genuine, but didn't include anything about vaccine deaths. But in this context it would give the false impression that the death rate statistics had come from the leak.
The data the influencers were asked to share had actually been cobbled together from different sources and taken out of context.
It presented the numbers of people who had died in several countries some time after receiving different Covid vaccines. But just because someone dies after having a vaccine doesn't mean they died because they had the vaccine. They could have been killed in a car accident.
In the countries the statistics were from, greater numbers of people had received the Pfizer vaccine at that time, so a higher number of people dying after having a Pfizer jab was to be expected.
"If you don't have any scientific training, you could just say, 'oh, there are these numbers, they are really different. So there must be a link.' But you can make any spurious correlation as you want really," Léo says.
The influencers were also provided with a list of links to share - dubious articles which all used the same set of figures that supposedly showed the Pfzer vaccine was dangerous.
When Léo and Mirko exposed the Fazze campaign on Twitter all the articles, except the Le Monde story, disappeared from the web.
C'est étrange.
— Léo Grasset (@dirtybiology) May 24, 2021
J'ai reçu une proposition de partenariat qui consiste à déglinguer le vaccin Pfizer en vidéo. Budget colossal, client qui veut rester incognito et il faut cacher la sponso.
Éthique/20. Si vous voyez des vidéos là dessus vous saurez que c'est une opé, du coup. pic.twitter.com/sl3ur9QuSu
The YouTubers who blew the whistle on an anti-vax plot
By Charlie Haynes and Flora Carmichael
BBC Trending
Published 1 day ago
A mysterious marketing agency secretly offered to pay social media stars to spread disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines. Their plan failed when the influencers went public about the attempt to recruit them.
"It started with an email" says Mirko Drotschmann, a German YouTuber and journalist.
Mirko normally ignores offers from brands asking him to advertise their products to his more than 1.5 million subscribers. But the sponsorship offer he received in May this year was unlike any other.
An influencer marketing agency called Fazze offered to pay him to promote what it said was leaked information that suggested the death rate among people who had the Pfizer vaccine was almost three times that of the AstraZeneca jab.
The information provided wasn't true.
It quickly became apparent to Mirko that he was being asked to spread disinformation to undermine public confidence in vaccines in the middle of a pandemic.
"I was shocked," says Mirko "then I was curious, what's behind all that?"
In France, science YouTuber Léo Grasset received a similar offer. The agency offered him 2000 euros if he would take part. Fazze said it was acting for a client who wished to remain anonymous.
"That's a huge red flag" says Léo.
Both Léo and Mirko were appalled by the false claims.
They pretended to be interested in order to try to find out more and were provided with detailed instructions about what they should say in their videos.
In stilted English, the brief instructed them to "Act like you have the passion and interest in this topic."
It told them not to mention the video had a sponsor - and instead pretend they were spontaneously giving advice out of concern for their viewers.
Social media platforms have rules that ban not disclosing that content is sponsored. In France and Germany it's also illegal.
Fazze's brief told influencers to share a story in French newspaper Le Monde about a data leak from the European Medicines Agency.
The story was genuine, but didn't include anything about vaccine deaths. But in this context it would give the false impression that the death rate statistics had come from the leak.
The data the influencers were asked to share had actually been cobbled together from different sources and taken out of context.
It presented the numbers of people who had died in several countries some time after receiving different Covid vaccines. But just because someone dies after having a vaccine doesn't mean they died because they had the vaccine. They could have been killed in a car accident.
In the countries the statistics were from, greater numbers of people had received the Pfizer vaccine at that time, so a higher number of people dying after having a Pfizer jab was to be expected.
"If you don't have any scientific training, you could just say, 'oh, there are these numbers, they are really different. So there must be a link.' But you can make any spurious correlation as you want really," Léo says.
The influencers were also provided with a list of links to share - dubious articles which all used the same set of figures that supposedly showed the Pfzer vaccine was dangerous.
When Léo and Mirko exposed the Fazze campaign on Twitter all the articles, except the Le Monde story, disappeared from the web.
C'est étrange.
— Léo Grasset (@dirtybiology) May 24, 2021
J'ai reçu une proposition de partenariat qui consiste à déglinguer le vaccin Pfizer en vidéo. Budget colossal, client qui veut rester incognito et il faut cacher la sponso.
Éthique/20. Si vous voyez des vidéos là dessus vous saurez que c'est une opé, du coup. pic.twitter.com/sl3ur9QuSu
A Key Trump Witness Is Being Muzzled Over Her Custody Battle
Jose Pagliery
Mon, 26 July 2021, 8:55 am·7-min read
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/key-trump-witness-being-muzzled-075502625.html
As the New York criminal investigation into the Trump Organization deepens, a parallel battle is quietly playing out in the city’s family court, where lawyers are trying to muzzle one of the government’s key witnesses—and cast doubt over her mental health.
Jennifer Weisselberg, the ex-wife of Trump employee Barry Weisselberg—and former daughter-in-law of one of Trump’s closest business confidants, Allen Weisselberg—has told investigators that executives at the Trump Organization were rewarded with untaxed perks.
Her documents and grand jury testimony were crucial to last month’s indictment of her former father-in-law, the corporation’s chief financial officer. And she has repeatedly explained to journalists how the tuition for her children’s private school was an untaxed corporate gift paid in lieu of salary.
But all the while, she’s said these things at great personal risk; since March 19, Jennifer Weisselberg has been under a judge’s gag order to shut her up.
“Defendant, Jennifer Weisselberg, shall refrain from having any discussions or interviews whatsoever with the press about the parties’ children… the custody proceeding… or her motivation for giving interviews insofar as it concerns the children,” reads the order, signed by New York County Supreme Court Justice Lori S. Sattler.
But if she can’t talk to journalists about her children—or even her “motivation” for speaking to journalists—then she can’t explain to the public how the Trump Organization allegedly broke the law. And she’s the only person who witnessed these alleged crimes and is willing to speak publicly.
The gag order does not limit her from speaking to investigators. But three sources familiar with the divorce proceedings describe the gag order as part of a broader campaign of witness intimidation. Attorneys separately representing her ex-husband and children have repeatedly demanded court-mandated mental evaluations and drug tests for Jennifer Weisselberg. And these sources say these orders smear her character ahead of a potential criminal trial where she would be expected to testify against the company.
The Trump Organization and its CFO, Allen Weisselberg, were charged with criminal tax fraud, falsifying business records, and scheming to defraud the government. According to the June 30 indictment, the company paid its CFO off-the-books by, among other things, covering the cost of his grandkids’ tuition at the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School. Jennifer Weisselberg claims to know the intimate details of that financial arrangement, but she’s legally barred from discussing it on the news.
The gag order was issued in her divorce case against Barry Weisselberg, the manager of the Trump Organization’s Wolman ice rink in Central Park. The case has been ongoing since 2017 but got nasty when it morphed into a custody battle that continues today.
Jennifer Weisselberg has been fighting the gag order in court without success. As her previous attorney, Aimee Richter, put it at a hearing in May: “What we have here is a concerted effort to keep my client quiet.”
“So it’s come full circle; lost her children, lost all her money, she is going to lose where she’s lived for the last year and… now, she’s losing her right to speak,” Richter said in court.
What appears to have set off this chain of events were emails from NBC News correspondent Tom Winter and CNN producer Sonia Moghe. In those emails, the reporters asked Barry Weisselberg’s lawyer about the ex-couple’s expensive corporate apartment—one of the company perks under investigation—and mentioned the ongoing custody case.
Those emails immediately made their way to Karen Rosenthal, a court-appointed attorney tasked with independently representing the children’s interests. Rosenthal wrote to the judge’s law clerk, asking the court to step in.
“I seek the court's intervention to prevent Ms. Weisselberg from discussing the custody proceedings or the children as it relates thereto,” she wrote in an email reviewed by The Daily Beast.
The very next day, the judge issued the gag order. The document indicates it was made with the “consent of the parties,” but subsequent court hearings show that Jennifer Weisselberg opposes the measure.
In past interviews with journalists, the mother of two has answered questions about the joint investigation by the New York attorney general and Manhattan district attorney. In the course of doing so, she also mentions how Trump personally signed checks that would pay for her children’s tuition, a point that was detailed in the indictment against the company.
But Rosenthal, the attorney independently representing the couple’s children, objects to press interviews that mention how the children attend Columbia Prep—and allegations that Trump paid for it. In court proceedings, Rosenthal has described Jennifer Weisselberg’s decision to speak publicly as a decision “to prioritize her 15 minutes of fame” over the privacy of her children, a move that is “embarrassing them on a daily basis.”
“That is supposed to be their safe place, to go to school and learn. No. Now, it’s about who paid the bill,” Rosenthal said at a hearing on May 26, in which she requested that the judge punish the mother by holding her in contempt of court.
Rosenthal and the ex-husband’s lawyer, Peter Stambleck, both requested that the judge seal off the courtroom from the public, barring journalists from reporting on what happens inside. The judge decided against that. But the issue came up again at a hearing the next month on June 7, when the judge herself said, “Obviously, the press is allowed to be here and they are here.” But she also noted, “I find the whole thing somewhat disturbing.”
Jennifer Weisselberg and her current attorney, Duncan Levin, declined to comment on this story. Barry Weisselberg and his attorney, Stambleck, did not respond to questions.
Reached by email on Saturday, Rosenthal, the attorney representing the children, stressed that “no one in the pending post judgment of divorce litigation is in any way trying to silence Ms. Weisselberg.”
“I will do anything and everything necessary and legal to protect my young clients from emotional harm,” she wrote.
But a legal advocate for Jennifer Weisselberg sees things differently.
Zoe Applbaum, who has been monitoring the case since February as a volunteer for the nonprofit STEPS to End Family Violence, said the gag order is part of an effort to harass and intimidate the mother of two.
“It’s a silencing tactic,” Applbaum said. “They’re bullying her and they’re being completely one-sided. They’re putting her in the hot seat so Barry doesn’t have to be.”
Applbaum also noted that Stambleck and Rosenthal, who separately represent the father and children, have “constant requests for drug tests and mental evaluations” that seek to smear the mother—and potentially put into question whatever testimony she could bring during a criminal trial of the Trump Organization and Allen Weisselberg.
“It’s an invalidation of her voice. If you order a bunch of evaluations, it’ll look like a person is mentally ill,” Applbaum said.
Three people familiar with the case who spoke to The Daily Beast on condition of anonymity expressed suspicions that Barry Weisselberg and the Trump Organization could be utilizing these lesser-known court proceedings to derail the government’s investigation by harming a witness with damning testimony.
Rob Georges, an attorney who represented Jennifer Weisselberg in her initial talks with the Manhattan DA, criticized the legal skirmish playing out in family court.
“It seemed like she was being treated unfairly. They’re trying to discredit her,” he said.
So far, however, this case has actually been helpful to investigators. As The Daily Beast reported, Barry Weisselberg’s previous testimony in the divorce confirmed that the Trump Organization covered the cost of several luxury apartments.
The judge, already frustrated at the public scrutiny of her courtroom, has tried to distance the case before her from what could turn out to be the most highly publicized criminal case currently making its way through the justice system.
“This is a custody case. This is a case about two children. This isn’t a case about Donald Trump or the Trump Organization,” the judge said in May.
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https://uk.news.yahoo.com/key-trump-witness-being-muzzled-075502625.html
An unvaccinated radio host is sick with covid. His family is ‘elated’ listeners are now getting the vaccine.
By Katie Shepherd
Today at 5:29 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07/26/tennessee-radio-host-coronvairus-vaccine/
When his brother first caught the novel coronavirus, Mark Valentine did not think he was suffering too much.
Phil Valentine continued posting regularly on Facebook, joked about his condition and even hosted a segment for his conservative talk radio show on WTN-FM in Nashville. He had chosen not to get the vaccine and frequently mocked Democrats’ campaigns to drive more people to get the shot. When the brothers spoke on the phone a few days after Phil tested positive in early July, he told Mark that he was already feeling better.
“He said, ‘I don’t think it’s going to be a big deal,’" Mark Valentine told The Washington Post on Sunday. “I frankly quit worrying about it.”
But by the end of the week, after nearly recovering, Phil Valentine’s health began a rapid descent. His family persuaded the 62-year-old to check into the emergency room. Medical scans showed the coronavirus infection had caused pneumonia in his right lung, Mark Valentine told The Post.
Not long after Phil Valentine was admitted to the hospital, the Tennessean reported, he and his family began thinking differently about the vaccine.
“I changed my mind as soon as I saw what was happening here,” Mark Valentine told The Post. “I immediately went and got the vaccine.”
He said his brother’s thinking also changed.
“If Phil were able to conduct this interview, he would tell you while he has never been an anti-vax person, he has always been a pro-choice person,” his brother told The Post. “What he regrets is not being more vehemently pro-vaccine, and when he gets back on the air, that’s exactly what he’s going to tell people.”
The Valentines are among a large number of Americans who had reservations about getting the coronavirus vaccine when it became widely available this spring. As politicians drew partisan battle lines around the handling of the pandemic, some Republicans grew weary of trusting the vaccine that had been rapidly developed when Donald Trump was president.
But with coronavirus cases again on the rise, especially among the unvaccinated, many people who were formerly skeptical of the vaccine have changed their tune.
Sarah Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary, penned an op-ed in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Sunday explaining why she decided to get vaccinated and declaring that “the Trump vaccine works and is saving lives.” At a rally in Arizona on Saturday, Trump told his supporters to get the vaccine, while blaming President Biden for lagging inoculation rates.
“I recommend that you take it,” Trump said, “but I also believe in your freedoms 100 percent.”
Yet for some, the realization that the vaccine can prevent a life-threatening illness only comes after a loved one catches the virus.
Even after he tested positive for the coronavirus, Phil Valentine and his family questioned the value of getting a vaccine when the politicians and public figures they respected had not advised it.
For days after contracting the novel coronavirus, Phil Valentine believed his body would beat back the worsening infection with the help of vitamin D supplements and ivermectin, a drug typically used to treat parasitic worms, lice and skin conditions that the Food and Drug Administration has not approved to treat covid-19.
“Doing my patriotic duty for natural herd immunity,” the radio-show host said on Facebook on July 14, when he started to feel better days after falling ill.
But when breathing became difficult enough to send him to the hospital, he and his family realized how dangerous the virus could be.
Doctors had him shift from his back to his stomach to stop fluid from pooling in his lungs. During the day, doctors put him on high-flow oxygen therapy. At night, he breathed with the help of a BiPap machine, a type of ventilator that does not require being intubated.
The family also learned that most of the people enduring life-threatening covid-19 infections at the hospital had not been vaccinated, Mark Valentine told The Post.
“The problem with this is that it has become a political decision,” he said. “The truth is 97 percent of the people in the hospital right now are unvaccinated.”
The number of unvaccinated people who have been hospitalized with covid-19 is far higher than the number of vaccinated people.
For unvaccinated, coronavirus is soaring again
In Tennessee, where Phil Valentine lives, the state recently reported that 97 percent of hospitalized covid patients had not been vaccinated. In neighboring Arkansas, 98 percent had not received any of the three vaccines available in the U.S.
Even in Maryland, where more than 75 percent of the adult population has received at least one vaccine dose, 93 percent of those in the hospital were unvaccinated, as was every single person who died from the virus in June.
After sharing the story of his brother’s ordeal in the hospital, Mark Valentine told The Post that dozens of WTN-FM listeners began writing to the family to say they have decided to get vaccinated.
“It’s overwhelming and heartwarming,” Mark Valentine said. “And for these people who are getting vaccinated, we’re just elated about that.”
By Katie Shepherd
Katie Shepherd is a reporter on The Washington Post's Morning Mix team. Before joining The Post, she was a staff writer at Willamette Week in Portland, Ore. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07/26/tennessee-radio-host-coronvairus-vaccine/
As coronavirus surges, GOP lawmakers are moving to limit public health powers
By Frances Stead Sellers and Isaac Stanley-Becker
Yesterday at 6:05 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/gop-legislatures-health-laws/2021/07/25/2455940c-db54-11eb-8fb8-aea56b785b00_story.html
Across the country, GOP lawmakers are rallying around the cause of individual freedom to counter community-based disease mitigation methods, moves experts say leave the country ill-equipped to counter the resurgent coronavirus and a future, unknown outbreak.
In some states, anger at perceived overreach by health officials has prompted legislative attempts to limit their authority, including new state laws that prevent the closure of businesses or allow lawmakers to rescind mask mandates. Some state courts have reined in the emergency and regulatory powers governors have wielded against the virus. And in its recent rulings and analysis, the U.S. Supreme Court has signaled its willingness to limit disease mitigation in the name of religious freedom.
“The legal framework has evolved in ways that will complicate and perhaps undermine efforts to deal with the next public health crisis or even routine health threats,” said Wendy Parmet, director of the Northeastern University Center for Health Policy and Law, who also said she has been a “long critic of emergency laws and their potential for abuse.”
A key issue, Parmet and others say, is that the legislative backlash is based on partisan assumptions about this pandemic, limiting states’ options in the face of a new threat.
“Whatever your feelings are about what health officials did in March of 2020, I can talk to you about a future threat that might be different, that would disproportionately affect a different population, that you would feel differently about,” said Lindsay F. Wiley, director of the Health Law and Policy Program at American University and an expert on emergency reform. “Please don’t constrain authority as a reaction in a way that will tie officials to the mast for a future crisis.”
At least 15 state legislatures have passed or are considering measures to limit the legal authority of public health agencies, according to the Network for Public Health Law, which partnered with the National Association of County and City Health Officials to document the legislative counterpunches. Lawmakers in at least 46 states have introduced hundreds of bills relating to legislative oversight of gubernatorial or executive actions during coronavirus or other emergencies, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The measures, as described by the Network for Public Health Law, include a North Dakota law that prohibits a mask mandate, even during an outbreak of tuberculosis, and a new Montana law that prohibits the use of quarantine to separate people who have probably been infected or exposed but are not yet sick. Many bills are modeled on legislation originally crafted by conservative think tanks and activist groups, according to state lawmakers who introduced them.
Among them is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has touted its model legislation aimed at reining in emergency powers so it is more “narrowly tailored to serve a compelling public health or safety purpose.”
In an interview, Jonathon Hauenschild, ALEC’s staff policy expert on the model legislation, said that from early in the pandemic he viewed governors’ use of emergency powers as problematic.
“I started to see .... that once a branch realizes power they didn’t have before, they don’t give it up unless they are forced to,” Hauenschild said. “Some governors still aren’t giving up their power.”
The group’s legislative members wrote their model Emergency Limitation Act in 2020. It was finalized in early January, in time for states’ new legislative sessions.
Hauenschild said he has seen the model act’s influence in new laws in Indiana and Kentucky, where certain emergency orders now expire after 30 days unless the General Assembly approves an extension and there are new protections to purchase firearms. The group’s model legislation, which public health experts believe would leave states relatively defenseless in an emergency, is not motivated by ideology, Hauenschild argues.
“It’s really just trying to inject a little bit of accountability into the system,” he said.
ALEC is not the only conservative group behind the flurry of recent bills.
An aide to Massachusetts state Rep. Nicholas Boldyga (R) said his office worked with Pacific Legal Foundation, a Sacramento-based libertarian group, on legislation imposing a 30-day sunset on emergency orders. Daniel Dew, legal policy director for the Pacific Legal Foundation, estimated that the group has had discussions with lawmakers in more than half the states and has been able to trace at least 18 bills to its model legislation or other activities.
Montana state Rep. Matt Regier (R) said he received input from the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the political network funded by the Koch fortune, on his bill, which limits the sort of executive actions that can be taken during an emergency, including by enshrining certain religious exemptions and ensuring the legislature gets to weigh in after 45 days. The measure gained approval in May over Democratic objections, and it was signed into law by Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte.
Gianforte’s support averted an intraparty squabble like those in other states against the powers of Republican governors. In March, Ohio’s legislature overrode a veto by Gov. Mike DeWine (R) in response to the approval of a bill giving lawmakers the power to rescind executive actions taken by the governor or state health authorities. State Sen. Rob McColley, a Republican co-sponsor of the legislation, said he had no qualms going against a governor of his own party.
That’s because McColley, like other advocates of similar legislation, views the incursions on personal liberty as grievous enough to rival the loss of life from the pandemic. “Coronavirus is serious, but we can’t make decisions in a vacuum,” he said.
“I start with this premise: If you would have asked any of us in January or February of 2020 if we could ever have foreseen the amount of unprecedented executive authority used over the coming 12 to 15 months, many of us would have scoffed at that idea,” McColley added. “No way that would happen in a country like the United States, in a state like Ohio. Yet it did.”
The recent passage of Ohio’s SB 22 has left local officials grappling to understand its future effect on everything from closing restaurants to quarantining residents.
Keary McCarthy, executive director of the Ohio Mayors Alliance, said that in a public health emergency, local officials need immediate clarity.
“If executive and legislative branches get into a dispute about all of these things, it really creates some challenges for local officials,” McCarthy said. “What are the rules? How do we implement them? How do we keep our folks safe?”
The measures are also motivated by the perceived randomness of some business restrictions. Particularly irksome to Boldyga, the Massachusetts lawmaker, was a rule against golf carts, which was designed to limit the use of shared equipment and lifted last May. “A golf cart was too difficult to be in by yourself because of covid, I guess,” he said. “It was absurd.”
Eighteen months ago, few people anticipated an infection that was as deadly, spread as stealthily or acted as disproportionately on certain groups in the way the coronavirus has done. With responsibility for protecting the public’s health falling historically to state and local government, many governors turned to general emergency powers, intended for disruptive but short-lived events like wildfires or tornadoes. As the pandemic persisted, they re-upped their powers, with many GOP lawmakers fighting back.
Some battles between Democratic governors and Republican-controlled legislatures have landed in state courts. The supreme courts of Michigan and Wisconsin, respectively, ruled that their governors didn’t have the power to renew executive orders relating to the pandemic or to declare multiple public health emergencies.
And in Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis (D), who has been under fire from Republican legislators, took matters into his own hands, announcing last month that he would phase out his emergency powers. In New York, some fellow Democrats earlier this year moved to strip Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) of unilateral emergency powers.
In some places, legislators are taking aim at laws that have been on the books for decades. In Tennessee, lawmakers have focused their ire on the Mature Minor Doctrine, which stems from a 1987 state Supreme Court ruling allowing clinicians to provide care including family planning, substance-abuse treatment and in some instances vaccines to adolescents without parental consent.
The state’s immunization manager, Michelle Fiscus, had alluded to the doctrine in a memo circulated to enrolled vaccine providers. The information enraged some conservative lawmakers, who disputed the doctrine’s validity.
Less than a month later, Fiscus was fired for what she argued were political reasons and the state scaled back on adolescent vaccine outreach.
“It’s an absolute travesty that individuals are putting their own political agenda ahead of the health and well-being of the people they were elected to serve,” Fiscus said in an interview with The Washington Post.
Tennessee Health Commissioner Lisa Piercey said Friday that almost all vaccine outreach was being restarted, with the exception of 11 social media posts that depicted a child without a parent. The pause in communications, she said, was to ensure that all forms of outreach — from postcard reminders to consent forms — “were appropriately directed at parents and not kids.”
Tennessee resumes most vaccine outreach to minors paused after GOP backlash
Public health law has long been controversial. In 2001, when the country was comparatively united following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and subsequent anthrax mailings, model legislation that has since been adopted by at least 40 states and some countries was met with opposition, including from the left and center.
It “turns governors into dictators,” the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons wrote about the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act, by empowering them “to create a police state by fiat, and for a sufficient length of time to destroy or muzzle [their] political opposition.”
The act, which strengthened powers to respond to public health emergencies, largely withstood the tests of Zika and Ebola. It anticipated the need for mask mandates and social distancing but failed to foresee other characteristics of the current pandemic — including lockdowns in America’s biggest cities, said Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University who drafted the act.
“We are always looking back at the current or past crisis, not the future crisis,” Gostin said.
While some scholars believe that in any future pandemic the federal government would step in to play a greater role, others are focused on new model legislation for states to adopt.
A group of lawyers at the Uniform Law Commission, a nonprofit with representatives from each state appointed by the state government, have formed a study committee to look into reforming public health legislation.
Diane Boyer-Vine, the ULC’s vice president, said the partisan divide makes the challenges of drafting enactable legislation daunting.
“I don’t think that is going to be easy, envisioning how we are going to draft this,” she said. “We have to represent the Californias and the Alabamas.”
Paulina Villegas contributed to this report.
By Frances Stead Sellers
Frances Stead Sellers is a senior writer at The Washington Post. Twitter
By Isaac Stanley-Becker
Isaac Stanley-Becker is a national political reporter. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/gop-legislatures-health-laws/2021/07/25/2455940c-db54-11eb-8fb8-aea56b785b00_story.html
Citing a provision of the law in Georgia giving Republican lawmakers more power to intervene in local elections operations, he said, “That is not America, that’s Russia. I mean, that is some straight-up dictator-type stuff.”
‘Death by 1,000 cuts’: Dems face mounting crisis over GOP voting laws
There’s growing concern — bordering on alarm — about the potential impact in 2022 of the raft of new voting restrictions.
By MAYA KING, DAVID SIDERS and DANIEL LIPPMAN
Politico
07/26/2021 04:30 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/26/democrats-gop-voting-laws-crisis-500726
ATLANTA — After Georgia Republicans passed a restrictive voting law in March, Democrats here began doing the math.
The state’s new voter I.D. requirement for mail-in ballots could affect the more than 270,000 Georgians lacking identification. The provision cutting the number of ballot drop boxes could affect hundreds of thousands of voters who cast absentee ballots that way in 2020 — and that’s just in the populous Atlanta suburbs alone.
It didn’t take long before the implications became clear to party officials and voting rights activists. In a state that Joe Biden carried by fewer than 12,000 votes last year, the new law stood to wipe out many of the party’s hard-fought gains — and put them at a decisive disadvantage.
Democrats in other states where similarly restrictive voting laws have passed are coming to the same conclusion. Interviews with more than three dozen Democratic elected officials, party operatives and voting rights activists across the country reveal growing concern — bordering on alarm — about the potential impact in 2022 of the raft of new laws passed by Republican legislatures, particularly in some of the nation’s most competitive battleground states.
“I’m super worried,” said Max Wood, founder and CEO of Deck, a progressive data analytics company that analyzes voting behavior. “I try to be optimistic, and I do think there are times when this kind of stuff can galvanize enthusiasm and turnout. … But I don’t know that that will be enough, especially with how extreme some of these laws are.”
Democratic efforts to model midterm turnout under the new laws remain in their infancy. But even without a sophisticated understanding of the practical effect, there is widespread fear that the party isn’t doing enough to counter these efforts, or preparing for an election conducted under, in some instances, a dramatically different set of rules governing voter access.
“If there isn’t a way for us to repeat what happened in November 2020, we’re f---ed,” said Nsé Ufot, CEO of the Stacey Abrams-founded New Georgia Project. “We are doing what we do to make sure that not only our constituents, our base, the people, the communities that we organize with, get it. We’re trying to make sure that our elected officials get it as well.”
Since Jan. 1, at least 18 states have passed laws that restrict access to the ballot, according to the Brennan Center’s voting laws tracker, ranging from voter I.D. requirements to provisions making early and absentee voting more difficult.
In Michigan, voting rights activists are fighting a push by Republicans to require voters who cast ballots without a photo I.D. to take additional steps to verify their identity within six days of voting. In 2020, about 11,400 voters cast ballots without a photo I.D. — a tiny proportion of the electorate, but almost exactly the margin by which Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the state in 2016.
“If you make all of those people vote by provisional ballot and you make them go back to their clerk’s office, some number of people are not going to take that extra step,” said Nancy Wang, executive director of Voters Not Politicians, a Michigan-based ballot initiative which has shifted its focus from redistricting to voting rights.
Republicans, Wang said, are “trying to peel away Democratic-leaning voters wherever they can. … It’s sort of death by 1,000 cuts.”
Georgia Democrats are rushing to develop a strategy to work around their state’s voting law, which GOP Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law in March, on the heels of unexpected Democratic victories. It has been widely viewed as a blueprint for similar measures in other states.
The state Democratic Party aims to confront the law by building on their voter education program established after the 2018 midterms. They are training county chairs, volunteers and voters on the law’s terms in Zoom and in-person sessions. The goal, according to one party official, is to train volunteers on how to obtain a voter I.D. in all 159 of Georgia’s counties. The party also brought on three new deputy political directors for Black, Latino and Asian American outreach.
This November’s mayoral election in Atlanta represents a test-run of the law and how its requirements will impact voters. While Democrats aim to apply lessons from this election to next year’s midterms, they recognize that the heavily Black, safely Democratic city is a far cry from a statewide race.
“Certainly, the city of Atlanta is very different than other parts of Georgia,” said Saira Draper, voter protection director for the Georgia Democratic Party, pointing out that Fulton County is Georgia’s most populous. “The fact that they’re going to have this opportunity to go through the process, that's a good thing. And the problems that they encounter, if they encounter problems, it might be a way for us to steer other counties away from these problems.”
What’s missing, however, is an overarching tactical plan to counter the restrictions in the states where they stand to wreak the most harm on Democratic chances. The party and its affiliated interest groups are preparing to spend millions of dollars litigating against restrictive voting laws and bolstering turnout operations, but Democrats have been largely splintered in their response. One reason: widespread hopes and expectations that Washington or the courts will provide some remedy.
“I don’t think the Democratic Party as a whole is prioritizing this issue and its potential damage in the way that they should,” said Doug Herman, who was a lead mail strategist for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns. “We just went through an insurrection that was stoked by voter fraud lies, and the reaction to that from the Republican Party is to restrict the voting process so severely that only their voters can participate. And I don’t understand the lack of fierce resistance to that from Americans and Democrats.”
The restrictions advanced by Republicans affect so many facets of voting that Democrats cannot agree on which provisions are the most problematic. Some Democrats cite signature-matching laws. Others point to fewer drop boxes or shorter time frames for early voting. Still more consider voter identification requirements especially crippling.
Aneesa McMillan, Priorities USA’s deputy executive director, who runs the group’s voting rights program, said the “most ridiculous thing we’ve had to sue over” was a Michigan law that prevents hiring people to transport voters to the polls.
Yet it’s difficult to project the effect of various laws on 2022 turnout because the rules are so new — and because the last election was held under pandemic conditions that are unlikely to be as severe in 2022. On top of that, even if Democrats can get their voters to the polls, stricter I.D. requirements and other restrictions in some states could make it easier to disallow their votes.
Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said that in addition to portions of laws seemingly designed to curb turnout, “what is even more nefarious is what happens once people, if they can get through all the hurdles that they’ve set up, what happens to their vote once it has been cast?”
Citing a provision of the law in Georgia giving Republican lawmakers more power to intervene in local elections operations, he said, “That is not America, that’s Russia. I mean, that is some straight-up dictator-type stuff.”
Vice President Kamala Harris this month announced a $25 million expansion of the DNC’s “I Will Vote” campaign to bolster voter registration, turnout and election protection programs. Harrison said the DNC in 2022 will have the largest voter protection program it has ever had, doubling the size of its staff, including embeds in states.
“Over the last 3 decades we have witnessed the Republican Party, especially at the state level, put up enormous roadblocks to the freedom to vote for every citizen and part of the problem is that there is one party that believes every American citizen deserves the freedom to vote while the other party erects barriers to the ballot box,” said Donna Brazile, a former DNC chair.
Some statewide elected officials expect a possible blowback effect on Republicans, saying that once Georgia Democrats understand the new rules in place, they will be even more motivated to turn out.
“That may incentivize more voters to turn out and do what needs to be done, to ensure that their ballot is cast,” said state Rep. Sam Park, whose district includes suburban Atlanta’s populous Gwinnett County, the state’s most diverse. “When you see politicians coming after your ability to cast your vote, it's a reminder of how much power you really have, how powerful the vote really is.”
Harris met with a group of voting rights activists at the White House in mid-July to discuss protecting ballot access, particularly among Black voters. Veteran civil rights leaders have also pulled the president’s ear on the issue, suggesting a number of filibuster workarounds to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act or For the People Act.
But even the White House’s heightened attention isn’t enough to erase the pessimism among many on the left.
“I’m pretty well convinced that it’s going to hurt Democrats significantly in the long run,” said Brian Fallon, co-founder and executive director of Demand Justice, which supports Supreme Court reform. “There’s definitely no combination of lawsuits or Biden remaining popular or voter registration that’s going to overcome that, so I think it’s pretty bleak.”
Congressional Democrats have yet to reintroduce the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore a requirement that certain jurisdictions receive approval from the Justice Department or D.C. district court before making changes to voting laws.
Senate Democrats used a first-in-two-decades field hearing last week in Atlanta to draw attention to voting rights and say they plan to continue holding field hearings in other places where state lawmakers are considering or passing legislation that limits access to the ballot.
Yet they did not provide a clear strategy for how Democrats could counter Georgia’s law and the nearly two dozen newly passed laws like it.
“Hope is quickly turning into frustration,” said Latosha Brown, co-founder of the Georgia-based voting rights group Black Voters Matter. “Constantly, we are showing up to protect democracy. When in the hell are those who claim that they are committed to democracy going to show up to protect those that protect democracy?”
Brown and Ufot pointed to Texas, where statehouse Democrats vacated the state in protest of its voting bill, as one example of the heights they would like to see other Democrats go to in pushing back against punitive voting measures in other battleground states.
“Texas Democrats were out of moves, and the only thing they could do to deny quorum was to take their families and leave the state in the middle of the night,” Ufot said. “That’s the kind of response and leadership that this moment requires, and I am waiting for the administration to match the energy of state and local Democrats across the country who are fighting these fights.”
Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/26/democrats-gop-voting-laws-crisis-500726
‘Holy moly!’: Inside Texas’ fight against a ransomware hack
By JAKE BLEIBERG and ERIC TUCKER
today
https://apnews.com/article/technology-government-and-politics-business-texas-hacking-47e23be2d9d90d67383c1bd6cee5aef7
DALLAS (AP) — It was the start of a steamy Friday two Augusts ago when Jason Whisler settled in for a working breakfast at the Coffee Ranch restaurant in the Texas Panhandle city of Borger. The most pressing agenda item for city officials that morning: planning for a country music concert and anniversary event.
Then Whisler’s phone rang. Borger’s computer system had been hacked.
Workers were frozen out of files. Printers spewed out demands for money. Over the next several days, residents couldn’t pay water bills, the government couldn’t process payroll, police officers couldn’t retrieve certain records. Across Texas, similar scenes played out in nearly two dozen communities hit by a cyberattack officials ultimately tied to a Russia-based criminal syndicate.
In 2019, ransomware had yet to emerge as one of the top national security concerns confronting the United States, an issue that would become the focus of a presidential summit between Washington and Moscow this year. But the attacks in Texas were a harbinger of the now-exploding threat and offer a vivid case study in what happens behind the scenes when small-town America comes under attack.
Texas communities struggled for days with disruptions to core government services as workers in small cities and towns endured a cascade of frustrations brought on by the sophisticated cyberattack, according to thousands of pages of documents reviewed by The Associated Press and interviews with people involved in the response. The AP also learned new details about the attack’s scope and victims, including an Air Force base where access to a law enforcement database was interrupted, and a city forced to operate its water-supply system manually.
In recent months, a ransomware attack led to gasoline shortages. Another, tied to the same hacking gang that attacked the Texas communities, threatened meat supplies. But the Texas attacks — which, unlike these prominent cases, were resolved without a ransom payment — make clear that ransomware need not hit vital infrastructure or major corporations to interrupt daily life.
“It was just a scary feeling,” Whisler, Borger’s emergency management coordinator, recounted in an interview.
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In the early morning of Aug. 16, as most Texans were still asleep, hackers half a world away were burrowing into networks. They encrypted files and left ransom notes.
That afternoon, with the attack’s impact becoming apparent, the city manager of Vernon emailed colleagues about a “ransom type” virus affecting the police department. The city near the Oklahoma state line could get back online by paying the $2.5 million the hackers were demanding, he wrote, but that was “obviously” not the plan.
“Holy moly!!!!!” replied city commissioner Pam Gosline, now the mayor.
The culprits were affiliated with REvil, the Russia-linked syndicate that last spring extorted $11 million from meat-processor JBS and more recently was behind a Fourth of July weekend attack that crippled businesses around the globe. In the Texas case, however, communities were ultimately able to recover most of their data and rebuild their systems without anyone paying ransom.
The hackers gained their foothold through an attack on a Texas firm that provides technology services to local governments, branching through screen-sharing software and remote administration to seize control of the networks of some of the company’s clients.
An early hint of trouble came with a 2 a.m. phone call to the firm’s president, Richard Myers. His company, TSM Consulting Services Inc., provides data communications service for Texas communities, linking police agencies to a statewide law enforcement database.
One of his client’s servers was unresponsive, he was told. Upon inspection, Myers noticed that someone who wasn’t supposed to be in the computer system was trying to install something remotely. He rebooted the server. Things initially seemed fixed until the department called back: One of its laptops had a ransom note on it.
It soon became clear the problem wasn’t isolated to a single client.
“I don’t think you can begin to express the terror that goes through your mind when something like that starts to unfold,” he said.
Within hours, state officials were hunkered inside an underground operations center normally used for calamities like hurricanes and floods. Gov. Greg Abbott declared it a cyber disaster. Texas National Guard cyber specialists were activated.
“If you needed to build something — you needed an inspection, something like that — out of luck for a week,” said Andy Bennett, the state’s then-deputy chief information security officer. “Records look-ups? Couldn’t go look up records. Basically, if there’s a municipal function that you would go down to a city hall for, or that you would rely on the police department for, it wasn’t available.”
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In Borger, a city of fewer than 13,000, early indications were worrisome as the city raced to shut down its computers.
Gibberish ransom demands spat out of printers and displayed on some computer screens. Government files were encrypted, with titles like “Budget Document” replaced by nonsensical combinations of letters and symbols, said current city manager Garrett Spradling.
Vital records, like birth and death certificates, were offline. Payments couldn’t be processed, checks couldn’t be issued — though, blessedly for Borger, it was an off-week for payroll. Signs posted on a drive-up window outside City Hall told residents the city couldn’t process water bill payments but cutoffs would be delayed.
One update shared with city officials soon after the attack described how every server was infected, as were about 60% of the 85 computers inspected by that point. A city government email told council members that agendas for a meeting would be in paper format, “since your tablets won’t be able to connect.” An official told a judge it was unclear if computer systems would be operational in time for trials two days away.
Because the city had paid for offsite remote backup, Borger had the capability to reformat servers, reinstall the operating system and bring data back over. A newly purchased server that had yet to be installed came in handy. The police department, however, retained its data locally and the attack hampered officers’ access to previous incident reports, Spradling said.
As they worked to resolve the problem, officials shared draft press releases that offered reassurances that critical emergency operations would continue and that the attacks weren’t a reflection of any misstep by the city.
One councilmember, a military veteran named Milton Ooley, cautioned against publicity for the hackers’ “form of terrorism.”
“This is consistent with my firsthand experience with how the U.S. handled terrorism in Europe when I was there in the late ’70s, some of which was directed at U.S. units including missile units I worked with/in during those days,” he wrote colleagues. In an interview, he said he believed the public was entitled to information but hackers didn’t deserve notoriety.
The day of the attack, Jeremy Sereno was working his civilian job at Dell when he was contacted by the state about the attack. A lieutenant colonel and senior cybersecurity officer with the Texas Military Department, Sereno began helping deploy Texas National Guard troops to hacked cities, where specialists over the next two weeks helped assess the damage, restore data from backed-up files and retake control of locked systems.
One of the first areas of concern was a small North Texas city where the attack locked the “human-machine interface” that workers used to control the water supply, forcing them to operate the system manually, Sereno said. Water purity was not endangered.
“That was probably our biggest number one,” Sereno said. “That’s what’s considered critical infrastructure, when you talk about water.”
AP is not identifying the city at the urging of state officials, who said doing so could draw new attacks on its water system.
In Graham, a small city a couple of hours west of Dallas, the computer virus attacked a police server housing body-camera videos, causing hundreds of them to be lost, said Sgt. Chris Denney.
For days, officers had to use notebooks and pens to take reports. Instead of using mobile data terminals to run checks on people, officers had to rely on requests to dispatchers of a sheriff’s office that was unaffected by the attack, said Chief Brent Bullock.
“That’s been at these officers’ fingertips for years, and then all of a sudden, they don’t have that anymore,” Bullock said. Officers, he added, “kind of had to go back to old school.”
Other communities preemptively took potentially vulnerable systems offline. In the Austin suburb of Leander, the city shut off the program that police used to check license plates for 24 hours as IT staff worked to confirm that it hadn’t been exposed.
Emails reveal moments of exasperation as problems persisted.
Spradling complained to an outside technology company about “massive delays” in getting a response to a support request. Local technology managers griped about what they perceived as state and law enforcement secretiveness. Several in cities that were not hit complained in emails after the attack that they hadn’t been told what company the ransomware spread from and didn’t have enough information to ensure their systems were safe.
The impact wasn’t limited to local governments. Sheppard Air Force Base confirmed to AP that its access to a statewide law enforcement database used for background checks on visitors was temporarily interrupted, causing delays for issuing passes. Operations were otherwise unaffected.
Officials at Joint Base San Antonio Randolph, which public records indicated was also affected, did not directly answer questions about the hack but said that it had no impact on “missions or network security” and the base “as a whole” was not a target.
One complication: TSM’s customer list was itself encrypted, though eventually a copy was procured, officials said. State officials didn’t immediately know which communities had been victimized. They called around asking, “Were you impacted? Were you impacted? Were you impacted?” said Nancy Rainosek, Texas’ chief information security officer.
“There was one place that we contacted and they said, ‘no, no, we’re not hit,’” Rainosek said. Then, days later, “they said, ‘yes, we were.’”
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State officials spent a full week inside their command post — built to withstand a nuclear blast — and used a map to chart the attack’s spread. All told, some 23 government entities were ultimately shaded to indicate they’d been hit.
“It’s a bit of a mind struggle because you’re trying to stay focused and present on the folks that you know about,” said Amanda Crawford, executive director of the Texas Information Resources Department. “But you’re continually worrying about, ‘Is there something you’re missing? Or are there others, that you’re going to get another call that somebody else has been hit?’”
By Wednesday evening, records show, most city services in Borger were restored, including utility payments, vital statistics and most employee computers. The situation had stabilized; the city ended up with about 80% of its data back and the concert Whisler was planning happened as scheduled.
Still, in a city with a roughly $31 million budget, Borger had overtime IT expenses to contend with and purchased $44,000 worth of new computers. It’s invested in additional cybersecurity protections, including some $30,000 in annual costs for additional remote backup.
Borger officials in the weeks before the hack had discussed upgrading the threat level from cyberattacks. Those considerations are now more than theoretical.
“When you complain about having to change your passwords, you complain a lot more when it’s never happened to you and you don’t have anything to relate it to,” Spradling said. “You tend to complain a little less after you’ve had to answer the phone and tell 300 people they couldn’t pay their water bill.”
But damage remains two years later.
Sometimes even now, Spradling said, officials will go to pull an old report or address record — only to find it isn’t there.
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Tucker reported from Washington.
https://apnews.com/article/technology-government-and-politics-business-texas-hacking-47e23be2d9d90d67383c1bd6cee5aef7