Category Archives: January 6 MAGA riot

NY Times fact-finding on the Jaunary 6 MAGA riot

The New Yorks Times writes:

Day of Rage: An In-Depth Look at How a Mob Stormed the Capitol By Dmitriy Khavin, Haley Willis, Evan Hill, Natalie Reneau, Drew Jordan, Cora Engelbrecht, Christiaan Triebert, Stella Cooper, Malachy Browne and David Botti  

A six-month Times investigation has synchronized and mapped out thousands of videos and police radio communications from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, providing the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.

By The New York Times June 30, 2021

In the six months since an angry pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, immense efforts have been made not only to find the rioters and hold them accountable, but also — and perhaps more important — to dig into the details of Jan. 6 and slowly piece together what actually happened that day.

Congressional committees have looked into police and intelligence failures. The Justice Department has launched a nationwide investigation that has now resulted in more than 500 arrests. And while Republicans in Congress blocked the formation of a blue-ribbon bipartisan committee, House Democrats are poised to appoint a smaller select committee.

Even now, however, Republican politicians and their allies in the media are still playing down the most brazen attack on a seat of power in modern American history. Some have sought to paint the assault as the work of mere tourists. Others, going further, have accused the F.B.I. of planning the attack in what they have described — wildly — as a false-flag operation.

The work of understanding Jan. 6 has been hard enough without this barrage of disinformation and, hoping to get to the bottom of the riot, The Times’s Visual Investigations team spent several months reviewing thousands of videos, many filmed by the rioters themselves and since deleted from social media. We filed motions to unseal police body-camera footage, scoured law enforcement radio communications, and synchronized and mapped the visual evidence

Here are some of the major revelations.

We pinpointed at least eight locations where rioters breached and entered the Capitol building — more than were previously known. The scenes revealed the extent of the rioters’ disregard for the law as they surged violently around the building’s perimeter and, eventually, inside.

The police were outnumbered and responded differently at various breach points, allowing rioters to break through doors using weapons like crowbars or, in some places, to simply walk through as the police stepped aside.

The multiple breaches also revealed the Capitol’s vulnerability. Despite locked doors and, in certain places, thick windows, rioters without specialized equipment were able to break in instantly in some places.

In the Senate, proceedings to certify the election results were halted almost immediately when a building-wide lockdown was called after the first breach by rioters. But we found that it took much longer for the House of Representatives to do the same. This delay appeared to have contributed to a rioter’s death.

Instead of evacuating, members of the House sheltered in place and resumed their work even as rioters overran the building. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was rushed to safety, but Representative Jim McGovern took her place presiding over the session. He told us that Capitol building security staff had said it was safe to resume.

Eventually, the House session was halted and members began streaming out of a rear door guided by security personnel. Rioters had arrived at almost the same moment, just on the other side of a hallway door with glass panels. They became incensed at the sight of the evacuating lawmakers — a situation that could have been avoided if the lawmakers had left before the mob arrived.

Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter and follower of the QAnon conspiracy theory, tried to climb through one of the door’s broken windows toward the lawmakers. A plainclothes Capitol Police officer charged with protecting the House shot her once through the upper chest. The wound was fatal.

One of the biggest questions hanging over the aftermath of Jan. 6 was whether the riot was planned and carried out by organized groups.

By identifying and tracking key players throughout the day, we found that most — even some at the forefront of the action — were ardent, but disorganized Trump supporters swept up in the moment and acting individually.

The first person to enter the Capitol building, for example, was a 43-year-old husband and father from Kentucky named Michael Sparks. He has no known affiliation with any organized groups. Ray Epps, an Arizona man seen in widely-circulated videos telling Trump supporters on multiple occasions to go into the Capitol, also seemed to have acted on his own.

Yet we also found that the crowd did include members of groups who seemed eager for a confrontation, like well-organized militias and far-right groups including the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. This proved to be a combustible mix. In the videos we analyzed, they can be seen with baseball bats and body armor, and coordinating with one another using radios. On several occasions, a calculated move by a more organized actor — for example, a Proud Boy identifying a weakness in the police line near a set of stairs — set off a surge by the mob.

Evidence collected by the F.B.I. suggests that the Proud Boys in particular were aware that they had inflamed the mob of ordinary people — and may have intended to do so in advance. Just before the assault, one Proud Boy leader wrote on a group chat on Telegram that he was hoping his men could incite the “normies” to “burn that city to ash today” and “smash some pigs to dust.” Then, after the riot, another Proud Boy leader wrote on Telegram: “This is NOT what I expected to happen. All from us showing up and starting some chants and getting the normies all riled up.”VISUAL INVESTIGATIONS: Our investigative journalists use evidence that’s hidden in plain sight to present a definitive account of the news. Get an email as soon as our next Visual Investigation is published.Sign Up

By synchronizing footage from both sides of the Capitol building, we were able to establish how crowds on each side interacted with one another.

We tracked the movement of a group of rioters from the west side of the Capitol — which faces the National Mall and absorbed most of the attendees arriving from Mr. Trump’s speech — to the opposite eastern side.

The eastern crowd had remained largely behind the barricades, but all that changed with the arrival of rioters from around the side of the building. This more violent group was the trigger that put the entire mob over the edge, spurring them to push easily through a line of officers and surround the Capitol on every front.

Most of the videos we analyzed were filmed by the rioters. By carefully listening to the unfiltered chatter within the crowd, we found a clear feedback loop between President Trump and his supporters.

As Mr. Trump spoke near the White House, supporters who had already gathered at the Capitol building hoping to disrupt the certification responded. Hearing his message to “walk down to the Capitol,” they interpreted it as the president sending reinforcements. “There’s about a million people on their way now,” we heard a man in the crowd say, as Mr. Trump’s speech played from a loudspeaker.

The call and response didn’t stop there. We found evidence of his influence once the violence was well underway. In one moment, a woman with a megaphone urged rioters to climb through a broken window by asking them to “stand up for our country and Constitution” — echoing the language in an earlier tweet from Mr. Trump. In another, as the police were pushing to clear the mob off the building, a rioter screamed at officers: “I was invited here by the president.”

One unanswered question when we began this investigation was how the police managed to reclaim the Capitol building from the mob. We found that once officers increased their numbers, armor and crowd-control weapons, clearing the rioters happened quickly and effectively.

The footage revealed that officers cleared several locations in less than an hour after being reinforced by local Metropolitan Police, Virginia State Police and other local and federal agencies that arrived with more manpower and authorization to use more powerful crowd-control weapons.

It’s a stark contrast to what we saw during the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, when federal officers were on scene from the start, already equipped with riot gear and authorized to use higher levels of force. Law enforcement’s relatively quick success in clearing the Capitol building once reinforcements arrived shows how the rioters might have been stopped far earlier with a different level of preparation — possibly preventing fatalities, countless officer injuries, over $30 million in damages.

There was another difference between the Capitol riot and those connected to this summer’s racial justice protests: Very few people who broke into the Capitol were arrested at the scene. Most were allowed to leave the building, forcing the F.B.I. to track them down later and take them into custody — a process that is still continuing today.

Continue reading the main story

Facts, anyone?

In light of the wide acceptance of Trump’s Big Lie (that his “landslide victory” was stolen by a bipartisan conspiracy against him), by tens of millions of Americans, it would appear that making a winning argument based on evidence and what you can actually prove, from a practical, tactical point of view, is a thing of the past — at least to a good 40% of our fellow citizens.

The real Big Lie, according to Trump, is that that everybody beside him, and those completely loyal to him, is lying about the rigged election he actually won in a “landslide.” The truth, Tump insists, is that a landslide victory was illegally stolen from him by massive voter fraud and a wide-ranging bipartisan conspiracy to deprive him of his rightful office and illegally install the illegitimate Joe Biden as the “president”. Hence, the rioters who stormed the Capitol January 6 had, as they believed, every right to be enraged, to fight like hell to protect their country and do what their president insisted was their patriotic duty — fight like hell to stop the steal of democracy in progress in the Capitol.

Not that long ago, facts (things that can be shown to have actually happened, things that are witnessed, that people swear to, that are recorded on cameras from multiple angles) supporting each side of an argument were weighed before deciding who was right and who was mistaken. Now, for purposes of American politics, one need only repeat the party line (“alternative facts” work beautifully), loudly and without deviation, and the “perception” of truth will do just fine for that loud minority of Americans.

If a violent mob unleashed by your party’s leader attacked you and threatened to kill your vice president, who, arguably, deserved to be punished for his cowardice and treachery, after all, you must say that there never was a lawless mob and nobody threatened violence against anybody. Anybody who says there was an armed, angry mob, 140 injuries to police, five deaths and threats to Pence and other elected officials is a bald-faced liar! Case closed, loser!

If a sitting president’s deliberate, months long, coordinated, well-funded attempt to violently stop the peaceful transition of power at the last possible moment doesn’t demand a fact-based reckoning, and accountability for the organizers and inciters of the violence, we all might as well just wait to be told where to report for re-education.

Facts still mattered in American court cases, in arguments over public policy, in basic agreement about what is reality and what is delusion, in our very recent history… (this doesn’t necessarily apply in the unappealable Supreme Court, of course, that non-political body Justice Breyer defends the impartiality of… [1])

It’s easy to forget important facts when a powerful firehose of ever more violent bullshit is constantly flooding our perceptions. Remember how Trump mega-donor Postmaster William DeJoy openly removed hundreds of mailboxes from urban areas and ordered urban high speed mail sorting machines dismantled? These moves were targeted to minimize the mail-in votes of Democrats. DeJoy was ordered to put the mailboxes back, but the high speed mail sorting machines could not be replaced, they were literally in a million pieces, already shipped somewhere to be sold for scrap. Sorry.

Polls showed Democrats were much more likely than Trump anti-maskers (future anti-vaxxers) to vote by mail during a pandemic. Trump and his mega-donor then made every effort to eliminate as much mail-in voting as possible, as he and Barr continued to spread furor with unfounded, evidence-free claims about fraud-rife mail-in voting, setting the stage for #Stop the Steal and the January 6 MAGA riot. (After the damage was done Barr claims to have told Trump the voter fraud business was “bullshit” and that he’d “suspected” that was the case even as he ordered — and announced — federal investigations of criminal voter fraud).

Trump won in 2016 by 78,000 votes delivered in key Electoral College districts in three states. One of them was Pennsylvania which he won by less than 1%. He could improve his odds of winning greatly in 2020 if he could eliminate a sizable percentage of anti-Trump votes in swing states where voting is always close. His party’s chances of winning elections are tied directly to voter suppression, particularly after Trump lost an election where he had the second highest number of votes cast, all-time, in an election that set the record for voter turnout, (during a pandemic, mind you).

CandidateYearPartyPopular vote
Joe Biden2020Democratic81,268,924
Donald Trump2020Republican74,216,154
Barack Obama2008Democratic69,498,516

The sixty baseless lawsuits challenging the 2020 elections brought by Trump and the RNC were famously all dismissed, often for lack of evidence. Sometimes forgotten is that before the 2020 election Trump and the Republican National Committee brought literally hundreds of lawsuits to stop forms of voting they felt would put them at a disadvantage. One was a federal suit in western Pennsylvania challenging the state’s plan to expand mail-in voting, and drop boxes, for an election during the second wave of a deadly pandemic. The judge ordered Trump/RNC to produce evidence of their claims that these long-used methods of voting would introduce massive fraud into the election. If they did not produce evidence, the judge ordered, they must state that they have no evidence.

The federal judge, J. Nicholas Ranjan, had been appointed by Trump and for a time it looked like he was bending over backwards not to dismiss the case. He wasn’t, as it turned out.

The Trump/RNC’s legal team’s initial response to Judge Ranjan’s order (which granted the state of Pennsylvania’s motion demanding evidence) by Trump’s attorneys was (according to Reuters):

The Trump campaign says the ballot drop box invites fraud. The federal judge asked the campaign to provide evidence of actual fraud, but the campaign declined, arguing it did not have to do so in order to win the case.

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In the end Trump’s lawyers obeyed the judge’s order by submitting several hundred pages, screenshots and stories from Breitbart, FOX, OANN, Newsmax and similar outfits, alleging massive fraud, without presenting any actual evidence of widespread fraud. Even the right-wing non-profit Heritage Foundation’s zealous crackpot documenter of voter fraud, Hans von Spakovsky, has found a statistically insignificant number of actual voting fraud since 1984.

When Judge Ranjan finally dismissed the Trump/RNC case he wrote that since Trump and the RNC were likely to file an appeal, that he would explicitly lay out the law supporting every facet of his dismissal, basically appeal-proofing his dismissal of the evidence-free lawsuit. He did so over the course of more than 100 pages.

“Frivolous suit” is the usual term for a lawsuit submitted without any credible evidence in support. These lawsuits are designed to harass, intimidate, bully, bankrupt and they are deeply frowned on by American courts. Law students are taught that lawyers who submit frivolous lawsuits abuse the legal process, violate their ethical obligations as “officers of the court” and are subject to sanctions including disbarment.

Millions of Americans are waiting, without much hope, for the legal consequences of this wave of frivolous, evidence-free Trump lawsuits that created the “perception” that there was massive voting fraud because an angry, powerful man who has never lied told us it was true, and filed countless lawsuits. Suspending Rudy’s law license seems a few hundred wrist slaps too few.

Where the Trump-appointed J. Nicholas Ranjan demanded actual proof of fraud, the 6-3 Federalist Society majority on the Supreme Court (5 of the 6 appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote) had no such scruples before ruling in favor of their party. The “perception of fraud” was good enough for Samuel Alito to rule that perception of fraud alone is sufficient reason for, admittedly partisan voter suppression laws you can’t actually prove were passed with anything but good old partisan intent. It’s the quiet Nazis you’ have to watch out for, the silently smoldering ones, particularly when they’re protected by a robust like-minded majority of extremists.

Even (or especially) in a country where a good 40% of voters are entirely faith-based, rather than reality-based, facts need to be known. Thousands of enraged Trump supporters violently assaulted the Capitol to Stop the Steal. The procedure for calling in the National Guard had been changed by “federal officials” shortly before the riot, delaying the deployment of waiting troops that quickly stopped the riot when they arrived, four hours too late to prevent the multiple breaches of the Capitol. When the National Guard arrived, and surrounded the crowd, the riot was quickly over and, instead of the arrest of every rioter, the rioters were allowed to go in peace, no harm no foul. They celebrated their triumph, they actually did stop a joint session of Congress, and posted selfies and videos that got many of them arrested weeks later.

It is too simple a point to make that had this been a crowd of angry Black people, January 6 would be remembered as the day police and National Guard massacred hundreds of American citizens in front of the Capitol.

We are to be consoled, six full months later, that perhaps as many as half of the violent “protesters” who breached the Capitol that day and beat down police officers are facing charges for things like trespassing. Merrick Garland is no radical, after all. Now, calling for an investigation of this violence, planned and incited by the former president and several sitting Congressmen, aided and abetted by multiple senators, is a political hot potato in a land where facts are as malleable as the clay God originally formed into the first man.

On the other hand…

It may be that in following an unhinged but popular leader the now extremist GOP may have finally sealed its fate — no matter how many voter suppression laws they pass, their over the top extremism may be punished at the polls by voters determined to vote, and organizing to defeat the laws designed to disenfranchise them. Heather Cox Richardson provides a great historical echo for that proposition. It may be that, like celebrity psychopath Al Capone, it will be the former president’s greed, cheapness and true belief that he is untouchable, even for shooting someone in the face, that brings him, and his whole criminal empire, down. I can hear his faithful, should that day arrive: “For that? For that?!!!”.

For those who have the stomach for the hideous facts, here’s the NY Times visual account of Trump’s January 6 MAGA riot, very well-done — the video is harrowing [2].

see the full video here
  • Video Investigation: Day of Rage

    [1]

    “My experience of more than 30 years as a judge has shown me that, once men and women take the judicial oath, they take the oath to heart,” [Breyer] said last month in a lecture at Harvard Law School. “They are loyal to the rule of law, not to the political party that helped to secure their appointment.”

    source

    Just ask any of your six Federalist Society colleagues about that one, Steve. I’m sure even Clarence Thomas would agree with you…

    [2]

    A few handy links from the NY Times video investigation of January 6, 2021 .

    Capitol Riot Fallout

    Worth Remembering

    “Given Mr. Trump’s reckless actions after losing the 2020 vote [1], and the violence they spurred, the newly released emails are unsurprising. But consider that fact for a moment:

    It is unsurprising that the president of the United States leaned on the Justice Department to help him try to steal an election.

    The country cannot forget that Mr. Trump betrayed his oath, that most Republican officeholders remain loyal to him nonetheless — and that it could be worse next time.”

    source

    you people are all fucking losers, you deserve “president” Biden

    [1]

    Among these reckless actions:

    repeating the baseless, infuriating lie that the election was rigged against him and riddled with bipartisan fraud, spending $50,000,000 in advertising to promote this lie, denouncing the numerous courts that found he’d produced no evidence of voter fraud or irregularity, firing the federal appointee who certified the election as fair and clean, attacking Republicans in various states he lost for not overturning election results, leaning on state voting commissions to overturn the election, making calls (18) to at least one Republican state Secretary of State asking him to give him a break and just “find” a total of one more vote than he lost by, calling for and promoting a Stop the Steal rally in front of the White House, with a march to the Capitol to “Stop the Steal,” on the day a joint session of Congress would ceremonially award the Electoral College votes to Biden, and officially make him winner of the presidential election, encouraging anger at the “cowardly” “traitor” Mike Pence who was refusing to be bold, break the “law” and declare Trump the winner, as his crowd stormed the Capitol and chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” with a gallows erected outside, Trump, watching the mob advance inside the Capitol on live TV, tweeted:

    etcetera

    When he was impeached for these dangerous, unconstitutional actions, he denounced the “partisan” impeachment as a desperate ploy by partisan, witch hunting fraudulent [cannibal pedophile] losers. etc.

    Now there are a bunch of new voter suppression laws, in states Trump lost, to make sure what he demanded be done by Trump-loyal state legislators to reverse the election results last time can now all be legally done next time.

    Where is the moderate, judicious Attorney General Merrick Garland on all of this? On the obstruction of justice case laid out by Robert Mueller? He hasn’t really taken a public position on the seriousness of this threat to democracy.

    Uncanny echoes of Nazism

    It is an unsettling thing to watch a right-wing movement move to an extreme position and appropriate so many of the tactical tics of, say, the Nazis.

    When the Nazis controlled the mass media in Germany it was easy enough for the party to get their unchallengeable message across to every citizen. They had a network of spies who informed on disloyal citizens, anyone privately critical of the one-party narrative. These traitors met with harsh, often gruesome fates. In many cases, they were turned in by their own true believer Nazi children, loyal members of the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend).

    An example of a debatable Nazi talking point, Jews had to be destroyed because they were responsible for the war. Hitler had invaded Poland, unprovoked, because of the Jews. The Jews, you see, were said to be a highly infectious disease that had to be eradicated. Every vice in the great German nation you could think of was a result of poisonous Jewish devilry. The only way to purify the blood of the Aryan Reich and make Germany great again was to exterminate this Judaic bacillus. The news was dispensed day after day in a way that made this controversial “theory” seem not only entirely reasonable but in urgent need of immediate action (or “aktion” in Nazi-speak).

    If you get your news from FOX (Rupert Murdoch), or from even more extreme right-wing sources, One America News Network (OANN) or Newsmax, you get a version of reality very much at odds with the facts that can actually be established by things like court verdicts, bipartisan election certifications, real-time videos, written statements, spoken statements, sworn statements made under the penalty of perjury.

    In the MAGA telling, the January 6 MAGA riot, for example, was not the result of a long, well-funded, long-planned campaign based on the lie that Trump won in a landslide and that communists, anarchists, anti-fascists (imagine how sick that is!) insane lying, violently rioting Blacks, angry radical Democrats and disloyal, lying Republicans had rigged the election against him, it was a spontaneous show of completely understandable patriotic fervor.

    The 140 Capitol Police officers supposedly injured by this crowd of peaceful protesters? Never happened, radical left propaganda. OK, injured cops are speaking up, showing up in Congress to testify. Well, it may have happened, but it was not Trump fans but terrorists from antifa and BLM who did all the damage, viciously attacked the police, who all supported Trump 100% and kissed and hugged the actual peaceful Trump supporters, who behaved like normal tourists (who’d smoked crack or crystal meth a moment earlier). Actually, wait, it was an FBI false flag operation to make Trump, who actually won in a landslide, look like the inglorious loser he will never be!

    A logical question I heard some pundit ask the other day: if the FBI staged this evil thing to make Trump look like a treasonous, seditious loser, wouldn’t you want a complete and thorough bipartisan investigation into the fucking FBI? Not the case with the lockstep GOP — they have learned from recent Trump/McConnell/Barr history. They want any finding about the January 6 “riot” to be dismissible as a complete and total “partisan witch hunt” and they know their solid 39% will believe that theory no matter what the radical partisan Democrat liars try to produce as “evidence”.

    It is, of course, a mistake to look for logic in any of this. Just like the average disgruntled German who listened to Nazi media broadcasting every evening and came to believe as indisputable fact whatever was confidently repeated several times, the average American who gets only one political opinion, the same talking points echoed endlessly, will never even consider the likely notion that, if Trump indeed was lying about all the traitors who rigged the election against him, the dozens of lost lawsuits dismissed for lack of evidence of the rigged election, the expenditure of $50,000,000 to advertise the lie that he’d actually won, organizing a mass gathering to physically Stop the Steal and prevent the peaceful transition of power, and gave a fiery speech immediately before the riot that incited an already angry crowd to break through police barricades, fight the police and storm the Capitol, forcing legislators and their staffs to run for their lives, as the law abiding mob did $1,400,000 worth of damage to the building, maybe . . . Trump didn’t actually win in a landslide.

    No matter. As we see from history, authoritarians rely on certain things, primarily blind obedience from their followers, who are inclined to believe whatever supports their view of a world run by vicious enemies who are mercilessly screwing them and need to be fought without mercy. Another common feature of authoritarian mobs is ready, justifiable, righteous violence against these rightfully hated enemies. This violence encourages obedience, or fearful silence, which also helps.

    The one thing that every right-wing movement has in common is an unshakable belief in a strongman, an infallible leader with the will to destroy all of their despicable, dangerous enemies. In the case of Trumpism, that leader is Trump. As Trump’s German born grandfather [1] might have said:

    The leader is always right.

    The Führerprinzip (German: [ˈfyːʀɐpʀɪnˌtsiːp] (listen); German for ‘leader principle’) prescribed the fundamental basis of political authority in the Government of Nazi Germany. This principle can be most succinctly understood to mean that “the Führer‘s word is above all written law” and that governmental policies, decisions, and offices ought to work toward the realization of this end.[1] In actual political usage, it refers mainly to the practice of dictatorship within the ranks of a political party itself, and as such, it has become an earmark of political fascism.

    source
    Amen to that, morons

    [1]

    Trump’s entrepreneurial grandfather, Friedrich Trump, trained as a barber, was deported from Germany for fleeing to avoid military service (and tax evasion when bringing in his American-made fortune). Interesting bit from Wikipedia:

    During the Klondike Gold Rush, Trump travelled to the Yukon Territory and made his fortune by operating a restaurant and a brothel for miners in the boomtown of Whitehorse.[1][2] Trump then returned to Bavaria and married Elisabeth Christ, the daughter of a former neighbor.

    As he had emigrated to America in order to evade conscription, the Bavarian Government stripped Trump of his citizenship and permanently banished him following an investigation. As a result, Trump and his family returned to the United States. He became a U.S. citizen in 1892.

    Trump worked as a hotel manager and was beginning to acquire real estate in Queens when he died in the 1918 flu pandemic. He was the father of Frederick Christ Trump and John G. Trump, and the paternal grandfather of former 45th U.S. president Donald Trump.

    source

    The poor man died during a pandemic from a lack of hydroxychloroquine . . . an eerie echo of history.

    The sometimes shady details of how he made his fortune are fascinating to read (see the article above), and another eerie echo of history.

    The Boston Globe nails it — MAGA man must be prosecuted

    In a six part series, which any American (or anyone else) can read without encountering a pay wall (Mexicans will pay for the paywall…) the Boston Globe editorial board makes a clear, overwhelmingly strong case for the need to prosecute the former president if we are to save American democracy.

    As simpering Trump toady Lindsey Graham put it, after voting to acquit the commander-in-chief who’d incited a violent attack on the Capitol, doubling down on his desperate efforts to prevent the peaceful transition of power (one of his last big crimes in office) “if you believe he committed a crime, he can be prosecuted like any other citizen.”  Indeed.

    Here’s a link to the conclusion of the Boston Globe series making the final argument for prosecution (the previous five parts, which I have not yet fully read, are linked below by the Globe). Nicely done, y’all are wicked smart.

    The first installment in the short series starts this way:

    Boston is an ANARCHIST JURISDICTION, the Globe editors suite is crawling with lying transexual anarchist antikhrist covfefes

    The plan for January 6 (outside of the MAGA riot)

    The following is from an early morning January 6, 2021 article from Bloomberg, published in the Washington Post, describing the legal backdrop for, and the history of, the parliamentary machinations planned by Trump supporters in Congress:

    3. What happens then?

    If at least one representative and one senator object to a state’s result, the joint session immediately recesses before the next state is called. The House and Senate meet separately to debate the objection for up to two hours before voting on whether to count or discard the electoral votes in question. Only if the objection is approved by both houses would votes be excluded. With a Democratic majority in the House, and several Republican senators on record opposing Trump’s attempts to overturn Biden’s win, any objection would be highly unlikely to succeed in getting electoral votes thrown out. But if separate two-hour debates are required for multiple states, the process could become a drawn-out, acrimonious affair.

    5. Have objections been raised before?

    Actually, objections aren’t rare during this process, but usually they are disposed of quickly and easily. After the 2016 election won by Trump, for instance, several Democratic representatives attempted to challenge electoral votes, but no senator joined them. In 2005, following the contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry, some Democrats were unhappy about voting issues that had come up in Ohio. In that instance, both Ohio Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones and California Senator Barbara Boxer objected to Ohio’s results, triggering consideration by both chambers. After about an hour of debate among senators — and lengthier debate among representatives — the challenge was rejected by votes of 267-31 by the House and 74-1 by the Senate.

    6. Has Congress ever rejected votes?

    In 1873, Congress decided not to count votes from Arkansas and Louisiana in the re-election of President Ulysses S. Grant, though Grant would have been the victor either way, according to the Congressional Research Service. Four years later, in 1877, a joint session of Congress confronting competing slates of electors opted to create a bipartisan electoral commission to resolve the highly disputed election between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who ended up winning by a single electoral vote. In hopes of avoiding such a situation in the future, Congress passed the Electoral College Act of 1887, which formed the basis for the current law. There have been no cases to date in which the process has changed the outcome of an election, according to the Congressional Research Service.

    For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

    ©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

    source

    On the other hand, if thousands in that massive MAGA crowd hadn’t been so timid that day — and had followed the bold, riled up, normal tourist crowd that beat the Capitol police, smashed windows, broke down doors and invaded the Capitol — Mike Pence likely wouldn’t be around today to boldly tell a crowd of Republicans in New Hampshire:

    “As I said that day, Jan. 6 was a dark day in history of the United States Capitol. But thanks to the swift action of the Capitol Police and federal law enforcement, violence was quelled. The Capitol was secured,” Pence said.

    “And that same day, we reconvened the Congress and did our duty under the Constitution and the laws of the United States,” Pence continued. “You know, President Trump and I have spoken many times since we left office. And I don’t know if we’ll ever see eye to eye on that day.”

    source

    Then, because Pence is what he is, and has always been, he added:

    

    “I will not allow Democrats or their allies in the media to use one tragic day to discredit the aspirations of millions of Americans. Or allow Democrats or their allies in the media to distract our attention from a new administration intent on dividing our country to advance their radical agenda,” Pence said. “My fellow Republicans, for our country, for our future, for our children and our grandchildren, we must move forward, united.”

    source

    “I don’t know if we’ll ever see eye to eye on that day.”

    Or, as one internet wag put it right after Pence’s brave words were spoken:

    Which is kind of a low blow. It’s not as if Trump was watching the riot live on TV, and tweeted anything like this moments after his MAGA crowd of normal tourists, who’d erected a working gallows outside (as normal tourists so often do) breached Capitol security and roamed the halls chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”

    Indeed we do, boss.

    Fucking Democrats…

    Instead of giving the Republican senators a stark choice last week between voting for the bipartisan January 6 Commission and facing a majority Democratic House Select Committee investigating the MAGA riot, with the power to subpoena whoever they want and broadcasting their sworn testimony live on television (with no veto from GOP reps, who could include insurrectionists Mo Brooks, Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor QAnon, Louie Gohmert, Paul Gosar, etc. — see full list of House 2020 election-contesting Select Committee contenders at [1]), we read that Democratic leaders are still fretting about the right way forward.

    There’s still a ghost of a chance, some optimistic Democrats appear to think, that six more Republicans will come forward to sacrifice their careers, and possibly endanger their families’ lives, by voting for the evenly bipartisan commission Republicans in the House demanded, and got.

    Here’s a headline, reporting the most recent “action” by the Democrats:

    Pelosi Weighing Options On How To move Forward With Jan. 6 Commission.

    I know that the Democrats, like the Republicans, work for corporations, that not alienating wealthy mega-donors is the name of the game, and that they rightfully don’t want to look like like McConnell’s lockstep, vindictive, truth-defying Trumpist zombies, but WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK is wrong with Democratic leadership?

    Vote A or you will get B, motherfuckers.

    What is hard about framing a simple choice like that? It presents the only two choices open to anyone who wants to fight to preserve democracy. If not A, we must do B, there is no third option, no compromise possible with a party of blustering zealots and cringing careerist cowards.

    Mind you, this filibuster was over something that should not have been partisan, like wearing a mask during a deadly pandemic (“Auschwitz!”), or getting vaccinated (“traitor!” “wimp!!!”) should not have been partisan. “Should” is a quaint word from a bygone time, a precatory word from the old world of norms, a word with no legal force or power. Still, it is hard to imagine (the above examples aside) anything more bipartisan than investigating on attack on Congress, Republicans and Democrats and their staffs all fled an angry mob of normal tourists on an normal mission to hang Trump’s loyal vice president and anyone else they found.

    It benefits only their leader to cover up an investigation into the roots of the riot that overran the police, surged into the Capitol after breaking windows and doors and actually halted a joint session of Congress that was about to finalize the peaceful transfer of power. The peaceful transfer of the presidency has been a hallmark of American democracy since the founding. Until a particular wealthy compulsive liar refused to accept the voters’ verdict and decided to send a mob to stop it.

    There is also, of course, the matter of learning for sure exactly who organized, paid for, and planned the attack that breached the Capitol. The organizers and financiers of the dress rehearsal for an all-out insurrection are all still out there. They have to be encouraged that, so far, but for a few of their pawns arrested and on their own, the mad plan worked so well and nobody is coming after the instigators so far.

    If you don’t think the riot was serious as terminal cancer, consider: if the tens of thousands of Trump supporters who swarmed the mall had followed the boldest 800 or so over the barricades and into the Capitol, there quite likely would have been state funerals for Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi and others.

    One thing I will say for Trump’s followers in Congress, and Nazi-types in general, they boldly and forcefully confront enemies and never publicly back down. They fetishize boldness. Boldness is a hallmark of the in-your-fucking-face provocative style of fascist/klan rallies. McConnell will never back down from his comment that 100% of his focus is on obstructing anything Biden and the Democrats try to do. There is no sniffing the wind, no deliberating, discussing, debating. They (or their leader) make a decision, no matter how stupid, and boldly stick to it. If it turns out to be wrong, they simply make it a rallying cry, to “trigger” the other side, their hated enemies. It works well for a solid 39% of Americans, we can say that for it.

    Even fucking Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post ran this editorial, not long after Trump demanded a filibuster of a commission to investigate his riot and McConnell asked for the filibuster as a “personal favor,” and it was so.

    “HOPEFULLY, MITCH McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are listening!” Once former president Donald Trump ordered Republican leaders in Congress on May 18 to block an independent commission to investigate the events of Jan. 6, the fate of the panel was sealed. On Friday, 35 Senate Republicans, including Mr. McConnell (Ky.), delivered the fatal blow by upholding a filibuster. But that must not be the end of efforts to get to the bottom of the most serious attack on U.S. democracy since the Civil War.

    Having tried bipartisanship on an issue of such critical importance, Democrats must now undertake their own investigation. Just as President Biden used reconciliation to enact covid-19 relief in the face of GOP obstruction, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) should use her authority to appoint a select committee to investigate what happened on Jan. 6.

    Such a committee, used in the past to examine such issues as the response to Hurricane Katrina, would have its drawbacks. It would be composed of members of Congress and not experts. Mr. McCarthy would likely use his appointments to lard the committee with members intent not on getting at the truth but protecting Mr. Trump. And it might be more difficult for the public to accept its conclusions. But Friday’s vote — in which Republicans prevented the commission bill from even coming to the floor for debate — leaves Democrats with little alternative. The country needs answers to such questions as what led to and who was responsible for the attack on Congress, and why there was a delay in getting reinforcements to the Capitol to help besieged police officers.

    During negotiations over the commission bill in the House, which passed with bipartisan support, Republicans got everything they asked for, including equal representation on the commission. Democrats were prepared to offer further concessions in the Senate. But most Republicans, as Friday’s vote made clear, would just as soon forget about the day thousands of Mr. Trump’s supporters breached the Capitol and assaulted police officers as they tried to stop Congress from certifying the presidential election results. No doubt, they know that much of the responsibility for the riot lies with Mr. Trump, and they are loath to incur his wrath or that of his base.

    In a closed-door meeting with his conference, Mr. McConnell argued that a lengthy commission wouldn’t be good politics heading into the midterms; he engaged in extraordinary arm-twisting, going so far as to tell wavering Republicans that their support to filibuster the bill would be a “personal favor” to him. It worked: Only six Republicans voted to advance debate on the commission: Bill Cassidy (La.), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Rob Portman (Ohio), Mitt Romney (Utah) and Ben Sasse (Neb.).

    Ms. Pelosi suggested during an April interview with USA Today that she might move to establish a select committee to investigate Jan. 6 if efforts for an independent commission failed. A statement she issued Friday in response to the Senate’s vote makes no mention of a select committee but stated that “honoring our responsibility to the Congress in which we serve and the Country which we love, Democrats will proceed to find the truth.” Proceed they should.

    source

    But only after A LOT more hand-wringing over the “right way” forward, like the agonizing year-long deliberations over whether Trump’s documented obstruction of justice, by itself, was enough to justify an impeachment (Nancy decided it wasn’t — an impeachment for extorting the new Ukrainian president and contempt of Congress — a political entity even more unpopular that Trump– would rally more Americans to the cause of impeachment, since it was more tangible and understandable than an abstraction like Obstruction of Justice, she argued).

    Here’s a thought:

    Maybe Joe Manchin has another good idea, or the coy Kyrsten Sinema will get inspired to offer any idea. Actually, Sinema reared her adorable little corporate head the other day, during a bipartisan Border Wall photo op with John Cornyn (R-Tx) to say this (which does not actually qualify as an idea):

    “Well, as folks in Arizona know, I’ve long been a supporter of the filibuster, because it is a tool that protects the democracy of our nation, rather than allowing our country to ricochet wildly every two to four years back and forth between policies.”

    Wait, here’s her idea! (from an April 2021 interview with Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal in which the senator for Arizona big business– she always listens to Arizona business leaders, she says — spelled out what needs to happen, instead of modifying the sacred Senate procedural rule so skillfully used by reactionary obstructionists)

    “When you have a place that’s broken and not working, and many would say that’s the Senate today, I don’t think the solution is to erode the rules,” Sinema told the Journal. “I think the solution is for senators to change their behavior and begin to work together, which is what the country wants us to do.”

    Brilliant. Simply change human nature. I feel much better now.

    How 35 obstructionists can uphold a filibuster is another head-scratcher, maybe one of those moderate centrists can explain to the rest of us.

    Free gold, losers!

    [1] Any of these 139 Trumpist patriots who voted to block confirmation of Biden Electors in the House would be an excellent candidate for the House Select Committee to investigate Benghazi, er, the January 6 MAGA riot. Many supported a commission to investigate election “fraud” before Biden could be sworn in, all later voted against a bill to form a bipartisan commission to investigate the riot that they helped inspire. (I know Frank Lucas and Lloyd Smucker are in there twice, they deserve to be, great men, both).

    (Also, formatting with this fucking intuitive WordPress editor was close to impossible for an old man like me… these are screen shots of screen shots, good luck making a collage, or formatting columns, with this ingeniously re-designed program… it’s so brilliantly simple to work with their innovative “blocks”…)

    Anyway, here they are:

    These 11 didn’t vote when Republicans won the filibuster 35-54 to block January 6 Commission

    At a moment when 60 votes are required to overcome even a 35 vote filibuster (parliamentary rules rule!) to obstruct debate, eleven senate weasels cast no vote one way or the other.

    While every vocal Republican senate supporter of Trump’s mad theory that in spite of bipartisan certification of the election the presidency had nonetheless been stolen from him (Cruz, Hawley, Johnson, Cotton, Tuberville, Kennedy, Scott, along with less vocal Hyde-Smith, Marshall and Loomis [1]) showed up to vote to kill the January 6 Commission, nine other Republicans opted for abstention (“neutrality” on the issue by simply not casting a vote — so much for Schumer’s vow to force all obstructionists to show their faces while voting), along with two “moderate” Democrats who didn’t vote:

    Patty Murray (D-Washington) (citing personal family reason for missing vote)

    Kyrsten Fucking Sinema (D-Arizona)

    From Sinema’s Wikipedia page:

    Sinema urged Senate colleagues to vote in favor of the proposed January 6 commission to further investigate the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. In a statement, she said, “we implore our Senate Republican colleagues to work with us to find a path forward on a commission to examine the events of January 6th.”[106] But she was one of two Senate Democrats who did not vote on it, the other being Senator Patty Murray of Washington, who cited a “personal family matter” for her absence.[107][108] Sinema did not give a reason for missing the vote.[109]

    Nor did her spokespeople give a reason, when reporters inquired.

    We learn, also from Wikipedia:

    During the 116th Congress, she voted with President Donald Trump‘s position roughly 25% of the time, the third-most of any Democratic senator, behind Joe Manchin [2] and Mark Kelly.[note 1][6]

    The nine Republican senators who opted for “abstention” were:

    • Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee
    • Republican Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri
    • Republican Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana
    • Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina
    • Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma
    • Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota
    • Republican Sen. James Risch of Idaho
    • Republican Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama
    • Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania

    Profiles in fucking courage, yo.

    [1]

    These patriots all voted to dispute the Electoral College certifications in one or more states, after the Stop the Steal riot that violently interrupted the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021:

    What happened to loud-mouthed Trumpists Ron Johnson from Wisconsin and Tom Cotton (R- Arkansas)? Apparently they were as cowardly that day as the useless Mike Pence…

    [2]

    Manchin, by the way, voted for the confirmations of Jeff Sessions (52-47), Neil Gorusch (54-45), Boof Kavanaugh (50-48) and yes to a federal law to ban abortions after 20 weeks (51-46). On the other hand, the “centrist” from West Virginia voted with the rest of his party against the hurried confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett (48-52, straight party-line vote), as did fellow “moderate” Kyrsten Sinema. Manchin also voted “no” on the confirmation of Betsey DeVos (50-51) for the cynically ironic post of Secretary of Education.

    More weasel dancing by the Biden DOJ

    This story snuck by fast, leaving barely a ripple, but coming on the heels of the Department of Justice appealing Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s ruling that Bill Barr’s disingenuous “deliberative” Mueller memo must be released to the public, it is alarming. The Washington Post:

    The American Civil Liberties Union of D.C., Black Lives Matter, other civil liberties groups and individual protesters accuse Trump and senior officials of driving the June 1 events. Military, federal and local police forcibly cleared the square using batons, clubs, horses, pepper spray, smoke and fired projectiles 30 minutes before a citywide curfew began. Images of violence drew a national backlash against Trump’s calls for “overwhelming force” to put down those he called “THUGS” and domestic terrorists. The nation’s top military official later apologized for walking with Trump before television cameras that day.

    Lawyers for the ACLU said that despite legal precedents, the government’s defense would “authorize brutality with impunity” in the heart of Washington at one of the most symbolic spaces within the seat of the federal government.

    source

    DOJ lawyers argued a few days ago that the case must be dismissed. They argued that the ACLU’s lawsuit over the June 2020 violent dispersal of a peaceful crowd so that Trump could walk to a photo op must be thrown out because the President and Attorney General were acting within the scope of their authority, Barr exercising the “paramount” government interest of protecting the president when he ordered federal anti-riot police to use force to drive a peaceful crowd from Lafayette Park.

    The Washington Post notes that right before Trump’s walk to the church to menacingly hold up a Bible:

    Trump called on governors to “dominate your city and your state” in the hours before the crackdown, adding, “In Washington, we’re going to do something people haven’t seen before.”

    Earlier, he tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” as protests raged in Minneapolis. Trump also threatened that if demonstrators outside the White House breached its gates, they “would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs and most ominous weapons I have ever seen.”

    Finally, the suit asserted that even as police moved on the square at 6:43 p.m., Trump spoke a few hundred yards away in the Rose Garden, saying, “[If] a city or a state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”

    President Donald Trump holds a Bible as he visits outside St. John's Church across from Lafayette Square.

    The ACLU had the better argument, that peaceful protesters have rights that prevent the federal (or state) government from burning, beating, shooting or giving them asthma attacks with chemical irritants:

    The lawsuits seek damages and a court order declaring that authorities conspired to violate civil rights statutes and the First and Fourth amendment rights of protesters injured after being burned, beaten, shot or put into respiratory distress.

    As Trump told his riled up supporters during his #Stop the Steal rally on January 6:

    “When you catch somebody in a fraud you’re allowed to go by very different rules.”

    Presumably the same goes for lawful protesters, when they represent something as ugly and divisive as police accountability for the murder of unarmed, unresisting citizens — when they refuse to stand down in the face of concrete threats and ultimatums, you’re allowed to go by very different rules.

    The DOJ, because, as it points out, the current president would never use violence against peacefully protesting anti-racists, moves to dismiss the case against Barr and Trump on those grounds, and on the grounds that Barr and Trump were acting completely within the scope of their duties when they used violence against a crowd, after numerous ugly provocations and threats by the president and the Attorney General, culminating in a calculated show of unconstitutional force to violently and “illegally” deprive citizens of their rights.

    Compare Trump and Barr’s response to the peaceful protest on June 1 to the federal response to the January 6 riot, during which a violent crowd of excited normal tourists fought police, breached, overran and vandalized the Capitol to prevent the final certification of Trump’s loss to Biden. Because, when you’re with president Trump, you’re allowed to go by very different rules.

    Nothing to see here. If you have asthma, don’t go to a peaceful protest that might be broken up by unaccountable government force including pepper spray, smoke bombs, stun grenades, tear gas and the armed charge of horse-mounted anti-riot police — in defense of the president’s unlimited right to provoke and order violence. You have to use common sense!

    Judge Amy Berman Jackson denies Trump rioter’s request to run free before his trial

    I am thankful that American court cases, however otherwise messed up and biased our system of justice is, are still decided based on the available evidence, facts proved in court, beyond a reasonable doubt. The ideologues on the Supreme Court can sometimes employ narrow legal theories to overturn a trial judge’s findings, invalidate or uphold a law, but judges in our trial courts are generally constrained by the facts in evidence in the case before them.

    Some of our judges are heroic in this perilous moment when a Big Lie is better than the truth to millions of our countrymen. I think of federal judges like J. Nicholas Ranjan, appointed by Trump, who nonetheless took days to write a 140 page appeal-proof ruling dismissing Trump’s evidence-free voter fraud case as the seamless tissue of bullshit it was.

    Another judicial hero is Judge Amy Berman Jackson, a trial court judge on the DC federal court. The trial judge’s first job is fact-finder, the court establishes the facts of the case before applying the law to the facts in evidence. Appeals courts review only alleged errors of law by the trial court. It is extremely rare for an appeals court to disturb the findings of fact by the trial judge.

    Judge Berman Jackson’s fact finding sets out a great deal of detail in her rulings, she illustrates her decisions with vivid facts from the record. She recently denied the motion for pre-trail release filed for enthusiastic Trump rioter, Karl Dresch, after weighing the facts before her.

    Here are few of the colorful facts she provided to support her findings, excerpted from many letters in support of Dresch’s motion for pre-trial release, from a long footnote of examples:

     T.L. (pastor of a local church): “[Defendant and his wife] are not yet members of the church.” “We have shared a few meals together, and [defendant] has done some work for the church. . . . That is the extent of our relationship.” “[As] a fairly quick judge of character . . . I do not believe that [defendant] is any real danger to our community or government. I ‘think’ that [defendant] got wrapped up in a movement and made some very foolish decisions.”

     A.P. (defendant’s longtime family friend): “While [defendant] may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time and got swept up in the unfortunate events of the day, I cannot imagine that he had any intent to inflict injury to persons or property.”

     P.L. (defendant’s longtime friend and local attorney): “[Defendant] has very strong political views concerning government, in particular the legislative and executive branches, and law enforcement.” “[T]o be candid, [defendant] has occasionally exercised rather poor judgement.” “I have never known [defendant] to be violent in any way nor do I believe him to be flight risk nor a person who would obstruct justice.”

     S.F. (casual acquaintance of defendant for past two years): “I can vouch for [defendant’s] sincere friendly character, morals and integrity over the time I have known him.”

    source

    In laying out the facts that support her decision to detain Dresch as a flight risk, and a danger to society, she includes a few pages of his social media posts, here’s one, from January 7:

     On January 7, 2021, defendant commented on an unidentified post that “Mike Pence gave our country to the communist hordes, traitor scum like the rest of them, we have your back give the word and we will be back even stronger.”

    and:

    Bro you shoulda been there . . . . the news is all fake . . . and just to correct shit . . we wasn’t violent but we took the capitol . . . . antifa didn’t do it they may have had some idiots undercover in the crowd but it was us that got in . . . and we didn’t fuck shit up . . . I seen a broken window . . . we picked up water bottles and shit cleaned up . . it was grand . . . best day ever . . . I think it was a good show of force . . . look what we can do peacefully, wait til we decide to get pissed.

    Of course, there is also a detail like this. In his home in Calumet, Michigan:

    Among other items, agents located several hundred rounds of rifle (7.62) ammunition, a Russian rifle, shotgun shells, a shotgun, and an Atlanta Braves backpack. The ammunition was located in multiple places throughout the house, including the dining room, the master bedroom, an upstairs hall room, and inside the backpack. Specifically, the backpack contained a Pilot gas station receipt from Hagerstown, Maryland dated January 5, 2021, a Metro SmartTrip card, and 8 boxes of 7.62 ammunition, containing a total of 160 rounds. The boxes matched the boxes of ammunition found in the house. The firearms were identified in the Michigan State Police Report as a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun and a Russian-made SKS 7.62 mm x 39 caliber rifle.

    The Judge then turns to Dresch’s motion to set him free until the trial and analyzes the applicable law, in light of the facts.

    Defendant argues that that government lacked sufficient grounds to move for his detention under the Bail Reform Act. Section 3142(f)(2) states that the judicial officer shall hold a hearing upon motion of the government or its own motion in a case that involves “(A) a serious risk that such person will flee; or (B) a serious risk that such person will obstruct or attempt to obstruct justice, or threaten, injure, or intimidate, or attempt to threaten, injure, or intimidate, a prospective witness or juror.”

    Then she sets to work ruling that the section 3142(g) factors support detention on the grounds of dangerousness by clear and convincing evidence (and here, due to formatting limitations, I will not indent, but the following is all from the May 28 decision)


    A. The nature and circumstances of the offense charged


    The United States Capitol was not open to the public on January 6, 2021.

    There was important business going on, though, because on that day, in accordance with Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, a joint session of Congress was convened to certify the vote of the Electoral College in the 2020 Presidential Election.


    This was after every single one of the fifty states, including those under Republican control or with Republican election officials, had certified its own count, and after court challenges to those counts or certifications had been rejected by more than sixty courts across the country – by state judges, and also by federal judges appointed by Presidents of both parties, including former President Trump.     Vice President Mike Pence, also a Republican, was present and presiding, as the Constitution required. See U.S. Const. art. II, § 1.

    The United States Capitol Police, federal law enforcement officers surrounding the building, and the members of the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department who were summoned to assist, were overcome.


    Defendant was one of many individuals who made their way through the barricades and past the officers who were attempting to keep the crowd away from the building. He was one of the individuals who entered the closed building. And that day, the certification process prescribed by the Constitution was interrupted as members of Congress of both parties and the Vice President had to be spirited to safety or were forced to barricade the doors or hide.

    (back to me) These facts are not in dispute. The “normal tourists” who forced GOP elected officials to flee for their lives and barricade themselves in safe rooms while these normal tourist crowds, after smashing their way into the tourist attraction, roamed the halls chanting “hang Mike Pence” and calling for “Nancy” to come out and face the music, had been whipped up by Trump and the most extreme members of his remaining extremist support group. Like this guy:

    The judge quotes defendant again:

    Ok all you conspiracy theorists . . . don’t worry I loves you all just setting the record straight. antifa did not take the capitol. that was Patriots . . . don’t give them the thunder, we the people took back our house, the news is all bullshit. and now those traitors Know who’s really in charge.

    As to Dresch’s likely future actions, the judge cites the incendiary power of Trump’s ongoing lie:

    Defendant’s promise to take action in the future cannot be dismissed as an unlikely occurrence given that his singular source of information, (“Trump’s the only big shot I trust right now”), continues to propagate the lie that inspired the attack on a near daily basis. See generally From the Desk of Donald J. Trump, https://www.donaldjtrump.com/desk (last visited May 27, 2021). And the anger surrounding the false accusation continues to be stoked by multiple media outlets as well as the state and federal party leaders who are intent on censuring those who dare to challenge the former President’s version of events.

    She sums up, a few pages later, after reciting defendant’s criminal history, including a drunk driving high speed chase (he did an impressive 145 miles an hour crossing from Michigan to Wisconsin to evade police) that landed him in jail, he served prison time in both states:

    Given defendant’s offer to return to Washington to engage in a similar effort to disrupt democratic processes again, his warning that authorities here cannot reach him at home, the utter contempt he showed for law enforcement and the safety of the community during the high speed chase, the threatening remarks directed at an individual who was reporting participants in the attack to the FBI, defendant’s other convictions for obstructive conduct, and his knowing possession of multiple weapons and a considerable supply of ammunition after two felony convictions, the Court has clear and convincing reasons to believe that defendant poses a danger to the community that cannot be alleviated by the imposition of any conditions.

    The court of public opinion may contain tens of millions who sincerely believe that Tom Hanks traffics and rapes children, then kills them and drinks their blood, and that because of heinous freaks like the falsely smiling Hanks, our country is in mortal danger and only Donald Trump can save us.

    The American court of law, so far, has been fairly consistent in requiring proof, beyond the sincerely, even passionately, held opinions of those who honestly believe that their violence is necessary to save us all from Satanist, pedophile, cannibal, socialist, fascist, antifa, BLM culture warriors, dangerous monsters like blood-drinkers Tom Hanks, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Talib, George Soros and company.

    It’s true– they’re all lying, except me.