Proud Boys leader charged with seditious conspiracy related to Capitol attack – as it happened

That’s it from us today. Here’s how another eventful day in Washington unfolded:

• The former leader of the Proud Boys, far-right nationalist group Enrique Tarrio, and four of his closest associates have been charged with seditious conspiracy related to the January 6 attack, according to a Justice Department filing released Monday. The rare charge against Tarrio as well as Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, Charles Donohoe and Dominic Pezzola builds on conspiracy charges filed by the government earlier this year.
• The January 6 committee is preparing to hold its first primetime hearing on Thursday. According to Axios, the committee has enlisted James Goldston, a former ABC News president who ran the shows “Nightline” and “Good Morning America,” to advise the committee on how to televise the hearing. The panel is expected to share never-before-seen photos taken inside the White House as the Capitol attack unfolded.
• A Democratic member of the January 6 committee said the panel’s hearings would demonstrate the extensive planning conducted by those who carried out the attack. “The committee has found evidence of concerted planning and premeditated activity,” Jamie Raskin said in a virtual discussion with the Washington Post today. “The idea that all of this was just a rowdy demonstration that spontaneously got a little out of control is absurd. You don’t almost knock over the US government by accident.”
• The Senate is trying to find a bipartisan compromise on gun-control legislation in the wake of the Uvalde massacre. Democratic senators are trying to find 10 Republicans to join them in supporting tougher gun laws, but that will be a heavy lift in the evenly divided chamber. Joe Manchin, the centrist Democrat who could play a key role in negotiations, said he would support raising the minimum age required to purchase semi-automatic weapons from 18 to 21. Manchin also signaled openness to an assault weapons ban, but that proposal is unlikely to win enough Republican support to be included in the final bill.
• The supreme court released more decisions this morning, but the country is still waiting to hear whether justices will move forward with their initial ruling to overturn Roe v Wade. The abortion case is one of dozens of decisions that the court still needs to release in the coming weeks. The court has announced that its next round of rulings will be released on Wednesday.

Thanks for following along with our coverage today. The blog will be back tomorrow morning, with more updates on the January 6 committee and the Senate negotiations over gun-control.

Back in Congress, a group of 10 “frontline” Democratic House lawmakers, who are considered the most vulnerable to getting ousted in the November midterms, have written a letter to the chamber’s leaders asking for votes on bills that would fight inflation.

The letter reported by Punchbowl News comes as the country faces an ongoing wave of price increases for essentials like gasoline, as well as a shortage of baby formula that has rattled the Biden administration.

Addressed to House speaker Nancy Pelosi and majority leader Steny Hoyer, the letter doesn’t name specific bills, and acknowledges that many proposals the chamber already passed haven’t been brought up in the Senate. The lawmakers nonetheless call for votes:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;} With the time that remains in the 117th Congress after the important upcoming votes on gun violence prevention – and particularly in the few months that remain before the late summer district work period – we urge you to prioritize bills that would lower costs for working families, address rising inflation and resolve supply chain challenges. To be clear, we know that many such bills have already received affirmative votes in the House and now await Senate action. However, we believe that more must be done to ensure that this body remains laser focused on addressing the most urgent challenges that continue to impact our constituents.

Consumer prices have been rising over the past year at rates not seen since the 1980s, fueling public discontent with the Biden administration. The Federal Reserve is hiking interest rates to tame the price increases, but much of the inflation has been caused by factors beyond their control such as global supply chain snarls and the war in Ukraine. Some economists fear the combination of higher rates and global supply shocks will put the economy into a recession — perhaps next year, just as campaign season for the 2024 presidential election kicks off.

Meanwhile in the UK, members of parliament have spent the day voting on whether to boot Prime Minister Boris Johnson from office, and the verdict is in: Johnson survives his no-confidence vote, 211 to 148.

That means he stays as prime minister, leader of the Conservatives and Joe Biden’s counterpart in one of America’s closest allies. The Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow has been keeping a meticulous live blog of the historic day.

Former leader of the Proud Boys far-right nationalist group Enrique Tarrio and four of his closest associates have been charged with seditious conspiracy related to the January 6 attack, according to a Justice Department filing released Monday.

The rare charge against Tarrio as well as Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, Charles Donohoe, and Dominic Pezzola builds on conspiracy charges filed by the government earlier this year.

In January, the Justice Department leveled seditious conspiracy charges against 11 members of another far-right group, the Oath Keepers militia, over their involvement in the assault on the Capitol as lawmakers were meeting to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.

Tarrio, 38, is also facing counts of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and obstruction of an official proceeding, and two counts each of assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers and destruction of government property.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has signaled a deal between Democrat and Republican lawmakers on a new gun control bill could be reached this week.

Republican Senator John Cornyn and Democratic Senator Chris Murphy have been leading negotiations in the evenly divided chamber to introduce some kind of legislation that could restrict gun purchases following a recent wave of mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, Uvalde, Texas and elsewhere.

The January 6 committee will hold its second hearing on Monday, June 13, at 10am ET, the House panel has just announced.

The first hearing is happening on Thursday at 8pm ET, and it is expected to attract worldwide news coverage, but the second hearing is not scheduled for the evening.

The select committee has reportedly enlisted the help of James Goldston, a former ABC News president, to assist in the planning of the primetime event.

Speaking to the Washington Post earlier today, a Democratic member of the committee, Jamie Raskin, said investigators had “found evidence of concerted planning and premeditated activity”.

“The idea that all of this was just a rowdy demonstration that spontaneously got a little out of control is absurd,” Raskin said. “You don’t almost knock over the US government by accident.”

The supreme court will now issue opinions on Wednesday, June 8, according to its website.

The justice have 30 cases to release decisions on, with the workload possible extending into next month. Several of these may be extremely consequential, including an environmental case out of West Virginia, a gun rights case stemming from New York, an immigration case via Texas involving the US-Mexico border and the pivotal Mississippi abortion case that also includes the state authorities asking Scotus to overturn Roe v Wade.

Nearly half of Republican voters think the US just has to live with mass shootings, according to a poll released in the aftermath of the Texas elementary school murders last month and as politicians in Washington negotiate for gun reform.

The CBS and YouGov poll returned familiar results, including 62% support for a nationwide ban on semi-automatic rifles, the kind of gun used in Uvalde, Texas.

Nineteen young children and two adults were killed at Robb elementary school on 24 May by an 18-year-old who bought his weapon legally.

But clear national support for a ban on such rifles or changes to purchasing ages and background checks is not mirrored in Congress. Most Republicans, supported financially by the powerful gun lobby, remain implacably opposed to most gun reform.

Read the Guardian’s full report:

An end to abortion rights would create yet another crisis for Biden, whose presidency has been increasingly defined by a list problems, annoyances and calamities that seems to only grow longer.

From high inflation to the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan to nationwide mass shootings, my colleague Lauren Gambino has an excellent piece on how Biden has become a crisis president — whether he wants to or not:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}In his third run for president, Joe Biden’s pitch to Americans was simple: after half a century in elected office, including eight years as vice-president, he understood the demands of what is arguably the hardest job in the world. It was a point Biden stressed on the campaign trail, in his own folksy way: “Everything landed on the president’s desk but locusts.”

Nearly a year and a half into his presidency, Biden now appraises his own fortunes differently. “I used to say in Barack’s administration: ‘Everything landed on his desk but locusts,’” he told Democratic donors in Oregon. “Well, they landed on my desk.”

Successive mass shootings, including a racist attack at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, and a massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 elementary school students and their teachers dead, present just the latest test for a president desperate to act but constrained, once again, by the limits of his own power.

The White House has released a statement condemning legislation introduced in Louisiana that would make abortion a crime of murder.

“Louisiana’s extreme bill will criminalize abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest and punish reproductive healthcare professionals with up to ten years in prison,” said Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, in a statement.

“The president is committed to protecting the constitutional rights of Americans afforded by Roe for nearly 50 years, and ensuring that women can make their own choices about their lives, bodies, and families. An overwhelming majority of the American people agree and reject these kinds of radical measures.”

Supporters of the bill admit it’s unconstitutional, but only as long as the Roe v Wade decision that enshrines abortion rights in the United States remains law. That decision’s days appear to be numbered, according to a draft of a supreme court opinion that was leaked last month.

Located just across the street from the Capitol, the supreme court has found itself sucked into the inquiry over January 6 as investigators eye the actions of Ginni Thomas, wife of conservative justice Clarence Thomas.

In March, my colleague Ed Pilkington reported on the calls for conflict-of-interest rules that erupted after revelations that Ginni Thomas pressed then-president Donald Trump’s chief of staff to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election:

The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reported later that month that committee members have weighed asking Thomas to cooperate either voluntarily or with a subpoena, but no decision has yet been made.

More revelations about Thomas’s actions around the time of the insurrection have trickled out since then, including that she pressed Republicans in Arizona to overturn Biden’s victory there, as first reported in The Washington Post last month.

January 6 committee member Jamie Raskin hinted to The Washington Post that lawmakers have discovered Donald Trump more than just incited the attack on the Capitol.

Raskin did not elaborate on what the House committee found, but the actions of the former president have been at the center of the inquiry from the start.

“The select committee has found evidence about a lot more than incitement here, and we’re gonna be laying out the evidence about all of the actors who were pivotal to what took place on Jan 6,” Raskin said.

“Donald Trump and the White House were at the center of these events. That’s the only way really of making sense of them all,” the Democratic House representative added.

Trump was impeached by the Democrat-controlled House immediately following the insurrection, but the Republican-led Senate decided not to convict and remove him from office, allowing Trump to remain in the White House for the final weeks of his term.

A Democratic member of the January 6 committee, Jamie Raskin, said the panel’s hearings would demonstrate the extensive planning conducted by those who carried out the attack on the Capitol.

“The committee has found evidence of concerted planning and premeditated activity,” Raskin said in a virtual discussion with the Washington Post today.

“The idea that all of this was just a rowdy demonstration that spontaneously got a little out of control is absurd. You don’t almost knock over the US government by accident.”

Raskin said the committee would use the hearings to outline all the evidence it has collected and provide recommendations on how to avoid future coups that could threaten the security of the US government.

Raskin’s comments echo those of Liz Cheney, the Republican vice-chair of the committee, who said yesterday that she considers the January 6 attack to be a conspiracy.

“It is extremely broad,” Cheney told CBS News. “It’s extremely well-organized. It’s really chilling.”

Warning of the danger of Trump’s hold on the Republican party, Cheney added, “I mean, it is fundamentally antithetical, it is contrary to everything conservatives believe, to embrace a personality cult. And yet, that is what so many in my party are doing today.”

The January 6 committee has enlisted James Goldston, a former ABC News president who ran the shows “Nightline” and “Good Morning America,” to advise the committee on how to televise its hearings beginning Thursday, according to Axios.

Axios reports:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;} I’m told Goldston is busily producing Thursday’s 8 p.m. ET hearing as if it were a blockbuster investigative special.

He plans to make it raw enough so that skeptical journalists will find the material fresh, and chew over the disclosures in future coverage.

And he wants it to draw the eyeballs of Americans who haven’t followed the ins and outs of the Capitol riot probe.

Goldston will apparently have a lot of material to work with. The committee reportedly plans to show never-before-seen photos from inside the White House on January 6, and new security-camera footage from the Capitol, taken as the insurrection occurred, will also be shared.

The committee has already conducted more than 1,000 depositions and interviews as part of its investigation, and clips from those conversations are expected to be played during the hearing.

Meanwhile, Republicans are busy planning a counter-messaging program to challenge the committee’s findings. According to Axios, House Republican leaders and outside conservative groups will paint the panel as hyperpartisan to try to discredit their conclusions.

Joe Manchin, the centrist Democrat who could play a key role in reaching a Senate compromise on a gun-control bill, outlined what he would like to see in the legislation.

The West Virginia senator told CNN that he would support raising the minimum age required to purchase semi-automatic weapons from 18 to 21. The gunman who carried out the Uvalde shooting was 18.

Manchin also indicated he would support some version of a red-flag provision, as long as the policy allowed for due process for those blocked from purchasing guns.

“We know we can do something that would have prevented this — raising the age,” Manchin said of Uvalde. “And the second thing is that we know that the red-flag laws do work, as long as there’s due process.”

On the question of enacting a ban on assault weapons, Manchin said he would be open to the idea, but that proposal faces stiff opposition from Senate Republicans.

“I never thought I had a need for that type of high-capacity automatic weapon,” Manchin said. “I like to shoot. I like to go out and hunt. I like to go out sports shooting. I do all that. But I’ve never felt I needed something of that magnitude.”

While there were no major decisions made by the supreme court today, the justices did opt not to review legal sanctions against Republican Senate candidate Mark McCloskey and his wife Patricia, who pointed guns at protesters during racial justice protesters in Missouri two years ago.

CNN reports that the McCloskeys, both attorneys, pled guilty to misdemeanors over the incident, which were later pardoned by Missouri’s governor. However the state’s supreme court later sanctioned them, calling their actions “moral turpitude.”

The McCloskeys contested the penalties, citing the constitution’s second amendment, but CNN reported the argument didn’t have much chance of success.

Mark McCloskey is a candidate in the Republican senate primary in Missouri to succeed Roy Blunt, who is retiring, but a SurveyUSA poll released last month did not find him among the race’s frontrunners.

As the Senate tries to find compromise on gun control, Joe Biden is using the presidential bully pulpit to urge Congress to take action to prevent more tragedies like Uvalde.

“After Columbine, after Sandy Hook, after Charleston, after Orlando, after Las Vegas, after Parkland, nothing has been done,” Biden said on Twitter. “This time, that can’t be true. This time, we must actually do something.”

Biden offered the same message to the nation last week, when he delivered a primetime address on the need to enact stricter gun laws.

He proposed expanding background checks and banning assault weapons. If Congress cannot approve an assault weapons ban, which seems unlikely given Republicans’ opposition to the idea, then the minimum age required to purchase those guns should be raised from 18 to 21, Biden said.

The House has already passed several gun-control bills, and Biden called on the Senate to act as well in the wake of the Uvalde massacre.

However, that will be difficult when the upper chamber is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, and the filibuster rules requires 60 votes to advance most legislation.

“I support the bipartisan efforts that include a small group of Democrats and Republican senators trying to find a way,” Biden said last Thursday.

“But my God, the fact that the majority of the Senate Republicans don’t want any of these proposals even to be debated or come up for a vote, I find unconscionable. We can’t fail the American people again.”

This week will provide some key clues as to whether any gun-control bill can pass the Senate.