More than 100 members of Congress are calling for Trump’s removal.
On Tyranny - “The eight senators and 139 representatives who voted to overturn democracy own this attempted coup, forever. Led by Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, they are the fascist faction of the Republican Party.”
Interview with Timothy Snyder, Professor/Yale (and others) on WBUR
Radio Interview on the Chaos at the Capitol.
Chaos At The Capitol: A Day Of Insurrection And What It Means For America
Matt Fuller , congressional reporter for the Huffington Post. (@MEPFuller)
Jennifer Horn , co-founder of the Lincoln Project. Former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party from 2013 to 2017. Last month, she announced her departure from the Republican Party. She is now a registered independent. (@NHJennifer)
Huffington Post : “After Day Of Chaos, Congress Certifies Joe Biden As The Election Winner” — “Hours after rioters violently stormed the Capitol and put the building into lockdown, lawmakers returned to the House chamber and certified Democrat Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. in the early hours of Thursday morning as the winner of the Electoral College and the next president of the United States.”
Associated Press : “A moment in America, unimaginable but perhaps inevitable” — “To see it unspool — to watch the jumbled images ricochet, live, across the world’s endless screens — was, as an American, a struggle to believe your eyes. But there it was, in the capital city of the United States in early January 2021: a real-time breaking and entering the likes of which the republic has never seen.”
Politico : “‘He screwed the country’: Trump loyalty disintegrates” — “It was, for many of President Donald Trump’s own allies, the final straw.”
Reuters : “Twitter, Facebook freeze Trump accounts as tech giants respond to storming of U.S. capitol” — “Twitter Inc and Facebook Inc on Wednesday temporarily locked the accounts of U.S. President Donald Trump, as tech giants scrambled to crack down on his baseless claims about the U.S. presidential elections amid riots in the capital.”
Washington Post : “Trump issued a call to arms. Then he urged his followers ‘to remember this day forever!’” — "
NPR : “Congress Rejects Objection To Arizona Votes, Takes Up Pennsylvania Objection” — “Members of the U.S. House and Senate on Wednesday voted to reject objections to President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory in the state of Arizona, hours after violent insurrectionists stormed the Capitol, forcing party leadership to evacuate the scene while rioters overtook the complex.”
CBS News : “4 dead after Trump supporters storm U.S. Capitol” — “Four people died during violent pro-Trump protests at the U.S. Capitol, the Metropolitan Police Department said Wednesday night. One woman was shot inside the Capitol, and three others died after suffering ‘medical emergencies,’ police said.”
USA Today : “Texas lawsuit was the last straw. I’m leaving the Republican Party: Former NH GOP chair” — “My mother spent a lifetime trying to teach me to stand for what is right. ‘You do the right thing because it is the right thing,’ she would tell me, ‘no matter how hard it might be. You will be better and stronger for having done so.’”
Timothy Snyder , professor of history at Yale. Permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Author of several books, including “Our Malady” and “The Road to Unfreedom.” (@TimothyDSnyder)
Rep. Raul Ruiz , Democratic representative for California’s 36th Congressional District. Chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. (@RepRaulRuizMD)
Kwame Rose , social activist, artist and organizer in Baltimore. (@kwamerose)
3 Likes
From Axios, just got in email.
They go on to say, current GOP is still Trump’s party, whatever other leaders say, or try to say.
2 Likes
Speculation is rampant now that Trump and his cronies at the Pentagon purposely hamstrung the National Guard to enable his insurrection attempt.
Pentagon under fire after memos reveal tight limits on National Guard response to Trump insurrection
The Pentagon placed tight limits on the D.C. National Guard ahead of pro-Trump protests this week, trying to ensure the use of military force remained constrained, as the Guard carried out a narrow, unarmed mission requested by the city’s mayor to help handle traffic ahead of planned protests.
In memos issued Monday and Tuesday in response to a request from the D.C. mayor, the Pentagon prohibited the District’s guardsmen from receiving ammunition or riot gear, interacting with protesters unless necessary for self-defense, sharing equipment with local law enforcement, or using Guard surveillance and air assets without the defense secretary’s explicit sign-off, according to officials familiar with the orders. The limits were established because the Guard hadn’t been asked to assist with crowd or riot control.
The D.C. Guard was also told it would be allowed to deploy a quick-reaction force only as a measure of last resort, the officials said.
Then the mission abruptly changed — and the Pentagon is now facing criticism from governors and local officials who say it moved too slowly to send National Guard troops to respond, a charge that its leaders denied Thursday.
The Capitol Police, the law enforcement force that reports to Congress and protects the House and Senate, hadn’t requested help from the Guard ahead of Wednesday’s events. But early Wednesday afternoon, its chief made an urgent plea for backup from 200 troops during a call with top Pentagon and city officials, according to officials familiar with the call.
On the call, Capitol Police Chief Steven A. Sund was asked whether he wanted help from the National Guard. “There was a pause,” one of the D.C. officials said. And Sund said yes. “Then there was another pause, and an official from the [office of the] secretary of the Army said that wasn’t going to be possible.”
The Army official — who was speaking on behalf of the secretary of the Army, who was de facto commanding the D.C. Guard but was not on the call — said the “optics” of soldiers inside the Capitol building was not something they wanted, the two District officials said.
Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) confirmed that account in an interview with The Washington Post, saying Capitol Police “made it perfectly clear that they needed extraordinary help, including the National Guard. There was some concern from the Army of what it would look like to have armed military personnel on the grounds of the Capitol.” One concern was whether the Army had been invited by Congress.
A U.S. defense official said the Army general on the call didn’t formally deny the request but rather reinforced the negative optics of having uniformed personnel inside the Capitol, a point on which Bowser had agreed, and later checked with the chain of command. The defense official said Bowser agreed that if further support was necessary, D.C. police would provide it inside the Capitol, and the Guard would backfill D.C. police positions away from the building.
The defense official said the military wanted to be the force of last resort, and that military officials had urged Bowser to request more support from federal law enforcement but that she didn’t do so until Wednesday.
Higher-up leaders at the Pentagon then evaluated the request and activated the full D.C. Guard, in addition to later calling the governors of other states to send their Guard forces as reinforcements. The officials also lifted limits on the Guard for the new mission, arming guardsmen with riot gear, but not guns, before they headed to create a perimeter around the Capitol.
In the roughly three hours it took the Pentagon to make the shift from traffic policing to full-fledged riot response, the Capitol Police found themselves overwhelmed and rioters stormed the building, forcing lawmakers to take cover and barricade themselves in their offices. The Pentagon left it to federal law enforcement to clear the Capitol of the rioters, amid the hesitancy about sending Guard units into the building itself. By the evening, Guard units helped the Capitol Police and federal and city law enforcement reestablish a perimeter around the building.
By Thursday, National Guard forces from across the Mid-Atlantic region were moving into the Washington area.
On Thursday afternoon, 24 hours after the Capitol breach, acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller called the violence “reprehensible and contrary to the tenets of the United States Constitution.”
“I, and the people I lead in the Department of Defense, continue to perform our duties in accordance with our oath of office, and will execute the time-honored peaceful transition of power to President-elect Biden on January 20,” he said in a statement.
Images of rioters overpowering a light law enforcement force and smashing their way into the Capitol building prompted immediate questions about how such a dramatic security breakdown could occur, especially given that rioters had openly voiced their intent to use violence on social media.
One contributing factor: As the seriousness of the threat became clear, the jumble of jurisdictions and command structures made it more difficult to respond with speed. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, who functions as de facto commander of the D.C. National Guard on behalf of the president, because the District is not a state, said 6,200 troops would be positioned in and around the city by the weekend, including Guard forces from Pennsylvania, New York and other nearby states.
Speaking alongside Bowser on Thursday, McCarthy said the military acted as quickly as it could once it received local authorities’ request for additional support and said officials had not been anticipating such a violent event, despite prolific calls on online platforms for violent action to overturn the Nov. 3 election.
McCarthy said officials didn’t in their “wildest imagination” envision rioters breaching Capitol grounds. City leadership had asked the Guard to carry out only a narrow mission, defense officials noted.
The chaotic and violent outcome of the events, which claimed four lives Wednesday, including a rioter who was shot by Capitol Police, came shortly after Trump egged on supporters in an address outside the White House, falsely insisting the election was fraudulent and urging the crowd to fight to keep him in office.
The turmoil follows a divisive year leading up to the election, amid the coronavirus pandemic and civil unrest after the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, in May.
The protests triggered by Floyd’s death and race-related violence appeared to have prompted both city and Pentagon officials to opt for a muted response that kept military personnel far from protesters and let local and Capitol police take the lead. The Pentagon came under severe criticism in June, after National Guard forces were on hand when unarmed protesters were forcibly cleared from an area near the White House and front-line troops were positioned outside of Washington.
On Thursday, some local officials complained about a delay in granting their request for additional National Guard help as rioters swarmed the Capitol.
But Guard units arrived less than three hours after local authorities made the emergency request for more help, defense officials said.
The Defense Department controls the D.C. Guard because the military force answers to the president rather than the mayor. The president’s power over the D.C. Guard is delegated to the defense secretary, then the Army secretary, who makes command decisions. It is therefore up to the Pentagon leadership to call state governors if the D.C. Guard needs reinforcement.
Security preparations ahead of Wednesday’s events came after Trump ordered a mass military response to racial justice protests in the nation’s capital this summer, prompting a public outcry when military helicopters flew low over protesters, surveillance assets hovered above the city and residents were left with a sense that the District was being occupied or was under siege.
A U.S. defense official, who like other officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations, said the military always issues memos outlining the parameters of any mission. The limits added ahead of Wednesday’s events made sense, the official said, given that D.C. officials requested the deployment of only a small contingent of some 340 guardsmen, primarily to control traffic and monitor Metro stations.
“All commanders have left and right limits,” the official said. “There is no such thing as carte blanche.”
The official said that when the mission changed Wednesday afternoon, the Pentagon provided more forces than were requested, bringing in Guard units from outside states and loosening the restrictions, and moved quickly.
The scope of the initial mission request by D.C. and the unique command structure of the D.C. Guard may have made it more difficult for authorities to quickly send guardsmen to aid at the Capitol. Defense leaders defended the timing of the Guard response, citing “confusion” in scoping out a revised mission among multiple agencies and jurisdictions.
Speaking to reporters by phone Thursday, McCarthy said that after violence erupted around 2 p.m. Wednesday, he spoke with Bowser and the request was relayed for about 200 additional soldiers.
“It was at that time we were trying to get to figure out the situation up on the Capitol Hill between our two entities and phone calls from members of Congress and others,” he said.
McCarthy then briefed Miller, who authorized the deployment of all available D.C. Guard troops, some 1,100 soldiers, with the goal of getting them to the D.C. Armory within four hours.
At the same time, McCarthy said, they began trying to pull the approximately 250 Guard troops who were already deployed in D.C., return them to the Armory to don riot gear and redirect them to the Capitol. By early evening, D.C. Guard troops were in place around the Capitol, allowing police and FBI to search the building and clear it for lawmakers’ return.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan ® said he received a call from House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), who said he was in a secure location with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer.
“I was actually on the phone with Leader Hoyer, who was pleading with us to send the guard,” Hogan said. “He was yelling across the room to Schumer and they were back and forth saying we do have the authorization, and I’m saying, ‘I’m telling you we do not have the authorization.’ ”
Hogan said Maj. Gen. Timothy Gowen, the adjutant general of the Maryland National Guard, was repeatedly rebuffed by the Pentagon. “The general . . . kept running it up the flagpole, and we don’t have authorization,” he said.
Ninety minutes later, Hogan said, he received a call “out of the blue, not from the secretary of defense, not through what would be normal channels,” but from McCarthy, who asked if the Maryland guardsmen could “come as soon as possible.”
“It was like, yeah, we’re waiting, we’re ready,” said Hogan, who had already sent 200 State Police troopers at Bowser’s request.
Virginia sent in its Guard after Gov. Ralph Northam (D) received a call from Pelosi asking for help.
Clark Mercer, Northam’s chief of staff, said he received a call from his counterpart in Bowser’s office, who suggested the Defense Department wasn’t moving fast enough and asked for Virginia to send in its own state Guard.
Northam spokeswoman Alena Yarmosky said the governor called up the Guard immediately after talking with Bowser, knowing it would take some time for guardsmen to prepare. The Northam administration worked with the Defense Department only after the fact, but was able to reach the necessary agreements before guardsmen crossed state lines, she said. The governor’s office publicly announced that he had called up the Guard at 3:29 p.m.
Once the Pentagon signed off, the Guard mounted a vast response.
“Going through that mission analysis process, we were able to do an analysis and provide more than what they asked for,” the defense official said. “No one asked us to activate the entire Guard. Those are decisions we made on our own by taking a pause and conducting another analysis.”
Ammunition and riot gear were severely limited, along with keeping the National Guard to directing traffic and not allowing them to confront or interact with Trump’s rioters.
So Trump put police and soldiers in harm’s way for his coup.
3 Likes
Thread
Adding
Pelosi consults general on restricting Trump military powers
“This morning, I spoke to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley to discuss available precautions for preventing an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike,” Pelosi said in a letter to her Democratic House colleagues Friday.
“The situation of this unhinged President could not be more dangerous, and we must do everything that we can to protect the American people from his unbalanced assault on our country and our democracy.”
2 Likes
There aren’t enough womps for this one.
Sidney Powell Sued by Dominion for $1.3 Billion Over Vote-Fraud Claims
4 Likes
Trump was ‘confused’ when others in the White House weren’t as ‘delighted’ as he was about Capitol violence: GOP’s Ben Sasse
https://hughhewitt.com/senator-ben-sasse-on-impeachment-and-transition-the-gop-in-minority/
Of course he was confused; Trump has no empathy. He revels in violence and pain, and has shown us that all along.
2 Likes
An interesting listen to the Capitol House attempted ‘takeover’ on Wed 1/6/21 - with those who are asserting that the election was ‘stolen,’ and the Republican enablers, and the Trump factor.
A good discussion on all those issues from historian and political commentators - Heather Cox Richardson and Bill Moyers, of PBS fame.
ANNOUNCER : Welcome to Moyers on Democracy. President Trump urged his followers to come to Washington for a “big protest” on January 6th. He wanted their help in reversing the results of the election he lost. “Be there,” he said.“ (It) will be wild.” And they came. By the thousands, they came, and sure enough, it was not only “wild,” as the President had promised, it was worse. Much worse. The protesters became a mob, stormed the US Capitol, drove the vice president and members of the House and Senate out of their chambers, and turned a day meant for celebrating democracy into a riot that sought to overturn a free and fair election. Across the country and around the world people watched, horrified, dumbfounded and disbelieving, as insurrection incited by the president of the United States and his Republican enablers struck at the very centerpiece of American governance. Here’s Bill Moyers, to talk about that day with the historian Heather Cox Richardson.
3 Likes
Sen Graham needs a full phlanx of security…
3 Likes
Dumping on VP Pence…that is a hard stop for those in Trump world.
2 Likes
Sure Ivanka - take it to the people to support your grift
2 Likes
Georgia Officials Reveal Third Trump Call Seeking to Influence Election Results
In a December call, President Trump told a Georgia elections investigator that the official would be a “national hero” for finding evidence of fraud.
I didn’t even know there was a second one, unless they mean the Graham one.
3 Likes
Just posted it here…they reference the Washington Post article this morning.
Was trying to consolidate a lot of overlapping events by creating that new Topic heading.
3 Likes
3 Likes
Having just watched the footage of an officer literally being CRUSHED in a door by a concerted, violent mob effort, I am amazed that only one of the MAGA terrorists was shot that day. It is simply brutal and horrifying.
Inside the House chamber as the Capitol was overrun by an angry mob
NBC News congressional reporter Haley Talbot was inside when the violence and chaos started.
Must-see new video shows Capitol riot was way worse than we thought
“Much of what we saw — silly costumes, people taking selfies, grabbing the speaker’s lectern — looked like of kind a group that might even attend a Trump boat parade. But there was something way, way darker, more violent, more sinister, and more organized happening in that Capitol on Wednesday. And it’s time we see it clearly.”
What it was like to report from a Capitol under siege
How They Stormed Congress
An exploration of the online planning and on-the-ground failures that contributed to the attack on the Capitol.
How a pro-Trump Mob Stormed Congress - The New York Times?
As riot raged at Capitol, Trump tried to call senators to overturn election
‘Senate Being Locked Down’: Inside a Harrowing Day at the Capitol
Erin Schaff of The New York Times later described what happened when the mob saw her Times ID. “They threw me to the floor, trying to take my cameras. I started screaming for help as loudly as I could,” she said. “No one came. People just watched. At this point, I thought I could be killed and no one would stop them. They ripped one of my cameras away from me, broke a lens on the other and ran away.” She fled and found a place to hide.
3 Likes
From the history books…what the bankers did in the FDR era
The consternation had been growing in the months between Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election and his inauguration, but his elimination of the gold standard in April 1933 infuriated some of the country’s wealthiest men.
Titans of banking and business worried that if U.S. currency wasn’t backed by gold, inflation could skyrocket and make their millions worthless. Why, they could end up as poor as most everyone else was during the Great Depression.
So, according to the sworn congressional testimony of a retired general, they decided to overthrow the government and install a dictator who was more business friendly. After all, they reasoned, that had been working well in Italy.
How close this fascist cabal got, and who exactly was in on it, are still subjects of historical debate. But as the dust settles after the pro-Trump attack on the U.S. Capitol, and as it becomes clearer how close lawmakers came to catastrophe, the similarities to the Business Plot are hard to ignore.
“The nation has never been at a potential brink as it was then up until, I think, now,” said Sally Denton, author of the book “The Plots against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right.”
Smedley D. Butler was a highly decorated Marine Corps general who had received the Medal of Honor twice. He was beloved by his men before his retirement, and more so afterward when he spoke in support of the Bonus Army’s fight for early bonus payments for World War I service.
“He was wildly popular and was an outspoken critic of fascism and Mussolini at a time when there was really an impulse toward that throughout the world, including in the United States,” Denton said.
Given his opposition to fascism, Butler might not seem like a good fit for the job of coup leader, but his support from veterans was more important to the Wall Street plotters. At the time, there were many more veterans than active-duty service members; if someone could summon them as a force of 500,000 to march on Washington, the government could fall without a shot being fired.
In the summer of 1933, a bond broker and American Legion member named Gerald MacGuire approached Butler and tried to convince him that it would be in the Bonus Army veterans’ interests to demand their payments in gold. He then offered to send Butler and a group of veterans on a lavish speaking trip, all expenses paid, in support of the gold standard.
Butler was suspicious about where the money was coming from but strung MacGuire along over several months to glean more information. Eventually, MacGuire laid it all out: He was working for a group of mega-rich businessmen with access to $300 million to bankroll a coup. They would plant stories in the press about Roosevelt being overwhelmed and in bad health. Once Butler’s army rolled in, a “Secretary of General Affairs” would be installed to handle the real governance, while Roosevelt would be reduced to cutting ribbons and such. And they would take care of Butler, too.
Additionally, they “offered college educations for his children and his mortgage paid off,” Denton said. “A lot of people would have taken it.”
But Butler wanted to know who these businessmen offering him money and power were. According to the BBC radio show “Document,” MacGuire told him they would announce themselves shortly.
A few weeks later, news of a new conservative lobbying group called the American Liberty League broke. Its members included J.P. Morgan Jr., Irénée du Pont and the CEOs of General Motors, Birds Eye and General Foods, among others. Together they held near $40 billion in assets, Denton said - about $778 billion today.
Had Butler been a different sort of person and gone along with the plot, Denton thinks it would have been successful. Instead, in the fall of 1934, he went to J. Edgar Hoover, head of what would become the FBI. Congressional hearings were launched to investigate possible fascist sympathizers.
Details of the plot soon leaked to the press, who mocked Butler and declared it all a “gigantic hoax.” If Butler wasn’t making it all up, journalists declared, then surely MacGuire was just a prankster fooling him.
The committee never released a report, but it told Congress it “had received evidence that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country. There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.”
Butler- who later published a book, “War Is a Racket,” in which he lamented that all the military conflicts he had ever been involved in were fought to benefit “millionaires and billionaires” - was somewhat vindicated. But he claimed that he had named names, and those names had been removed from his testimony that was released to the public. “Like most committees, it has slaughtered the little and allowed the big to escape. The big shots weren’t even called to testify,” he said in a radio interview.
The committee maintained the names were kept under wraps until they could be investigated and verified. But no further investigation was ever conducted.
According to journalist John Buchanan, speaking to the BBC in 2007, that was probably because Roosevelt struck a deal with the backers of the plot: They could avoid treason charges - and possible execution - if they backed off their opposition to the New Deal. Denton thinks the press may have ignored the report at the urging of the government, which didn’t want the public to know how precarious things might have been.
3 Likes
Sarah Groh, chief of staff to “Squad” member Rep. Ayanna Pressley, tells the Boston Globe that when she hid from the howling mob, she discovered that “every panic button in my office had been torn out.”
3 Likes
Lindsey Graham once again proves how far he has fallen as he leads resistance to Trump’s ouster amid the fast-moving 2nd impeachment.
The push to remove the president from office is quickly gaining bipartisan steam.
2 Likes
2 Likes