In Sicknick’s case, it’s still not known publicly what caused him to collapse the night of the insurrection. Findings from a medical examiner’s review have not yet been released and authorities have not made any announcements about that ongoing process.
According to one law enforcement official, medical examiners did not find signs that the officer sustained any blunt force trauma, so investigators believe that early reports that he was fatally struck by a fire extinguisher are not true.
One possibility being considered by investigators is that Sicknick became ill after interacting with a chemical irritant like pepper spray or bear spray that was deployed in the crowd. But investigators reviewing video of the officer’s time around the Capitol haven’t been able to confirm that in tape that has been recovered so far, the official said.
In court documents, FBI agents have laid out elements of the attacks faced by officers in alarming detail. More than 100 police officers were injured in the melee, including at least 15 officers who required hospitalization, according to court documents.
One man can be seen in surveillance video striking uniformed officers from the Capitol Police and the DC’s Metropolitan Police Department with a metal baseball bat, according to an FBI affidavit.
Another man allegedly threw a fire extinguisher at a group of police officers, striking three in the head, an affidavit says.
vs this
Adding this
Trump played a movie for the seditionists. This was not the kind of movie you bring popcorn to. More like pitchforks and tiki torches.
Movie at the Ellipse: A Study in Fascist Propaganda
Scholars on the Nazis and anti-Semitism have seen this before
On January 6, Trump supporters gathered at a rally at Washington DC’s Ellipse Park, regaled by various figures from Trump world, including Donald Trump Jr. and Rudy Giuliani. Directly following Giuliani’s speech, the organizers played a video. To a scholar of fascist propaganda, well-versed in the history of the National Socialist’s pioneering use of videos in political propaganda, it was clear, watching it, what dangers it portended. In it, we see themes and tactics that history warns pose a violent threat to liberal democracy. Given the aims of fascist propaganda – to incite and mobilize – the events that followed were predictable.
Before decoding what the video presents, it is important to take a step back and discuss the structure of fascist ideology and how it can mobilize its most strident supporters to take violent actions.
I. The Fascist Framework
Increasingly central to Trumpism is the QAnon conspiracy theory, which, as many commentators have now pointed out, closely resembles Nazi anti-Semitic myths. QAnon is just the most obvious manifestation of the increasing parallels between Trumpism and Hitler’s framework itself. Indeed, several contemporary fascist and white supremacist movements find similar roots in the framework Hitler developed, even if they did not culminate in such extreme actions as the Nazis.
Fascist thought
Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf, Hitler’s first and most famous book, is entitled “Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna.” In it, he documents what he describes as his gradual realization that behind the various institutions of power were the Jews. His enlightenment supposedly begins with the entertainment industry, where he remarks that “[t]he fact that nine tenths of all literary filth, artistic trash, and theatrical idiocy can be set to the account of a people, constituting hardly one hundredth of all the country’s inhabitants, could simply not be talked away; it was plain truth.” But it was, Hitler writes, when he “recognized the Jew as the leader of the Social Democracy” that “the scales fell from [his] eyes.” Hitler describes a growing sense, foundational to the ideology the book delineates, the ideology of Nazism, that Jews were controlling the apparatus of the state, both as important party politicians in the Social Democratic Party, and as operators behind the scenes of the press and other institutions.
In Nazi ideology, Jews are represented by an unholy alliance between Jewish capitalists and Jewish communists. The goal of the Jewish plot is to destroy national states, replacing them by a world government run by Jews. This diabolical Jewish plot involves destroying the character of individual nations, by flooding them with immigrants, and empowering minority populations. Hitler describes the German loss in World War I as part of this plan, a “stab in the back” of the German people by Jewish traitors seeking the ruin of the nation. In Nazi ideology, liberal democracy is represented as a corruption, a mask for this takeover by a global elite. Hitler reveals his true attitude toward liberalism in Mein Kampf, when he writes (in the characteristically sexist terms of Nazi ideology):
Like the woman, whose psychic state is determined less by grounds of abstract reason than by an identifiable emotional longing for a force which will complement her nature, and who, consequently, would rather bow to a strong man than dominate a weakling, likewise the masses love a commander more than a petitioner…
Fascism is a patriarchal cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by a treacherous and power-hungry global elite, who have encouraged minorities to destabilize the social order as part of their plan to dominate the “true nation,” and fold them into a global world government. The fascist leader is the father of his nation, in a very real sense like the father in a traditional patriarchal family. He mobilizes the masses by reminding them of what they supposedly have lost, and who it is that is responsible for that loss – the figures who control democracy itself, the elite; Nazi ideology is a species of fascism in which this global elite are Jews.
The future promised by the fascist leader is one in which there are plentiful blue collar jobs, reflecting the manly ideals of hard work and strength. In Nazi propaganda, many white collar jobs, the domain of Jews – running department stores, banking – were for the idle. And the fascist nation’s heart and soul is the military – as Hitler writes, “[w]hat the German people owes to the army can be briefly summed up in a single word, to wit: everything.” The fascist future is a kind of restoration of a glorious past, but a modern version – replete with awesome technology that glorifies the nation to the world. The German V-2 rocket was a characteristic representation of Nazi might. The fascist future is, in the famous description of Jeffrey Herf, a kind of reactionary modernism.
Fascist propaganda
Fascism uses propaganda as a way of mobilizing a population behind the leader. Fascist propaganda creates an awesome sense of loss, and a desire for revenge against those who are responsible. In the face of the supposed betrayal of the nation during World War I by Jewish “vipers,” Hitler describes the proper response to have been to place the “leaders of the whole movement…behind bars.” Hitler writes, “[a]ll the implements of military power should have been ruthlessly used for the extermination of this pestilence. The parties should have been dissolved, the Reichstag brought to its senses, with bayonets if necessary, but, best of all, dissolved at once.” The goal of fascist propaganda is to mobilize a population to violently overthrew multi-party democracy and replace it with the leader.
Fascism is not an ideology consigned to Europe. Black American intellectuals from W.E.B. Du Bois to Toni Morrison have spoken of American fascism. America has a long history of anti-Semitism similar to Nazi anti-Semitism, central to the ideology not just of the Ku Klux Klan, but to Henry Ford’s “The International Jew.” In its American version, communist Jews supposedly use Black liberation movements, control of Hollywood, and labor unions to destroy the nation in the service of a global elite. We should not be surprised at all by the rise of a fascist movement in the United States. And if it does arise, it would be no surprise if it did so in the party that keeps alive the “lost cause” myths of the American South.
II. The Movie Shown at the Ellipse
This history, both European and American, illuminates the dangers we face today, laid bare in the video. In it, Trump is repeatedly represented as the nation’s father figure. It is laced through with images of masculinity, and mournful loss at the hands of traitors, clearly justifying a violent restoration of recent glory.
The video begins with Trump’s eyes in the shadow, and its second frame focuses the audience on the Capitol building – America’s Reichstag, where the decisions being denounced by the rally’s organizers were being made that day. The third frame of the video is the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles. This image immediately directs the attention of an audience attuned to an American fascist ideology to the supposedly elite class of Jews who, according to this ideology, control Hollywood. The appearance of the Hollywood sign makes no other sense in the context of a short video about an election. The next two images, of the UN General Assembly and the EU Parliament floor, connect supposed Jewish control of Hollywood to the goal of world government. As we have seen, according to Nazi ideology, Jews seek to use their control of the press and the entertainment industry to destroy individual nations. The beginning of the video focuses our attention on this supposedly “globalist,” but really Jewish, threat.
The next clip lingers on Joe Biden, with a vacant stare in his eyes and the video footage slowed, while Trump’s inauguration speech plays, “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government, while the people have borne the cost.” It is clear from the image of Biden that he is not making the decisions. The video shifts to an image of Senator Charles Schumer, reminding the viewer of prominent Jewish leaders of the Democratic party. Schumer is wearing a Kente cloth, an image evocative of Ku Klux Klan ideology — that Jews support Black liberation movements as a way to undermine white rule and destroy the nation. The next frame shows the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, flanked by two Jewish Congressman, Representatives Nadler and Schiff. Pelosi, too, is controlled by Jews.
Who, then, are this “small group in our nation’s capital”? The video suggests it is a group that controls Hollywood and the Democratic Party, and seeks to use Black liberation movements to undermine the nation, and bring about world government. In Nazi ideology, as well as its US counterpart, this group is the Jews. And what are the costs? As the inauguration speech continues, “The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of this our country;” gunshots are fired and we are shown images of these citizens betrayed by a duplicitous establishment – mournful pictures of coffins of veterans, homeless encampments, and a series of slides varying between nostalgic images of white American families over dinner with rural destitution – a worn down home flying a large American flag with an old pickup truck in front. At the end of these grim scenes of the results of elite betrayal, Trump declares, “This all ends right here, right now.”
As the music surges, what follows is a series of photos taken during Trump’s first term. This phase of the video begins with images of enormous naval ships on the ocean, and moves to images of Trump striding in front of a military guard at a football game, the iconic sport of American masculinity (hence the very particular danger of the Black quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s challenge to white supremacy). It is followed by rally after rally with adoring masses cheering Trump. The images of women overcome with emotion at the sight of the nation’s father figure, and violent anger at his political enemies, are interspersed with heavy machinery in factories, churning out huge new pick-up trucks, fighter jets streaking across the sky, and Trump striding across the screen framed by the powerful American imagery of the Lincoln Memorial. A Black man and a white man are shown in brotherhood at a Trump rally. Trump is shown observing powerful rockets launch, images evocative, for those schooled in history, of the Nazi’s own obsession with this particular technology.
After these scenes of Trump’s glorious leadership, the restoration of American rocket technology dominance, the mood shifts, as we are shown former Attorney General Bill Barr swearing in at what appears to be a deposition, followed by a smirking Joe Biden. Treachery has entered in, stage left.
What follows is scene after scene of immense loss. Empty streets of great American cities, a forlorn white woman peering out of a window, trapped at home. Scrabble pieces spelling “FEAR” appear and disappear within less than a second, empty chairs at a school, a sign reading “closed.” We see an image of the Supreme Court, followed by what appears to be a Black Lives Matter rally on a street emblazoned with “DEFUND THE POLICE.” Joe Biden appears in a forlorn photo in a gym, speaking to a lone man in a chair – Biden is here a petitioner, not a commander. The video switches back to a representation of glorious Trump years – a rising stock market, more fighter planes, a Black man and a white man with a “Jesus Saves” shirt embracing in brotherhood – a reference to the power of a shared Christian identity to bond Americans across racial lines. It ends with the screen filling with a powerful image of Trump’s face, showing steely resolve.
The message of the video is clear. America’s glory has been betrayed by treachery and division sown by politicians seeking to undermine and destroy the nation. To save the nation, one must restore Trump’s rule.
Each of us can decide what moral responsibility Trump personally has for a video to rouse his supporters at the rally. How much of a role the White House or Trump himself may have played in deciding to show the video and sequencing it immediately after Giuliani’s speech, we don’t know. But it is worth noting that the New York Times recently reported that by early January, “the rally would now effectively become a White House production” and, with his eye ever on media production, Trump micromanaged the details. “The president discussed the speaking lineup, as well as the music to be played, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations. For Mr. Trump, the rally was to be the percussion line in the symphony of subversion he was composing from the Oval Office,” the Times reported.
Worldwide, there have been many fascist movements. Not all fascist movements focus on a global Jewish conspiracy as the enemy, and not all of them were genocidal. Early on, Italian fascism was not anti-Semitic in its core, though it later turned that way. British fascism was not genocidal (though it also was never given the opportunity to be). The most influential fascist movement that takes a shadowy Jewish conspiracy as its central target is German fascism, Nazism. Nazism did not start out in genocide. It began with militias and violent troops disrupting democracy. In its early years in power, in the 1930s, it was socialists and communists who were targeted for the Concentration Camps, torture, and murder. But it must never be forgotten where Nazism culminated.
Capitol riot’s suspected “bullhorn lady” Rachel Powell taken into custody
Updated on: February 5, 2021 / 11:45 AM / CBS News
Rachel Powell, a single mother of eight suspected of playing a role in the assault on the U.S. Capitol, was taken into custody in Pennsylvania on Thursday night, federal authorities confirmed to CBS News on Friday. The FBI raided her home Thursday searching for evidence to help build a case against her, CBS Pittsburgh reports.
Neighbors say Powell and some of the younger children haven’t been seen for a week or more.
Powell was scheduled to appear before a federal magistrate Friday afternoon. She faces multiple charges, including violent entry or disorderly conduct, obstruction and depredation of government property.
MTG is incorrigible…horror show this one.
Or this take
- The Trump Organization held failed talks with Parler to become a part-owner, BuzzFeed News reported.
- Parler offered a 40% stake in exchange for Trump making the app his go-to social media platform.
- The talks could have violated anti-bribery laws, ethics experts told BuzzFeed.
I’m working on the assumption that if everyone stops clicking on her “news” stories & clicks, she will fade from sight. Isn’t that how the algorithms work?
I’m doing that with the digital newspapers I subscribe to too about the former president.
So… the Trump campaign paid Arizona state Republican Mark Finchem to back their bid to overturn the election, and he was an Oathkeeper who was also part of the Wednesday Coup? Wow.
Lindsey Graham basically admits Trump is responsible for Jan. 6th and he just doesn’t give a fuck.
Graham says Trump will have ‘a place in history’ for Capitol riots
One of former President Trump’s longtime allies in the Senate said Sunday that Trump would be remembered for his role in the events leading up to the deadly riot that overtook the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) indicated that he thought history would judge Trump’s responsibility for the siege that resulted in the deaths of several people, including one Capitol Police officer, but added that he did not think it was the Senate’s role to convict the former president for inciting the riot.
“Well, I mean, he’s going to have a place in history for all of this, but the point of the matter is that we’re in Congress. We’re not prosecutors. Impeachment was never meant to be a prosecution,” Graham said.
“I think I’m ready to move on. I’m ready to end the impeachment trial because I think it’s blatantly unconstitutional,” Graham continued, before adding, “As to Donald Trump, he is the most popular figure in the Republican Party. He had a consequential presidency. Jan. 6 was a very bad day for America, and he’ll get his share of blame in history.”
Graham’s comments come as the Senate GOP has signaled that a conviction of the former president is unlikely to occur, as many members have expressed doubt over whether such a maneuver is constitutional.
A number of Republicans, including Graham, have criticized the former president over the Jan. 6 violence. The president’s second impeachment by the House last month saw 10 Republicans vote in favor of charging him with inciting an insurrection.
The South Carolina Republican, a top ally of the former president during his one term in the White House, said last month that Trump’s legacy had been “tarnished” by the riot and that Trump’s “actions were the problem” that led to the violence.
Trump Told Stop the Steal Organizers He Would Speak at the Front of the Capitol After His January 6 Speech at the Ellipse
New revelations about Trump’s schedule for January 6 confirm that the White House was indispensable to the events that led to an armed assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Do what I say, not what I do theory of governing…
Georgia secretary of state’s office launches investigation into Trump’s phone call
Exclusive: Ukraine Releases ‘Shock’ Call With Giuliani As Trump’s Second Impeachment Trial Begins
Ukraine Releases ‘Shock’ Call With Giuliani As Trump’s Impeachment Trial Begins | Time
“Let these investigations go forward,” Rudy Giuliani told the presidential headquarters in Kyiv, Ukraine, his voice turning impatient. “Get someone to investigate this.” On the other end of the line, hunched over a speakerphone, two Ukrainian officials listened in disbelief as Giuliani demanded probes that could help his client, then-President Donald Trump, win another term in office.
The 40-minute call, a transcript of which was obtained by TIME, provides the clearest picture yet of Giuliani’s attempts to pressure the Ukrainians on Trump’s behalf. The President’s personal lawyer toggled between veiled threats—“Be careful,” he warned repeatedly—and promises to help improve Ukraine’s relations with Trump. “My only motive—it isn’t to get anybody in trouble who doesn’t deserve to be in trouble,” Giuliani said. “For our country’s sake and your country’s sake, we [need to] get all these facts straight,” he added. “We fix them and we put it behind us.”
The conversation on July 22, 2019, kicked off the campaign of intimidation that resulted in Trump’s first impeachment. For a year and half, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his aides said little about their interactions with Giuliani, not wanting to anger an emissary of the U.S. President. But now, as the Trump era ends with a historic second impeachment trial, the Ukrainians have begun to speak up about the circumstances that led to the first. They are also taking steps that could imperil Giuliani and his Ukrainian allies.
Igor Novikov, who served as a close adviser to Zelensky during Trump’s first impeachment, says he is willing to assist an ongoing federal investigation of Giuliani that is reportedly underway in New York, as well as a separate effort to strip Giuliani of his license to practice law. Zelensky’s government has taken legal action against Giuliani’s Ukrainian associates. And they have opened up to the media about the pressure campaign mounted by Trump and his allies. On Feb. 3, Novikov sent TIME a transcript of the Giuliani call, whose accuracy TIME has independently verified.
Giuliani did not respond to a detailed list of questions about the transcript of his call with the Ukrainian officials, the Ukrainian support for his disbarment and the federal investigation.
In a series of interviews, Zelensky’s advisers say their motives are not to get even with Giuliani or merely clarify the historical record. Their goal is to rebuild relations with the U.S. now that President Joe Biden has taken office. “The past is the past,” Zelensky told TIME in a statement on Feb. 4. “I care deeply about the future of our relationship with the United States, so I want to focus on that.”
The Ukrainian moves highlight the raft of fresh threats to Trump and his associates now that he has left office. Under the Constitution, impeachment by the House and a conviction by the Senate are the remedies for presidential misconduct. Trump is now likely to escape conviction for the second time. Yet his critics don’t have to rely on Congress to punish Trump and his allies. They are finding ways to do it themselves: through libel lawsuits, criminal investigations, pressure to ban his social media accounts and other means.
The costs are mounting for Giuliani and his associates, especially the Russian agents and Ukrainian politicians who aided his crusade to get Trump re-elected in 2020. In the final days of Trump’s term, the U.S. government sanctioned seven of these men—all Ukrainian citizens—for being part of a “Russia-linked foreign influence network” that promoted Giuliani’s spurious claims against the Bidens.
Zelensky’s government has launched its own counter-offensive against Giuliani and his enablers in Ukraine. It moved to shut down several Ukrainian media outlets that broadcast unsubstantiated claims of corruption against the Biden family, which Giuliani spent more than a year trying to prove and publicize. One of the Ukrainian lawmakers who helped him, Oleksandr Dubinsky, was kicked out of Zelensky’s political party on Feb. 1.
Potentially more worrying for Giuliani is the Ukrainian support for the investigations he is reportedly facing in New York. Novikov tells TIME that he is providing assistance to a legal campaign to revoke Giuliani’s law license. Novikov is also open to helping the investigation that the former New York City mayor is reportedly facing in the Southern District of New York, the same office where Giuliani made his name as a prosecutor in the 1980s.
“If I get an official request from SDNY or any other non-partisan effort, such as potential disbarment of Rudy Giuliani, I would be open to helping them,” says Novikov, who left government in August but remains close to Zelensky’s administration. “That is because I believe Mayor Giuliani’s actions in Ukraine threatened our national security,” he adds. “It is our responsibility to make sure that any effort to drag our country into our allies’ domestic politics does not go unpunished.”
Initiated in 2019, the SDNY investigation has reportedly focused on Giuliani’s alleged lobbying on behalf of Ukrainian politicians, as well as business deals that his associates pursued in the country’s energy sector. A spokesman for the Southern District declined to comment on the status of the probe, though an NBC News report indicated that it is ongoing as of December. At least two Ukrainian officials have told TIME that they already discussed Giuliani with SDNY investigators. “It was weird,” says one, describing a visit in 2019 to their Manhattan offices, which Giuliani led before becoming mayor of New York City. “There I am to give testimony against Giuliani, and [hanging on the wall] they’ve got these pictures of him shaking hands with people.”
Giuliani has long insisted that there is no grounds for SDNY to investigate him. After NBC News reported in December that prosecutors are seeking access to his communications, Giuliani tweeted, “They want to seize my emails. No reason[.] No wrongdoing.” On his video blog and other outlets, the former mayor has also defended his ethical standards. “I’m not stupid,” he said on his radio show Jan. 14. “I don’t want to get in trouble. And I have a high sense of ethics, personally. I hate it when people attack my integrity.”
In the phone call with Zelensky’s aides in 2019, Giuliani was careful to avoid explicitly asking for a favor, according to the transcript. “I have no interest in anybody not telling the truth or exaggerating. It isn’t about political favor,” Giuliani said on the call. He also seemed keenly aware of the dilemma he was creating for the Ukrainians, and how it might make them feel. “You shouldn’t feel terrible,” he said. “All we need from the President is to say, ‘I’m putting an honest prosecutor [on these investigations], and he will dig up the evidence that presently exists.’”
But from Ukraine’s perspective, the call put the Zelensky government in a perilous position. “That first phone call left me in a state of shock,” says Novikov, who participated in the call along with Andriy Yermak, then a top adviser to Zelensky and currently his chief of staff. “After we hung up the phone, without a shadow of a doubt I knew that we were in grave danger.”
Three days after that conversation, Trump held a phone call with Zelensky that would become Exhibit A in his first impeachment inquiry. He used the call to make some of the same requests of the Ukrainians that his lawyer made earlier that week. Trump famously asked Zelensky to “do us a favor” by opening investigations related to Biden and his son Hunter, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
At the dawn of the Biden administration, Zelensky and his top aides have embarked on a mini-media tour to discuss some of these events. During an interview with Axios broadcast on Jan. 31, Zelensky was asked whether he felt “a little bit angry” at Trump. The Ukrainian leader laughed and responded, “A little bit?” The day before that interview aired, details of Giuliani’s first phone call with Zelensky’s aides appeared in the Washington Post , which cited Novikov’s notes from the conversation.
Trump ordered a freeze on some $400 million in aid to Ukraine in the summer of 2019. After learning of the move, Zelensky and his aides prepared to announce the investigations that Trump and Giuliani wanted. But before they went through with it, a complaint from a whistleblower inside the White House exposed Giuliani’s pressure campaign, and Trump agreed to release the aid to Ukraine.
Looking back on those events, Zelensky’s advisers still wonder what the fallout would have been if those investigations of the Biden family had been opened. “The consequences could have been catastrophic,” says Yermak, the chief of staff to Ukraine’s president. “I think we avoided domestic American politics,” he tells TIME. “At least that was our mission all along.”
So many perks for the kids.
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner disclosed receiving between $23,791,645 and $120,676,949 in combined outside income in their final financial disclosure reports. The disclosures cover the entirety of 2020 through January 20, 2021. Like former President Donald Trump, their income also appears to have been affected by the pandemic. In their financial disclosures covering 2019, they reported between $36,151,214 and $157,020,085 in income.
According to her final financial disclosure report, Ivanka Trump did not receive any income from the businesses she ran before entering government in her final year working at the White House. In each of her previous disclosures, including the one covering 2019, she reported income from the businesses despite reporting that they ceased operating in July 2018.
Ivanka Trump’s interest in and income from the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC also decreased dramatically in 2020. In her combined annual/termination report, she reported $1,463,449 in hotel-related revenue, down from nearly $4 million in her previous disclosure. By the time she left the White House, the value of her stake in the hotel dropped from between $5 and $25 million as reported in her previous disclosures to $100,001 to $250,000. The sudden decrease in value is not explained in her financial disclosure report, but it appears that Trump did not sell a significant portion of her stake in the hotel because there is no corresponding transaction related to the entity in the disclosure.
Another anomaly in Trump’s report relates to fixed guaranteed payments she arranged to receive from a few entities to prevent a situation in which she would have a stake in their performance while she worked in the White House. Starting in 2018, Trump began receiving annually $100,000 from T International Realty LLC, $800,000 from TTT Consulting LLC, and $600,000 from TTTT Venture LLC. In her latest financial disclosure report, however, she reported receiving an extra $62,500 from TTTT Venture LLC and only $362,500 from TTT Consulting LLC. While the extra income from TTTT Venture LLC could be explained by the longer reporting period covered by her annual/termination report, it is not clear why she received less than half of the $800,000 guaranteed payment from TTT Consulting LLC in her final year working for the government.
Jared Kushner’s final financial disclosure report shows that he retained his controversial interest in the real estate technology company Cadre for the entirety of his time in government. Though his interest in the company posed possible conflicts from the moment he started working at the White House, Kushner finally committed to divest his $25 to $50 million stake in the company in February 2020 due to concerns over its international business dealings. CREW found, however, that at Kushner’s request, the Office of Government Ethics withdrew the certificate of divestiture related to his plans to sell his interest in the company in June 2020. The pandemic reportedly halted Kushner’s planned sale but an anonymous representative for Kushner told CNBC in July that he still planned to sell his interest in the company. The sale, however, never went through according to Kushner’s latest financial disclosure report.
Kushner also reported a newly-formed offshore holding company located in the British Virgin Islands, “Kushner Companies BVI Limited (Holding Company, British Virgin Islands),” which has apparently resulted in a restructuring for some of his holdings. According to his disclosure, the entity was formed in 2020. It appears that several of his holdings are now held through the offshore company, including the Puck Building LP, which is valued at more than $25 million.
Read Jared Kushner’s disclosure here.
Read Ivanka Trump’s disclosure here.
Adding
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner — former President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, respectively — declined to take government salaries while working in Trump’s White House, partly to sidestep anti-nepotism laws. But they earned between $172 million and $640 million in outside income while working in the White House, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) reported Monday, citing its review of financial disclosures.
That large range is due in part to income from up to four months before Trump and Kushner joined the Trump administration, and partly because their income was reported in broad ranges, CREW noted. Ivanka Trump reported more than $13 million in income from her stake in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., which CREW calls “the locus of influence peddling in the Trump administration.” The “the defining scandal of her time in office,” though, is the 28 or more foreign trademarks approved for Ivanka Trump, more than half from China, while she served in the White House, often granted after beneficial actions by the Trump administration, CREW says.
Oddly, the Chinese government approved 16 new trademarks for Ivanka Trump, and Canada approved another one, months after she announced that her lifestyle brand was shutting down. Trump said in a 2018 government disclosure that “all operations” of her namesake business “ceased on July 31, 2018,” CREW reports, but “we discovered that she still made up to $1 million from it in 2019 despite the fact that she claimed it no longer existed.”
The group also pointed to likely conflicts of interest with Ivanka Trump working on the federal Opportunity Zones program in 2018, even as her husband owned a significant financial stake in a company, Cadre, that offers Opportunity Zones investment vehicles. Kushner’s controversial stake in Cadre was valued at between $5 million and $25 million when he entered the White House and $25 million to $50 million when he left, CREW said. Peter Weber
::sighs::
QAnon …some families impacted by it.
WSJ profiles in 11 minute video Proud Boys entry into Capitol Building - created 1/25/21. It shows them breaching the police lines first, their organization and some subsequent arrests. All will offer some form of denial about not belonging to any organized group.
They always have been ‘standing by.’
Arrests which was happened within the last day
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/case-multi-defendant/file/1366446/download