180 members of the House have cosponsored an article to impeach President Donald Trump in the wake of his efforts to incited a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol earlier this week.
Continue reading “180 House Members Have Cosponsored Article To Impeach Trump”
Hours after Twitter announced its decision to permanently suspend President Donald Trump’s account on its platform, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) suggested that actions taken by “a small & unelected group” to silence and erase the President “will only stoke new grievances.”
Continue reading “Rubio Claims Efforts To Silence Trump ‘Will Only Stoke New Grievances’”
This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Members of the ultranationalist street gang known as the Proud Boys were easy to spot at the protests that flared across the United States throughout 2020, often in the middle of a brawl, typically clad in black and yellow outfits.
But in December, as the group’s leaders planned to flood Washington to oppose the certification of the Electoral College vote this week for President-elect Joe Biden, they decided to do something different.
“The ProudBoys will turn out in record numbers on Jan 6th but this time with a twist…,” Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, the group’s president, wrote in a late-December post on Parler, a social media platform that has become popular with right-wing activists and conservatives. “We will not be wearing our traditional Black and Yellow. We will be incognito and we will spread across downtown DC in smaller teams. And who knows….we might dress in all BLACK for the occasion.”
The precise composition of the mob that forced its way into the Capitol on Wednesday, disrupting sessions of both houses of Congress and leaving a police officer and four others dead, remains unknown. But a review by a ProPublica-FRONTLINE team that has been tracking far-right movements for the past three years shows that the crowd included members of the Proud Boys and other groups with violent ideologies. Videos reveal the presence of several noted hardcore nativists and white nationalists who participated in the 2017 white power rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that President Donald Trump infamously refused to condemn.
Tarrio does not appear to have been present during the insurrection. Two days before members of the House and Senate gathered to certify the Electoral College results, Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department arrested Tarrio and charged him with possessing high-capacity firearm magazines and destruction of property over the burning of a Black Lives Matter banner last month. A judge barred him from entering the city while he awaits trial.
But it appears that Tarrio’s followers heeded his advice. A journalist working with ProPublica and FRONTLINE encountered members of the Proud Boys in dark clothes walking through Washington on the night before the attack. The four men posed for a photo and confirmed their membership in the group. Few participants involved in the Capitol siege were seen wearing Proud Boys colors or logos.
I came across some Proud Boys dressed in black around H Street.
They’re basically using American flags on their masks, arms, or shirts to distinguish themselves from actual antifa activists.
I asked to take pic, this is what I got. pic.twitter.com/9ElhSSU3xo
— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) January 6, 2021
But since the incident, Proud Boys social media channels have flaunted their direct role in the attack and looting of the Capitol.
One prominent Proud Boys account encouraged rioters as the chaos was unfolding: “Hold your ground!!!… DO NOT GO HOME. WE ARE ON THE CUSP OF SAVING THE CONSTITUTION.”
So far, police have arrested more than 80 people in connection with the attack, including at least one Proud Boy, Nick Ochs. They have seized pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails and arrested at least six people on illegal firearms charges, including one Maryland man who was captured in the visitors’ center of the Capitol. More arrests are expected.
As the crowds ringing the Capitol swelled on Wednesday, a small group of men clad in body armor shuffled toward the doors at the center of the building’s east-facing facade.
The eight men, whose movements were captured on video, were identified by ProPublica and FRONTLINE as members of the Oath Keepers, a long-standing militia group that has pledged to ignite a civil war on behalf of Trump. Members of the group joined the protesters and insurrectionists flooding into the Capitol. Footage from later in the day shows Oath Keepers dragging a wounded comrade out of the building.
Stewart Rhodes, a former soldier and Yale law school graduate, who founded the Oath Keepers in 2009 and built it into a nationwide network, was seen on video standing outside the Capitol building. While he was not seen entering the Capitol, he could be seen talking with his militia followers throughout the day.
Several other of the participants ProPublica and FRONTLINE identified from video have direct links to the white nationalist movement, which has seen a resurgence of activity during the Trump era.
One was Nick Fuentes, an internet personality who streams a daily talk show on DLive, an alternative social media platform. Fuentes, who marched in Charlottesville during the 2017 white power rally there, speaks frequently in anti-Semitic terms and pontificates on the need to protect America’s white heritage from the ongoing shift in the nation’s demographics. He has publicly denied believing in white nationalism but has said that he considers himself a “white majoritarian.”
Fuentes, who spoke at pro-Trump rallies late last year in Michigan and Washington, D.C., said he was at the rally on Wednesday but didn’t follow the mob into the Capitol. One group of Fuentes’ supporters, who call themselves the Groyper Army, was filmed running through the Capitol carrying a large blue flag with the America First logo.
Days before the Capitol was stormed, Fuentes seemed to encourage his followers to kill state legislators in a bid to overturn Biden’s electoral victory, as Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University who follows online extremist communities, noted on Twitter.
“What can you and I do to a state legislator — besides kill him?” he said with a smirk. “We should not do that. I’m not advising that, but I mean, what else can you do, right?”
Squire fears that Fuentes’ incendiary rhetoric will inspire his followers to engage in more drastic — even lethal — acts of political violence. “Instead of trying to appear democratic he’s making an argument for fascism, for monarchism,” she said. “He’s criticizing democracy at every turn. He doesn’t believe in democracy and it’s scary because his fans find him fascinating.”
DLive recently announced that it has booted Fuentes from its platform.
Another figure inside the Capitol with ties to white nationalists was Tim Gionet, a livestreamer who uses the handle Baked Alaska and who participated in the Charlottesville rally, which left one woman dead. Gionet was photographed within the Capitol and apparently used DLive to stream from within the building as events unfolded. Part of his video appeared to show him in Nancy Pelosi’s office, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups.
Other extremist figures present either at the rally or within the Capitol included Vincent James Foxx, an online propagandist for the Rise Above Movement, a now-defunct Southern California white supremacist group.
Also on scene: Jason Tankersley, a former Nazi skinhead leader from Maryland, and Gabe Brown, a New Englander who helped create Anticom, a now-defunct organization devoted to physically combating leftists. In 2017, Anticom members posted a vast trove of bomb-making manuals to a private online chatroom.
The militant group members joined with scores of others who rampaged inside the Capitol.
Rep. André Carson, a Democrat from Indiana, said the scene reminded him of a Ku Klux Klan rally. Photos from within the Capitol showed one unidentified man carrying a Confederate battle flag and another wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with a skull and the words “Camp Auschwitz,” a reference to the infamous Nazi death camp.
Carson and other House members who spoke to ProPublica and FRONTLINE said the body would be launching an extensive investigation of the Capitol Police force and its mishandling of Wednesday’s events.
The rioters, said Carson, who is Black, “were hostile. They were venomous. And I think there was a sense of entitlement that they carried that somehow their country was being taken away from them.”
After the siege, a Boogaloo Bois group called the Last Sons of Liberty, which includes militants from Virginia, posted a video to Parler purporting to document their role in the incident — a clip that shows members inside the Capitol. A loose-knit confederation of anti-government militants, the Boogaloo Bois have been tied to a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and to the murder of two law enforcement officers in California. ProPublica and FRONTLINE have been unable to independently confirm their involvement.
Some far-right activists are already calling for retribution over the death of Ashli Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran from California who was shot and killed by a security officer. “We’ve got a girl that’s dead. She’s shot, laying on the ground in there,” said Damon Beckley, leader of a group called DC Under Siege, in an interview just outside the Capitol while the riot was ongoing. “We’re not putting up with this tyrannical rule. … If we gotta come back here and start a revolution and take all these traitors out — which is what should happen — then we will.”
Another person took to Parler to say that they were planning to show up, armed, in Washington for Inauguration Day. “Many of us will return on January 19, 2021 carrying Our weapons,” wrote the Parler user, who goes by the handle Colonel007. “We will come in numbers that no standing army or police agency can match.”
The Proud Boys also celebrated on social media. On Parler, one Proud Boys leader posted a photo of members of Congress cowering in fear and captioned it with a menacing statement: “Today you found out. The power of the people will not be denied.”
Logan Jaffe of ProPublica and Lila Hassan, Dan Glaun and Zoe Todd of FRONTLINE contributed reporting.
House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) suggested on Friday that someone from inside the U.S. Capitol may have been “complicit” in its attack earlier this week, citing the relative ease that Trump’s supporters raided the building on Wednesday.
“I do believe that something was going on,” Clyburn told CBSN’s Lana Zak in an interview on Friday. “They knew where to go.”
Continue reading “Clyburn Suggests Someone Within US Capitol Was ‘Complicit’ In Letting Mob Inside”
President Donald Trump is “ballistic,” after Twitter finally removed his account on Friday, according to a Politico report.
The social media platform’s decision comes days before Trump leaves office and well after a good deal of damage that culminated in a deadly insurrection by his followers at the U.S. Capitol earlier this week had been done.
A senior administration official told Politico that the President was “scrambling to figure out what his options are” after learning that the social media platform which he has used as a megaphone for years — spewing falsehood and inciting his supporters to violence — had permanently suspended his account.
Twitter cited concerns that Trump might enflame further violence in the remaining 12 days before the end of his term as the reason for his removal from the platform.
One White House official told the publication that there were initial internal discussions between White House aides and Trump about possibly doing a “last farewell interview.” The official was uncertain, however, whether or not those plans would come to fruition.
In a statement issued by the White House late Friday, President Trump said he had “predicted” his expulsion from the platform and accused Twitter executives of coordinating with “Democrats and the Radical Left” to remove his account to silence him and the supporters who had voted for him in November.
“Twitter may be a private company, but without the government’s gift of Section 230 they would not exist for long,” he said.
In an effort to desperately hang onto the coattails of political relevance beyond his term, Trump added that he had been in negotiations with “various other sites” and would soon deliver what he called a “big announcement” as his team considers the possibilities of “building out our own platform in the near future.”
“Of all things, don’t throw me in the briar patch,” Brer Rabbit implores Brer Wolf, but Brer Wolf, wanting to do away with his nemesis, tosses him in the briar patch, from which Brer Rabbit, who was born and bred in the briar patch, emerges, laughing at the fox. The fox is Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats; Trump is the rabbit; and the briar patch is impeachment. Continue reading “Democrats: Impeachment is a Political Trap”
Nick Ochs, a Hawaii resident and member of the right-wing street gang the Proud Boys, had a grand ol’ time inside the nation’s Capitol Wednesday.
Continue reading “Proud Boy Who Posted Selfie Smoking In The Capitol And Others Now Facing Charges”
Twitter clipped President Trump’s wings by permanently banning him from the platform on Friday night.
Twitter’s decision to ban Trump came after the President incited a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Wednesday. Trump whipped up an angry crowd as Congress prepared to affirm the Electoral College win of President-elect Joe Biden. The mob moved toward the Capitol, breached the building and attacked police officers, ultimately reaching the legislative chambers. Law enforcement swiftly escorted members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence to secure locations.
“After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter said in a blog post.
Twitter homed in on two tweets from this week in its decision to ban the President:
“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
Twitter said the tweets were being interpreted by the President’s supporters as egging on violence and casting additional doubt on the now-once-and-for-all settled election
Ryan Greer kept his schedule for the afternoon of Jan. 6 open.
This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
The grieving family of a slain Capitol Police officer says he was a private man whose death shouldn’t be politicized. But now, it is forced to make sense of the reality that he is a victim of political violence, his legacy forever linked to an insurrection in the U.S. Capitol.
“He spent his life trying to help other people,” the officer’s eldest brother told ProPublica. “This political climate got my brother killed.”
Brian David Sicknick, 42, died Thursday of injuries he sustained while trying to protect the Capitol from a mob of violent rioters supporting President Donald Trump who rushed the building to disrupt the certification of the presidential election.
Before the officer’s death had officially been announced late Thursday, the Sicknick family was rushing from its home in New Jersey to see him in a Washington-area hospital as word circulated on social media that a Capitol Police officer had succumbed to grave injuries.
Last they had heard, Sicknick was in critical condition on a ventilator, according to family members who spoke to ProPublica. While some news reports had said an unnamed officer was in critical condition after being bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher, family members did not have details of his injuries. They say Sicknick had texted them Wednesday night to say that while he had been pepper-sprayed, he was in good spirits. The text arrived hours after a mob’s assault on the Capitol had left more than 50 officers injured and five people dead.
“He texted me last night and said, ‘I got pepper-sprayed twice,’ and he was in good shape,” said Ken Sicknick, his brother, as the family drove toward Washington. “Apparently he collapsed in the Capitol and they resuscitated him using CPR.”
But the day after that text exchange, the family got word that Brian Sicknick had a blood clot and had had a stroke; a respirator was keeping him alive.
“We weren’t expecting it,” his brother said.
As apparently premature news of Sicknick’s death spread in law enforcement circles, the U.S. Capitol Police Department remained silent, including no response to an early request for confirmation from ProPublica on Thursday evening. The family learned from reporter phone calls that something was wrong.
“We have not gotten any calls,” Ken Sicknick said when first contacted. Brian Sicknick was the youngest of three siblings, all boys. “We’re kind of overwhelmed right now. You guys are getting reports of his death before I even got anything.”
Nearly an hour later, the department issued a statement rebutting news reports that an officer had died. The department finally reported that Sicknick had died at 9:30 p.m. Thursday, adding that this was the result of injuries sustained during the melee the previous day.
By the time family members reached the hospital, they say, Sicknick was dead.
In separate interviews with ProPublica, family members say they are still waiting to learn exactly what happened. They described Sicknick as the kindest of the three siblings. They said he went to a technical school to study electronics but ditched it to follow his dream of becoming a police officer. They couldn’t confirm the time of death.
The family’s grief and confusion comes amid serious questions about how a secretive police department that is well-funded and highly trained at quelling violent protests and protecting members of Congress had failed to protect one of its own from an attack that had been planned out in plain sight.
In a press release, the department said: “The entire USCP Department expresses its deepest sympathies to Officer Sicknick’s family and friends on their loss, and mourns the loss of a friend and colleague.”
The Sicknick family issued its own press release Friday, urging the public and reporters to not politicize Sicknick’s death.
“Please honor Brian’s life and service and respect our privacy while we move forward in doing the same. Brian is a hero and that is what we would like people to remember,” the statement said.
Still in shock, one family member, who agreed to talk but asked not to be named, said Sicknick had sometimes expressed frustrations with his job.
“Occasionally he would mention that they were very understaffed and they worked a lot of hours,” the family member said. “And morale could be low.”
Larry Schaefer, who spent 34 years on the force before retiring last year and knew Sicknick, said Wednesday’s breach of the Capitol was unfathomable until he saw it on his TV screen.
“We handle demonstrations on a regular basis,” Schaefer said. “We’re prepared for this kind of stuff. We hold people back in a perimeter. We’re set up for mass arrests, to load buses of people away.”
He said he blames department leaders for the tragedy. Under pressure from congressional leaders, Chief Steven Sund of the Capitol Police and two other security officials have resigned.
After Sicknick struggled to find a policing job early on, his family said, in 1997 he joined the New Jersey National Guard “as a means to that end.” He was deployed to Saudi Arabia and Kyrgyzstan during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and was honorably discharged in 2003, according to a Guard spokesman.
He subsequently trained to be a Capitol Police officer, graduating in 2008. The family came down to see the graduation ceremony, in “one of those big fancy buildings,” one family member said.
One of his first assignments was working the inauguration of former President Barack Obama, a moment that filled Sicknick and the family with pride.
Twelve years later, Sicknick was a member of the department’s First Responder Unit when Trump, in the final days of a presidency that fomented anger and division, held a rally that precipitated the Capitol attack.
In a press release Friday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, said, “The violent and deadly act of insurrection targeting the Capitol, our temple of American Democracy, and its workers was a profound tragedy and stain on our nation’s history.”
“I send our deepest condolences to the family and loved ones of Officer Brian Sicknick,” Pelosi said. “The perpetrators of Officer Sicknick’s death must be brought to justice.”
After a forced hiatus from Twitter, Trump returned to his favorite platform on Friday to honor his supporters, whom he called “patriots,” and to announce he will not attend the inauguration of Joe Biden.
In a statement, Trump’s deputy press secretary Judd Deere said: “Anytime a member of law enforcement dies in the line of duty it is a solemn reminder to us all that they run toward danger to maintain peace. The President and the entire Administration extend our prayers to Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick’s family as we all grieve the loss of this American hero.”
