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    US Capitol attack: first defendant in 6 January riot expected to be sentenced

    Three years of probation, 40 hours of community service and $500.That is the punishment federal prosecutors have requested for the first Capitol rioter expected to be sentenced in court, Anna Morgan-Lloyd, a 49-year-old Donald Trump supporter from Indiana.“Best day ever. We stormed the capitol building,” Morgan-Lloyd wrote on Facebook on 6 January, prosecutors said. She added that she and her friend “were in the first 50 people in”, authorities said.With nearly 500 people already arrested and charged for their roles in the 6 January attack, the sentencing of Morgan-Lloyd, a grandmother from a small town in Indiana with no known connections to extremist groups, will be the first indication of what kinds of sentences federal judges may impose on the hundreds of people who invaded the Capitol during the official certification of Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election.While some members of extremist groups are facing more serious conspiracy charges for allegedly planning the violence at the Capitol in advance, and others are facing charges for assaulting law enforcement officers, many defendants, like Morgan-Lloyd, are facing only misdemeanor charges.Morgan-Lloyd has agreed to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of “parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building,” which carries a maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment, and is scheduled to be sentenced by a federal judge on Wednesday afternoon.In a sentencing memo, federal prosecutors said Morgan-Lloyd and her friend Donna Sue Bissey were inside one hallway of the Capitol for a little over 10 minutes, that she did not engage in any acts of violence or destroy any government property, and that she did not appear to have planned her actions in advance or coordinated with any extremist groups.In a letter to the court, prosecutors said, the 49-year-old took responsibility for her actions, and wrote, “At first it didn’t dawn on me, but later I realized that if every person like me, who wasn’t violent, was removed from that crowd, the ones who were violent may have lost the nerve to do what they did.”Because she had no previous criminal record, Morgan-Lloyd quickly confessed to her participation and cooperated with law enforcement, and later expressed regret for what she had done, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo, they believed it was appropriate to request no prison time for Morgan-Lloyd, only an extended period of probation, community service, and a $500 restitution payment towards the nearly $1.5m in damages the Capitol building sustained during the invasion.“I think she’s learned a lot,” Morgan-Lloyd’s attorney, Heather Shaner, told the Guardian. “This has been a trauma for her, and she knows it was a trauma for the United States of America that people did what they did, and she would never do it again.”Shaner said that her client was “from a very small town and has had very limited life exposure”, and that she believed that many of the people who participated in the Capitol riots were “were uninformed or misinformed”.“She’s a very fine woman, and I hope she gets probation,” Shaner said.Prosecutors wrote that Morgan-Lloyd spent “approximately two days” incarcerated after she was initially arrested in February and that the time inside the criminal justice system was likely “eye-opening” and a deterrent to any future criminal behavior.The conditions of her probation should include barring her owning firearms, prosecutors requested.Unlike most federal defendants, who typically remain in detention before trial, the vast majority of people charged in the Capitol riots have already been released, a Guardian analysis found. The stark contrast in pretrial detention rates has prompted questions about whether the predominantly white Capitol defendants were getting different treatment from prosecutors and judges than most federal defendants, who are Black and Latino. More

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    Biden signs bill marking Juneteenth as federal holiday celebrating end of slavery in US – video

    The US will officially recognize Juneteenth as a federal holiday on 19 June after Joe Biden signed a bill into law which commemorates the end of slavery in the country. The president described a day to remember the moral stain of slavery but also to celebrate the capacity to heal. Before signing the bill, Biden said: ‘I’ve only been president for several months, but I think this will go down for me as one of the greatest honors I will have had as president’

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    Trump tells Fox News he ‘didn’t win’ election but doesn’t drop fraud lie

    Donald Trump has told Fox News he “didn’t win” the 2020 presidential election, and wishes Joe Biden well.The former president made the admission seven months after the election was called for his rival and five months after Biden’s inauguration, during a rambling phone interview with Fox show host Sean Hannity on Wednesday night.He did not drop his lie that the Democrat won thanks to electoral fraud.“We were supposed to win easily, 64m votes,” Trump said. “We got 75m votes and we didn’t win but let’s see what happens on that.”Biden won more than 7m more votes than Trump and won by 306-232 in the electoral college, a result Trump called a landslide when it was in his favour over Hillary Clinton in 2016.Nonetheless Trump has pursued his lie about electoral fraud both in court – where more than 80 lawsuits challenging the result have been thrown out – and in a speech which stoked the deadly attack on the US Capitol by supporters on 6 January.Trump was impeached a second time, for inciting an insurrection, but acquitted when only seven Republican senators voted to convict. GOP senators also blocked the establishment of an independent, 9/11-style inquiry into the attack on the Capitol.Republicans in the states have pursued Trump’s lie about electoral fraud – Arizona, one of the key states won by Biden, mounted a controversial audit of ballots in its most populous county.Republicans in state governments have introduced laws to limit ballot access among communities more likely to vote Democratic, and to make it easier to overturn election results.Trump also told Hannity he hoped Biden “has no problems” in office.“I want him to do well,” he said. “I think the election was unbelievably unfair, but I want this guy to go out and do well for our country.”Biden returned to the US on Wednesday from Geneva, where he met the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, at the end of a European tour.Trump told Hannity Biden “gave a very big stage to Russia, and we got nothing … I think it was a good day for Russia”.Trump held a summit with Putin in Helsinki in 2018 which most observers thought was a good day for Russia and a humiliating one for the US.Most were outraged when Trump sided with Putin over Russian interference in the 2016 US election. He told Hannity the investigation of that interference and links between him and Moscow “made it difficult to deal with Russia”.He also complained about reporting of the Russia investigation, which produced convictions of numerous Trump aides but which under then attorney general William Barr left Trump untouched despite extensive evidence of attempts to obstruct justice.Biden is 78. Hannity suggested his mental acuity was slipping. Trump turned 75 this week. Though he complained the US under Biden was in a “shocking state”, Trump said that for Biden, “age is not the problem”.Trump retains a firm grip on the Republican party, stoking its attacks on Biden’s $1.9tn coronavirus stimulus and rescue package and similarly priced infrastructure proposals as dangerously and radically leftwing.“This is far worse than Bernie was ever going to be,” he said. “Bernie Sanders would have never thought to suggest some of the things that are happening right now.”Though the Trump administration fast-tracked development of Covid-19 vaccines and began distribution, Biden accelerated the effort. Though the US death toll from the coronavirus pandemic passed 600,000 this week, most states are in the process of reopening.Trump told Hannity he believed the theory Covid-19 escaped from a laboratory in China. US intelligence agencies are investigating that theory and others.Trump leads most polls of possible Republican nominees for 2024, has announced a return to large-scale public events and has done little to suggest he will not mount another run for the White House.He told Hannity he would “be making a decision on 2024” after midterm elections next year, “but if you look at the numbers, people are liking me more than ever before.“I think the reason is they are watching what is happening to our country, they are watching no energy independence, never has there been a scene like what is happening at the border and the death that is being caused … they are looking at the economy and inflation, looking at interest rates and gasoline prices, and I guess it is making me very popular.”Trump, who bequeathed Biden an economy cratered by Covid-19, has also proved popular with prosecutors, facing mounting legal problems over his business dealings.In Washington, Democrats are demanding accountability for justice department actions under his administration, including obtaining the private records of reporters and congressmen in leak investigations. More

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    ‘Pure insanity’: emails reveal Trump push to overturn election defeat

    Donald Trump tried to enlist top US law enforcement officials in a conspiracy-laden and doomed effort to overturn his election defeat, a campaign they described as “pure insanity”, newly released emails show.The documents reveal Trump and his allies’ increasingly desperate efforts between December and early January to push bogus conspiracy theories and cling to power – and the struggle of bewildered justice department officials to resist them.“These documents show that President Trump tried to corrupt our nation’s chief law enforcement agency in a brazen attempt to overturn an election that he lost,” said Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House of Representatives’ oversight committee, which released the emails on Tuesday.At least five times, the documents show, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, instructed justice department officials to investigate false allegations of voter fraud, including a conspiracy theory called “Italygate”, which claims electoral data was changed from Europe by means including military satellites and with the knowledge of the CIA.On 1 January Meadows, a fierce Trump loyalist, sent Jeffrey Rosen, then acting attorney general, a link to a YouTube video detailing the “Italygate” theory. Rosen forwarded the email to the then acting deputy attorney general, Richard Donoghue, who replied: “Pure insanity.”The documents also show that Trump pressured Rosen to make the justice department take up election fraud claims.But Rosen refused to arrange a meeting between officials and Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who has played a leading role in pushing the conspiracy theories. Meadows asked Rosen to help arrange a meeting with Giuliani, the emails show.Rosen wrote to a justice department colleague on 1 January: “I flatly refused, said I would not be giving any special treatment to Giuliani or any of his ‘witnesses’, and reaffirmed yet again that I will not talk to Giuliani about any of this.”Meadows also sent an email to Rosen about alleged irregularities in Fulton county, Georgia, a state Joe Biden won narrowly. Rosen again forwarded the email to Donoghue and asked: “Can you believe this? I am not going to respond to the message below.”Trump, through an assistant, sent Rosen an email on 14 December with documents purporting to show evidence of election fraud in northern Michigan – a debunked allegation a federal judge had already rejected.Forty minutes later, Trump announced that William Barr, his second and loyal attorney general but who proved reluctant to back the claims of a stolen election, would resign and be replaced by Rosen.Two weeks later, on 29 December, Trump’s White House assistant emailed Rosen and other justice department lawyers a draft legal brief they were urged to file at the US supreme court.The department never filed the brief. Emails released by the House committee showed that Kurt Olsen, a Maryland lawyer involved in writing Trump’s draft brief, repeatedly tried to meet Rosen but was unsuccessful.The draft brief backed by Trump argued that changes to voting procedures by Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania, made amid the coronavirus pandemic to expand mail-in voting, were unlawful. Biden won all those states.Similar arguments were made in a lawsuit filed by Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas and a Trump ally. The supreme court rejected that long-shot lawsuit in December.The House oversight committee has requested that former officials including Meadows and Donoghue appear for transcribed testimony. The committee previously requested Rosen’s testimony on 21 May.Eric Swalwell, a Democratic congressman, told MSNBC: “It would be more surprising if these emails were not sent. It’s really on brand for what Donald Trump was trying to do … to weaponise his own Department of Justice to overturn the will of the American voter. Frankly, we cannot allow this to pass without consequences.”Congress also is investigating the deadly 6 January attack on the US Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters trying to stop the formal certification of Biden’s election victory.On Tuesday the attorney general, Merrick Garland, said nearly 500 people had been arrested in connection with the attack.“The resolve and dedication with which the justice department has approached the investigation of the 6 January attack,” he said, “reflects the seriousness with which we take this assault on a mainstay of our democratic system, the peaceful transfer of power.“Over the 160 days since the attack, we have arrested over 480 individuals and brought hundreds and hundreds of charges against those who attacked law enforcement officers, obstructed justice and used deadly and dangerous weapons to those ends.” More

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    White House unveils first national strategy to fight domestic terrorism

    The White House has published its first ever national strategy for countering domestic terrorism five months after a violent mob stormed the US Capitol in Washington.The framework released on Tuesday by the national security council describes the threat as now more serious than potential attacks from overseas but emphasises the need to protect civil liberties.Anticipating Republican objections that Joe Biden could use counterterrorism tools to persecute supporters of Donald Trump, the strategy is also careful to state that domestic terrorism must be tackled in an “ideologically neutral” manner.It cites examples such as “an anti-authority extremist” ambushing, shooting and killing five police officers in Dallas In 2016; a lone gunman (and leftwing activist) wounding four people at a congressional baseball practice in 2017; and an “unprecedented attack” on Congress on 6 January.“They come across the political spectrum,” a senior administration said on a media conference call. “We acknowledge the shooting at the congressional baseball, the attack on police officers in Dallas, just as we acknowledge the attack in Charlottesville and the attack on the Capitol on January 6.“So it’s not motivating politics or ideology that matters for us or, more importantly for the strategy and its implementation. It’s when political grievances become acts of violence and we remain laser focused on that.”The strategy, to be formally announced by the attorney general, Merrick Garland, on Tuesday, follows an order from Biden on his first full day in office for a review of government efforts to address domestic terrorism, which is described as “the most urgent terrorism threat the United States faces today”.An expert assessment of the threat provided by intelligence and law enforcement, a summary of which was released in March, found that its two most deadly elements are white supremacists and anti-government violent extremists.A senior administration said: “Further, it found that violent extremists who promote the superiority of the white race have the most persistent transnational connections and may be in frequent contact with violent extremists abroad.“However, it’s important to underscore that the study provided to us by ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] did not find a robust nexus between domestic terrorism and foreign actors. This is largely today an inside-out problem, not an outside-in problem, although we do know that our adversaries are seeking to sow divisions in our society.”The strategy consists of four pillars: efforts to understand and share information regarding the full range of domestic terrorism threats; efforts to prevent domestic terrorists from successfully recruiting, inciting, and mobilising Americans to violence; efforts to deter and disrupt domestic terrorist activity before it yields violence; long–term issues that contribute to domestic terrorism that must be addressed to ensure that this threat diminishes over generations.The prevention aspect includes a focus on working with big tech companies such as Facebook, which has been strongly criticised for allowing rightwing hate groups to thrive and coordinate, including ahead of the 6 January insurrection.An official said: “We as the government see different things from what any particular tech company might see, Any particular tech company often knows its own platform very well but the government sees things such as threats of violence across platforms … The process has already begun between the government and the tech sector and it will continue.”Biden’s budget for fiscal year 2022 includes more than $100m in additional resources for analysts, investigators, prosecutors and other personnel and resources to thwart domestic terrorism.The government says it is improving employee screening to enhance methods for identifying domestic terrorists who might pose “insider threats”. The defence, justice and homeland security departments are pursuing efforts “to ensure domestic terrorists are not employed within our military or law enforcement ranks and improve screening and vetting processes”.The strategy does not take a position on whether there should be a new statute criminalising domestic terrorism, leaving the question to a review by the justice department.Despite its plea for neutrality, a White House fact sheet does cite key Biden legislation – the American Rescue Plan, American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan – as providing “relief and opportunity” that can help counter long term distrust in democracy and its ability to deliver.It adds: “Government will also work to find ways to counter the polarization often fueled by disinformation, misinformation, and dangerous conspiracy theories online, supporting an information environment that fosters healthy democratic discourse.” More

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    Marjorie Taylor Greene apologises for comparing Covid-19 masks to Holocaust – video

    Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene apologised for comparing Covid-19 mask requirements and vaccinations to the Nazi Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews. ‘I have made a mistake and it’s really bothered me for a couple of weeks now, and so I definitely want to own it,’ Taylor Greene said. Her apology on Monday came amid calls from some Democrats to censure her for the Holocaust remarks. Her comments had also been denounced by Republican congressional leaders

    Marjorie Taylor Greene apologizes for comparing House mask rule to the Holocaust
    Fury as Marjorie Taylor Greene likens Covid rules to Nazi treatment of Jews More

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    Biden says Putin a 'worthy adversary' ahead of talks – video

    Joe Biden said meeting with Vladimir Putin would be ‘critical’ and that he would offer to cooperate on areas of common interest if the Kremlin so choses. Biden warned that if Russia chose not to cooperate in areas like cybersecurity ‘then we will respond’. The US president also characterised Putin as ‘bright’, ‘tough’ and ‘a worthy adversary’. When questioned by reporters, Biden said the potential death of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, now jailed in Russia, would be a tragedy and would hurt Russian relations with the rest of the world and with the United States. The two men are meeting in Geneva on 16 June for the first time as presidents

    Biden says US-Russia relations at low point but ‘we’re not looking for conflict’
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    Birx hinted she wanted Trump to lose election, new book says

    Dr Deborah Birx, then the White House coronavirus taskforce coordinator, hinted to an Obama-era official shortly before the 2020 election she wanted Donald Trump to lose to Joe Biden.Andy Slavitt, a former acting chief of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, writes in a new book, according to CNN, that he spoke to Birx “to get a sense for whether, in the event of a strained transition of government, she would help give Biden and his team the best chance to be effective.“At one point, after a brief pause, she looked me in the eye and said, ‘I hope the election turns out a certain way.’ I had the most important information I needed.”Slavitt stepped down last week as senior adviser to the Biden pandemic response. His book, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the US Coronavirus Response, is published on Tuesday.The book draws on conversations with Trump insiders. Slavitt, who also worked to fix the Affordable Care Act website, spoke to such figures in an informal role.“Her early optimism was long gone,” Slavitt writes of his meeting with Birx, according to CNN, adding: “At the end of October 2020, she was beyond all of that; she was downright scared.”Slavitt also writes of conversations with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who led the federal response. Slavitt says Kushner told him some governors “clearly don’t want to succeed” and had “bad incentives to keep blaming us”.Kushner’s view that governors should take the blame for US failures has been reported elsewhere. He is reportedly working on a book of his own.Speaking to the Daily Beast’s The New Abnormal podcast, Slavitt said he had “kind of a front-row seat” to the chaos of the US response, prominently including Scott Atlas, a Stanford medic but not an epidemiologist or infectious diseases specialist and an aggressive champion for Trump in the press.“I contacted the White House,” he said, “I contacted Jared Kushner, every one of my conversations with Jared Kushner and Deborah Birx, they’re in the book. And you know the job that they had to do was, essentially, at a bare minimum, acknowledge that we have a more serious situation than we have ever had.“Show a little bit of empathy, lead the country by asking for even a small amount of sacrifice. They didn’t do any of those things and they didn’t plan and put together a competent response and it largely it had to do with the person they all worked for.”Slavitt told the Daily Beast Birx “did some good things”. He called Atlas “a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster that Donald Trump created”.Deaths from Covid-19 have slowed dramatically as more Americans are vaccinated and society reopens. But under the shadow of Covid variants, vaccination rates are also slowing and the US is on track to pass 600,000 deaths this week.Slavitt reportedly writes that Birx, a respected public health official with a history in the fight against Aids before she joined the Trump taskforce, told him she had “no illusions” about the effect on her government career.Another official who came to mass media prominence as part of the Trump response, Dr Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has continued to serve under Biden. Birx has not. More