Pentagon officials say 12 Army National Guard members have been removed from securing President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration after vetting by the FBI, including two who posted and texted extremist views about Wednesday’s event.
3:15 p.m.
Pentagon officials say 12 Army National Guard members have been removed from securing President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration after vetting by the FBI, including two who posted and texted extremist views about Wednesday’s event.
There was no specific threat to Biden.
Two U.S. officials told The Associated Press that all 12 were found to have ties to right-wing militia groups or posted extremist views online. The officials, a senior intelligence official and an Army official briefed on the matter, did not say which fringe group the Guard members belonged to or what unit they served in. The officials were not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
Gen. Daniel Hokanson, chief of the National Guard, confirmed Tuesday that the Guard members had been removed and sent home but said only two were for inappropriate comments or texts related to the inauguration. The other 10 were for other potential issues that may involve previous criminal activity, but not directly related to the inaugural event.
The officials told the AP they had all been removed because of “security liabilities.”
It’s unclear whether they will face discipline when they return home.
— By AP writers Lolita Baldor and James LaPorta
2:05 p.m.
“To heal you must remember.” - Lincoln memorial Covid Memorial.
President Joe Biden speaks tonight
A wave of calm, careful thoughts and warmth is so welcome now.
This pardon doc is nuts. After listing each person’s litany of crimes, we are told how great they are, everybody loves them, 12 kids, etc.
As if all of that makes their crimes perfectly okay. “He’s a great guy, just blew up a teeny tiny mall!” Geez.
I should note, there are a great many people on this list who deserved pardons or commutations. There are a great many more not on this list who didn’t get pardons because rather than listen to the office designed for it, Trump only listened to the rich and famous.
A lot of people on this list, though, definitely committed crimes they deserved to be convicted of, and in numerous cases already served their sentences, meaning their pardons are more red tape hand-waving away their crimes than actually freeing them from current incarceration.
Aside from Steve Bannon I noticed Elliott Broidy on the list, and a number of others with political connections. Note how the pardon doesn’t go into detail about Bannon’s crimes, and seems to indicate his pardon is so he can go back to being “an important leader in the conservative movement” “known for his political acumen.”
I hope this is not just wishful thinking…but it looks like the Q’s may feel like they got ‘played.’
Interesting to note that there is a shift in their thinking (?)
QAnon believers grapple with doubt, spin new theories as Trump era ends: ‘We all got played’
Some of the most notable figures in QAnon’s online universe said they were having a change of heart. After Biden’s inauguration, Ron Watkins — the longtime administrator of QAnon’s online home, 8kun, who critics have suspected may have helped write Q’s posts himself, a charge he denies — said on Telegram that it was time to move on.
“We need to keep our chins up and go back to our lives as best we are able,” said Watkins, who in recent months had become one of the loudest backers of conspiracy theories suggesting Biden’s win was a fraud.
“We have a new president sworn in and it is our responsibility as citizens to respect the Constitution regardless of whether or not we agree with the specifics,” Watkins added. “As we enter into the next administration please remember all the friends and happy memories we made together over the past few years.”
But Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which tracks misinformation, said QAnon followers are making increasingly illogical leaps as they struggle to make sense of developments.
“It’s something that has long been true of conspiracy theories: When they don’t come to fruition, they shift their delusions to the next thing,” he said. He noted how some comments posted below Trump’s farewell video suggested that “it wasn’t quite time for the Great Awakening, but it’s coming soon and this is how.”
Researchers said some QAnon supporters appear to be rethinking their commitment due to a range of factors, including Q’s relative silence since the election, Trump’s anticlimactic White House exit, and the Capitol insurrection, which resulted in more than 100 arrests and delayed the certification of Biden’s victory by only several hours.
But several feared that the rising intensity of those still committed to QAnon could create problems for years to come if a die-hard, militarized core persists in their belief that the U.S. government is controlled by evil pedophiles who successfully subverted the Constitution.
lolwut
At this point I am 98% sure that QAnon was a social experiment that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and the stability of the country and the world. The person/people who started and perpetuated it should be isolated from society for the rest of their lives.
There are always fringe groups…and like any cult, they would be hard to unconvince that their conspiracy is wrong. But am glad that there are some leaving behind this far-outside-the-norm ideology.
They are dangerous and they are off kilter. Truth may or may not help.
Let’s do the time warp again…
Kraken Cracks Up At SCOTUS
Justices Will Pass On The Rancid Calamari.
Oh Dear! How sad! Perhaps he should have thought about what might happen before he behaved in such a violent and insolent way.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/republicans-gaslighting-capitol-riot_n_60428828c5b613cec15d8b73
Republicans Are Gaslighting The Country About The Capitol Riot
GOP lawmakers are desperately trying to deflect blame away from Donald Trump and themselves.
Sure, the attack on the Capitol was bad, but did you hear about the attack on the White House last year?
The supposed siege of the president’s residence is the latest Republican deflection from the events of Jan. 6, when a pro-Donald Trump mob stirred up by Republican lies about voter fraud ransacked the U.S. Capitol.
Some Republicans, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), have admitted what actually happened.
“They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the vice president,” McConnell said in February. “They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth ― because he was angry he’d lost an election.”
But others are compiling a growing list of distractions, excuses and alternate theories of the day’s events, hoping that as time passes, the public forgets what actually went on. Here are some of the ways Republicans are trying to deflect blame:
The Rioters Were Just A Group Of Random People, Not United By Anything
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said this week that the fact that “these extremist groups are not monolithic” ran counter to the Democratic “narrative” about what happened at the Capitol.
“I’ve heard some of these folks described as white supremacists, domestic terrorists, insurrectionist, rioters, seditionist, anarchist, the list goes on and on,” Cornyn said at a Tuesday hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Cornyn was upset that Democrats “wanted to create a narrative about white supremacists, but clearly that is part of the problem but it’s not a monolithic group,” he told HuffPost after the hearing. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) had said the rioters “might as well have” been wearing Ku Klux Klan robes.
“I don’t think there was any single reason why people were here,” Cornyn said.
Wray testified that many had militia ties and some were white supremacists, but there’s no doubt they were all Trump supporters trying to overthrow the election. Indeed, they had just marched from a “Stop the Steal” rally featuring Trump, who told them to go to the Capitol and stop lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential election.
“They were here for a variety of reasons,” Cornyn insisted.
Nancy Pelosi Is To Blame
An increasingly common theme is blaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
“I think Nancy Pelosi will have a lot of questions to answer about what she knew leading up to the riot on Jan. 6,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said on Fox News last month.
Four GOP House members also wrote Pelosi a letter, claiming that “many important questions about your responsibility for the security of the Capitol remain unanswered.” And Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said Pelosi was using the riot as an excuse to consolidate her power.
The argument is that Pelosi wanted all this to happen ― or, at the very least, she looked the other way on the potential for violence. In other words, Republicans think she didn’t take seriously a mob of pro-Trump supporters who despised her and, in at least one case, wanted her dead.
The GOP has continued to push the theory that Pelosi stood in the way of police requests for additional assistance, even though then-House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving has repeatedly shot down that suggestion.
It Was Antifa
The likes of Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) wasted no time blaming the supposedly fearsome anti-fascist group known as “antifa” for the attack, based on a false story that was almost immediately retracted.
But this outrageously untrue claim will not die. Trump’s lawyers even uttered it on the Senate floor during his impeachment trial, when they claimed “a leader of antifa” had been arrested for infiltrating the building.
It may seem ridiculous, but a significant number of Republican voters believe the Capitol attack was an antifa operation, according to several polls. A majority of Republicans said in a January survey they believed it was antifa, as did 58% of Trump voters in a February survey.
It Was Fake Trump Supporters
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) claimed during a Senate hearing last week that the crowd marching toward the Capitol at Trump’s direction was a peaceable bunch, and that the riot had been carried out by “provocateurs” and “fake Trump supporters.”
“Many of the marchers were families with small children; many were elderly, overweight, or just plain tired or frail — traits not typically attributed to the riot-prone,” Johnson said, reading from a delusional piece published in The Federalist, a far-right website. “A very few didn’t share the jovial, friendly, earnest demeanor of the great majority. Some obviously didn’t fit in.”
The FBI director testified this week that there is no evidence of antifa involvement in the attack, and no evidence that there were fake Trump supporters. Some of the pro-Trump rioters charged in the attack have even complained about antifa getting credit.
HuffPost asked Johnson on Thursday whether he himself believed the statements he read aloud during the hearing, since they’d been written by someone else.
“He witnessed it. He wrote down what he witnessed,” Johnson said. “We need to assemble a bunch of eyewitness accounts to determine what all happened from different perspectives, different vantage points.”
HuffPost reporters witnessed the attack on the Capitol from both the inside and outside and saw only Trump supporters.
“They ― they might have been Trump provocateurs, OK?” Johnson said.
The Mob Wasn’t Even That Dangerous
Five people died in the Jan. 6 riot, including one police officer. Another 140 officers were injured, suffering cracked ribs, concussions, loss of part of a finger, burns and a mild heart attack. Two officers involved in the response that day later died from suicide. The pro-Trump mob smashed officers with flagpoles, pipes, bats, metal barriers and doors in order to push past them and break into the Capitol.
Yet according to some Republicans, this crowd wasn’t dangerous at all.
“If it was armed, it would have been a bloodbath,” said Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), who said Democrats were trying to make it seem like “there’s a bunch of people running around in the woods with Army fatigues on the weekends, and they’re going to take over the country, and that’s just nonsense.”
“This didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me,” Johnson said in a radio interview last month.
“I mean ‘armed,’ when you hear ‘armed,’ don’t you think of firearms? Here’s the questions I would have liked to ask. How many firearms were confiscated? How many shots were fired? I’m only aware of one and I’ll defend that law enforcement officer for taking that shot. It was a tragedy, OK? But I think there was only one,” he added.
Authorities actually confiscated a range of weapons from that day, including an assault rifle, a crossbow, Molotov cocktails, stun guns, knives and brass knuckles. Since they weren’t searching attendees for weapons, there likely were far more.
Black Lives Matter Attacked The White House First
Many Republicans who condemned the violence at the Capitol broadened their condemnation to include violence against police officers in 2020.
But Republicans have begun to suggest a more direct false equivalence, decrying an “attack on the White House” by Black Lives Matters protesters last summer.
“Sixty-seven Secret Service officers were injured during a three-day siege on the White House, which caused then-President Trump to be brought into a secure bunker,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Tuesday.
At a separate hearing on Wednesday, Hawley also brought up “the attack on the White House where 60 Secret Service officers were injured, the president had to be evacuated into a bunker.”
Most people may remember the “siege on the White House” as a protest against police brutality near the White House. (Officers wound up tear-gassing protesters so the president could pose for photos holding a Bible in front of a church that had been damaged.)
The Secret Service said more than 60 officers were injured as protesters threw objects and scuffled with officers, 11 of whom received hospital treatment for non-life-threatening injuries.
But they weren’t trying to storm the White House.
“No individuals crossed the White House Fence and no Secret Service protectees were ever in any danger,” the Secret Service said in May.
Trump subsequently said he was only “inspecting” the bunker.
‘Everybody’ Is Responsible
In January, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack. A week later, however, he said he didn’t actually believe Trump had “provoked” the mob of his supporters.
And in an interview that aired a day later, McCarthy found a way to both blame Trump for the riot while not really blaming him at all.
“I also think everybody across this country has some responsibility,” he said.
McCarthy later tried to clarify his remarks, insisting he wasn’t necessarily saying everyone in the country was responsible for Trump’s supporters attacking the Capitol, but rather that “it is incumbent upon every person in America to help lower the temperature of our political discourse.”
Trump’s fake inauguration on March 4 was QAnon’s latest vision that flopped. A new date is now being peddled to perpetuate the mind games.
Am I the only one hearing Nelson’s “HA-ha!” in his head after reading this:
Yes, what does Sen Graham really think about Trump…Oh, it’s a numbers game for Graham. Trump attracts voters to make the Republican party strong.
Hmmmmm…
Sen. Lindsey Graham told “Axios on HBO” that Donald Trump has a “dark side” but he tries to “harness the magic” because he succeeded where Republican candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney failed.
Why it matters: The South Carolina Republican gyrates between support and criticism of the former president, even after Trump harshly criticized McCain — Graham’s longtime friend — and helped spark the Capitol insurrection.
- “What I’m tryin’ to do is just harness the magic,” Graham told Axios’ Jonathan Swan. “To me, Donald Trump is sort of a cross between Jesse Helms, Ronald Reagan and P.T. Barnum.”
- “He could make the Republican Party something that nobody else I know can make it. He can make it bigger. He can make it stronger. He can make it more diverse. And he also could destroy it,” Graham said.
The big picture: Graham won reelection in November in one of the most expensive political races in American history. That helps explain his embrace of Trump, wildly popular with the Republican base, but also confounds those who wonder why he sticks with him.
- In 2016, when they were competing for the GOP presidential nomination, Graham questioned Trump’s mental fitness.
- After Trump beat Hillary Rodham Clinton, Graham embraced the new president, despite him criticizing his former sidekick McCain for becoming a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
- The day after the Capitol siege, Graham blamed Trump for fueling the attack and declared, “enough is enough.”
- Now, Graham says he is reengaging purposefully.
What they’re saying: “Donald Trump was my friend before the riot. And I’m trying to keep a relationship with him after the riot. I still consider him a friend. What happened was a dark day in American history, and we’re going to move forward.”
- “I want us to continue the policies that I think will make America strong. I believe the best way for the Republican Party to do that is with Trump, not without Trump.”
- “Mitt Romney didn’t do it. John McCain didn’t do it. There’s something about Trump. There’s a dark side and there’s some magic there.”
Flashback: When Swan noted Trump is not showing remorse for his election challenge and still arguing he won in a landslide, Graham invoked McCain.
- “I tell (Trump) every day that he wants to listen that I think the main reason he probably lost in Arizona is beatin’ on the dead guy called John McCain,” the senator said.
Swift actions by R’s in GA wanted to cut down on voting and curtailing other methods of voting.
Following unexpected Democratic victories in Georgia in November and January, Republicans in the state Senate voted Monday to significantly curtail the right to vote.
On Monday afternoon, the legislators approved a bill repealing no-excuse absentee voting, which 1.3 million voters used to cast ballots by mail in 2020, including 450,000 Republicans. They were also set to consider a bill on Monday evening ending automatic voter registration, which 5 million of the state’s 7.6 million voters used to register since it was implemented in 2016.
The Senate bills follow the passage of a sweeping House bill last week that cuts weekend voting days—including on Sundays, when Black churches hold “Souls to the Polls” get-out-the-vote drives—restricts the use of mail ballot drop boxes, prevents counties from accepting grants from nonprofits to improve their elections, adds new voter ID requirements for mail ballots, gives election official less time to send out mail ballots and voters less time to return them, and even makes it a crime to distribute food and water to voters waiting in line.
Collectively, these bills represent the most sustained effort to roll back access to the ballot in Georgia since the Jim Crow era. The same is true nationally, where Republicans have introduced 253 bills in 43 states in the first two months of this year to make it harder to vote.
This is what the R’s want…to adjourn…why. They won’t have to finalize the Rescue plan I believe.