NBC
"Capitol rioter in horned hat gloats as feds work to identify suspects - “The fact that we had a bunch of our traitors in office hunker down, put on their gas masks and retreat into their underground bunker, I consider that a win,” Jake Angeli said."
By Rich Schapiro and Michael Kosnar
Jan. 7, 2021, 8:11 PM EST
As investigators were poring over surveillance footage and social media posts of the Capitol invasion Thursday afternoon, one of the most recognizable participants was in a car cruising out of Washington, D.C.
“The fact that we had a bunch of our traitors in office hunker down, put on their gas masks and retreat into their underground bunker, I consider that a win,” Jake Angeli, 33, said in an interview with NBC News near the start of his cross-country journey to his native Arizona.
Angeli, who stormed the Capitol bare chested and wearing a fur headdress with horns, is among hundreds of Trump supporters who are now in the crosshairs of local and federal law enforcement.
Because the vast majority of the Capitol mob was allowed to leave the building free of arrest, investigators now face the massive undertaking of identifying and tracking down hundreds of people from all over the country.
In a conference call with reporters, Michael Sherwin, acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, acknowledged the challenges brought on by the U.S. Capitol Police’s failure to corral the demonstrators.
“I’m not going to play Monday morning quarterback to see when or why they didn’t do it,” Sherwin said.
“But the scenario has made our job difficult because we now have to go through the process – cell site orders, video – to try to identify people and charge them and then try to execute their arrest.”
“That has made things challenging,” Sherwin added.
“But I can’t answer why or why not those people weren’t zip-tied as they were leaving the building.”
Calls to the Capitol Police were not returned but a spokesperson announced late Thursday that Chief Steven Sund was resigning amid growing criticism.
The images of the Capitol incursion – broadcast on national television Wednesday afternoon – were jarring.
Windows were smashed.
Offices were ransacked.
Members of the mob manhandled Capitol police officers.
That the vast majority were allowed to leave the building and carry on demonstrating marked a stark contrast to the massive law enforcement response that greeted Black Lives Matter protesters during the summer.
District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine lamented what he described as the disparate deployment of assets “the federal government put forward with overwhelmingly peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters versus that which we saw yesterday.”
A total of 41 people were arrested on the Capitol grounds late Wednesday and early Thursday, according to Washington D.C. police chief Robert Contee.
Some 27 others were arrested for offenses not linked to the Capitol breach, Contee said.
Sherwin’s office has charged a total of 55 people following the riot.
One of them was arrested near the building with a semi automatic rifle and 11 Molotov cocktails, according to prosecutors.
One demonstrator, an Air Force veteran from California named Ashlii Babbit, was shot dead by Capitol police.
Three other people died of medical issues amid the violent protests, authorities said.
In his press briefing, Sherwin emphasized that prosecutors have moved at a rapid clip to bring charges and more are on the way.
But questions still lingered as to why authorities weren’t better prepared to seal off the Capitol – and why more wasn’t done to arrest members of the pro-Trump mob as they left the building.
"Clearly there's failures," former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer said on NBC's "Today" show Thursday.
"There has to be a lot of questions asked and answers given."
"What is very clear is the police underestimated the violent crowd and the size of it, and they overestimated their ability to control it."
In a statement released prior to word of his resignation, Capitol Police Chief Sund praised his officers for their "heroic" actions but did not address why his department wasn’t better prepared.
"United States Capitol Police officers and our law enforcement partners responded valiantly when faced with thousands of individuals involved in violent riotous actions as they stormed the United States Capitol Building," he said.
"The violent attack on the U.S. Capitol was unlike any I have ever experienced in my 30 years in law enforcement here in Washington, D.C."
The FBI said Thursday that its Washington Field Office has received more than 4,000 online tips, including photos and videos of suspects rioting at the Capitol.
Intelligence analysts were sorting through the information and forwarding credible leads to teams of agents working the case, the FBI said.
Investigators were also employing facial recognition software to identify suspects.
E.J. Hilbert, a former FBI agent who focused on cybercrime and terrorism, said the approach is likely similar to that used in the investigation of the Boston Marathon bombers.
“They’re going to look at every piece of footage that’s out there,” he said.
Hilbert said he would expect that the investigation will also lead to a flood of subpoenas to social media companies like Facebook and Twitter as authorities work to track down the people who posted online footage inside the Capitol.
“It’s not going to happen tomorrow, but over the next week, internet service providers are going to be overworked responding to these requests,” he said.
Angeli, meanwhile, said he was unconcerned with the investigation.
A QAnon conspiracy theorist who posts regularly on YouTube, he compared himself to Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
“What I was doing was civil disobedience,” he said.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Angeli added.
“I walked through an open door, dude.”
Rich Schapiro is a reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit.
Michael Kosnar is a Justice Department producer for the NBC News Washington Bureau.
Stefan Sykes contributed.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ca ... s-n1253392
THE MAGA-MAN DONALD TRUMP
Re: THE MAGA-MAN DONALD TRUMP
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
"Biden slams Capitol mob as ‘domestic terrorists’; Trump acknowledges new administration day after inciting riot and as calls grow for his removal"
8 January 2021
What you should know
* A growing number of lawmakers are calling on President Donald Trump to either resign or be removed for office following a deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.
* Congress certified President-elect Joe Biden’s victory early Thursday morning, hours after a mob stormed the Capitol, forcing the building into lockdown. Vice President Mike Pence declared Biden the winner at 3:39 a.m.
* Trump said there will be “an orderly transition on January 20th,” the closest he has come to conceding. He posted a video on Twitter after his ban on the platform was lifted.
* Biden addressed the nation Thursday from Wilmington, calling the insurrectionists “domestic terrorists.”
* An Air Force veteran was shot and killed during the rioting. Three others died from medical emergencies, including Ben Philips, who organized a bus of Pennsylvania Trump supporters.
Members of Congress from the Philadelphia region joined a growing Democratic chorus Thursday urging President Donald Trump’s cabinet and Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from power.
If that long-shot effort doesn’t gain traction, many of them said they would support impeaching Trump a second time before he leaves office on Jan. 20.
That step, too, would be extremely difficult to achieve, politically and logistically, with such little time to act.
But Democrats said Wednesday’s riot at the Capitol demanded action.
One of the four people who died Wednesday was Trump supporter Ben Philips, 50, of Pennsylvania.
With a temporary suspension lifted on his Twitter account, Trump posted a 2-minute, 41-second video acknowledging a new presidential administration and attempting to distance himself from his supporters who stormed the Capitol at his incitement.
President-elect Joe Biden called the participants in the mob “domestic terrorists.”
“Don’t dare call them protesters,” Biden said.
“They were a riotous mob, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists.”
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos became the second Cabinet secretary to resign a day after a pro-Trump insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao tendered her resignation earlier Thursday.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has become the second Cabinet secretary to resign a day after a pro-Trump insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
In a resignation letter Thursday, DeVos blamed President Donald Trump for inflaming tensions in the violent assault on the seat of the nation’s democracy.
She says, “There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me.”
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao tendered her resignation earlier Thursday.
News of DeVos’ resignation was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Jim Sinclair, a 38-year-old home restoration contractor from Bensalem, traveled to Washington to support President Donald Trump and, perhaps, help foment a revolution.
“Freedom!!!!!!!” Sinclair posted on Facebook on Wednesday (photo of Mel Gibson from Braveheart included) after the mob had breached the Capitol building.
“It’s 1776, the American people have ears and eyes."
"We will not accept this fraudulent election.”
Sinclair, who last month wrote that it was time to spill the “blood of tyrants,” ultimately failed to overthrow the republic.
But he did drink two cranberry vodkas and get arrested after the riot for violating curfew and carrying a set of illegal brass knuckles, according to the Metropolitan Police Department.
Court records noted that he “became emotional” after he was approached by officers.
Sinclair was among the more than 50 people arrested by Capitol Police or D.C. authorities in Wednesday’s storming of the Capitol by pro-Trump supporters egged on by the president’s rhetoric.
Thirteen of them hailed from Pennsylvania and one from South Jersey.
Most, like Sinclair, were cited with violating the 6 p.m. curfew imposed by Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser.
With a temporary suspension lifted on his Twitter account, President Donald Trump posted a 2-minute, 41-second video acknowledging a new presidential administration and attempting to distance himself from his supporters who stormed the Capitol at his incitement.
Speaking from the White House, Trump called what happened on Wednesday at the Capitol a “heinous attack” and said he was “outraged by the violence, lawlessness, and mayhem.”
The siege happened after Trump encouraged supporters to march on the Capitol.
The mob then attacked the building, and the president was blocked from posting on social media after making false claims about the election and telling the insurrectionists, among other things, “We love you.”
To the people who engaged in violence and destruction — who had just attended a rally in which Trump vowed to march with them, but then didn’t — “you do not represent our country,” he said Thursday.
He claimed his challenge of Joe Biden’s election victory was his “fight to defend Democracy.”
The president has continued to make false claims about fraud as his legal challenges in Pennsylvania and elsewhere repeatedly failed in the courts.
Trump, who has not conceded the race and did not mention President-elect Joe Biden by name in the video, acknowledged the coming transition.
“A new administration will be inaugurated on Jan. 20th,” he said, promising a “smooth, orderly, and seamless transition.”
The head of the U.S. Capitol Police will resign effective Jan. 16 following the breach of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
Chief Steven Sund said Thursday that police had planned for a free speech demonstration and did not expect the violent attack.
He said it was unlike anything he’d experienced in his 30 years in law enforcement.
He resigned Thursday after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called on him to step down.
His resignation was confirmed to The Associated Press by a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The breach halted the effort by Congress to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
Protesters stormed the building and occupied for hours.
The lawmakers eventually returned and finished their work.
In a very brief statement, President Donald Trump’s Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the White House condemns the violence that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday and insisted that “those who broke the law should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
McEnany also said that “now is the time for America to unite.”
“We grieve for the loss of life and for those injured,” she said.
One person was fatally shot and three others died of medical emergencies during the storming of the building, authorities have said.
McEnany thanked the law-enforcement officers at the Capitol, calling them “true American heroes,” and did not take questions.
Ben Philips drove to Washington in a white van Wednesday, smiling over the steering wheel as he explained the significance of the day.
“It seems like the first day of the rest of our lives to be honest,” he said, eager to protest what he believed was a stolen election with throngs of other Trump supporters, including a group from Pennsylvania he brought there.
“They should name this year Zero because something will happen.”
Philips, 50, of Bloomsburg, died that day after suffering a medical emergency in the nation’s capital.
The group of Pennsylvanians he organized returned without him on a quiet, somber ride home, following a historic day when insurrectionists incited by President Donald Trump’s false claims of election rigging attacked the Capitol building.
Philips was one of at least four people who died during amid the chaos.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) joined the growing, bipartisan call for President Donald Trump to either resign or be removed from office after his supporters rioted at the Capitol on Wednesday.
“In calling for this seditious act, the president has committed an unspeakable assault on our nation and our people,” Pelosi said during a press conference Thursday, noting that Congress may be prepared to impeach Trump if the vice president does not act.
“While there are only 13 days left, any day could be a horror show for America,” Pelosi added.
Also calling for the president’s removal was Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, who said the country “would be better off” without Trump in the White House.
President-elect Joe Biden called the violent, Trump-inspired insurrectionists who broke into the Capitol on Wednesday, “domestic terrorists.”
“Don’t dare call them protesters,” Biden said on Thursday, before announcing his nominees for key positions in his Department of Justice, including Merrick Garland for Attorney General.
“They were a riotous mob, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists.”
Biden blamed Trump’s incendiary language and actions throughout his presidency for what he called “one of the darkest days of our nation.”
“I wish we could say we couldn’t see it coming, but that isn’t true."
"We could see it coming,” Biden said.
“He unleashed an all out assault on our institutions of our Democracy from the outset and yesterday was but the culmination on that unrelenting attack.”
Biden pointed out the stark differences in how protesters against police brutality were treated over the summer, versus how police treated the violent mob outside the Capitol.
“Not only did we see the failure to protect one of the three branches of our government,” Biden said, “we also saw a clear failure to carry out equal justice.”
Biden’s granddaughter Finnegan, a senior studying at the University of Pennsylvania, texted him a photo during the chaos at the Capitol that halted the congressional certification of his electoral victory.
It showed “military people in full military gear, scores of them, lining the steps of the Lincoln Memorial because of a protest by Black Lives Matter,” Biden said.
“Pop,” Biden recalled Finnegan telling him, “This isn’t fair.”
“No one can tell me that if had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol,” Biden said.
“We all know that is true, and it is totally unacceptable."
"Totally unacceptable."
"The American people saw it in plain view.”
Biden did not answer questions about calls for the 25th Amendment to be activated to remove Trump from office.
Instead, he focused on his nominees, emphasizing their commitment to fair treatment under the law.
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris also spoke of the unequal treatment of Americans under the law and said Biden’s nominees have “dedicated themselves to building a more just and equal America.”
“We witnessed two systems of justice when we saw one that let extremists storm the United States Capitol and another that released teargas on peaceful protesters last summer,” Harris said.
“We know this is unacceptable."
"We know we should be better than this.”
Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.) joined a growing chorus of Democrats Thursday urging members of the Trump administration to invoke the 25th Amendment remove the president from office.
”President Trump is a threat to our domestic and national security. It is self-evident that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office."
"I call on Vice President [Mike] Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and begin the process of removing the powers of the presidency from Donald Trump,” Casey said in a statement.
“This is the quickest way to protect our domestic and national security.”
He pointed to Trump’s role in stoking the violence that unfolded at the Capitol Wednesday.
“While shocking, yesterday’s events were entirely foreseeable."
"They were the direct result of President Trump’s lies about the integrity of our most recent election, and his frequent incitements to violence,” Casey said.
“For weeks, the President has lied about his decisive defeat, promoting wild conspiracy theories about unsubstantiated fraud and encouraging this insurrection."
"But he didn’t do it alone."
"President Trump was aided and abetted every step of the way by a multitude of Republicans in both the House and Senate who, after four years of enabling his authoritarian tendencies, yesterday sought to invalidate the will of the very people they serve.”
Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.), Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D., Pa.), and Rep. Mike Doyle (D., Pa.) also joined the call, though any such action faces steep odds with just 13 days left in Trump’s term.
The amendment, which has never been invoked, allows for removing the president if the vice president and a majority of the cabinet votes that the president “is unable to discharge the powers and duties” of the office.
In that event, Pence would become president.
U.S. Attorney William M. McSwain joined several of his Trump-appointed counterparts across the country Thursday in condemning Wednesday’s storming of the U.S. Capitol and pledging to assist in prosecuting those behind it.
“Yesterday was a sad day for our country,” he said in a tweet.
“In a constitutional republic like ours, there is never any excuse for rioting and violence – ever."
"I condemn the attack on the Capitol in the strongest possible terms.”
McSwain, who has served as the top federal prosecutor in Eastern Pennsylvania since 2018 and is expected to resign with the change in administration, had previously condemned what he described as “rioting and looting” during last spring’s racial injustice protests in Philadelphia, while acknowledging the First Amendment right to protest.
He quickly vowed to prosecute those involved in property destruction, and since then, his office has filed charges against several defendants, mostly tied to police car arsons, and sought to keep them imprisoned until their trials.
Given that response to the Philadelphia protests, some staffers within McSwain’s office, speaking anonymously due to their positions, wondered Thursday morning why it had taken him so long to issue a response to Wednesday’s violence in the Capitol.
Other U.S. Attorneys had issued similar condemnations within hours of Wednesday’s attack.
Scott Brady, the U.S. Attorney in Pittsburgh, issued a rebuke of his own early Thursday morning.
In his tweet, McSwain added: “Regardless of our political affiliations, it is time to come together as a country and welcome the new administration.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) has called for President Donald Trump to be immediately removed from office, calling Wednesday’s riot at the Capitol “an insurrection against the United States.”
“The quickest and most effective way — it can be done today — to remove this president from office would be for the vice president to immediately invoke the 25th amendment,” Schumer said in a statement.
“If the vice president and cabinet refuse to stand up Congress should reconvene to impeach the president.”
Schumer’s call to remove Trump garnered support from at least one Republican: Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R., Ill.), who called Trump “unfit” and “unwell” in remarks shared on Twitter Thursday morning.
https://www.inquirer.com/politics/elect ... 10107.html
"Biden slams Capitol mob as ‘domestic terrorists’; Trump acknowledges new administration day after inciting riot and as calls grow for his removal"
8 January 2021
What you should know
* A growing number of lawmakers are calling on President Donald Trump to either resign or be removed for office following a deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.
* Congress certified President-elect Joe Biden’s victory early Thursday morning, hours after a mob stormed the Capitol, forcing the building into lockdown. Vice President Mike Pence declared Biden the winner at 3:39 a.m.
* Trump said there will be “an orderly transition on January 20th,” the closest he has come to conceding. He posted a video on Twitter after his ban on the platform was lifted.
* Biden addressed the nation Thursday from Wilmington, calling the insurrectionists “domestic terrorists.”
* An Air Force veteran was shot and killed during the rioting. Three others died from medical emergencies, including Ben Philips, who organized a bus of Pennsylvania Trump supporters.
Members of Congress from the Philadelphia region joined a growing Democratic chorus Thursday urging President Donald Trump’s cabinet and Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from power.
If that long-shot effort doesn’t gain traction, many of them said they would support impeaching Trump a second time before he leaves office on Jan. 20.
That step, too, would be extremely difficult to achieve, politically and logistically, with such little time to act.
But Democrats said Wednesday’s riot at the Capitol demanded action.
One of the four people who died Wednesday was Trump supporter Ben Philips, 50, of Pennsylvania.
With a temporary suspension lifted on his Twitter account, Trump posted a 2-minute, 41-second video acknowledging a new presidential administration and attempting to distance himself from his supporters who stormed the Capitol at his incitement.
President-elect Joe Biden called the participants in the mob “domestic terrorists.”
“Don’t dare call them protesters,” Biden said.
“They were a riotous mob, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists.”
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos became the second Cabinet secretary to resign a day after a pro-Trump insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao tendered her resignation earlier Thursday.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has become the second Cabinet secretary to resign a day after a pro-Trump insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
In a resignation letter Thursday, DeVos blamed President Donald Trump for inflaming tensions in the violent assault on the seat of the nation’s democracy.
She says, “There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me.”
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao tendered her resignation earlier Thursday.
News of DeVos’ resignation was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Jim Sinclair, a 38-year-old home restoration contractor from Bensalem, traveled to Washington to support President Donald Trump and, perhaps, help foment a revolution.
“Freedom!!!!!!!” Sinclair posted on Facebook on Wednesday (photo of Mel Gibson from Braveheart included) after the mob had breached the Capitol building.
“It’s 1776, the American people have ears and eyes."
"We will not accept this fraudulent election.”
Sinclair, who last month wrote that it was time to spill the “blood of tyrants,” ultimately failed to overthrow the republic.
But he did drink two cranberry vodkas and get arrested after the riot for violating curfew and carrying a set of illegal brass knuckles, according to the Metropolitan Police Department.
Court records noted that he “became emotional” after he was approached by officers.
Sinclair was among the more than 50 people arrested by Capitol Police or D.C. authorities in Wednesday’s storming of the Capitol by pro-Trump supporters egged on by the president’s rhetoric.
Thirteen of them hailed from Pennsylvania and one from South Jersey.
Most, like Sinclair, were cited with violating the 6 p.m. curfew imposed by Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser.
With a temporary suspension lifted on his Twitter account, President Donald Trump posted a 2-minute, 41-second video acknowledging a new presidential administration and attempting to distance himself from his supporters who stormed the Capitol at his incitement.
Speaking from the White House, Trump called what happened on Wednesday at the Capitol a “heinous attack” and said he was “outraged by the violence, lawlessness, and mayhem.”
The siege happened after Trump encouraged supporters to march on the Capitol.
The mob then attacked the building, and the president was blocked from posting on social media after making false claims about the election and telling the insurrectionists, among other things, “We love you.”
To the people who engaged in violence and destruction — who had just attended a rally in which Trump vowed to march with them, but then didn’t — “you do not represent our country,” he said Thursday.
He claimed his challenge of Joe Biden’s election victory was his “fight to defend Democracy.”
The president has continued to make false claims about fraud as his legal challenges in Pennsylvania and elsewhere repeatedly failed in the courts.
Trump, who has not conceded the race and did not mention President-elect Joe Biden by name in the video, acknowledged the coming transition.
“A new administration will be inaugurated on Jan. 20th,” he said, promising a “smooth, orderly, and seamless transition.”
The head of the U.S. Capitol Police will resign effective Jan. 16 following the breach of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
Chief Steven Sund said Thursday that police had planned for a free speech demonstration and did not expect the violent attack.
He said it was unlike anything he’d experienced in his 30 years in law enforcement.
He resigned Thursday after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called on him to step down.
His resignation was confirmed to The Associated Press by a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The breach halted the effort by Congress to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
Protesters stormed the building and occupied for hours.
The lawmakers eventually returned and finished their work.
In a very brief statement, President Donald Trump’s Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the White House condemns the violence that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday and insisted that “those who broke the law should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
McEnany also said that “now is the time for America to unite.”
“We grieve for the loss of life and for those injured,” she said.
One person was fatally shot and three others died of medical emergencies during the storming of the building, authorities have said.
McEnany thanked the law-enforcement officers at the Capitol, calling them “true American heroes,” and did not take questions.
Ben Philips drove to Washington in a white van Wednesday, smiling over the steering wheel as he explained the significance of the day.
“It seems like the first day of the rest of our lives to be honest,” he said, eager to protest what he believed was a stolen election with throngs of other Trump supporters, including a group from Pennsylvania he brought there.
“They should name this year Zero because something will happen.”
Philips, 50, of Bloomsburg, died that day after suffering a medical emergency in the nation’s capital.
The group of Pennsylvanians he organized returned without him on a quiet, somber ride home, following a historic day when insurrectionists incited by President Donald Trump’s false claims of election rigging attacked the Capitol building.
Philips was one of at least four people who died during amid the chaos.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) joined the growing, bipartisan call for President Donald Trump to either resign or be removed from office after his supporters rioted at the Capitol on Wednesday.
“In calling for this seditious act, the president has committed an unspeakable assault on our nation and our people,” Pelosi said during a press conference Thursday, noting that Congress may be prepared to impeach Trump if the vice president does not act.
“While there are only 13 days left, any day could be a horror show for America,” Pelosi added.
Also calling for the president’s removal was Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, who said the country “would be better off” without Trump in the White House.
President-elect Joe Biden called the violent, Trump-inspired insurrectionists who broke into the Capitol on Wednesday, “domestic terrorists.”
“Don’t dare call them protesters,” Biden said on Thursday, before announcing his nominees for key positions in his Department of Justice, including Merrick Garland for Attorney General.
“They were a riotous mob, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists.”
Biden blamed Trump’s incendiary language and actions throughout his presidency for what he called “one of the darkest days of our nation.”
“I wish we could say we couldn’t see it coming, but that isn’t true."
"We could see it coming,” Biden said.
“He unleashed an all out assault on our institutions of our Democracy from the outset and yesterday was but the culmination on that unrelenting attack.”
Biden pointed out the stark differences in how protesters against police brutality were treated over the summer, versus how police treated the violent mob outside the Capitol.
“Not only did we see the failure to protect one of the three branches of our government,” Biden said, “we also saw a clear failure to carry out equal justice.”
Biden’s granddaughter Finnegan, a senior studying at the University of Pennsylvania, texted him a photo during the chaos at the Capitol that halted the congressional certification of his electoral victory.
It showed “military people in full military gear, scores of them, lining the steps of the Lincoln Memorial because of a protest by Black Lives Matter,” Biden said.
“Pop,” Biden recalled Finnegan telling him, “This isn’t fair.”
“No one can tell me that if had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol,” Biden said.
“We all know that is true, and it is totally unacceptable."
"Totally unacceptable."
"The American people saw it in plain view.”
Biden did not answer questions about calls for the 25th Amendment to be activated to remove Trump from office.
Instead, he focused on his nominees, emphasizing their commitment to fair treatment under the law.
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris also spoke of the unequal treatment of Americans under the law and said Biden’s nominees have “dedicated themselves to building a more just and equal America.”
“We witnessed two systems of justice when we saw one that let extremists storm the United States Capitol and another that released teargas on peaceful protesters last summer,” Harris said.
“We know this is unacceptable."
"We know we should be better than this.”
Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.) joined a growing chorus of Democrats Thursday urging members of the Trump administration to invoke the 25th Amendment remove the president from office.
”President Trump is a threat to our domestic and national security. It is self-evident that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office."
"I call on Vice President [Mike] Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and begin the process of removing the powers of the presidency from Donald Trump,” Casey said in a statement.
“This is the quickest way to protect our domestic and national security.”
He pointed to Trump’s role in stoking the violence that unfolded at the Capitol Wednesday.
“While shocking, yesterday’s events were entirely foreseeable."
"They were the direct result of President Trump’s lies about the integrity of our most recent election, and his frequent incitements to violence,” Casey said.
“For weeks, the President has lied about his decisive defeat, promoting wild conspiracy theories about unsubstantiated fraud and encouraging this insurrection."
"But he didn’t do it alone."
"President Trump was aided and abetted every step of the way by a multitude of Republicans in both the House and Senate who, after four years of enabling his authoritarian tendencies, yesterday sought to invalidate the will of the very people they serve.”
Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.), Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D., Pa.), and Rep. Mike Doyle (D., Pa.) also joined the call, though any such action faces steep odds with just 13 days left in Trump’s term.
The amendment, which has never been invoked, allows for removing the president if the vice president and a majority of the cabinet votes that the president “is unable to discharge the powers and duties” of the office.
In that event, Pence would become president.
U.S. Attorney William M. McSwain joined several of his Trump-appointed counterparts across the country Thursday in condemning Wednesday’s storming of the U.S. Capitol and pledging to assist in prosecuting those behind it.
“Yesterday was a sad day for our country,” he said in a tweet.
“In a constitutional republic like ours, there is never any excuse for rioting and violence – ever."
"I condemn the attack on the Capitol in the strongest possible terms.”
McSwain, who has served as the top federal prosecutor in Eastern Pennsylvania since 2018 and is expected to resign with the change in administration, had previously condemned what he described as “rioting and looting” during last spring’s racial injustice protests in Philadelphia, while acknowledging the First Amendment right to protest.
He quickly vowed to prosecute those involved in property destruction, and since then, his office has filed charges against several defendants, mostly tied to police car arsons, and sought to keep them imprisoned until their trials.
Given that response to the Philadelphia protests, some staffers within McSwain’s office, speaking anonymously due to their positions, wondered Thursday morning why it had taken him so long to issue a response to Wednesday’s violence in the Capitol.
Other U.S. Attorneys had issued similar condemnations within hours of Wednesday’s attack.
Scott Brady, the U.S. Attorney in Pittsburgh, issued a rebuke of his own early Thursday morning.
In his tweet, McSwain added: “Regardless of our political affiliations, it is time to come together as a country and welcome the new administration.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) has called for President Donald Trump to be immediately removed from office, calling Wednesday’s riot at the Capitol “an insurrection against the United States.”
“The quickest and most effective way — it can be done today — to remove this president from office would be for the vice president to immediately invoke the 25th amendment,” Schumer said in a statement.
“If the vice president and cabinet refuse to stand up Congress should reconvene to impeach the president.”
Schumer’s call to remove Trump garnered support from at least one Republican: Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R., Ill.), who called Trump “unfit” and “unwell” in remarks shared on Twitter Thursday morning.
https://www.inquirer.com/politics/elect ... 10107.html
Re: THE MAGA-MAN DONALD TRUMP
NEWSWEEK
"The Top Five Rigged U.S. Presidential Elections"
Fred Lucas
On 10/23/16 at 6:30 AM EDT
This article first appeared on The Daily Signal.
In the 2016 presidential election, one candidate is warning about voter fraud, while another proclaims Russians are interfering.
It's not the first time contenders have alleged some form of a "rigged" election.
Tuesday in the Rose Garden, President Barack Obama dismissed concerns of fraud.
"I have never seen in my lifetime, or in modern political history, any presidential candidate trying to discredit the elections process before votes have even taken place."
"It's unprecedented."
"There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even rig America's elections, in part because they are so decentralized and the number of votes that are cast."
"There is no evidence that has happened in the past, or instances that will happen this year."
While such complaints have been rare before votes were cast, they were very prominent in certain presidential elections, as was evidence that votes weren't always counted properly.
In my book, Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections, I write about some of the most controversial presidential elections that left large segments of the population believing their president was selected instead of elected.
In two elections, the aftermath nearly led to mass violence.
1800: John Adams vs. Thomas Jefferson/Thomas Jefferson vs. Aaron Burr
James Monroe, who was aligned with the Democratic-Republican faction led by Thomas Jefferson, worried about reports that Jefferson supporters were arming for revolt, and said, "Anything [like] a commotion would be fatal to us."
Jefferson much preferred a convention to amend the Constitution if the opposing Federalists continued down this road.
Though it would be Alexander Hamilton who would play a massive role in the outcome, there was a great flurry of activity that led up to the final result.
Moderates in both camps didn't want to see the country torn apart should the die-hard Federalists push it to the deadlock and try to appoint a president.
Thousands poured into Washington, prepared for partisan violence if there was what the Jeffersonians called "usurpation."
President John Adams would assert years later, "a civil war was expected."
Benjamin Franklin's cautionary words, "a Republic, if you can keep it," were put to the test.
As it turned out, Americans could keep it.
Flaws and all, these were men with enough character and intellect to realize the folly of clinging to power or risking bloodshed to obtain it.
The nation truly could have been on the brink of collapse while still in its infancy.
1824: John Quincy Adams vs. Andrew Jackson
On February 14, 1824, Henry Clay accepted the offer of the President-elect John Quincy Adams to serve as his secretary of state — presumably making him the next heir apparent since the last four men to lead the State Department became president.
Andrew Jackson and his supporters immediately called this a "corrupt bargain" between Adams and Clay.
The enraged Jackson said Speaker Clay approached him with a similar offer — to make him president in exchange for Jackson appointing him as secretary of state.
As Jackson told it, he had too much character to accept such an offer.
So Clay went to Adams with the same offer and received a different answer.
Clay and Adams denied that any deal was made.
Clay even demanded a congressional investigation into the allegations, which found no proof.
It is one of those things that can be difficult to prove or disprove if no witnesses were present for those meetings.
Above all, having those meetings to start with seems a miscalculation on the part of Adams, who should have known it might look suspicious.
That said, there is no question who Clay preferred between the two.
The only real question is who was telling the truth, Jackson or Clay, on the charge that he made the same offer to both rivals.
Clay considered the optics of becoming secretary of state as well, he later told friends, but thought he couldn't reject the nomination because: "It would be said of me that, after having contributed to the elevation of a president, I thought so ill of him that I would not take first place under him."
1876: Rutherford B. Hayes vs. Samuel Tilden
Henry Watterson, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal and a Democratic congressman from Kentucky, on January 8, 1876 — which he called "St. Jackson's Day" because it marked the Battle of New Orleans — called for "the presence of at least 10,000 unarmed Kentuckians in the city" to march on Washington to ensure Samuel Tilden was elected.
His friend Joseph Pulitzer, still building a vast newspaper empire, went further, calling for 100,000 people "fully armed and ready for business" to ensure that Tilden became president.
Angry Democrat mobs across the country would chant, "Tilden or blood," and reportedly in a dozen states, club-wielding "Tilden Minutemen" had formed threatening to march into Washington to take the White House for their candidate.
This came to Tilden's chagrin, who sought to calm the rowdiness, as he didn't want to be responsible for an insurrection.
Still, with all the bellicose verbiage from the newspapers and the masses, it was the Democrat hierarchy in the South that was ready to make a deal, though not the Northern Democrats.
Richard Smith of the Republican Cincinnati Gazette reached out to Southern powerbrokers.
Rutherford Hayes asserted to Smith in early January 1877: "I am not a believer in the trustworthiness of the forces you hope to rally."
But, he told the newspaperman, he did back internal improvements and education funding in the South believing it would "divide the whites" and help "obliterate the color line."
On the night of February 26, 1877, four Southern Democrats — Representatives John Y. Brown and Watterson of Kentucky, Senator J.B. Gordon of Georgia and Representative W. M. Levy of Louisiana — met with Ohio Republicans James Garfield and Charles Foster, both House members, and Ohio Senator Stanley Matthews and Ohio Senator-elect John Sherman at the Wormley House hotel in Washington to see if a deal could be reached to prevent the House Democrats from blocking the results with a filibuster.
The men talked about details through the night, and by morning agreed to stop the House Democratic delay tactics that were blocking the certification of the Electoral Commission's findings, on the condition of ending Reconstruction, appointing a Southern Democrat to the Cabinet, and providing federal money for Southern projects.
These were things Hayes expected to do anyway.
1960: John F. Kennedy vs. Richard Nixon
Earl Mazo, a Washington reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, began his investigation after he said Chicago reporters were "chastising" him and other national reporters for missing the real story.
He traveled to Chicago, obtained a list of voters in the suspicious precincts, and began matching names with addresses.
Mazo told The Washington Post:
"There was a cemetery where the names on the tombstones were registered and voted."
"I remember a house."
"It was completely gutted."
"There was nobody there."
"But there were 56 votes for [John F.] Kennedy in that house."
Mazo also found that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's charge that other counties were doing the same thing in favor of Republicans proved to be true — but nothing on the scale of what happened in Chicago.
In Texas, Mazo found similar circumstances.
The New York Herald Tribune planned a 12-part series on the election fraud.
Four of the stories had been published and were republished in newspapers across the country in mid-December.
At Richard Nixon's request, Mazo met him at the vice president's Senate office, where Nixon told him to back off, saying, "Our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis" in the midst of the Cold War.
Mazo didn't back off, and Nixon called his editors.
The newspaper did not run the rest of the series.
"I know I was terribly disappointed."
"I envisioned the Pulitzer Prize," Mazo said.
The entire matter wasn't void of accountability.
Illinois state special prosecutor Morris Wexler, named to investigate charges of election fraud in Chicago, indicted 677 election officials, but couldn't nail down convictions with state Judge John Karns.
It wasn't until 1962, when an election worker confessed to witness tampering in Chicago's 28th Ward, that three precinct workers pleaded guilty and served jail sentences.
Pulitzer-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reported hearing tapes of FBI wiretaps about potential election fraud.
Hersh — whose books indicate he is a fan of neither Kennedy nor Nixon — believed Nixon was the rightful winner.
2000: George W. Bush vs. Al Gore
Al Gore campaign aide Bob Beckel intended to make that moral case to Florida's electors — and perhaps electors in other states — who could be convinced to follow the will of the people.
Gore did not need all of the state's electors, just four.
For that matter, he didn't think it had to be limited to Florida.
He thought demonstrating statistics to prove Gore's win could sway enough of the George W. Bush electors to switch their votes since they were not legally bound.
The Wall Street Journal first reported that Gore's team "has been checking into the background of Republican electors with an eye toward persuading a handful of them to vote for Mr. Gore."
Beckel insisted afterward he never had plans to try to blackmail electors to collect Gore votes, which he thought the article implied.
But in an interview on Fox News on November 17, 2000, Beckel said: "I'm trying to kidnap electors."
"Whatever it takes."
Beckel later explained what the Founders wanted: "The idea was that electors, early on, were to be lobbied."
Pro-Gore websites even started popping up, listing the names and contact information of Republican electors across the country, asking the public to barrage them with demands to vote for Gore and follow the will of the people.
Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nichols sent an email to supporters asking them to "Help Stop Democratic Electoral Tampering."
Responding to the chairman, Beckel said: "The Constitution gives me the right to send a piece of mail to an elector."
It never made a difference.
No electors shifted, but it did serve as another twist as the 2000 election story unfolded — and another PR fumble for Democrats.
Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal.
https://www.newsweek.com/top-five-rigge ... ons-511765
"The Top Five Rigged U.S. Presidential Elections"
Fred Lucas
On 10/23/16 at 6:30 AM EDT
This article first appeared on The Daily Signal.
In the 2016 presidential election, one candidate is warning about voter fraud, while another proclaims Russians are interfering.
It's not the first time contenders have alleged some form of a "rigged" election.
Tuesday in the Rose Garden, President Barack Obama dismissed concerns of fraud.
"I have never seen in my lifetime, or in modern political history, any presidential candidate trying to discredit the elections process before votes have even taken place."
"It's unprecedented."
"There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even rig America's elections, in part because they are so decentralized and the number of votes that are cast."
"There is no evidence that has happened in the past, or instances that will happen this year."
While such complaints have been rare before votes were cast, they were very prominent in certain presidential elections, as was evidence that votes weren't always counted properly.
In my book, Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections, I write about some of the most controversial presidential elections that left large segments of the population believing their president was selected instead of elected.
In two elections, the aftermath nearly led to mass violence.
1800: John Adams vs. Thomas Jefferson/Thomas Jefferson vs. Aaron Burr
James Monroe, who was aligned with the Democratic-Republican faction led by Thomas Jefferson, worried about reports that Jefferson supporters were arming for revolt, and said, "Anything [like] a commotion would be fatal to us."
Jefferson much preferred a convention to amend the Constitution if the opposing Federalists continued down this road.
Though it would be Alexander Hamilton who would play a massive role in the outcome, there was a great flurry of activity that led up to the final result.
Moderates in both camps didn't want to see the country torn apart should the die-hard Federalists push it to the deadlock and try to appoint a president.
Thousands poured into Washington, prepared for partisan violence if there was what the Jeffersonians called "usurpation."
President John Adams would assert years later, "a civil war was expected."
Benjamin Franklin's cautionary words, "a Republic, if you can keep it," were put to the test.
As it turned out, Americans could keep it.
Flaws and all, these were men with enough character and intellect to realize the folly of clinging to power or risking bloodshed to obtain it.
The nation truly could have been on the brink of collapse while still in its infancy.
1824: John Quincy Adams vs. Andrew Jackson
On February 14, 1824, Henry Clay accepted the offer of the President-elect John Quincy Adams to serve as his secretary of state — presumably making him the next heir apparent since the last four men to lead the State Department became president.
Andrew Jackson and his supporters immediately called this a "corrupt bargain" between Adams and Clay.
The enraged Jackson said Speaker Clay approached him with a similar offer — to make him president in exchange for Jackson appointing him as secretary of state.
As Jackson told it, he had too much character to accept such an offer.
So Clay went to Adams with the same offer and received a different answer.
Clay and Adams denied that any deal was made.
Clay even demanded a congressional investigation into the allegations, which found no proof.
It is one of those things that can be difficult to prove or disprove if no witnesses were present for those meetings.
Above all, having those meetings to start with seems a miscalculation on the part of Adams, who should have known it might look suspicious.
That said, there is no question who Clay preferred between the two.
The only real question is who was telling the truth, Jackson or Clay, on the charge that he made the same offer to both rivals.
Clay considered the optics of becoming secretary of state as well, he later told friends, but thought he couldn't reject the nomination because: "It would be said of me that, after having contributed to the elevation of a president, I thought so ill of him that I would not take first place under him."
1876: Rutherford B. Hayes vs. Samuel Tilden
Henry Watterson, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal and a Democratic congressman from Kentucky, on January 8, 1876 — which he called "St. Jackson's Day" because it marked the Battle of New Orleans — called for "the presence of at least 10,000 unarmed Kentuckians in the city" to march on Washington to ensure Samuel Tilden was elected.
His friend Joseph Pulitzer, still building a vast newspaper empire, went further, calling for 100,000 people "fully armed and ready for business" to ensure that Tilden became president.
Angry Democrat mobs across the country would chant, "Tilden or blood," and reportedly in a dozen states, club-wielding "Tilden Minutemen" had formed threatening to march into Washington to take the White House for their candidate.
This came to Tilden's chagrin, who sought to calm the rowdiness, as he didn't want to be responsible for an insurrection.
Still, with all the bellicose verbiage from the newspapers and the masses, it was the Democrat hierarchy in the South that was ready to make a deal, though not the Northern Democrats.
Richard Smith of the Republican Cincinnati Gazette reached out to Southern powerbrokers.
Rutherford Hayes asserted to Smith in early January 1877: "I am not a believer in the trustworthiness of the forces you hope to rally."
But, he told the newspaperman, he did back internal improvements and education funding in the South believing it would "divide the whites" and help "obliterate the color line."
On the night of February 26, 1877, four Southern Democrats — Representatives John Y. Brown and Watterson of Kentucky, Senator J.B. Gordon of Georgia and Representative W. M. Levy of Louisiana — met with Ohio Republicans James Garfield and Charles Foster, both House members, and Ohio Senator Stanley Matthews and Ohio Senator-elect John Sherman at the Wormley House hotel in Washington to see if a deal could be reached to prevent the House Democrats from blocking the results with a filibuster.
The men talked about details through the night, and by morning agreed to stop the House Democratic delay tactics that were blocking the certification of the Electoral Commission's findings, on the condition of ending Reconstruction, appointing a Southern Democrat to the Cabinet, and providing federal money for Southern projects.
These were things Hayes expected to do anyway.
1960: John F. Kennedy vs. Richard Nixon
Earl Mazo, a Washington reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, began his investigation after he said Chicago reporters were "chastising" him and other national reporters for missing the real story.
He traveled to Chicago, obtained a list of voters in the suspicious precincts, and began matching names with addresses.
Mazo told The Washington Post:
"There was a cemetery where the names on the tombstones were registered and voted."
"I remember a house."
"It was completely gutted."
"There was nobody there."
"But there were 56 votes for [John F.] Kennedy in that house."
Mazo also found that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's charge that other counties were doing the same thing in favor of Republicans proved to be true — but nothing on the scale of what happened in Chicago.
In Texas, Mazo found similar circumstances.
The New York Herald Tribune planned a 12-part series on the election fraud.
Four of the stories had been published and were republished in newspapers across the country in mid-December.
At Richard Nixon's request, Mazo met him at the vice president's Senate office, where Nixon told him to back off, saying, "Our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis" in the midst of the Cold War.
Mazo didn't back off, and Nixon called his editors.
The newspaper did not run the rest of the series.
"I know I was terribly disappointed."
"I envisioned the Pulitzer Prize," Mazo said.
The entire matter wasn't void of accountability.
Illinois state special prosecutor Morris Wexler, named to investigate charges of election fraud in Chicago, indicted 677 election officials, but couldn't nail down convictions with state Judge John Karns.
It wasn't until 1962, when an election worker confessed to witness tampering in Chicago's 28th Ward, that three precinct workers pleaded guilty and served jail sentences.
Pulitzer-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reported hearing tapes of FBI wiretaps about potential election fraud.
Hersh — whose books indicate he is a fan of neither Kennedy nor Nixon — believed Nixon was the rightful winner.
2000: George W. Bush vs. Al Gore
Al Gore campaign aide Bob Beckel intended to make that moral case to Florida's electors — and perhaps electors in other states — who could be convinced to follow the will of the people.
Gore did not need all of the state's electors, just four.
For that matter, he didn't think it had to be limited to Florida.
He thought demonstrating statistics to prove Gore's win could sway enough of the George W. Bush electors to switch their votes since they were not legally bound.
The Wall Street Journal first reported that Gore's team "has been checking into the background of Republican electors with an eye toward persuading a handful of them to vote for Mr. Gore."
Beckel insisted afterward he never had plans to try to blackmail electors to collect Gore votes, which he thought the article implied.
But in an interview on Fox News on November 17, 2000, Beckel said: "I'm trying to kidnap electors."
"Whatever it takes."
Beckel later explained what the Founders wanted: "The idea was that electors, early on, were to be lobbied."
Pro-Gore websites even started popping up, listing the names and contact information of Republican electors across the country, asking the public to barrage them with demands to vote for Gore and follow the will of the people.
Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nichols sent an email to supporters asking them to "Help Stop Democratic Electoral Tampering."
Responding to the chairman, Beckel said: "The Constitution gives me the right to send a piece of mail to an elector."
It never made a difference.
No electors shifted, but it did serve as another twist as the 2000 election story unfolded — and another PR fumble for Democrats.
Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal.
https://www.newsweek.com/top-five-rigge ... ons-511765
Re: THE MAGA-MAN DONALD TRUMP
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHICS
"The 1876 election was the most divisive in U.S. history. Here’s how Congress responded."
By Erin Blakemore
PUBLISHED January 5, 2021
On January 6, the U.S. Congress will convene to count and certify the results of the Electoral College vote, the last step to formally naming Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election.
But Republican members from both houses of Congress, many with presidential ambitions of their own, have announced they intend to contest the results.
Under pressure from President Donald Trump, and despite the fact that the Department of Justice has found no evidence of voter fraud, one faction of Republican legislators is calling for an investigation into the president’s fraud allegations before the vote is counted — and invoking an extraordinary 144-year-old compromise as a model.
“In 1877, Congress did not ignore those allegations [of fraud],” wrote Texas Senator Ted Cruz and 10 other senators in a joint statement.
“We should follow that precedent.”
But what is that precedent, and could it really apply in 2021?
To find out means delving into the unsavory history of an election that, until 2020, was deemed the nation’s most divisive — and that led to an unusual compromise with weighty consequences.
Here’s what you need to know about the 1876 election and why it still looms large in American history.
A nation united, but still divided
In 1876, the nation was still scarred and divided by the Civil War, which had ended a decade earlier.
During the war’s aftermath, approximately four million enslaved people were freed.
In what would become known as the Reconstruction era, a Republican-controlled Congress moved swiftly to restore the former Confederacy to the Union, limit the political power of former Confederates, and protect the rights of formerly enslaved people by granting them citizenship and the right to vote.
Newly enfranchised Black voters overwhelmingly supported the Republican Party, the party of President Abraham Lincoln and a critical force behind the Union’s Civil War victory.
They registered to vote in large numbers and ran for and were elected to public office.
But as Black citizens gained political and social power in the late 1860s, white Southerners, who largely supported the anti-Reconstruction Democratic Party, resented the federal government’s policies.
Reconstruction represented what they saw as the theft of their rightful dominance of the racial, political, and economic hierarchy.
In an attempt to wrest back their power, they used intimidation and violence to disenfranchise Black voters.
Then, in the early 1870s, the Republican Party’s popularity took a hit due to an economic depression and political scandals like the Whiskey Ring, a bribery scheme in which federal officials helped whiskey distillers evade taxes.
Between the Republicans’ tarnished reputation and the intimidating tactics that allowed white Southerners to suppress Republican votes, Democrats finally saw a path to electoral victory.
A bitter election
Although the stage was set for a dirty election, both 1876 candidates were solid, sensible, and seemingly above reproach.
The Republican candidate, war hero and Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes, ran on a reform platform, promising to clean up the civil service and serve for only one term.
His opponent, Democrat and New York governor Samuel J. Tilden, was known for challenging political corruption.
At the time, though, candidates let their party operatives promote them, and they staged a cutthroat campaign.
Tilden’s opponents painted him as a diseased drunkard who planned to pay off the former Confederacy’s debts; Hayes’s enemies claimed he had stolen money from his brothers in arms during the war.
Election Day was even worse: Both parties participated in rampant fraud.
Republican operatives stuffed ballot boxes, allowed repeat votes, and threw out Democratic ballots; Democrats physically intimidated Black voters in an attempt to keep them from the polls.
(Voter fraud used to be rampant. Now it’s an anomaly.)
When the votes were counted, it appeared that Tilden had garnered 200,000 more votes than Hayes.
But results were unclear in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, where both parties claimed victory — and alleged tampering.
Republican-led state election boards in those three states rejected enough Democratic votes to give Hayes a chance at victory through the Electoral College, despite his opponent’s three-point lead in the popular vote.
The states convened dueling slates of electors and sent conflicting returns to Congress.
Meanwhile, in Oregon, where Hayes had won the popular vote, the Democratic governor claimed one of the state’s three Republican electors was ineligible because he was employed by the postal service.
(Federal employees are not allowed to serve as members of the Electoral College.)
As a result, the state submitted two competing certificates of the final electoral vote tally, one signed by the Democratic governor that showed two votes for Hayes and one for Tilden, and another signed by the secretary of state that showed three votes for Hayes.
A total of 20 Electoral College votes — four from Florida, eight from Louisiana, seven from South Carolina, and one from Oregon — were contested.
It would be up to Congress to sort out the mess.
Electoral mayhem
Democrats were furious about what they saw as the Republicans’ theft of the Southern states.
Henry Watterson, a journalist and Democratic member of the Kentucky House of Representatives, used his platform to call for a “peaceful army of 100,000 men” to march on Washington unless Tilden was declared the winner, stoking fears of a second Civil War.
Faced with fears of violence and a deadlock between the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and the Republican-controlled Senate, Congress struggled to find a solution.
The Constitution offered no clear guidance about how to deal with a contested electoral vote, and members suggested and bitterly rejected a variety of proposals.
Time was ticking.
The inauguration was scheduled for March 5, 1877, and the legislators didn’t hit on a solution until late January.
Finally, they reached a compromise: a one-time commission consisting of an equal number of House and Senate lawmakers, four Supreme Court justices, and an additional justice selected by the participating Supreme Court members.
Although multiple Republicans objected to the measure, it passed and outgoing President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Electoral Commission Act on January 29.
An unprecedented commission
The electoral commission conducted a court-style tribunal in the Supreme Court chamber in February 1877.
Though the Democrats objected to the vote counts put forward by the Southern states’ Republican electoral boards, they were outnumbered by their Republican colleagues by one and were consistently overruled.
Each contested state was decided in favor of Hayes.
Yet the Democrats refused to accept the results and filibustered in the House of Representatives as fear of civil unrest grew throughout the nation.
It would take a backroom deal — and a momentous political compromise — to settle the election.
During a series of secretive meetings, Southern Democratic lawmakers promised to call off the filibuster and concede the election in exchange for an end to Reconstruction.
Though the terms of the informal agreement remain unknown, it is thought to have included the withdrawal of all federal forces from the former Confederacy, increased federal funds for Southern states, the construction of a transcontinental railroad through the South, and the appointment of a Southern Democrat to Hayes’s cabinet.
In the wee hours of March 2, 1877, a mere three days before the scheduled inauguration, Congress completed the electoral vote count.
Hayes won by a single electoral vote.
Amid fear of assassination, he was sworn in during a secret ceremony the next day.
The controversial Compromise of 1877 was lauded by many at the time as a move that preserved the fragile Union and allowed the country to move forward as one.
But it had disastrous consequences for Black Southerners.
Without federal oversight, states created harsh “Jim Crow” laws that reestablished a brutal racial hierarchy in the South and effectively disenfranchised Black citizens.
A decade after the Hayes-Tilden election was finally decided, Congress passed the Electoral Count Act of 1887 in an attempt to avoid further electoral chaos by providing a consistent system for the delivery of electoral votes.
The law, which still stands today, provides a mechanism by which Congress can determine whether electoral votes are legal: During the joint session of Congress on January 6, members can object to the votes of individual electors or states’ overall returns.
For an objection to be formally considered and voted upon, it must be lodged by both a member of the House and the Senate.
That has only happened twice in history, and both objections failed.
Is it precedent?
Will Republican lawmakers’ calls for an 1877-style commission change the outcome of the election?
Don’t count on it, say legal and historical experts.
The 2020 election didn’t result in a close electoral vote.
More than 50 court actions challenging the legitimacy of the returns have been rejected.
And though the Republican Party has attempted to submit a dueling slate of electors in five states, they were not certified and thus were not passed to Congress as official electoral slates.
Although Congressional Republicans have sufficient numbers to object to the returns and force a debate on the issue, their effort is destined to fail.
Enough of their Republican colleagues have signaled their opposition to the last-ditch effort to overturn the electors’ votes, and are expected to vote in favor of certifying the election.
Nor is a proposed gambit for Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election results likely to succeed.
Though President Trump falsely claims that Pence, who as president of the Senate will preside over the count, has the power to reject “fraudulently chosen” electors, the vice president in fact lacks that power.
As president of the Senate, his job is merely to count the electoral votes — whether the President likes the outcome or not.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/hist ... responded/
"The 1876 election was the most divisive in U.S. history. Here’s how Congress responded."
By Erin Blakemore
PUBLISHED January 5, 2021
On January 6, the U.S. Congress will convene to count and certify the results of the Electoral College vote, the last step to formally naming Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election.
But Republican members from both houses of Congress, many with presidential ambitions of their own, have announced they intend to contest the results.
Under pressure from President Donald Trump, and despite the fact that the Department of Justice has found no evidence of voter fraud, one faction of Republican legislators is calling for an investigation into the president’s fraud allegations before the vote is counted — and invoking an extraordinary 144-year-old compromise as a model.
“In 1877, Congress did not ignore those allegations [of fraud],” wrote Texas Senator Ted Cruz and 10 other senators in a joint statement.
“We should follow that precedent.”
But what is that precedent, and could it really apply in 2021?
To find out means delving into the unsavory history of an election that, until 2020, was deemed the nation’s most divisive — and that led to an unusual compromise with weighty consequences.
Here’s what you need to know about the 1876 election and why it still looms large in American history.
A nation united, but still divided
In 1876, the nation was still scarred and divided by the Civil War, which had ended a decade earlier.
During the war’s aftermath, approximately four million enslaved people were freed.
In what would become known as the Reconstruction era, a Republican-controlled Congress moved swiftly to restore the former Confederacy to the Union, limit the political power of former Confederates, and protect the rights of formerly enslaved people by granting them citizenship and the right to vote.
Newly enfranchised Black voters overwhelmingly supported the Republican Party, the party of President Abraham Lincoln and a critical force behind the Union’s Civil War victory.
They registered to vote in large numbers and ran for and were elected to public office.
But as Black citizens gained political and social power in the late 1860s, white Southerners, who largely supported the anti-Reconstruction Democratic Party, resented the federal government’s policies.
Reconstruction represented what they saw as the theft of their rightful dominance of the racial, political, and economic hierarchy.
In an attempt to wrest back their power, they used intimidation and violence to disenfranchise Black voters.
Then, in the early 1870s, the Republican Party’s popularity took a hit due to an economic depression and political scandals like the Whiskey Ring, a bribery scheme in which federal officials helped whiskey distillers evade taxes.
Between the Republicans’ tarnished reputation and the intimidating tactics that allowed white Southerners to suppress Republican votes, Democrats finally saw a path to electoral victory.
A bitter election
Although the stage was set for a dirty election, both 1876 candidates were solid, sensible, and seemingly above reproach.
The Republican candidate, war hero and Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes, ran on a reform platform, promising to clean up the civil service and serve for only one term.
His opponent, Democrat and New York governor Samuel J. Tilden, was known for challenging political corruption.
At the time, though, candidates let their party operatives promote them, and they staged a cutthroat campaign.
Tilden’s opponents painted him as a diseased drunkard who planned to pay off the former Confederacy’s debts; Hayes’s enemies claimed he had stolen money from his brothers in arms during the war.
Election Day was even worse: Both parties participated in rampant fraud.
Republican operatives stuffed ballot boxes, allowed repeat votes, and threw out Democratic ballots; Democrats physically intimidated Black voters in an attempt to keep them from the polls.
(Voter fraud used to be rampant. Now it’s an anomaly.)
When the votes were counted, it appeared that Tilden had garnered 200,000 more votes than Hayes.
But results were unclear in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, where both parties claimed victory — and alleged tampering.
Republican-led state election boards in those three states rejected enough Democratic votes to give Hayes a chance at victory through the Electoral College, despite his opponent’s three-point lead in the popular vote.
The states convened dueling slates of electors and sent conflicting returns to Congress.
Meanwhile, in Oregon, where Hayes had won the popular vote, the Democratic governor claimed one of the state’s three Republican electors was ineligible because he was employed by the postal service.
(Federal employees are not allowed to serve as members of the Electoral College.)
As a result, the state submitted two competing certificates of the final electoral vote tally, one signed by the Democratic governor that showed two votes for Hayes and one for Tilden, and another signed by the secretary of state that showed three votes for Hayes.
A total of 20 Electoral College votes — four from Florida, eight from Louisiana, seven from South Carolina, and one from Oregon — were contested.
It would be up to Congress to sort out the mess.
Electoral mayhem
Democrats were furious about what they saw as the Republicans’ theft of the Southern states.
Henry Watterson, a journalist and Democratic member of the Kentucky House of Representatives, used his platform to call for a “peaceful army of 100,000 men” to march on Washington unless Tilden was declared the winner, stoking fears of a second Civil War.
Faced with fears of violence and a deadlock between the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and the Republican-controlled Senate, Congress struggled to find a solution.
The Constitution offered no clear guidance about how to deal with a contested electoral vote, and members suggested and bitterly rejected a variety of proposals.
Time was ticking.
The inauguration was scheduled for March 5, 1877, and the legislators didn’t hit on a solution until late January.
Finally, they reached a compromise: a one-time commission consisting of an equal number of House and Senate lawmakers, four Supreme Court justices, and an additional justice selected by the participating Supreme Court members.
Although multiple Republicans objected to the measure, it passed and outgoing President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Electoral Commission Act on January 29.
An unprecedented commission
The electoral commission conducted a court-style tribunal in the Supreme Court chamber in February 1877.
Though the Democrats objected to the vote counts put forward by the Southern states’ Republican electoral boards, they were outnumbered by their Republican colleagues by one and were consistently overruled.
Each contested state was decided in favor of Hayes.
Yet the Democrats refused to accept the results and filibustered in the House of Representatives as fear of civil unrest grew throughout the nation.
It would take a backroom deal — and a momentous political compromise — to settle the election.
During a series of secretive meetings, Southern Democratic lawmakers promised to call off the filibuster and concede the election in exchange for an end to Reconstruction.
Though the terms of the informal agreement remain unknown, it is thought to have included the withdrawal of all federal forces from the former Confederacy, increased federal funds for Southern states, the construction of a transcontinental railroad through the South, and the appointment of a Southern Democrat to Hayes’s cabinet.
In the wee hours of March 2, 1877, a mere three days before the scheduled inauguration, Congress completed the electoral vote count.
Hayes won by a single electoral vote.
Amid fear of assassination, he was sworn in during a secret ceremony the next day.
The controversial Compromise of 1877 was lauded by many at the time as a move that preserved the fragile Union and allowed the country to move forward as one.
But it had disastrous consequences for Black Southerners.
Without federal oversight, states created harsh “Jim Crow” laws that reestablished a brutal racial hierarchy in the South and effectively disenfranchised Black citizens.
A decade after the Hayes-Tilden election was finally decided, Congress passed the Electoral Count Act of 1887 in an attempt to avoid further electoral chaos by providing a consistent system for the delivery of electoral votes.
The law, which still stands today, provides a mechanism by which Congress can determine whether electoral votes are legal: During the joint session of Congress on January 6, members can object to the votes of individual electors or states’ overall returns.
For an objection to be formally considered and voted upon, it must be lodged by both a member of the House and the Senate.
That has only happened twice in history, and both objections failed.
Is it precedent?
Will Republican lawmakers’ calls for an 1877-style commission change the outcome of the election?
Don’t count on it, say legal and historical experts.
The 2020 election didn’t result in a close electoral vote.
More than 50 court actions challenging the legitimacy of the returns have been rejected.
And though the Republican Party has attempted to submit a dueling slate of electors in five states, they were not certified and thus were not passed to Congress as official electoral slates.
Although Congressional Republicans have sufficient numbers to object to the returns and force a debate on the issue, their effort is destined to fail.
Enough of their Republican colleagues have signaled their opposition to the last-ditch effort to overturn the electors’ votes, and are expected to vote in favor of certifying the election.
Nor is a proposed gambit for Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election results likely to succeed.
Though President Trump falsely claims that Pence, who as president of the Senate will preside over the count, has the power to reject “fraudulently chosen” electors, the vice president in fact lacks that power.
As president of the Senate, his job is merely to count the electoral votes — whether the President likes the outcome or not.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/hist ... responded/
Re: THE MAGA-MAN DONALD TRUMP
NBC NEWS
"Coming to a black market near you: Covid-19 vaccine - Reports of the rich and connected jumping the line to get vaccinated is just the beginning, experts say. "
By Adiel Kaplan and Corky Siemaszko
Jan. 10, 2021, 4:30 AM EST
The Covid-19 vaccine could wind up on the black market, experts are warning.
The much-criticized rollout by the Trump administration has laid the groundwork for a scenario in which the rich and the politically connected use their money and power to cut in line and get vaccinated before everyone else, they said.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has already threatened to impose fines of up to $1 million and revoke the licenses of doctors, nurses and others who don’t follow state and federal vaccine distribution guidelines, which currently place a priority on inoculating front-line health care workers and nursing home residents.
There have been reports in Miami of big hospital donors getting the first crack at the vaccine and in New York of tycoons flying their friends down to Florida to get inoculated with doses earmarked for a retirement home.
And in Colorado, some teachers are crying foul after nurses and educators in wealthier public school districts and private schools got inoculated first.
“It’s a little frustrating that districts who already don’t have the same wealth accumulated around them were lower on the totem pole,” said a ninth grade teacher in Aurora Public Schools, one of the poorest in the Denver area, who asked not to be identified by name.
“The districts that already were receiving a lot of support got this before districts that need more support.”
Arthur Caplan of New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine and one of the nation’s top bio-ethicists said the lament will likely be heard a lot more as the divide grows between vaccine haves and vaccine have-nots.
“We’re hearing about some politicians, some trustees of big hospitals and others getting shots ahead of health care workers and elderly people,” Caplan said.
“I’m also hearing that some [drug manufacturing and distribution] companies are saying that as soon as the government contracts are filled, they’re going to make getting vaccines for themselves a priority.”
The result will be higher prices for everybody else, Caplan said.
“Anything that’s seen as life-saving, life-preserving and that’s in short supply creates black markets,” Caplan said, echoing remarks he made in an interview last month.
Scarcity helped turn toilet paper and masks into gold early in the pandemic, and it’s likely to do the same for vaccines, making them especially attractive to thieves and foreign copycat artists, other experts said.
"The danger is there is an already existing market for unregulated drugs," said Michael Einhorn, president of medical supplier Dealmed.
"And the issue is that products will be imported from foreign countries that may not have as strict regulations as the United States — where product can be diverted, sold on the side and imported to the United States."
Jonathan Cushing of Transparency International, an anti-corruption watchdog organization, issued a similar warning in November.
“The vaccine is likely to have a high ‘street value’, making government supplies an attractive target for theft and diversion unless adequate safeguards are built into supply chains,” Cushing wrote.
Cushing said in an email that so far, he has not seen “any black market issues in the U.S.,” but the potential is there.
"There have been reports of substandard or falsified vaccines already being made in India, and also falsified hand-sanitizers in the U.S.A. appearing throughout the course of the pandemic," he said.
"We’ve also seen people using connections to access drugs purported to be therapeutics, such as hydroxychloroquine."
“I’d argue that much of the planning for distribution in the U.S. has been done too late in the day, and the lack of guidelines, and clear eligibility criteria for receipt of vaccines are probably the root cause of many of the issues being faced in the U.S. at the moment," he added.
"And subsequently this lack of planning gives rise to opportunities for individuals to jump the queue, and to exploit their position to get vaccines ahead of others."
Dr. Sadiya Khan, an epidemiologist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, agreed and added that the lack of a coherent vaccine distribution plan is clear evidence the federal government did not learn from its failure to ramp up testing as a means of slowing the spread of the virus.
“The absence of any federal infrastructure across counties and states is leading to an unmitigated disaster in addition to inefficient distribution,” Khan said.
“Vaccine distribution is the Groundhog Day of what Covid-19 testing was in the beginning of the pandemic."
"These considerable delays are likely to lead to more hospitalizations and deaths that could be preventable.”
President-elect Joe Biden, who has joined the chorus of critics lambasting President Donald Trump's Operation Warp Speed for failing to meet its goal of rolling out 20 million vaccines by the end of 2020, has pledged to “move heaven and earth” to accelerate the pace of distribution.
Biden has also pledged to invoke the Defense Production Act, which allows a president to compel private companies to prioritize the manufacture of certain items for national security.
In Colorado, teachers were thrown for a loop this week after the state Department of Public Health and Environment surprised educators by suddenly announcing Wednesday that it was prioritizing first responders and older people.
That announcement came just a week after Gov. Jared Polis placed teachers on the state’s priority vaccine list.
By then, school nurses and health staffers at well-off public school districts like the Cherry Creek School District in the Denver suburbs had already been vaccinated as had several teachers at private schools like the Stanley British Primary School in Denver, NBC News learned.
When asked about two private school teachers who posted photos online of themselves holding vaccination cards after getting their shots last week at a local pharmacy, Stanley British Primary School head Sumant Bhat said in an email that it did not organize any vaccinations for its staff.
“While teachers are now in the 1B category, we have communicated internally that they are currently below the line within that category and, therefore, ‘NOT up’ for the vaccine at this time,” Bhat wrote.
“We are in frequent contact with our independent school network and our public health partners to determine when we will be able to roll out a thoughtful plan to make vaccinations available to our faculty and staff.”
With the federal government leaving it up to local authorities to distribute the vaccine, Caplan said the likelihood of a nonpriority person being offered a shot is heightened.
Caplan’s advice for resolving this ethical dilemma?
“We think the employee should accept the vaccine,” Caplan and fellow ethicist Kyle Ferguson wrote.
“What goals would be furthered by refusal?"
"Those who feel the dilemma’s force assume that their refusal would free up a scarce resource, that the liberated dose would end up in the arm of someone who needs it more urgently."
"But that is dubitable."
"It is likely that the vaccine will not leave the institution.”
Adiel Kaplan is a reporter with the NBC News Investigative Unit.
Corky Siemaszko is a senior writer for NBC News Digital.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/co ... e-n1253504
"Coming to a black market near you: Covid-19 vaccine - Reports of the rich and connected jumping the line to get vaccinated is just the beginning, experts say. "
By Adiel Kaplan and Corky Siemaszko
Jan. 10, 2021, 4:30 AM EST
The Covid-19 vaccine could wind up on the black market, experts are warning.
The much-criticized rollout by the Trump administration has laid the groundwork for a scenario in which the rich and the politically connected use their money and power to cut in line and get vaccinated before everyone else, they said.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has already threatened to impose fines of up to $1 million and revoke the licenses of doctors, nurses and others who don’t follow state and federal vaccine distribution guidelines, which currently place a priority on inoculating front-line health care workers and nursing home residents.
There have been reports in Miami of big hospital donors getting the first crack at the vaccine and in New York of tycoons flying their friends down to Florida to get inoculated with doses earmarked for a retirement home.
And in Colorado, some teachers are crying foul after nurses and educators in wealthier public school districts and private schools got inoculated first.
“It’s a little frustrating that districts who already don’t have the same wealth accumulated around them were lower on the totem pole,” said a ninth grade teacher in Aurora Public Schools, one of the poorest in the Denver area, who asked not to be identified by name.
“The districts that already were receiving a lot of support got this before districts that need more support.”
Arthur Caplan of New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine and one of the nation’s top bio-ethicists said the lament will likely be heard a lot more as the divide grows between vaccine haves and vaccine have-nots.
“We’re hearing about some politicians, some trustees of big hospitals and others getting shots ahead of health care workers and elderly people,” Caplan said.
“I’m also hearing that some [drug manufacturing and distribution] companies are saying that as soon as the government contracts are filled, they’re going to make getting vaccines for themselves a priority.”
The result will be higher prices for everybody else, Caplan said.
“Anything that’s seen as life-saving, life-preserving and that’s in short supply creates black markets,” Caplan said, echoing remarks he made in an interview last month.
Scarcity helped turn toilet paper and masks into gold early in the pandemic, and it’s likely to do the same for vaccines, making them especially attractive to thieves and foreign copycat artists, other experts said.
"The danger is there is an already existing market for unregulated drugs," said Michael Einhorn, president of medical supplier Dealmed.
"And the issue is that products will be imported from foreign countries that may not have as strict regulations as the United States — where product can be diverted, sold on the side and imported to the United States."
Jonathan Cushing of Transparency International, an anti-corruption watchdog organization, issued a similar warning in November.
“The vaccine is likely to have a high ‘street value’, making government supplies an attractive target for theft and diversion unless adequate safeguards are built into supply chains,” Cushing wrote.
Cushing said in an email that so far, he has not seen “any black market issues in the U.S.,” but the potential is there.
"There have been reports of substandard or falsified vaccines already being made in India, and also falsified hand-sanitizers in the U.S.A. appearing throughout the course of the pandemic," he said.
"We’ve also seen people using connections to access drugs purported to be therapeutics, such as hydroxychloroquine."
“I’d argue that much of the planning for distribution in the U.S. has been done too late in the day, and the lack of guidelines, and clear eligibility criteria for receipt of vaccines are probably the root cause of many of the issues being faced in the U.S. at the moment," he added.
"And subsequently this lack of planning gives rise to opportunities for individuals to jump the queue, and to exploit their position to get vaccines ahead of others."
Dr. Sadiya Khan, an epidemiologist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, agreed and added that the lack of a coherent vaccine distribution plan is clear evidence the federal government did not learn from its failure to ramp up testing as a means of slowing the spread of the virus.
“The absence of any federal infrastructure across counties and states is leading to an unmitigated disaster in addition to inefficient distribution,” Khan said.
“Vaccine distribution is the Groundhog Day of what Covid-19 testing was in the beginning of the pandemic."
"These considerable delays are likely to lead to more hospitalizations and deaths that could be preventable.”
President-elect Joe Biden, who has joined the chorus of critics lambasting President Donald Trump's Operation Warp Speed for failing to meet its goal of rolling out 20 million vaccines by the end of 2020, has pledged to “move heaven and earth” to accelerate the pace of distribution.
Biden has also pledged to invoke the Defense Production Act, which allows a president to compel private companies to prioritize the manufacture of certain items for national security.
In Colorado, teachers were thrown for a loop this week after the state Department of Public Health and Environment surprised educators by suddenly announcing Wednesday that it was prioritizing first responders and older people.
That announcement came just a week after Gov. Jared Polis placed teachers on the state’s priority vaccine list.
By then, school nurses and health staffers at well-off public school districts like the Cherry Creek School District in the Denver suburbs had already been vaccinated as had several teachers at private schools like the Stanley British Primary School in Denver, NBC News learned.
When asked about two private school teachers who posted photos online of themselves holding vaccination cards after getting their shots last week at a local pharmacy, Stanley British Primary School head Sumant Bhat said in an email that it did not organize any vaccinations for its staff.
“While teachers are now in the 1B category, we have communicated internally that they are currently below the line within that category and, therefore, ‘NOT up’ for the vaccine at this time,” Bhat wrote.
“We are in frequent contact with our independent school network and our public health partners to determine when we will be able to roll out a thoughtful plan to make vaccinations available to our faculty and staff.”
With the federal government leaving it up to local authorities to distribute the vaccine, Caplan said the likelihood of a nonpriority person being offered a shot is heightened.
Caplan’s advice for resolving this ethical dilemma?
“We think the employee should accept the vaccine,” Caplan and fellow ethicist Kyle Ferguson wrote.
“What goals would be furthered by refusal?"
"Those who feel the dilemma’s force assume that their refusal would free up a scarce resource, that the liberated dose would end up in the arm of someone who needs it more urgently."
"But that is dubitable."
"It is likely that the vaccine will not leave the institution.”
Adiel Kaplan is a reporter with the NBC News Investigative Unit.
Corky Siemaszko is a senior writer for NBC News Digital.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/co ... e-n1253504
Re: THE MAGA-MAN DONALD TRUMP
NPR logo
"House Resolution Calls On Pence To Assume Powers Of Presidency"
Barbara Sprunt
January 12, 2021 5:00 AM ET
2017 square
The House of Representatives is expected to debate and vote Tuesday on a measure calling on Vice President Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to declare President Trump incapable of executing his duties.
If the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet agree, Pence could assume the powers of the presidency.
The resolution calls on Pence to take these steps, referencing Trump's attempts to intervene in the vote counting of the Nov. 3 election — including his call to Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — as well as his language to supporters at a rally in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 ahead of the siege at the Capitol building.
"While violent insurrectionists occupied parts of the Capitol, President Trump ignored or rejected repeated real-time entreaties from Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to appeal to his followers to exit the Capitol," states the measure, submitted by Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin.
In a letter to the Democratic caucus Sunday evening, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said that if the resolution passes, as is expected, Pence will have 24 hours to respond.
Pence has made no indication he would take such an action.
ticle continues after sponsor message
Democrats had attempted to pass this resolution on Monday through unanimous consent, but Rep. Alex Mooney, R-W.Va., objected.
Separately, the House is also likely to vote on an article of impeachment on Wednesday.
RESOLUTION calling on Vice President Michael R. Pence to convene and mobilize the principal officers of the executive departments of the Cabinet to activate section 4 of the 25th Amendment to declare President Donald J. Trump incapable of executing the duties of his office and to immediately exercise powers as acting President.
Whereas on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, the day fixed by the Constitution for the counting of electoral votes, Congress experienced a massive violent invasion of the United States Capitol and its complex by a dangerous insurrectionary mob which smashed windows and used violent physical force and weapons to overpower and outmaneuver the United States Capitol Police and facilitated the illegal entry into the Capitol of hundreds, if not thousands, of unauthorized persons (all of whom entered the Capitol complex without going through metal detectors and other security screening devices);
Whereas, the insurrectionary mob threatened the safety and lives of the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and the President pro tempore of the Senate, the first three individuals in the line of succession to the presidency, as the rioters were recorded chanting ''Hang Mike Pence'' and ''Where's Nancy'' when President Donald J. Trump tweeted to his supporters that ''Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country'' after the Capitol had been overrun and the Vice President was in hiding;
Whereas the insurrectionary mob attacked law enforcement officers, unleashed chaos and terror among Members and staffers and their families, occupied the Senate Chamber and Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office along with other leadership offices, vandalized and pilfered government property, and succeeded in interfering with the counting of electoral votes in the joint session of Congress;
Whereas the insurrectionary mob's violent attacks on law enforcement and invasion of the Capitol complex caused the unprecedented disruption of the Electoral College count process for a 4-hour period in both the House and the Senate, a dangerous and destabilizing impairment of the peaceful transfer of power that these insurrectionary riots were explicitly designed to cause;
Whereas 5 Americans have died as a result of injuries or traumas suffered during this violent attack on Congress and the Capitol, including Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick and Ashli Babbitt, Rosanne Boyland, Kevin Greeson, and Benjamin Phillips, and more than 50 police officers were seriously injured, including 15 officers who had to be hospitalized, by violent assaults, and there could easily have been dozens or hundreds more wounded and killed, a sentiment captured by Senator Lindsey Graham, who observed that ''the mob could have blown the building up. They could have killed us all'';
Whereas these insurrectionary protests were widely advertised and broadly encouraged by President Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly urged his millions of followers on Twitter and other social media outlets to come to Washington on January 6 to ''Stop the Steal'' of the 2020 Presidential election and promised his activist followers that the protest on the Electoral College counting day would be ''wild'';
Whereas President-elect Joseph R. Biden won the 2020 Presidential election with more than 81 million votes and defeated President Trump 306–232 in the Electoral College, a margin pronounced to be a ''landslide'' by President Trump when he won by the same Electoral College numbers in 2016, but President Trump never accepted these election results as legitimate and waged a protracted campaign of propaganda and coercive pressure in the Federal and State courts, in the state legislatures, with Secretaries of State, and in Congress to nullify and overturn these results and replace them with fraudulent and fabricated numbers;
Whereas President Trump made at least 3 attempts to intervene in the lawful vote counting and certification process in Georgia and to coerce officials there into fraudulently declaring him the winner of the State's electoral votes, including calls to Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and a State elections investigator, and an hour-long conversation with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger badgering him to ''find 11,780 votes'' and warning of a ''big risk'' to Raffensperger if he did not intervene favorably to guarantee the reelection of President Trump;
Whereas President Trump appeared with members of his staff and family at a celebratory kickoff rally to encourage and charge up the rioters and insurrectionists to ''march on the Capitol'' and ''fight'' on Wednesday, January 6, 2021;
Whereas while violent insurrectionists occupied parts of the Capitol, President Trump ignored or rejected repeated real-time entreaties from Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to appeal to his followers to exit the Capitol, and also ignored a tweet from Alyssa Farah, his former communications director, saying: ''Condemn this now, @realDonaldTrump — you are the only one they will listen to. For our country!'';
Whereas photographs, cell phone videos, social media posts, and on-the-ground reporting show that numerous violent insurrectionists who invaded the Capitol were armed, were carrying police grade flex cuffs to detain and handcuff people, used mace, pepper spray, and bear spray against United States Capitol Police officers, erected a gallows on Capitol grounds to hang ''traitors,'' vehemently chanted ''Hang Mike Pence!'' while surrounding and roving the Capitol, emphasized that storming the Capitol was ''a revolution,'', brandished the Confederate battle flag inside the Capitol, and were found to be in possession of Napalm B, while still unidentified culprits planted multiple pipe bombs at buildings near the Capitol complex, another lethally dangerous criminal action that succeeded in diverting law enforcement from the Capitol; and
Whereas Donald Trump has demonstrated repeatedly, continuously, and spectacularly his absolute inability to discharge the most basic and fundamental powers and duties of his office, including most recently the duty to respect the legitimate results of the Presidential election, the duty to respect the peaceful transfer of democratic power under the Constitution, the duty to participate in legally defined transition activities, the duty to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States, including the counting of Electoral College votes by Congress, the duty to protect the people of the United States and their elected representatives against domestic insurrection, mob rule, and seditious violence, and generally the duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That the House of Representatives calls upon Vice President Michael R. Pence—
(1) to immediately use his powers under section 4 of the 25th Amendment to convene and mobilize the principal officers of the executive departments in the Cabinet to declare what is obvious to a horrified Nation: That the President is unable to successfully discharge the duties and powers of his office; and
(2) to transmit to the President pro tempore of 10 the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives notice that he will be immediately assuming the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
https://www.npr.org/sections/trump-impe ... presidency
"House Resolution Calls On Pence To Assume Powers Of Presidency"
Barbara Sprunt
January 12, 2021 5:00 AM ET
2017 square
The House of Representatives is expected to debate and vote Tuesday on a measure calling on Vice President Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to declare President Trump incapable of executing his duties.
If the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet agree, Pence could assume the powers of the presidency.
The resolution calls on Pence to take these steps, referencing Trump's attempts to intervene in the vote counting of the Nov. 3 election — including his call to Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — as well as his language to supporters at a rally in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 ahead of the siege at the Capitol building.
"While violent insurrectionists occupied parts of the Capitol, President Trump ignored or rejected repeated real-time entreaties from Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to appeal to his followers to exit the Capitol," states the measure, submitted by Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin.
In a letter to the Democratic caucus Sunday evening, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said that if the resolution passes, as is expected, Pence will have 24 hours to respond.
Pence has made no indication he would take such an action.
ticle continues after sponsor message
Democrats had attempted to pass this resolution on Monday through unanimous consent, but Rep. Alex Mooney, R-W.Va., objected.
Separately, the House is also likely to vote on an article of impeachment on Wednesday.
RESOLUTION calling on Vice President Michael R. Pence to convene and mobilize the principal officers of the executive departments of the Cabinet to activate section 4 of the 25th Amendment to declare President Donald J. Trump incapable of executing the duties of his office and to immediately exercise powers as acting President.
Whereas on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, the day fixed by the Constitution for the counting of electoral votes, Congress experienced a massive violent invasion of the United States Capitol and its complex by a dangerous insurrectionary mob which smashed windows and used violent physical force and weapons to overpower and outmaneuver the United States Capitol Police and facilitated the illegal entry into the Capitol of hundreds, if not thousands, of unauthorized persons (all of whom entered the Capitol complex without going through metal detectors and other security screening devices);
Whereas, the insurrectionary mob threatened the safety and lives of the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and the President pro tempore of the Senate, the first three individuals in the line of succession to the presidency, as the rioters were recorded chanting ''Hang Mike Pence'' and ''Where's Nancy'' when President Donald J. Trump tweeted to his supporters that ''Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country'' after the Capitol had been overrun and the Vice President was in hiding;
Whereas the insurrectionary mob attacked law enforcement officers, unleashed chaos and terror among Members and staffers and their families, occupied the Senate Chamber and Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office along with other leadership offices, vandalized and pilfered government property, and succeeded in interfering with the counting of electoral votes in the joint session of Congress;
Whereas the insurrectionary mob's violent attacks on law enforcement and invasion of the Capitol complex caused the unprecedented disruption of the Electoral College count process for a 4-hour period in both the House and the Senate, a dangerous and destabilizing impairment of the peaceful transfer of power that these insurrectionary riots were explicitly designed to cause;
Whereas 5 Americans have died as a result of injuries or traumas suffered during this violent attack on Congress and the Capitol, including Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick and Ashli Babbitt, Rosanne Boyland, Kevin Greeson, and Benjamin Phillips, and more than 50 police officers were seriously injured, including 15 officers who had to be hospitalized, by violent assaults, and there could easily have been dozens or hundreds more wounded and killed, a sentiment captured by Senator Lindsey Graham, who observed that ''the mob could have blown the building up. They could have killed us all'';
Whereas these insurrectionary protests were widely advertised and broadly encouraged by President Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly urged his millions of followers on Twitter and other social media outlets to come to Washington on January 6 to ''Stop the Steal'' of the 2020 Presidential election and promised his activist followers that the protest on the Electoral College counting day would be ''wild'';
Whereas President-elect Joseph R. Biden won the 2020 Presidential election with more than 81 million votes and defeated President Trump 306–232 in the Electoral College, a margin pronounced to be a ''landslide'' by President Trump when he won by the same Electoral College numbers in 2016, but President Trump never accepted these election results as legitimate and waged a protracted campaign of propaganda and coercive pressure in the Federal and State courts, in the state legislatures, with Secretaries of State, and in Congress to nullify and overturn these results and replace them with fraudulent and fabricated numbers;
Whereas President Trump made at least 3 attempts to intervene in the lawful vote counting and certification process in Georgia and to coerce officials there into fraudulently declaring him the winner of the State's electoral votes, including calls to Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and a State elections investigator, and an hour-long conversation with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger badgering him to ''find 11,780 votes'' and warning of a ''big risk'' to Raffensperger if he did not intervene favorably to guarantee the reelection of President Trump;
Whereas President Trump appeared with members of his staff and family at a celebratory kickoff rally to encourage and charge up the rioters and insurrectionists to ''march on the Capitol'' and ''fight'' on Wednesday, January 6, 2021;
Whereas while violent insurrectionists occupied parts of the Capitol, President Trump ignored or rejected repeated real-time entreaties from Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to appeal to his followers to exit the Capitol, and also ignored a tweet from Alyssa Farah, his former communications director, saying: ''Condemn this now, @realDonaldTrump — you are the only one they will listen to. For our country!'';
Whereas photographs, cell phone videos, social media posts, and on-the-ground reporting show that numerous violent insurrectionists who invaded the Capitol were armed, were carrying police grade flex cuffs to detain and handcuff people, used mace, pepper spray, and bear spray against United States Capitol Police officers, erected a gallows on Capitol grounds to hang ''traitors,'' vehemently chanted ''Hang Mike Pence!'' while surrounding and roving the Capitol, emphasized that storming the Capitol was ''a revolution,'', brandished the Confederate battle flag inside the Capitol, and were found to be in possession of Napalm B, while still unidentified culprits planted multiple pipe bombs at buildings near the Capitol complex, another lethally dangerous criminal action that succeeded in diverting law enforcement from the Capitol; and
Whereas Donald Trump has demonstrated repeatedly, continuously, and spectacularly his absolute inability to discharge the most basic and fundamental powers and duties of his office, including most recently the duty to respect the legitimate results of the Presidential election, the duty to respect the peaceful transfer of democratic power under the Constitution, the duty to participate in legally defined transition activities, the duty to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States, including the counting of Electoral College votes by Congress, the duty to protect the people of the United States and their elected representatives against domestic insurrection, mob rule, and seditious violence, and generally the duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That the House of Representatives calls upon Vice President Michael R. Pence—
(1) to immediately use his powers under section 4 of the 25th Amendment to convene and mobilize the principal officers of the executive departments in the Cabinet to declare what is obvious to a horrified Nation: That the President is unable to successfully discharge the duties and powers of his office; and
(2) to transmit to the President pro tempore of 10 the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives notice that he will be immediately assuming the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
https://www.npr.org/sections/trump-impe ... presidency
Re: THE MAGA-MAN DONALD TRUMP
NBC NEWS
"Man pictured carrying away Pelosi's lectern, two others charged in Capitol riot"
By Nicole Acevedo
Jan. 9, 2021, 11:17 AM EST / Updated Jan. 9, 2021, 3:17 PM EST
A man photographed carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern through the U.S. Capitol while a pro-Trump mob rampaged on Wednesday has been arrested, as have two others who were seen in the riot, a West Virginia legislator and a longtime QAnon supporter who was seen wearing wearing a horned helmet and carrying a 6-foot spear.
Adam Johnson, 36, of Parrish, Florida was arrested Friday around 9 p.m. and is being held on a federal warrant, jail records from the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office show.
The FBI had been searching for Johnson after he was quickly identified on social media by local residents in the viral photo that shows him wearing a red, white, and blue Trump winter hat while carrying the House speaker's lectern amid the mob violence Wednesday.
Allan Mestel is acquainted with Johnson and notified the FBI after recognizing him in the photo, NBC-affiliated station in Tampa, Florida, WFLA-TV, reported.
“I felt a little disassociated for a minute."
"It was almost like, it was surreal."
"I mean it was surreal."
"I wasn’t surprised, but I was shocked," Mestel told WFLA-TV.
“Couldn’t believe it, the fact that I recognize somebody from our hometown, was, I was floored.”
Johnson has been charged with one count of knowingly entering a restricted building without lawful authority, one count of theft of government property as well as one count of violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, which is prosecuting all three cases.
Republican West Virginia legislator Derrick Evans, 35, was also arrested on Friday and is now facing charges for knowingly entering a restricted building without lawful authority as well as for violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol Grounds.
Evans livestreamed a video on his Facebook page Wednesday afternoon outside the Capitol as rioters who support President Donald Trump pushed against a police barricade.
"Bring the tear gas."
"We don't care," Evans is heard yelling.
"We're taking this country back whether you like it or not."
"Today's a test run."
"We're taking this country back."
At another point in the now-deleted video, he's heard asking, "Where's the Proud Boys?" referring to the far-right, all-male, self-described group of "Western chauvinists."
Evans defended his actions, saying in a Facebook statement that he attended the protest as "an independent member of the media to film history."
After initially refusing to resign from the West Virginia House of Delegates, Evans announced his resignation Saturday "effective immediately," NBC-affiliated station in Huntington, West Virginia, WSAZ, reported.
"The past few days have certainly been a difficult time for my family, colleagues and myself, so I feel it’s best at this point to resign my seat in the House and focus on my personal situation and those I love," Evans said in a statement Saturday.
“I take full responsibility for my actions, and deeply regret any hurt, pain or embarrassment I may have caused my family, friends, constituents and fellow West Virginians."
Jacob Anthony Chansley, known as Jake Angeli, was taken into custody Saturday and is facing charges for knowingly entering a restricted building without lawful authority as well as for violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said.
Chansley, 33, of Phoenix, Arizona was photographed in the U.S. Capitol carrying a 6-foot spear and wearing a horned helmet during the riot.
The longtime QAnon supporter is known as the "Q Shaman" for attending protests wearing face paint and an elaborate horned fur costume.
Johnson is married to a local physician and is a father of five, WFLA-TV reported.
Before being deleted or taken down, Johnson’s social media accounts had posts showing he was in Washington, D.C., ahead of the riots and included disparaging comments about the Black Lives Matter movement and law enforcement who defended First Amendment protected rights, the Bradenton Herald reported.
The FBI is requesting the public's help in identifying other Trump supporters who unlawfully invaded the Capitol for about four hours, with investigators poring over surveillance footage and social media posts.
The vast majority of the hundreds of people who stormed the building were allowed to leave without getting arrested, making the task of tracking them down exceedingly difficult.
So far, after 16 people have been arrested and charged with federal crimes, and 40 others are facing charges for lower-level crimes after the violence that took place in the Capitol building.
Nicole Acevedo is a reporter for NBC News Digital. She reports, writes and produces stories for NBC Latino and NBCNews.com.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ma ... d-n1253628
"Man pictured carrying away Pelosi's lectern, two others charged in Capitol riot"
By Nicole Acevedo
Jan. 9, 2021, 11:17 AM EST / Updated Jan. 9, 2021, 3:17 PM EST
A man photographed carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern through the U.S. Capitol while a pro-Trump mob rampaged on Wednesday has been arrested, as have two others who were seen in the riot, a West Virginia legislator and a longtime QAnon supporter who was seen wearing wearing a horned helmet and carrying a 6-foot spear.
Adam Johnson, 36, of Parrish, Florida was arrested Friday around 9 p.m. and is being held on a federal warrant, jail records from the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office show.
The FBI had been searching for Johnson after he was quickly identified on social media by local residents in the viral photo that shows him wearing a red, white, and blue Trump winter hat while carrying the House speaker's lectern amid the mob violence Wednesday.
Allan Mestel is acquainted with Johnson and notified the FBI after recognizing him in the photo, NBC-affiliated station in Tampa, Florida, WFLA-TV, reported.
“I felt a little disassociated for a minute."
"It was almost like, it was surreal."
"I mean it was surreal."
"I wasn’t surprised, but I was shocked," Mestel told WFLA-TV.
“Couldn’t believe it, the fact that I recognize somebody from our hometown, was, I was floored.”
Johnson has been charged with one count of knowingly entering a restricted building without lawful authority, one count of theft of government property as well as one count of violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, which is prosecuting all three cases.
Republican West Virginia legislator Derrick Evans, 35, was also arrested on Friday and is now facing charges for knowingly entering a restricted building without lawful authority as well as for violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol Grounds.
Evans livestreamed a video on his Facebook page Wednesday afternoon outside the Capitol as rioters who support President Donald Trump pushed against a police barricade.
"Bring the tear gas."
"We don't care," Evans is heard yelling.
"We're taking this country back whether you like it or not."
"Today's a test run."
"We're taking this country back."
At another point in the now-deleted video, he's heard asking, "Where's the Proud Boys?" referring to the far-right, all-male, self-described group of "Western chauvinists."
Evans defended his actions, saying in a Facebook statement that he attended the protest as "an independent member of the media to film history."
After initially refusing to resign from the West Virginia House of Delegates, Evans announced his resignation Saturday "effective immediately," NBC-affiliated station in Huntington, West Virginia, WSAZ, reported.
"The past few days have certainly been a difficult time for my family, colleagues and myself, so I feel it’s best at this point to resign my seat in the House and focus on my personal situation and those I love," Evans said in a statement Saturday.
“I take full responsibility for my actions, and deeply regret any hurt, pain or embarrassment I may have caused my family, friends, constituents and fellow West Virginians."
Jacob Anthony Chansley, known as Jake Angeli, was taken into custody Saturday and is facing charges for knowingly entering a restricted building without lawful authority as well as for violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said.
Chansley, 33, of Phoenix, Arizona was photographed in the U.S. Capitol carrying a 6-foot spear and wearing a horned helmet during the riot.
The longtime QAnon supporter is known as the "Q Shaman" for attending protests wearing face paint and an elaborate horned fur costume.
Johnson is married to a local physician and is a father of five, WFLA-TV reported.
Before being deleted or taken down, Johnson’s social media accounts had posts showing he was in Washington, D.C., ahead of the riots and included disparaging comments about the Black Lives Matter movement and law enforcement who defended First Amendment protected rights, the Bradenton Herald reported.
The FBI is requesting the public's help in identifying other Trump supporters who unlawfully invaded the Capitol for about four hours, with investigators poring over surveillance footage and social media posts.
The vast majority of the hundreds of people who stormed the building were allowed to leave without getting arrested, making the task of tracking them down exceedingly difficult.
So far, after 16 people have been arrested and charged with federal crimes, and 40 others are facing charges for lower-level crimes after the violence that took place in the Capitol building.
Nicole Acevedo is a reporter for NBC News Digital. She reports, writes and produces stories for NBC Latino and NBCNews.com.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ma ... d-n1253628
Re: THE MAGA-MAN DONALD TRUMP
NBC NEWS
"Two men seen carrying restraints during Capitol riot charged with federal crimes"
By Tim Stelloh
Jan. 10, 2021, 6:06 PM EST
Two men seen carrying zip tie-style restraints when supporters of President Donald Trump breached the U.S. Capitol were charged Sunday in federal court, authorities said.
The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia identified the men as Larry Rendell Brock of Texas and Eric Gavelek Munchel of Tennessee.
Brock and Munchel were charged with one count of entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority and one count of violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, the office said in a statement.
The men, who were identified by researchers at the University of Toronto, were seen inside the building with the restraints, authorities said.
Brock was wearing a tactical vest and a green helmet, the statement said, and Munchel appeared to have an unidentified item in a holster and a cellphone mounted on his chest.
It wasn't immediately clear Sunday whether they have lawyers.
Jail records show that Munchel was booked Sunday afternoon and is being held by the Davidson County Sheriff's Office in Nashville, Tennessee.
It isn't clear where Brock is being held.
In an interview with The New Yorker, he described himself as a decorated Air Force veteran who retired from the military in 2014 and began working for Hillwood Airways, a Texas-based carrier that describes itself as a luxury private airline for high-end corporate clients.
The Air Force didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday.
A spokesman for Hillwood, James Fuller, said Brock no longer works for the company.
He declined to provide additional details.
Army investigating officer for attending pro-Trump rally in D.C.
Speaking to The New Yorker, Brock acknowledged entering the building and said he had traveled to Washington to demonstrate peacefully.
He echoed Trump's baseless claims of election fraud, the magazine reported.
Brock and Munchel had been among dozens of people the FBI is searching for after Wednesday's incursion, in which five people died, including a police officer.
Also facing charges are a West Virginia legislator, an Arizona QAnon supporter seen carrying a 6-foot spear and a Florida man photographed with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's lectern.
Tim Stelloh is a reporter for NBC News based in California.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tw ... l-n1253671
"Two men seen carrying restraints during Capitol riot charged with federal crimes"
By Tim Stelloh
Jan. 10, 2021, 6:06 PM EST
Two men seen carrying zip tie-style restraints when supporters of President Donald Trump breached the U.S. Capitol were charged Sunday in federal court, authorities said.
The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia identified the men as Larry Rendell Brock of Texas and Eric Gavelek Munchel of Tennessee.
Brock and Munchel were charged with one count of entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority and one count of violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, the office said in a statement.
The men, who were identified by researchers at the University of Toronto, were seen inside the building with the restraints, authorities said.
Brock was wearing a tactical vest and a green helmet, the statement said, and Munchel appeared to have an unidentified item in a holster and a cellphone mounted on his chest.
It wasn't immediately clear Sunday whether they have lawyers.
Jail records show that Munchel was booked Sunday afternoon and is being held by the Davidson County Sheriff's Office in Nashville, Tennessee.
It isn't clear where Brock is being held.
In an interview with The New Yorker, he described himself as a decorated Air Force veteran who retired from the military in 2014 and began working for Hillwood Airways, a Texas-based carrier that describes itself as a luxury private airline for high-end corporate clients.
The Air Force didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday.
A spokesman for Hillwood, James Fuller, said Brock no longer works for the company.
He declined to provide additional details.
Army investigating officer for attending pro-Trump rally in D.C.
Speaking to The New Yorker, Brock acknowledged entering the building and said he had traveled to Washington to demonstrate peacefully.
He echoed Trump's baseless claims of election fraud, the magazine reported.
Brock and Munchel had been among dozens of people the FBI is searching for after Wednesday's incursion, in which five people died, including a police officer.
Also facing charges are a West Virginia legislator, an Arizona QAnon supporter seen carrying a 6-foot spear and a Florida man photographed with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's lectern.
Tim Stelloh is a reporter for NBC News based in California.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tw ... l-n1253671
Re: THE MAGA-MAN DONALD TRUMP
THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR January 12, 2021 at 7:11 pm
Paul Plante says:
Yes, people, making it up as they go big time, and here I am specifically referring to Nancy Pelosi, a San Francisco congresswoman who once again purchased the office of speaker of the house of representatives, what Nancy calls the “people’s house,” and who thinks it is she who is in charge of the national government of the United States of America, trying to order Mike Pence, the vice president of the United States of America and a member of the executive branch of the national government, which branch the Constitution gives Nancy Pelosi no control over, at all, to remove a sitting American president because Nancy Pelosi doesn’t like him, never has liked him, never will like him and wants him gone, period.
“GET RID OF THE MOTHER******” screeches Nancy at the top of her lungs, as if she were Catherine the Great of Russia picking a new king of Poland.
And no, I am not making things up here, nor giving out with fake news.
We are indeed seeing the Democrats in the House of Representatives openly waging war on the office of the executive, which takes us for a moment back to FEDERALIST No. 62, The Senate, for the Independent Journal to the People of the State of New York by either James Madison or Alexander Hamilton writing as Publius circa 1788, wherein was stated as follows and still applies to this day, to wit:
No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable, without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.
end quotes
Thanks to the continued internecine and childish warfare between the Democrat faction of Nancy Pelosi, and Trump, our worthless national government is no longer respected, precisely because it is no longer respectable, because it no longer possesses a certain portion of order and stability.
To the contrary, all it has to offer is BULL**** on top of BULL**** which is heaped over by even more BULL**** until the stench emanating from Washington, D.C. has become overpowering, which takes us to the RESOLUTION to remove Trump Pelosi has her Democrats voting on today, to wit:
RESOLUTION calling on Vice President Michael R. Pence to convene and mobilize the principal officers of the executive departments of the Cabinet to activate section 4 of the 25th Amendment to declare President Donald J. Trump incapable of executing the duties of his office and to immediately exercise powers as acting President.
Whereas on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, the day fixed by the Constitution for the counting of electoral votes, Congress experienced a massive violent invasion of the United States Capitol and its complex by a dangerous insurrectionary mob which smashed windows and used violent physical force and weapons to overpower and outmaneuver the United States Capitol Police and facilitated the illegal entry into the Capitol of hundreds, if not thousands, of unauthorized persons (all of whom entered the Capitol complex without going through metal detectors and other security screening devices);
Whereas, the insurrectionary mob threatened the safety and lives of the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and the President pro tempore of the Senate, the first three individuals in the line of succession to the presidency, as the rioters were recorded chanting ”Hang Mike Pence” and ”Where’s Nancy” when President Donald J. Trump tweeted to his supporters that ”Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country” after the Capitol had been overrun and the Vice President was in hiding;
Whereas the insurrectionary mob attacked law enforcement officers, unleashed chaos and terror among Members and staffers and their families, occupied the Senate Chamber and Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office along with other leadership offices, vandalized and pilfered government property, and succeeded in interfering with the counting of electoral votes in the joint session of Congress;
Whereas the insurrectionary mob’s violent attacks on law enforcement and invasion of the Capitol complex caused the unprecedented disruption of the Electoral College count process for a 4-hour period in both the House and the Senate, a dangerous and destabilizing impairment of the peaceful transfer of power that these insurrectionary riots were explicitly designed to cause;
Whereas 5 Americans have died as a result of injuries or traumas suffered during this violent attack on Congress and the Capitol, including Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick and Ashli Babbitt, Rosanne Boyland, Kevin Greeson, and Benjamin Phillips, and more than 50 police officers were seriously injured, including 15 officers who had to be hospitalized, by violent assaults, and there could easily have been dozens or hundreds more wounded and killed, a sentiment captured by Senator Lindsey Graham, who observed that ”the mob could have blown the building up. They could have killed us all”;
Whereas these insurrectionary protests were widely advertised and broadly encouraged by President Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly urged his millions of followers on Twitter and other social media outlets to come to Washington on January 6 to ”Stop the Steal” of the 2020 Presidential election and promised his activist followers that the protest on the Electoral College counting day would be ”wild”;
Whereas President-elect Joseph R. Biden won the 2020 Presidential election with more than 81 million votes and defeated President Trump 306–232 in the Electoral College, a margin pronounced to be a ”landslide” by President Trump when he won by the same Electoral College numbers in 2016, but President Trump never accepted these election results as legitimate and waged a protracted campaign of propaganda and coercive pressure in the Federal and State courts, in the state legislatures, with Secretaries of State, and in Congress to nullify and overturn these results and replace them with fraudulent and fabricated numbers;
Whereas President Trump made at least 3 attempts to intervene in the lawful vote counting and certification process in Georgia and to coerce officials there into fraudulently declaring him the winner of the State’s electoral votes, including calls to Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and a State elections investigator, and an hour-long conversation with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger badgering him to ”find 11,780 votes” and warning of a ”big risk” to Raffensperger if he did not intervene favorably to guarantee the reelection of President Trump;
Whereas President Trump appeared with members of his staff and family at a celebratory kickoff rally to encourage and charge up the rioters and insurrectionists to ”march on the Capitol” and ”fight” on Wednesday, January 6, 2021;
Whereas while violent insurrectionists occupied parts of the Capitol, President Trump ignored or rejected repeated real-time entreaties from Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to appeal to his followers to exit the Capitol, and also ignored a tweet from Alyssa Farah, his former communications director, saying: ”Condemn this now, @realDonaldTrump — you are the only one they will listen to. For our country!”;
Whereas photographs, cell phone videos, social media posts, and on-the-ground reporting show that numerous violent insurrectionists who invaded the Capitol were armed, were carrying police grade flex cuffs to detain and handcuff people, used mace, pepper spray, and bear spray against United States Capitol Police officers, erected a gallows on Capitol grounds to hang ”traitors,” vehemently chanted ”Hang Mike Pence!” while surrounding and roving the Capitol, emphasized that storming the Capitol was ”a revolution,”, brandished the Confederate battle flag inside the Capitol, and were found to be in possession of Napalm B, while still unidentified culprits planted multiple pipe bombs at buildings near the Capitol complex, another lethally dangerous criminal action that succeeded in diverting law enforcement from the Capitol; and
Whereas Donald Trump has demonstrated repeatedly, continuously, and spectacularly his absolute inability to discharge the most basic and fundamental powers and duties of his office, including most recently the duty to respect the legitimate results of the Presidential election, the duty to respect the peaceful transfer of democratic power under the Constitution, the duty to participate in legally defined transition activities, the duty to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States, including the counting of Electoral College votes by Congress, the duty to protect the people of the United States and their elected representatives against domestic insurrection, mob rule, and seditious violence, and generally the duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That the House of Representatives calls upon Vice President Michael R. Pence—
(1) to immediately use his powers under section 4 of the 25th Amendment to convene and mobilize the principal officers of the executive departments in the Cabinet to declare what is obvious to a horrified Nation: That the President is unable to successfully discharge the duties and powers of his office; and
(2) to transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives notice that he will be immediately assuming the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/o ... ent-316061
Paul Plante says:
Yes, people, making it up as they go big time, and here I am specifically referring to Nancy Pelosi, a San Francisco congresswoman who once again purchased the office of speaker of the house of representatives, what Nancy calls the “people’s house,” and who thinks it is she who is in charge of the national government of the United States of America, trying to order Mike Pence, the vice president of the United States of America and a member of the executive branch of the national government, which branch the Constitution gives Nancy Pelosi no control over, at all, to remove a sitting American president because Nancy Pelosi doesn’t like him, never has liked him, never will like him and wants him gone, period.
“GET RID OF THE MOTHER******” screeches Nancy at the top of her lungs, as if she were Catherine the Great of Russia picking a new king of Poland.
And no, I am not making things up here, nor giving out with fake news.
We are indeed seeing the Democrats in the House of Representatives openly waging war on the office of the executive, which takes us for a moment back to FEDERALIST No. 62, The Senate, for the Independent Journal to the People of the State of New York by either James Madison or Alexander Hamilton writing as Publius circa 1788, wherein was stated as follows and still applies to this day, to wit:
No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable, without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.
end quotes
Thanks to the continued internecine and childish warfare between the Democrat faction of Nancy Pelosi, and Trump, our worthless national government is no longer respected, precisely because it is no longer respectable, because it no longer possesses a certain portion of order and stability.
To the contrary, all it has to offer is BULL**** on top of BULL**** which is heaped over by even more BULL**** until the stench emanating from Washington, D.C. has become overpowering, which takes us to the RESOLUTION to remove Trump Pelosi has her Democrats voting on today, to wit:
RESOLUTION calling on Vice President Michael R. Pence to convene and mobilize the principal officers of the executive departments of the Cabinet to activate section 4 of the 25th Amendment to declare President Donald J. Trump incapable of executing the duties of his office and to immediately exercise powers as acting President.
Whereas on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, the day fixed by the Constitution for the counting of electoral votes, Congress experienced a massive violent invasion of the United States Capitol and its complex by a dangerous insurrectionary mob which smashed windows and used violent physical force and weapons to overpower and outmaneuver the United States Capitol Police and facilitated the illegal entry into the Capitol of hundreds, if not thousands, of unauthorized persons (all of whom entered the Capitol complex without going through metal detectors and other security screening devices);
Whereas, the insurrectionary mob threatened the safety and lives of the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and the President pro tempore of the Senate, the first three individuals in the line of succession to the presidency, as the rioters were recorded chanting ”Hang Mike Pence” and ”Where’s Nancy” when President Donald J. Trump tweeted to his supporters that ”Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country” after the Capitol had been overrun and the Vice President was in hiding;
Whereas the insurrectionary mob attacked law enforcement officers, unleashed chaos and terror among Members and staffers and their families, occupied the Senate Chamber and Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office along with other leadership offices, vandalized and pilfered government property, and succeeded in interfering with the counting of electoral votes in the joint session of Congress;
Whereas the insurrectionary mob’s violent attacks on law enforcement and invasion of the Capitol complex caused the unprecedented disruption of the Electoral College count process for a 4-hour period in both the House and the Senate, a dangerous and destabilizing impairment of the peaceful transfer of power that these insurrectionary riots were explicitly designed to cause;
Whereas 5 Americans have died as a result of injuries or traumas suffered during this violent attack on Congress and the Capitol, including Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick and Ashli Babbitt, Rosanne Boyland, Kevin Greeson, and Benjamin Phillips, and more than 50 police officers were seriously injured, including 15 officers who had to be hospitalized, by violent assaults, and there could easily have been dozens or hundreds more wounded and killed, a sentiment captured by Senator Lindsey Graham, who observed that ”the mob could have blown the building up. They could have killed us all”;
Whereas these insurrectionary protests were widely advertised and broadly encouraged by President Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly urged his millions of followers on Twitter and other social media outlets to come to Washington on January 6 to ”Stop the Steal” of the 2020 Presidential election and promised his activist followers that the protest on the Electoral College counting day would be ”wild”;
Whereas President-elect Joseph R. Biden won the 2020 Presidential election with more than 81 million votes and defeated President Trump 306–232 in the Electoral College, a margin pronounced to be a ”landslide” by President Trump when he won by the same Electoral College numbers in 2016, but President Trump never accepted these election results as legitimate and waged a protracted campaign of propaganda and coercive pressure in the Federal and State courts, in the state legislatures, with Secretaries of State, and in Congress to nullify and overturn these results and replace them with fraudulent and fabricated numbers;
Whereas President Trump made at least 3 attempts to intervene in the lawful vote counting and certification process in Georgia and to coerce officials there into fraudulently declaring him the winner of the State’s electoral votes, including calls to Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and a State elections investigator, and an hour-long conversation with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger badgering him to ”find 11,780 votes” and warning of a ”big risk” to Raffensperger if he did not intervene favorably to guarantee the reelection of President Trump;
Whereas President Trump appeared with members of his staff and family at a celebratory kickoff rally to encourage and charge up the rioters and insurrectionists to ”march on the Capitol” and ”fight” on Wednesday, January 6, 2021;
Whereas while violent insurrectionists occupied parts of the Capitol, President Trump ignored or rejected repeated real-time entreaties from Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to appeal to his followers to exit the Capitol, and also ignored a tweet from Alyssa Farah, his former communications director, saying: ”Condemn this now, @realDonaldTrump — you are the only one they will listen to. For our country!”;
Whereas photographs, cell phone videos, social media posts, and on-the-ground reporting show that numerous violent insurrectionists who invaded the Capitol were armed, were carrying police grade flex cuffs to detain and handcuff people, used mace, pepper spray, and bear spray against United States Capitol Police officers, erected a gallows on Capitol grounds to hang ”traitors,” vehemently chanted ”Hang Mike Pence!” while surrounding and roving the Capitol, emphasized that storming the Capitol was ”a revolution,”, brandished the Confederate battle flag inside the Capitol, and were found to be in possession of Napalm B, while still unidentified culprits planted multiple pipe bombs at buildings near the Capitol complex, another lethally dangerous criminal action that succeeded in diverting law enforcement from the Capitol; and
Whereas Donald Trump has demonstrated repeatedly, continuously, and spectacularly his absolute inability to discharge the most basic and fundamental powers and duties of his office, including most recently the duty to respect the legitimate results of the Presidential election, the duty to respect the peaceful transfer of democratic power under the Constitution, the duty to participate in legally defined transition activities, the duty to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States, including the counting of Electoral College votes by Congress, the duty to protect the people of the United States and their elected representatives against domestic insurrection, mob rule, and seditious violence, and generally the duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That the House of Representatives calls upon Vice President Michael R. Pence—
(1) to immediately use his powers under section 4 of the 25th Amendment to convene and mobilize the principal officers of the executive departments in the Cabinet to declare what is obvious to a horrified Nation: That the President is unable to successfully discharge the duties and powers of his office; and
(2) to transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives notice that he will be immediately assuming the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/o ... ent-316061
Re: THE MAGA-MAN DONALD TRUMP
CNBC
"Top military leaders condemn ‘sedition and insurrection’ at Capitol, acknowledge Biden win"
Amanda Macias @amanda_m_macias
Published Tue, Jan 12 2021
Key Points
* The nation’s top military commanders condemned Wednesday’s acts of “sedition and insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol.
* The message from the Joint Chiefs of Staff comes nearly one week after thousands of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, resulting in at least five deaths, including that of a Capitol Police officer.
WASHINGTON — In an extraordinary letter Tuesday to the U.S. military, the nation’s top commanders condemned last week’s acts of “sedition and insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol, while acknowledging Joe Biden’s election victory.
The message did not mention President Donald Trump by name, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, made it clear that the military intends to stand by the constitutional transfer of power to the next administration.
“As we have done throughout our history, the U.S. military will obey lawful orders from civilian leadership, support civilian authorities to protect lives and property, ensure public safety in accordance with the law, and remain fully committed to protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” wrote the nation’s highest military officers.
“As Service Members, we must embody the values and ideals of the Nation."
"We support and defend the Constitution."
"Any act to disrupt the Constitutional process is not only against our traditions, values and oath; it is against the law,” the chiefs wrote.
The message to the troops comes nearly one week after thousands of the president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, resulting in at least five deaths, including that of a Capitol Police officer.
Earlier on Tuesday, Trump told reporters that people found his comments at a rally that sparked the violence at the Capitol “totally appropriate” and called the fallout “absolutely ridiculous.”
The president also briefly discussed the blowback he said would follow potential impeachment proceedings.
“For [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi and [Senate Democratic leader] Chuck Schumer to continue on this path, I think it’s causing tremendous danger to our country, and it’s causing tremendous anger,” he said.
On Wednesday, the House plans to decide whether to make Trump the first president ever impeached twice.
The assault on the Capitol delayed congressional proceedings to tally electors’ votes and confirm Biden’s win in the Nov. 3 election.
Biden’s victory was projected by all major news outlets in mid-November and confirmed by Electoral College votes in mid-December.
The Republican president has falsely insisted he won in a “landslide,” baselessly claiming his reelection was stolen through massive electoral fraud.
As protesters besieged the Capitol on Wednesday, Trump told supporters in a tweeted video, “You have to go home now.”
The president stopped short of condemning the violence and told the mob, “We love you, you’re very special.”
On Monday, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., called on acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller to investigate whether active-duty or retired military members took part in the deadly mob.
If such individuals are identified by criminal investigators, Duckworth said, Miller must “take appropriate action to hold individuals accountable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”
Duckworth, an Iraq War veteran who retired as a lieutenant colonel from the Army National Guard, noted that “upholding good order and discipline demands that the U.S. Armed Forces root out extremists that infiltrate the military and threaten our national security.”
A U.S. Army officer resigned Monday after commanders at Fort Bragg confirmed that they were reviewing Capt. Emily Rainey’s involvement in the riot.
In a Tuesday evening statement, the Army said it is working with the FBI to determine whether any participants in last week’s riot have any connection to the Army.
“Any type of activity that involves violence, civil disobedience, or a breach of peace may be punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice or under state or federal law,” an Army spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.
In a nearly three-minute video posted on Thursday, the president called for national “healing and reconciliation.”
“To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country."
"And to those who broke the law, you will pay,” Trump said, in his first address to the nation following the violence that rocked Washington.
“Now tempers must be cooled, and calm restored."
"We must get on with the business of America,” Trump added.
The president also acknowledged that “a new administration will be inaugurated on Jan. 20.”
A day later he said that he would skip President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Vice President Mike Pence said he will attend Biden’s swearing-in ceremony.
Traditionally, the incoming and outgoing presidents ride from the White House to the U.S. Capitol together for the inauguration ceremony.
Trump is not the first outgoing president to skip the inauguration of his successor.
The others were Presidents John Adams, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Johnson, according to the White House Historical Association.
Like Trump, Johnson was also impeached.
The National Guard said Monday that it has authorized up to 15,000 troops to support the security of the inauguration.
Defense officials added that there were approximately 9,000 National Guard members at former President Barack Obama’s inauguration.
For Trump’s ceremony in 2017, more than 7,000 troops were mobilized.
Data also provided by Reuters
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/12/top-mil ... n-win.html
"Top military leaders condemn ‘sedition and insurrection’ at Capitol, acknowledge Biden win"
Amanda Macias @amanda_m_macias
Published Tue, Jan 12 2021
Key Points
* The nation’s top military commanders condemned Wednesday’s acts of “sedition and insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol.
* The message from the Joint Chiefs of Staff comes nearly one week after thousands of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, resulting in at least five deaths, including that of a Capitol Police officer.
WASHINGTON — In an extraordinary letter Tuesday to the U.S. military, the nation’s top commanders condemned last week’s acts of “sedition and insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol, while acknowledging Joe Biden’s election victory.
The message did not mention President Donald Trump by name, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, made it clear that the military intends to stand by the constitutional transfer of power to the next administration.
“As we have done throughout our history, the U.S. military will obey lawful orders from civilian leadership, support civilian authorities to protect lives and property, ensure public safety in accordance with the law, and remain fully committed to protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” wrote the nation’s highest military officers.
“As Service Members, we must embody the values and ideals of the Nation."
"We support and defend the Constitution."
"Any act to disrupt the Constitutional process is not only against our traditions, values and oath; it is against the law,” the chiefs wrote.
The message to the troops comes nearly one week after thousands of the president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, resulting in at least five deaths, including that of a Capitol Police officer.
Earlier on Tuesday, Trump told reporters that people found his comments at a rally that sparked the violence at the Capitol “totally appropriate” and called the fallout “absolutely ridiculous.”
The president also briefly discussed the blowback he said would follow potential impeachment proceedings.
“For [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi and [Senate Democratic leader] Chuck Schumer to continue on this path, I think it’s causing tremendous danger to our country, and it’s causing tremendous anger,” he said.
On Wednesday, the House plans to decide whether to make Trump the first president ever impeached twice.
The assault on the Capitol delayed congressional proceedings to tally electors’ votes and confirm Biden’s win in the Nov. 3 election.
Biden’s victory was projected by all major news outlets in mid-November and confirmed by Electoral College votes in mid-December.
The Republican president has falsely insisted he won in a “landslide,” baselessly claiming his reelection was stolen through massive electoral fraud.
As protesters besieged the Capitol on Wednesday, Trump told supporters in a tweeted video, “You have to go home now.”
The president stopped short of condemning the violence and told the mob, “We love you, you’re very special.”
On Monday, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., called on acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller to investigate whether active-duty or retired military members took part in the deadly mob.
If such individuals are identified by criminal investigators, Duckworth said, Miller must “take appropriate action to hold individuals accountable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”
Duckworth, an Iraq War veteran who retired as a lieutenant colonel from the Army National Guard, noted that “upholding good order and discipline demands that the U.S. Armed Forces root out extremists that infiltrate the military and threaten our national security.”
A U.S. Army officer resigned Monday after commanders at Fort Bragg confirmed that they were reviewing Capt. Emily Rainey’s involvement in the riot.
In a Tuesday evening statement, the Army said it is working with the FBI to determine whether any participants in last week’s riot have any connection to the Army.
“Any type of activity that involves violence, civil disobedience, or a breach of peace may be punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice or under state or federal law,” an Army spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.
In a nearly three-minute video posted on Thursday, the president called for national “healing and reconciliation.”
“To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country."
"And to those who broke the law, you will pay,” Trump said, in his first address to the nation following the violence that rocked Washington.
“Now tempers must be cooled, and calm restored."
"We must get on with the business of America,” Trump added.
The president also acknowledged that “a new administration will be inaugurated on Jan. 20.”
A day later he said that he would skip President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Vice President Mike Pence said he will attend Biden’s swearing-in ceremony.
Traditionally, the incoming and outgoing presidents ride from the White House to the U.S. Capitol together for the inauguration ceremony.
Trump is not the first outgoing president to skip the inauguration of his successor.
The others were Presidents John Adams, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Johnson, according to the White House Historical Association.
Like Trump, Johnson was also impeached.
The National Guard said Monday that it has authorized up to 15,000 troops to support the security of the inauguration.
Defense officials added that there were approximately 9,000 National Guard members at former President Barack Obama’s inauguration.
For Trump’s ceremony in 2017, more than 7,000 troops were mobilized.
Data also provided by Reuters
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/12/top-mil ... n-win.html