Seems like a lot of those 'easy' opened doors was not law enforcement, but 'tourists' who already forced their way in and pushed back police off the doors that were opened by rioters. These are the doors the right wingnuts claim the cops opened for them.
A year after election, RNC still spending hundreds of thousands to cover Trump's legal bills
The unusual move is indicative of Trump's ongoing influence, experts say.
BySoo Rin Kim January 10, 2022, 4:01 AM
07/21 Capitol insurrection: Tracking the attack 1 year later On Jan. 6, 2021, pro-Trump rioters broke into the U.S. Capitol. The attack resulted in deaths, injuries, more than 700 arrests and former President Donald Trump's second impeachment. More than a year after the 2020 presidential election, the GOP is still covering numerous legal bills for the benefit of former President Donald Trump -- and the price tag is ruffling the feathers of some longtime GOP donors who are now critical of Trump.
In October and November alone, the Republican National Committee spent nearly $720,000 of its donor money on paying law firms representing Trump in various legal challenges, including criminal investigations into his businesses in New York, according to campaign finance records.
Trump's legal bills have sent the Republican Party's total legal expenditures soaring in recent months, resulting in $3 million spent just between September and November. In contrast, the Democratic National Committee has been gradually winding down its legal expenses over the last few months.
Traditionally, national political parties have at times covered presidents and their advisers' legal fees in matters related to their presidential campaigns. And throughout his presidency, the Republican Party has footed legal bills for Trump, his family members and his political allies, going back to the days of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the 2016 election, through the impeachment proceedings following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol... https://abcnews.go.com/alerts/us-capitol-breach
But experts say the GOP's recent payments of Trump's attorney fees after he left the White House, for investigations that are not relevant to the next presidential campaign, is a very unusual move that's indicative of the ongoing influence that the former president has over the party.
"Campaign finance law does not strictly prohibit a national party committee from paying for private legal expenses, but it is very rare for a party committee to use donor money in that way," said Brendan Fischer, federal reforms director at nonpartisan government ethics group Campaign Legal Center.
"And it is entirely unprecedented for a national party committee to cover a former president's private legal bills, especially when those legal expenses arise out of an investigation into activity that preceded Trump's time in the White House, and when Trump is sitting on millions of his own PAC funds," Fischer said.
RNC spokesperson Emma Vaughn told ABC News that the RNC's executive committee approved paying for "certain legal expenses that related to politically motivated legal proceedings waged against President Trump," while declining to comment on which specific cases are being paid for.
"As a leader of our party, defending President Trump and his record of achievement is critical to the GOP," Vaughn said. "It is entirely appropriate for the RNC to continue assisting in fighting back against the Democrats' never ending witch hunt and attacks on him."
The RNC has so far paid three law firms on behalf of Trump, paying $328,000 to NechelesLaw LLP, $200,000 to van der Veen, Hartshorn and Levin, and $172,000 to Fischetti & Malgieri LLP, according to its recent disclosure filings. The Washington Post reported that the RNC has agreed to pay up to $1.6 million of Trump's legal bills.
Fischetti & Malgieri represents Trump in the parallel investigations by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. and New York state Attorney General Letitia James into the business practices of Trump's eponymous company. Vance and James have said their investigations are not politically motivated.
Susan Necheles of NechelesLaw reportedly joined the legal team representing Trump and the Trump Organization last summer. Michael van der Veen was part of Trump's defense team during the impeachment proceedings after Jan. 6.
The law firm payments haven't sat well with some Trump critics within the GOP.
"It is very disheartening to see RNC donors funding Trump's legal bills," former Rep. Francis Rooney, R-Fla., told ABC News.
Rooney, who is among several Republican lawmakers who announced their retirement after clashing with pro-Trump forces within the GOP, was previously a U.S. ambassador to the Holy See under the Bush administration and a generous donor to the Republican Party, giving upwards of $1 million to various GOP candidates and groups over the years.
"I used to support the RNC quite a bit, especially when Reince Priebus was there," Rooney said. "But I don't see myself doing it right now because they keep giving money to Trump."
"We're getting tarred with this big lie and this claim of election fraud, and that is damaging our most important institution in our country -- belief in elections," Rooney said.
The RNC's financial support of Trump's legal bills also complicates the party's vow to remain neutral ahead of nominating process for the 2024 presidential election. "The party has to stay neutral. I'm not telling anybody to run or not to run in 2024," RNC Chairman Ronna McDaniel said last January. She has since reaffirmed that Trump "still leads the party."
Financial support notwithstanding, the GOP and Trump have not always had a smooth relationship over the past year. In the final days of Trump's presidency, Trump told McDaniel he was leaving the GOP and creating his own political party, only to back down after McDaniel threatened to stop paying Trump's legal bills for his post-election challenges, according to a book by ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl.
Both Trump and McDaniel have denied the story.
Not long after that, Trump and the party again clashed over the use of Trump's name in fundraising appeals, with the GOP eventually reaching an agreement to use his name.
In addition to covering many of Trump's legal bills, the RNC has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars supporting lawsuits across the country "to ensure the integrity of our elections," said RNC spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez.
Gearing up for the 2022 election cycle, the RNC has been building an aggressive nationwide "election integrity program," engaging in election-related lawsuits in states like Georgia, Florida, Arizona and Texas, stationing state-directors in battleground states, engaging hundreds of attorneys at the state level and training thousands of poll watchers.
The party is engaged in 30 such "election integrity" lawsuits, Alvarez said, with financial disclosures showing payments of $500,000 to the law firm of Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP, more than $260,000 to McGuireWoods, and $243,000 to Consovoy McCarthy PLLC.
Even with all the legal expenditures, the RNC has continued to build a huge war chest over the past year. Backed by megadonors that include Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman and casino mogul Steve Wynn, the RNC ended November with more than $65 million in cash on hand.
In battle against far-right extremists, an old strategy re-emerges: Bankrupt them A lawsuit against the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers follows similar litigation that was successful against the organizers of a far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
"If it so happens we bankrupt them, that's a good day," Karl Racine, the attorney general of Washington, D.C., who is partnering with other organizations in the suit, said at a news conference last month.
Now, the civil case is taking shape as the federal government's sprawling criminal investigation into the Capitol attack ensnared a prominent figure of the movement on Thursday, Oath Keepers leader and founder Stewart Rhodes, who was arrested on a charge of seditious conspiracy.
Whether the group will survive in its current form remains to be seen, but the objective in Racine's suit will test the limits in the fight against far-right extremists. The legal strategy behind it was used as recently as last November in the civil trial in Charlottesville, Virginia, against organizers of the far-right rally that erupted in deadly violence in 2017.
And it's a tactic that has worked before.
In the 1980s, the Southern Poverty Law Center took the United Klans of America to court after two Klansmen lynched a 19-year-old Black man, Michael Donald, in Mobile, Alabama. A jury awarded his family $7 million. The white supremacist group, however, could not scrounge together the payment and had to turn over the deed to their Tuscaloosa headquarters — their lone asset — to Donald's mother.
In 1990, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League successfully sued the leader of another white supremacist group, the White Aryan Resistance, for his part in inciting the 1988 fatal beating of an Ethiopian man in Portland, Oregon. The family of Mulugeta Seraw was awarded $12.5 million in damages, and the head of the group, Tom Metzger, found himself in financial ruins over the litigation, losing his home and filing for bankruptcy protection.
Like the case against the White Aryan Resistance, the suit targeting the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers hinges on proving at trial that they violated the Ku Klux Klan Act, a rarely used federal law codified after the Civil War to protect civil rights. The litigation has a good chance of succeeding, experts on hate and extremism in the U.S. say, because it sources the information that's being collected as part of the congressional investigation into what role the two groups played in the planning and execution of the assault on the Capitol.
"That's pretty damning — it's coming from the federal government," Randy Blazak, a sociologist at the University of Oregon who is involved in efforts in the Portland area to combat hate speech and extremist activity, said of the lawsuit.
Racine's lawsuit alleges that the two groups and their leaders "worked together to plot, publicize, recruit for, and finance their planned attack" on Jan. 6, 2021, by conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election in order to secure Donald Trump's second term as president.
Judge refuses to dismiss charges against 4 Proud Boy leaders involved in Jan. 6 riot
Similar litigation has been launched by U.S. Capitol Police officers and, separately, by the NAACP, although those suits also name Trump and his allies as defendants. Trump is attempting to get those lawsuits tossed, citing his immunity as then-president.
Racine's suit — joined by the ADL; States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan voting-rights and election-security think tank; and two large law firms — is not focusing on the former president. If successful, the suit would pry open the financial earnings and assets of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and some of their top members.
Since the Jan. 6 riot, at least one member of the Proud Boys has pleaded guilty to conspiring with fellow members to stop the certification of the 2020 election. Federal authorities allege more than three dozen people accused of storming the Capitol are affiliated with the Proud Boys, a combative, far-right group of self-described "Western chauvinists."
Some members appear to be in need of financial help. An online campaign on behalf of Nicholas Ochs, a self-proclaimed Proud Boy leader from Hawaii who was arrested on a charge of conspiracy and other counts last year, raised nearly $20,000. Ochs has pleaded not guilty. He could not immediately be reached for comment.
The Oath Keepers, a paramilitary anti-government group founded in 2009, has had at least 10 members or affiliates charged with conspiracy in the aftermath of Jan. 6. Its finances have been under tight control by its leader, Rhodes, an avowed Trump supporter and former Army paratrooper who studied law at Yale University. Before his arrest, Rhodes, 56, had been subpoenaed to testify as part of the congressional investigation.
In the days before the Capitol riot, Rhodes put out a call on the group's website for "all patriots who can be in DC" to travel to the capital for a "security mission" to "stand tall in support of President Trump's fight."
Rhodes on Friday pleaded not guilty during his first appearance in a federal court in Texas. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted on the seditious conspiracy charge.
Kellye SoRelle, a Texas attorney representing the Oath Keepers, told reporters outside of the courthouse that he is "not guilty of any of the outlandish charges and the organization stands with Mr. Rhodes."
Sam Jackson, an assistant professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity at the University at Albany in New York, said the Oath Keepers was claiming as many as 35,000 dues-paying members several years ago, although the actual number of active members is reportedly far smaller. The fallout from Jan. 6 has likely only stymied recruitment of people who don't want to be caught up in criminal investigations, he added.
A victory in the latest suit involving the Oath Keepers would be significant, but it's not a "silver bullet" against the far-right movement, said Jackson, the author of "Oath Keepers: Patriotism and the Edge of Violence in a Right-Wing Antigovernment Group."
"It might be possible that civil lawsuits result in organizations collapsing," he said, "but I don't think a single organization's collapse would change the landscape of anti-government extremism in the U.S."
Eileen Hershenov, the ADL's senior vice president of policy, said the suit against the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers will have its own set of challenges.
The suit is the first time a state or municipal government agency is suing using the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, she said. Also complicating efforts: The litigation involves a web of more than 30 individually named defendants, some of whom face criminal charges related to Jan. 6 and are in jail.
Hershenov said the coalition of legal teams will seek to examine the flow of money and where it came from.
"They fund-raised, recruited, planned and so forth in the weeks and days leading up to Jan. 6, so we know they talked about some of the ways they tried to finance getting people to Washington and getting different paraphernalia," she said.
Ultimately, any potential compensatory and punitive damages against the defendants will require the suit's plaintiff, the D.C. government, to determine how it was harmed. Hershenov said that could include the physical desecration to the Capitol, the cost of medical bills associated with the bodily injuries and mental trauma on members of the Metropolitan Police Department, as well as the economic harm to D.C. when businesses were temporarily closed.
The financial toll on defendants could conceivably be in the millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars, Hershenov said.
Pro-Trump protesters gather in front of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Jon Cherry / Getty Images file In the Charlottesville trial, nine plaintiffs won more than $25 million in financial compensation from about two dozen white supremacists, neo-Nazis and key organizers of the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally.
While the jury in Charlottesville was deadlocked on whether the defendants engaged in a federal conspiracy as outlined under the Ku Klux Klan Act, the suit was successful in shutting down or hindering facets of their activities.
One defendant, white nationalist Richard Spencer, said the suit had been "financially crippling" and he was "in a very difficult situation in terms of getting funds." A leader of another defendant, the League of the South, said the suit stalled its effort to fundraise for a new building in Alabama.
Some defendants have said that they're leaving the white supremacist movement altogether, although there remains skepticism that will happen, said Amy Spitalnick, the executive director of Integrity First for America, the nonprofit civil rights organization that funded the Charlottesville suit.
The suit's aim — to hold the defendants liable for the violence at the "Unite the Right" rally — was also effective when it came to going to trial because it forced white supremacists and white nationalists to appear in court and answer for what transpired.
"Others can see how they've been held accountable," Spitalnick said, "and they'll know that a lawsuit like ours will follow these defendants to the ends of the Earth to collect on them, to place liens on their homes, garnish their wages and seize their assets, whatever it takes."
The Jan. 6 lawsuit, she said, can similarly highlight questions surrounding the groups' finances and flush out sources of income that may not have previously been known to the public. The timing of a potential trial remains unclear.
The Charlottesville lawsuit was filed in 2017, but a trial took four years, impeded in part by the pandemic.
"This is about making clear the consequences," Spitalnick said of litigation that is successful. "We may not change the hearts and minds of those radicalized, but this can be a crucial tool in deterring extremism down the road."
These New Details About the 'Peaceful Tourists' Who Visited the Capitol Are Incredibly Dark
"The Conspirators: The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers on Jan. 6 "Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun" [...] By then, another far-right, extremist group, the Oath Keepers, was also preparing for Jan. 6. Two days before the riot, the group’s founder and leader, Stewart Rhodes, posted a statement on the Oath Keeper’s website. It read .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172347/513-sixth-superseding-indictment.pdf .. in part: - It is CRITICAL that all patriots who can be in DC get to DC to stand tall in support of President Trump’s fight to defeat the enemies foreign and domestic who are attempting a coup, through the massive vote fraud and related attacks on our Republic. … [W]e will also have well armed and equipped QRF [quick reaction force] teams on standby, outside DC, in the event of a worst case scenario, where the President calls us up as part of the militia to assist him inside DC. -"
A drone, a weapons cache, 30 days of supplies, and a Quick Reaction Force.
- But the most salient details in the new memo describe the planning and stockpiling of weapons at the Comfort Inn. Among them, prosecutors say, were “at least three luggage carts’ worth of gun boxes, rifle cases, and suitcases filled with ammunition.”
“A second QRF team from North Carolina consisted of four men who kept their rifles ready to go in a vehicle parked in the hotel lot,” according to the Justice Department. “Later, Vallejo and other members of the Arizona QRF team wheeled in bags and large bins of weapons, ammunition, and essential supplies to last 30 days.”
Prosecutors say that as some Oath Keepers breached the Capitol, Vallejo “attempted, but failed, to launch … a ‘drone with a 720p cam for recon use.’” Capitol Police officials have, in recent days, described efforts to protect the Capitol against unauthorized drones. -
A drone?
These guys had a drone?
There clearly were different tiers of the insurrection. There were the masterminds in the Willard and in the White House. There was the unfocused mob acting out of abandoned wrath. And there was a group of militarized, sophisticated insurgents who came prepared to stop the certification of the 2020 election by force of arms if they thought that to be necessary. The militarized element had weapons, and they had reinforcements standing by. They were allegedly prepared for an ongoing insurgency. They were prepared for a new, darker country than the one that we have now.
WARNING: LONG -Kyle Rittenhouse and the New Era of Political Violence "Kyle Rittenhouse shot his victims, but we can't call them that? What kind of justice system is this?" [...] It began with the video of a white police officer shooting a Black man named Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., a small lakefront manufacturing city, on Aug. 23, 2020. [...] “KYLE RITTENHOUSE FOR CONGRESS,” Anthony Sabatini, a Republican state representative in Florida, tweeted. “I want him as my president,” Ann Coulter tweeted. “ALL THE BEST PEOPLE #StandWithKyle,” the right-wing commentator Michelle Malkin tweeted. “It’s now or never ... and, yes, it’s war.” [...] In the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020, many of the participants were not themselves Black: a significant break with the preceding history of racial protest politics in America, and a reflection of how much white liberals’ views on race had changed in the last decade .. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2017/10/05/4-race-immigration-and-discrimination/4_3-11/ . But even as racial justice became thoroughly embedded in Democratic politics, B.L.M. retained the characteristics of a largely leaderless protest movement — most notably, in 2020, an inability to control the actions that were taken under its banner. P - According to a study .. https://acleddata.com/2021/02/05/us-crisis-monitor-releases-full-data-for-2020/ .. by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, only 6 percent of Black Lives Matter demonstrations last year involved violence — by demonstrators, counter-?demonstrators or police officers — or property destruction. But those that did presented an obvious dilemma for Democratic elected officials: [...] Donald Trump had labored for several years to make a national boogeyman out of antifa,... [...] But the possibility, however faint, of the event’s having been genuinely nonpartisan seemed to have been precluded from the outset by the organizers’ choice of headlining act: David Clarke, the former Milwaukee County sheriff and right-wing celebrity, and possibly the most political and polarizing figure in American law enforcement. In a 2018 column on TownHall.com, Clarke criticized the “guerrilla-type warfare tactics of the Democrat Party and the American left” and the Republican elites who were ill-equipped to fight them in “this new age of political warfare.” This sort of rhetorical posture, that held anyone to the left of the Republican Party to be a treasonous threat to the state, was once a fringe view in the party; by 2020, national Republicans who did not espouse it seemed the exception rather than the rule. P - Clarke, who is Black, had also described Black Lives Matter activists as “subhuman creeps” and claimed that they were allying with the Islamic State to destroy America. Local racial-justice activists quickly assembled a protest to the Back the Blue rally. Early in the event, one of their number crossed the street, banging loudly on a metal pot. Several rallygoers confronted him, and as the argument escalated, another activist and a local journalist were hit as they tried to separate them. A white police officer in plain clothes mistaken by a rallygoer for a demonstrator was punched in the jaw when he went to pick up a BLACK LIVES MATTER sign that the activist had dropped in the street. [...] All of these episodes looked, in retrospect, like steppingstones on the way to the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol .. https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000007606996/capitol-riot-trump-supporters.html , where a coalition of standard-issue Trump voters, QAnon true believers and militiamen united in an attempt to blow up American democracy in order to save the country from their perceived enemies. We had entered a new era in which there would always be an enemy and someone ready to meet them. It was clear, by then, that what happened in Kenosha was about something much bigger than the buildings that burned there. It did not really matter if dozens of buildings were burning or one was. It did not really matter if buildings were burning at all.? https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=166752175
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