Month: April 2021

He’s baaaack:

Politico’s report on the speech:

Former President Donald Trump ripped into Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell before a Republican National Committee donor retreat Saturday evening, deriding him as a “dumb son of a bitch.”

Trump veered off his prepared text during a roughly 50-minute speech before several hundred well-heeled GOPdonors at his Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida, saying that he was “disappointed” in former Vice President Mike Pence, calling last year’s presidential election election a “fraud” and mocking Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The former president spent several minutes tearing into McConnell, saying that he didn’t do enough to defend him during the February impeachment trial. At one point, three people familiar with the remarks said, Trump called the Senate GOP leader a “dumb son of a bitch.”

Trump also went after McConnell’s wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, for resigning her cabinet post after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

A spokesperson for McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who was just reelected to a seventh six-year term last year, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The latest verbal broadside against McConnell, the most powerful Republican still in elected office, comes as Trump reemerges as a dominant force in GOP politics. The former president has, in recent days, sought to rev up his small-dollar fundraising apparatus, and he is issuing a steady stream of endorsements for the 2022 midterm elections, in addition to battles over state party chairmanships.

Though many of Trump’s 2022 endorsements align with McConnell’s preferences, including backing a number of incumbent GOP senators for reelection, he has occasionally gotten crosswise with the Senate leader. Trump has pledged to oppose GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski in next year’s Alaska elections after Murkowski voted for his conviction in the Senate trial, though McConnell and his top allies say they will support Murkowski’s reelection.

It isn’t the first time Trump has gone after McConnell since leaving office. In February, Trump released an extensive statement bashing McConnell for being “a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack.” The statement came just days after McConnell took to the Senate floor to flay Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.

Several attendees said there was little response to Trump’s insult.

Much of Trump’s Saturday night speech was aimed at relitigating the election results, on which the former president has remained fixated. At one point he said he remained disappointed with Pence for not doing more to stop the certification of the election, which he called “rigged.”

Trump’s ongoing criticism of Pence has created a rift in their relationship. While several other potential 2024 Republican hopefuls made the trek to South Florida for the event, Pence did not.

The former president also savaged Fauci, saying that he gave him bad advice. He poked fun of Fauci for botching a first pitch at last year’s opening day game for the Washington Nationals.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who spoke before Trump, also went after Fauci, sources said.

The three-day event drew a number of potential 2024 GOP contenders, including DeSantis, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Also present were several 2022 midterm election candidates, including Jane Timken and Bernie Moreno, both of whom are seeking Ohio’s open Senate seat.

The confab was held mainly at the Four Seasons Resort in Palm Beach, though for the Saturday evening dinner attendees made the short jaunt north up A1A to Mar-a-Lago.

McConnell’s wingman John Thune was appropriately insulted on his friend’s behalf:

“Tone and style,” yeah.

The tone and style of a sociopath.

The “driving while black” in Virginia incident that hit the news this weekend continues to make headlines. As I noted yesterday, the Virginia law that would have made that near-deadly encounter last December illegal was passed in November but only took effect in March. Second Lt. Caron Nazario, Black and Latino, is lucky to have survived the encounter.

Next door in Maryland, legislatiors are doing something about police overreach, too (Washington Post):

Maryland enacted historic police accountability measures Saturday, becoming the first state to repeal its powerful Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights and setting new rules for when police may use force and how they are investigated and disciplined.

The Democratic-majority legislature dealt Republican Gov. Larry Hogan a sharp rebuke, overriding his vetoes of measures that raise the bar for officers to use force; give civilians a role in police discipline for the first time; restrict no-knock warrants; mandate body cameras; and open some allegations of police wrongdoing for public review.

Each bill had been hailed by criminal justice advocates as having the potential to make policing in the state fairer and more transparent. Democrats, who hold large majorities in the legislature, made enacting them a top priority after months of protests over the police-involved deaths of unarmed Black men and women.

Republican lawmakers echoes Hogan’s concern that the law would “further erode police morale, community relationships and public confidence,” reports the Baltimore Sun, adding it “raised worries that provisions would leave officers fearful that split-second decisions under dangerous circumstances might cost them their jobs or send them to prison.”

Comply or die

But Black backers of the bills pushed back:

Sen. Jill P. Carter, a Baltimore Democrat who fought for years to pass policing legislation, responded Saturday on the Senate floor to Hogan’s comments. What corrodes community trust in police, Carter said, is years of frustration over abuses that go unpunished, protests that go unheard and a broken system that carries on unchanged.

Carter cited scores of people killed by law enforcement in Maryland over the past two decades and notorious instances of corruption that went unchecked for years. Baltimore residents filed numerous complaints about since-convicted officers on the Baltimore Police Department’s infamous Gun Trace Task Force, Carter said, but members of the force continued to abuse the public with impunity.

“It’s a critically important step in the right direction,” Carter said of the legislation.

Lawmakers approved some policing changes the year after Freddie Grey died in Baltimore Police Department custody in 2015, but critics said they were not enough.

The trial of former officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis for the killing last May of George Floyd spotlights the kind of unchecked and uncesessary violence directed by police at Black suspects. Three officers pinned Floyd to the ground while demanding he get into the squad car.

Nazario’s attorney said in a federal lawsuit that video footage of the encounter points to wider trends:

“These cameras captured footage of behavior consistent with a disgusting nationwide trend of law enforcement officers, who, believing they can operate with complete impunity, engage in unprofessional, discourteous, racially biased, dangerous, and sometimes deadly abuses of authority, (including issuing unreasonable comply-or-die commands,) ignore the clearly established mandates of the Constitution of these United States and the state and local laws, and usurp the roles of legislator, judge, jury, and executioner; substituting the rule of law for their arbitrary and illegal conduct.”

Maryland has begun tapping the brakes.

“White Lives Matter” events planned for today will probably fizzle. Rumor has it that one of such rally in North Caolina is already cancelled. Are white conservatives now cancel-culturing themselves?

Business Insider:

Police forces across the country are reportedly preparing for white supremacist rallies planned for this weekend. 

White supremacist groups are organizing the rallies over encrypted messaging app Telegram, Newsweek first reported. There are also public event pages on Facebook suggesting there will be several rallies on Sunday, April 11.

“Patriots all over this nation are peacefully marching to raise awareness for whites being victims of massive interracial crime and also persecution by the government,” one Facebook event page reads.

The event description adds, “This is happening in every majority white nation on earth.” Who knew?

But are those majority white nations passing laws to inhibit white people from voting? Are white people routinely dying at the hands of police for minor or non-offenses? Are they legislating gender conformity?

White Reoublican legislators are doing that here in North Carolina:

The legislation follows a nationwide trend of GOP-controlled state legislatures looking to limit treatments for transgender adolescents. Unlike other states, however, North Carolina would classify adults between the ages of 18 and 21 as minors under the “Youth Health Protection Act.”

Medical professionals who facilitate a transgender person’s desire to present themselves or appear in a way that is inconsistent with their biological sex could have their license revoked and face civil fines of up to $1,000 per occurrence. The measure bars doctors from providing gender confirming hormone treatment, puberty blockers or surgery.

What’s more:

Senate Bill 514 would also compel state employees to immediately notify parents in writing if their child displays “gender nonconformity” or expresses a desire to be treated in a way that is incompatible with the gender they were assigned at birth. LGBTQ advocates fear the bill would out people under 21 who tell state workers that they may be transgender.

“Transgender youth have the best chance to thrive when they are supported and affirmed, not singled out and denied critical care that is backed by virtually every leading health authority,” said a statement from the Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality, adding that “a person’s gender identity shouldn’t limit their ability to access health care or be treated with dignity and respect.”

Beach-Ferrara, a member of the Buncombe County Commission (Asheville), has announced plans to run for Congress in 2022 against NC-11 Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R).

Meanwhile, “oppressed” white people will rally today to protest their oppression and do some male bonding.

I’m still waiting for my first “driving while white” traffic stop. I can proudly wear it on my sleeve for decades as proof of government persecution.

Normally, I would just assume he’s lying. But I actually believe he’s telling the truth here. A majority of MAGA nation is almost certainly with him:

There is literally nothing a Trump henchman can do to shake the loyalty of the cult.

Here’s Marc Caputo with a dispatch from Florida:

Battling anonymous leaks that he had sex with a minor or had paid prostitutes, Rep. MATT GAETZ (R-Fla.) appeared at Trump National Doral Miami on Friday night (where else?) and spoke to the pro-Trump Women for America First, delivering a speech aimed just as much at the crowd as the bank of TV cameras recording his stemwinder.

Basically, Gaetz did exactly what defense lawyers and establishment types in politics and media say an embattled pol shouldn’t do: He ran his mouth, and acerbically so. Gaetz swiped at the “lying media.” He decried the “smears” against him and the “distortions of my personal life … [and] wild conspiracy theories.” He pledged he “won’t be extorted by a former DOJ official and the crooks he is working with.” The alleged extortion plot is one of those odd twists that prove how Florida is stranger than fiction.

But that’s Gaetz. He isn’t an establishment type. He’s a MAGA media figure. He’s always starring in The Gaetz Show, perhaps a vestige of having grown up in the house where and while “The Truman Show” was filmed (remember: Florida is stranger than fiction).

Gaetz, 38, grew into his role as a TV figure shortly after arriving in Washington in 2017. In the seniority-based gerontocracy that is Congress, he realized that the path to political power and influence was to have President DONALD TRUMP’S ear — and the way to do that was by auditioning as Trump’s top defender on Fox News. It worked. Trump loved it and promoted him. Gaetz got a podcast (“Hot Takes with Matt Gaetz”). He penned a book (“Firebrand: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the MAGA Revolution”). He starred in an HBO documentary (“The Swamp”).

In his newfound celebrity, Gaetz styled himself into a ladies’ man, showing up to high-profile events with a number of different beautiful women. At a 2018 Republican Party of Florida Lincoln Day dinner in Orlando, he caused a stir by appearing with two dates, one of whom is a model for Monster Energy Drink and had competed decades ago in child beauty pageants against JonBenét Ramsey (remember: Florida is stranger than fiction).

Gaetz’s predilections brought him into the orbit of Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg, who now sits in federal jail and awaits trial on a 33-count indictment. He appears ready to cut a deal with prosecutors. They want Gaetz.

One of the charges Greenberg faces concerns sex with a 17-year-old, with whom Gaetz is suspected of also having sex. Two POLITICO sources say Gaetz had personally told them he had sexual relations with her, but only after she turned 18 in November 2017. About six months after the woman turned 18, The Daily Beast first reported, Gaetz used Venmo to send money to Greenberg, and mentioned the woman’s name in the payment’s memo. POLITICO first reported this week that the woman, who did not return messages for comment, went on to work in pornography, and that Greenberg had boasted about that fact to friends. We’ve also learned that she was on a Bahamas trip, first reported by CBS, that federal prosecutors are examining as part of their investigation.

The story is developing and grows more lurid and strange by the day. It’s unlikely Gaetz will get quiet. He’s not only speaking out, he’s fundraising off of the investigation. The cash is rolling in. He needs it to pay his new lawyers. Though a lawyer himself, Gaetz believes that letting attorneys speak for you — especially if you’re innocent — often makes you look more guilty. Advice rendered in a court of law is sometimes horrible in the court of public opinion. And he’s the star of The Gaetz Show, not them. It’s what keeps everyone tuned in — that, and the fact that Florida is stranger than fiction.

He’s MAGA all the way, doing the Trump playbook. I don’t know if he has Trump’s special talent for slithering out of jams, though. But maybe he does. People are sending him vast amounts of cash and even though it’s reported that his fellow elected officials can’t stand him any more than they can stand Trump, they are not abandoning him. So maybe that Trump magic dust is transferable as long as you stay loyal to Dear Leader. It will be interesting to see how it works without the promise of a presidential pardon…

They aren’t even trying to hide it, which is a form of voter intimidation in itself. If they can pass laws allowing what are essentially vigilante wingnuts to have free rein, they may very well be able to keep some people from even trying to vote:

In a leaked video of a recent presentation, a man who identifies himself as a GOP official in Harris County, Tex., says the party needs 10,000 Republicans for an “election integrity brigade” in Houston.

Then he pulls up a map of the area’s voting precincts and points to Houston’s dense, racially diverse urban core, saying the party specifically needed volunteers with “the confidence and courage to come down here,” adding, “this is where the fraud is occurring.”

The official cites widespread vote fraud, which has not been documented in Texas, as driving the need for an “army” of poll watchers to monitor voters at every precinct in the county.

Now the government accountability group Common Cause Texas — which published the footage Thursday — is raising the alarm that such an effort could instead serve to intimidate and suppress voters in metro Houston.

“It’s very clear that we’re talking about recruiting people from the predominantly Anglo parts of town to go to Black and Brown neighborhoods,” Anthony Gutierrez, the group’s executive director, told The Washington Post.

“This is a role that’s supposed to do nothing but stand at a poll site and observe,” he added. So “why is he suggesting someone needs to be ‘courageous’?” Gutierrez asked.

In a statement to The Post, the Harris County Republican Party said Common Cause was “blatantly mischaracterizing a grassroots election worker recruitment video.” The party chair, Cindy Siegel, accused the group of trying “to bully and intimidate Republicans.”

“The goal is to activate an army of volunteers for every precinct in Harris County,” Siegel said. “And to engage voters for the whole ballot, top to bottom, and ensure every legal vote is counted.”

The video, recorded in early March, comes as the Texas Legislature considers a set of voting changes that would expand the role of poll watchers and limit other election officials’ ability to oversee those volunteers.

Republicans have proposed a raft of such legislation in dozens of statehouses across the country, insisting they are necessary to shore up confidence in voting systems. But nationwide, as in Texas, critics say these voting bills would only tighten access to the ballot box, particularly for voters of color and other marginalized groups.

This is an old tactic. The Republicans ran a similar program nationally back in the 1960s.

It it was the presidential election of 1964 that marked the first national effort at partisan vote suppression. It was called Operation Eagle Eye. The approach was simple: to challenge voters, especially voters of color, at the polls throughout the country on a variety of specious pretexts. If the challenge did not work outright—that is, if the voter was not prevented from casting a ballot (provisional ballots were not in widespread use at this time)—the challenge would still slow down the voting process, create long lines at the polls, and likely discourage some voters who could not wait or did not want to go through the hassle they were seeing other voters endure.

A Republican memo, obtained by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 1964, outlined plans for challenging voters at the polls and described the tactics as including encouraging stalling on lines in Democratic districts, equipping poll watchers with cameras to “frighten off . . . Democratic wrong-doers,” enlisting the help of local police sympathetic to the Goldwater campaign, and charging that ineligible Democratic voters were on the registration rolls.

Almost 60 years after the civil rights movement, they are still at it.

Can you see what’s wrong with this Fox News story?

President Biden’s niece worked in The Coca-Cola Company’s government relations arm as the company lobbied against a bill that would have banned US companies from importing a large swath of Chinese goods made with forced labor from Uyghur Muslims.

Missy Owens formerly worked in the American soda giant’s government affairs division for almost a decade, leaving in November of last year. The New York Times reported shortly after she left the company that Coca-Cola had joined Nike and other companies in lobbying against the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

I knew that you could see the problem. The first paragraph says she worked there “as the company lobbied against a bill” and then in the second it says she left the company before they lobbied against the bill.

It’s obvious what they’re insinuating: that the “woke corporations” they now consider to be enemies for speaking out against vote suppression laws are hypocrites because they lobbied against a bill that would have prevented them from buying goods made with forced labor. They too are hypocrites, of course — their Dear Leader, the man they all worship like a god, had this to say on the issue last July:

In an interview with Axios published on Sunday, Mr. Trump was asked why he had not approved a Treasury Department plan in late 2018 to impose sanctions on Chinese government officials who were connected to the severe crackdown on China’s Uighurs and other Muslim minorities.

“Well, we were in the middle of a major trade deal,” Mr. Trump said.

Trying to tie Biden into the corporate hypocrisy through his niece is a reach in any case. (And I don’t need to point out again all of Trump’s real conflicts of interest and corruption while in office…) But to smear her with this policy when she quit before they did it — and for all we know, because they did it — is just sloppy and stupid.

I think Fox is going after Biden’s family in retaliation for what they saw as unfair attacks on Trump’s family, even though he brought Ivanka and Jared into the White House and the boys spent all their time defending their father on television while blatantly selling access to potential business partners and political supporters. But it’s also to try to hurt Biden personally with his strong, sentimental attachment to his family. Maybe they think they can bait him into breaking down in public or something. It’s sick.

I think Trump really thought his thugs could force the congress to hand him the election. In his experience threats work. And if they did manage to hurt Pence or members of congress, he would have said that this demonstrated the seriousness of their purpose.

The AP has a new timeline of events from the Pentagon:

From a secure room in the Capitol on Jan. 6, as rioters pummeled police and vandalized the building, Vice President Mike Pence tried to assert control. In an urgent phone call to the acting defense secretary, he issued a startling demand.

“Clear the Capitol,” Pence said.

Elsewhere in the building, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were making a similarly dire appeal to military leaders, asking the Army to deploy the National Guard.

“We need help,” Schumer, D-N.Y., said in desperation, more than an hour after the Senate chamber had been breached.

At the Pentagon, officials were discussing media reports that the mayhem was not confined to Washington and that other state capitals were facing similar violence in what had the makings of a national insurrection.

“We must establish order,” said Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a call with Pentagon leaders.

But order would not be restored for hours.

These new details about the deadly riot are contained in a previously undisclosed document prepared by the Pentagon for internal use that was obtained by The Associated Press and vetted by current and former government officials.

The timeline adds another layer of understanding about the state of fear and panic while the insurrection played out, and lays bare the inaction by then-President Donald Trump and how that void contributed to a slowed response by the military and law enforcement. It shows that the intelligence missteps, tactical errors and bureaucratic delays were eclipsed by the government’s failure to comprehend the scale and intensity of a violent uprising by its own citizens.

With Trump not engaged, it fell to Pentagon officials, a handful of senior White House aides, the leaders of Congress and the vice president holed up in a secure bunker to manage the chaos.

While the timeline helps to crystalize the frantic character of the crisis, the document, along with hours of sworn testimony, provides only an incomplete picture about how the insurrection could have advanced with such swift and lethal force, interrupting the congressional certification of Joe Biden as president and delaying the peaceful transfer of power, the hallmark of American democracy.

Lawmakers, protected to this day by National Guard troops, will hear from the inspector general of the Capitol Police this coming week.

“Any minute that we lost, I need to know why,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., chair of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, which is investigating the siege, said last month.

The timeline fills in some of those gaps.

At 4:08 p.m. on Jan. 6, as the rioters roamed the Capitol and after they had menacingly called out for Pelosi, D-Calif., and yelled for Pence to be hanged, the vice president was in a secure location, phoning Christopher Miller, the acting defense secretary, and demanding answers.

There had been a highly public rift between Trump and Pence, with Trump furious that his vice president refused to halt the Electoral College certification. Interfering with that process was an act that Pence considered unconstitutional. The Constitution makes clear that the vice president’s role in this joint session of Congress is largely ceremonial.

Pence’s call to Miller lasted only a minute. Pence said the Capitol was not secure and he asked military leaders for a deadline for securing the building, according to the document.

By this point it had already been two hours since the mob overwhelmed Capitol Police unprepared for an insurrection. Rioters broke into the building, seized the Senate and paraded to the House. In their path, they left destruction and debris. Dozens of officers were wounded, some gravely.

Just three days earlier, government leaders had talked about the use of the National Guard. On the afternoon of Jan. 3, as lawmakers were sworn in for the new session of Congress, Miller and Milley gathered with Cabinet members to discuss the upcoming election certification. They also met with Trump.

In that meeting at the White House, Trump approved the activation of the D.C. National Guard and also told the acting defense secretary to take whatever action needed as events unfolded, according to the information obtained by the AP.

The next day, Jan. 4, the defense officials spoke by phone with Cabinet members, including the acting attorney general, and finalized details of the Guard deployment.

The Guard’s role was limited to traffic intersections and checkpoints around the city, based in part on strict restrictions mandated by district officials. Miller also authorized Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy to deploy, if needed, the D.C. Guard’s emergency reaction force stationed at Joint Base Andrews.

The Trump administration and the Pentagon were wary of a heavy military presence, in part because of criticism officials faced for the seemingly heavy-handed National Guard and law enforcement efforts to counter civil unrest in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

In particular, the D.C. Guard’s use of helicopters to hover over crowds in downtown Washington during those demonstrations drew widespread criticism. That unauthorized move prompted the Pentagon to more closely control the D.C. Guard.

“There was a lot of things that happened in the spring that the department was criticized for,” Robert Salesses, who is serving as the assistant defense secretary for homeland defense and global security, said at a congressional hearing last month.

On the eve of Trump’s rally Jan. 6 near the White House, the first 255 National Guard troops arrived in the district, and Mayor Muriel Bowser confirmed in a letter to the administration that no other military support was needed.

By the morning of Jan. 6, crowds started gathering at the Ellipse before Trump’s speech. According to the Pentagon’s plans, the acting defense secretary would only be notified if the crowd swelled beyond 20,000.

Before long it was clear that the crowd was far more in control of events than the troops and law enforcement there to maintain order.

Trump, just before noon, was giving his speech and he told supporters to march to the Capitol. The crowd at the rally was at least 10,000. By 1:15 p.m., the procession was well on its way there.

As protesters reached the Capitol grounds, some immediately became violent, busting through weak police barriers in front of the building and beating up officers who stood in their way.

At 1:49 p.m., as the violence escalated, then- Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund called Maj. Gen. William Walker, commanding general of the D.C. National Guard, to request assistance.

Sund’s voice was “cracking with emotion,” Walker later told a Senate committee. Walker immediately called Army leaders to inform them of the request.

Twenty minutes later, around 2:10 p.m., the first rioters were beginning to break through the doors and windows of the Senate. They then started a march through the marbled halls in search of the lawmakers who were counting the electoral votes. Alarms inside the building announced a lockdown.

Sund frantically called Walker again and asked for at least 200 guard members “and to send more if they are available.”

But even with the advance Cabinet-level preparation, no help was immediately on the way.

Over the next 20 minutes, as senators ran to safety and the rioters broke into the chamber and rifled through their desks, Army Secretary McCarthy spoke with the mayor and Pentagon leaders about Sund’s request.

On the Pentagon’s third floor E Ring, senior Army leaders were huddled around the phone for what they described as a “panicked” call from the D.C. Guard. As the gravity of the situation became clear, McCarthy bolted from the meeting, sprinting down the hall to Miller’s office and breaking into a meeting.

As minutes ticked by, rioters breached additional entrances in the Capitol and made their way to the House. They broke glass in doors that led to the chamber and tried to gain entry as a group of lawmakers was still trapped inside.

At 2:25 p.m., McCarthy told his staff to prepare to move the emergency reaction force to the Capitol. The force could be ready to move in 20 minutes.

At 2:44 p.m., Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer as she tried to climb through a window that led to the House floor.

Shortly after 3 p.m., McCarthy provided “verbal approval” of the activation of 1,100 National Guard troops to support the D.C. police and the development of a plan for the troops’ deployment duties, locations and unit sizes.

Minutes later the Guard’s emergency reaction force left Joint Base Andrews for the D.C. Armory. There, they would prepare to head to the Capitol once Miller, the acting defense secretary, gave final approval.

Meanwhile, the Joint Staff set up a video teleconference call that stayed open until about 10 p.m. that night, allowing staff to communicate any updates quickly to military leaders.

At 3:19 p.m., Pelosi and Schumer were calling the Pentagon for help and were told the National Guard had been approved.

But military and law enforcement leaders struggled over the next 90 minutes to execute the plan as the Army and Guard called all troops in from their checkpoints, issued them new gear, laid out a new plan for their mission and briefed them on their duties.

The Guard troops had been prepared only for traffic duties. Army leaders argued that sending them into a volatile combat situation required additional instruction to keep both them and the public safe.

By 3:37 p.m., the Pentagon sent its own security forces to guard the homes of defense leaders. No troops had yet reached the Capitol.

By 3:44 p.m., the congressional leaders escalated their pleas.

“Tell POTUS to tweet everyone should leave,” Schumer implored the officials, using the acronym for the president of the United States. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., asked about calling up active duty military.

At 3:48 p.m., frustrated that the D.C. Guard hadn’t fully developed a plan to link up with police, the Army secretary dashed from the Pentagon to D.C. police headquarters to help coordinate with law enforcement.

Trump broke his silence at 4:17 p.m., tweeting to his followers to “go home and go in peace.”

By about 4:30 p.m., the military plan was finalized and Walker had approval to send the Guard to the Capitol. The reports of state capitals breached in other places turned out to be bogus.

At about 4:40 p.m. Pelosi and Schumer were again on the phone with Milley and the Pentagon leadership, asking Miller to secure the perimeter.

But the acrimony was becoming obvious.

The congressional leadership on the call “accuses the National Security apparatus of knowing that protestors planned to conduct an assault on the Capitol,” the timeline said.

The call lasts 30 minutes. Pelosi’s spokesman acknowledges there was a brief discussion of the obvious intelligence failures that led to the insurrection.

It would be another hour before the first contingent of 155 Guard members were at the Capitol. Dressed in riot gear, they began arriving at 5:20 p.m.

They started moving out the rioters, but there were few, if any, arrests. by police.

At 8 p.m. the Capitol was declared secure.

The Trump administration literally could not do anything right. We were lucky we didn’t have a nuclear war.

“We used to make shit in this country. Build shit.” Then we spent decades letting it decay to the point we sold off the country to vultures who only saw value in cutting it up and selling off the parts.

We did it before and we can do it again.

George Floyd’s death in police custody last May in Minneapolis may have saved another black man’s life in Virginia in December. This story blew up last night online (Richmond Times-Dispatch):

A second lieutenant in the U.S. Army is suing two Virginia police officers over a traffic stop last December during which the officers drew their guns, pointed them at him and used a slang term to suggest he was facing execution before pepper-spraying him and knocking him to the ground.

Body camera footage shows Caron Nazario, who is Black and Latino, was dressed in uniform with his hands held in the air outside the driver’s side window as he told the armed officers, “I’m honestly afraid to get out.”

“Yeah, you should be!” one of the officers responded during the stop at a gas station.

Nazario was driving home at night in a newly-purchased Chevy Tahoe when stopped in Windsor, Virginia, a town of under 3,000 people in the southeast corner of the state. His temporary tag was taped to the rear window, attorney Jonathan Arthur told The Associated Press on Friday.

Windsor police officer Daniel Crocker radioed he was attempting to stop a vehicle with no rear license plate and tinted windows. He said the driver was “eluding police” and he considered it a “high-risk traffic stop,” according to a report he submitted afterward and which was included in the court filing.

Arthur said Nazario explained at the time that he wasn’t trying to elude the officer, but was trying to stop in a well-lit area “for officer safety and out of respect for the officers.”

Another officer, Joe Gutierrez, was driving by when he heard Crocker’s call, saw him attempting to stop the SUV and decided to join the traffic stop. Gutierrez acknowledged that Nazario’s decision to drive to a lighted area happens to him “a lot, and 80% of the time, it’s a minority,” Arthur said, quoting the officer.

Vice’s reporting indicates Nazario “slowed down his vehicle within seconds of the police pursuing him and activated his turn signal.” Then he “drove for less than a mile—below the posted speed limit—until he reached a well-lit BP gas station, where he pulled over. In all, it took about 1 minute, 40 seconds for Nazario to pull over after Crocker initiated the stop, according to the lawsuit.”

In the police video, officers with guns trained on Nazario shout conflicting commands.

“Keep your hands outside the window! Keep your hands outside the window!”

“Get out of the car NOW!”

Exiting would require Nazario to pull his left hand inside the window to open the door and to pull his right hand inside to release the seat belt. So how was Nazario to comply without disobeying one of those commands and being shot and killed for reaching ?

His hands still outside the window, Nazario was cool-headed enough to speak slowly and calmly, and to ask the officer screaming at him to get out of the car to “please calm down.”

Lt. Nazario is lucky he did not die that night. Driving to a well-lit area probably saved him.

Vice quotes the lawsuit:

The officers were not “willing or able to articulate why they had initiated the traffic stop,” according to the lawsuit. Gutierrez told Nazario, who did not immediately get out of the car despite repeated orders to do so, that he was “fixin’ to ride the lightning,” according to body camera footage.

“This is a colloquial expression for an execution, originating from glib reference to execution by the electric chair,” the lawsuit alleges. 

After officers pepper-sprayed Nazario, dragged him out of the driver’s seat, threw him onto the pavement, handcuffed him, and searched his vehicle … they let him go.

Nazario was told that he could leave without charges if he would “chill and let this go,” according to the lawsuit—or, he could be charged, have to go to court, and face the consequences in his military career.

Ironically, the Virginia legislature passed a bill last fall that would prohibit many of these kinds of traffic stops:

The legislation bars police from stopping drivers for a wide range of vehicle equipment offenses — everything from tinted windows to faulty brake lights to loud mufflers to objects dangling from the rear view mirrors. The measure says the cops can’t pull drivers over for having expired vehicle inspection stickers — unless they’re at least three months past due — or for outdated registration tags.

It says police can’t stop cars for driving without headlights at night — though the legislation’s sponsor told the Daily Press Friday that he wasn’t aware of that aspect of the bill until a reporter asked him about it. He said he would look into whether it should be removed.

In another big policy shift, the bill would block police from searching vehicles on the basis that a police officer says he smells marijuana coming from the car.

Reformers have long contended that the practice is open to abuse — with a built-in incentive for officers to lie about smelling an odor — and can perpetuate racial disparities in the justice system.

Gov. Ralph Northam signed the bill after requesting removal of the headlight provision. But it did not take effect until March 1, 2021.

Nazario had to have been terrified. Asked about Nazario’s condition, Arthur said, “He’s definitely not doing too well.”