Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 163 Shares169 Views

    in Elections

    FBI releases new Capitol attack footage as it seeks to identify 10 suspects

    The FBI has released new footage of the deadly 6 January US Capitol insurrection as it seeks to identify 10 suspects involved in what the agency says were “some of the most violent attacks on officers”.Law enforcement are still pursuing more than 100 suspects from the attack on Congress, which Donald Trump was accused of inciting and led to his historic second impeachment. Hundreds have been arrested after the violent mob invaded the Capitol to try to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory.But the 10 suspects highlighted this week by the federal authorities are considered amongst the most dangerous still at large.Each of the clips posted to the FBI’s Washington field office website shows the suspects allegedly in the act of assaulting the officers, alongside closeups of their faces, several of them masked but many not.“The FBI is asking for the public’s help in identifying 10 individuals suspected of being involved in some of the most violent attacks on officers who were protecting the US Capitol and our democratic process on January 6,” Steven M D’Antuono, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office, said in a statement accompanying the footage.“These individuals are seen on video committing egregious crimes against those who have devoted their lives to protecting the American people.”The FBI said it had already received “hundreds of thousands of tips” following the riots that claimed five lives when a mob stormed the Capitol and invaded the US Senate and House of Representatives.At a rally earlier in the day, the former president incited his followers to march to the Capitol building and “fight like hell” in support of his false claims that the election was stolen from him.The massive investigation that ensued led to the arrest of more than 300 individuals, of whom 65 were arrested for assaulting law enforcement officers, the FBI said.The most recent came this week as the agency arrested and charged two men, Julian Elie Khater, 32, of Pennsylvania, and George Pierre Tanios, 39, from West Virginia, with assaulting Brian Sicknick, a US Capitol police officer who died in hospital after the attacks.Khater was seen in social media footage discharging a spray he referred to as “bear shit” into the 42-year-old officer’s face, court papers allege. The cause of death is not yet known, although investigators believe Sicknick may have ingested a chemical substance, possibly bear spray, that may have played a role.Earlier this month, Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, called the riots “domestic terrorism” in congressional testimony.“That attack, that siege, was criminal behavior, plain and simple, and it’s behavior that we, the FBI, view as domestic terrorism,” Wray told the Senate judiciary committee.“The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a number of years now, and it’s not going away any time soon,” he added, although analysis has concluded that most of the 6 January rioters were unconnected to any extremist group.The alleged assaults captured in the new FBI footage take place in a variety of locations around the capitol. All the suspects are male, and several are wearing red “Make America Great Again” caps that became a signature of Trump’s supporters during his tumultuous presidency.“We’re grateful to the members of the public who have already been a tremendous help in these investigations,” D’Antuono said.“We know it can be a difficult decision to report information about family, friends, or co-workers, but it is the right thing to do.” More

  • 175 Shares159 Views

    in Elections

    'We are in pain': Asian American lawmaker Grace Meng makes powerful speech – video

    The Asian American lawmaker Grace Meng called out the violence and discrimination against her community at a hearing on Capitol Hill on Thursday. ‘Our community is bleeding. We are in pain. And for the last year, we’ve been screaming out for help,’ she  said. She told a panel the rising tide of anti-Asian bigotry was fuelled in part by rhetoric from Donald Trump and his allies, who have referred to Covid-19 as the ‘China virus’ and ‘kung flu’ 

    Asian American lawmakers say violence has reached ‘crisis point’
    ‘That hit home for me’: Atlanta reeling after spa shootings of Asian Americans More

  • 125 Shares169 Views

    in Elections

    12 Republicans vote against honoring Capitol police for protecting Congress

    A dozen Republicans voted against a resolution honoring US Capitol police for their efforts to protect members of Congress during the insurrection on 6 January.The House voted 413-12 on Wednesday to award congressional gold medals, Congress’s “highest expression of national appreciation”, to all members of the Capitol police force.The Republicans who opposed this honor included Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Matt Gaetz of Florida and Thomas Massie of Kentucky. They and other opposing members said they had problems with the text of the legislation.Massie told reporters he disagreed with the terms “insurrection” and “temple” in the legislation.The resolution said: “On January 6, 2021, a mob of insurrectionists forced its way into the US Capitol building and congressional office buildings and engaged in acts of vandalism, looting, and violently attacked Capitol police officers.”It also named the three officers who responded to the attack and died shortly after – Capitol police officers Brian Sicknick and Howard Liebengood and Metropolitan police department officer Jeffrey Smith – and said seven other people died and more than 140 law enforcement officers were injured.“The desecration of the US Capitol, which is the temple of our American democracy, and the violence targeting Congress are horrors that will forever stain our nation’s history,” the bill said.Louie Gohmert, a congressman from Texas, said in a statement that the text “does not honor anyone, but rather seeks to drive a narrative that isn’t substantiated by known facts”.Gohmert separately circulated a competing bill to honor Capitol police that did not mention the 6 January attack, according to a copy obtained by Politico. His text also named the officers who died after the insurrection but did not specify the circumstances of their deaths, writing instead that they: “All passed in January 2021.”The other Republicans who voted against the legislation were Andy Biggs of Arizona, Andy Harris of Maryland, Lance Gooden of Texas, Michael Cloud of Texas, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Greg Steube of Florida, Bob Good of Virginia and John Rose of Tennessee.All of the bill’s opponents, except for Massie, voted to object to state’s electoral votes in the presidential election in the hours after the insurrection. More

  • 163 Shares189 Views

    in Elections

    Republican senator says he would’ve been afraid had Capitol rioters been BLM activists

    Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin faced charges of racism and calls for his resignation after he told a radio host that he did not feel threatened by the pro-Donald Trump mob that raided the Capitol in January, but he would have been concerned if the invaders were “antifa” or Black Lives Matter activists.“I never really felt threatened,” Johnson told Wisconsin radio host Jay Weber. He said the insurrectionists were mostly “people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break a law”.“Had the tables been turned and President Donald Trump won the election and those were thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters I would have been concerned,” Johnson continued.Five people died in the 6 January riot at the Capitol, including one police officer, and dozens were injured. Prosecutors have charged more than 300 people with crimes and nearly that many had been arrested. Forty people have been arrested for assault on law enforcement officers.“This didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me,” Johnson tole the radio host. “I mean ‘armed,’ when you hear ‘armed,’ don’t you think of firearms?The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called on Johnson to resign in an editorial. “If he runs again, Johnson must be opposed in both the primary and general elections by people who care enough about democracy to support and defend it,” the paper said.“No, Senator Ron Johnson,” tweeted Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, “the truth is that the January 6 insurrectionists did break the law, they hurt and killed law enforcement officers, and they were trying to overturn the elected government of the United States.“To say that the opposite is true about this group of insurrectionists, but that you would have been worried if they had been Black Lives Matters protesters, is racist, dangerous and unbecoming a United States senator.”Former Democratic senator Barbara Boxer agreed.“Everybody in the country and the world saw the insurrectionists beat up, injure and kill law-enforcement at the Capitol and they saw them break the law over and over as they smashed windows and soiled the citadel of democracy,” she tweeted. “Everybody except Sen. Ron Johnson. He needs to go.”A two-term senator, Johnson would be up for re-election in 2022. He was one of Donald Trump’s most vocal defenders through the former president’s two impeachment trials and supported Trump’s efforts to overthrow the 2020 election.Days before the Capitol invasion, Johnson spread lies about voter fraud on national TV and called for a “full investigatory and fact-finding authority” to audit the election. The Trump justice department found no evidence of election fraud and dozens of courts rejected allegations of fraud by Trump lawyers as groundless. More

  • 213 Shares139 Views

    in Elections

    'Help is on the way': Democrats cheer as US House passes $1.9tn Covid relief plan – video

    The House of Representatives gave final approval on Wednesday to one of the largest economic stimulus measures in US history, a sweeping $1.9tn Covid-19 relief bill that gives Joe Biden his first major victory in office. The measure provides $400bn for $1,400 direct payments to most Americans, $350bn in aid to state and local governments, an expansion of the child tax credit, and increased funding for vaccine distribution. ‘This is the most consequential legislation that many of us will ever be a party to,’ the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said at a ceremony to sign the bill before it goes to the White House
    US House passes $1.9tn Covid relief plan in major legislative victory for Biden
    US news – live updates More

  • 138 Shares199 Views

    in Elections

    Biden pledges to combat sexual assault in US military – video

    Joe Biden pledged to combat sexual assault in the US military as he announced the nomination of two female officers, Gen Jacqueline Van Ovost and Lt Gen Laura Richardson, to become four-star commanders. The president, who spoke on International Women’s Day, said: “Sexual assault is abhorrent and wrong at any time. And in our military, so much of unit cohesion is built on trusting your fellow service members to have your back – there’s nothing less than a threat to our national security”
    Biden pledges to tackle ‘scourge’ of sexual assault in US military More

  • 138 Shares199 Views

    in Elections

    Mail-in voting did not swell turnout or boost Democrats, study finds

    Mail-in voting did not significantly increase turnout nor did it benefit Democrats in the 2020 election, a new study has found, undermining the talking point, advanced by Donald Trump and others, that mail-in ballots cost him the election.States that required an excuse to vote by mail saw increases in turnout similar to those that did not, the researchers from Stanford found. In Texas, where only voters ages 65 and up can vote by mail without an excuse, Democratic turnout did not “substantially increase” relative to Republican turnout.“Despite the extraordinary circumstances of the 2020 election, vote-by-mail’s effect on turnout and on partisan outcomes is very muted,” the researchers wrote. “Voter interest appears to be far more important in driving turnout.”Those findings challenge the conventional wisdom that has emerged after Joe Biden’s victory in November. Republicans have repeatedly pointed to the decision to expand vote by mail – a choice driven largely by the Covid-19 pandemic – as a major reason Trump lost the election. They have filed a flood of bills in statehouses seeking to restrict voting, several of which take aim at mail-in voting specifically. In Georgia, for example, there are proposals to require voters to provide identification information as well as an excuse when they vote absentee, which would end the no-excuse policy Republicans adopted there in 2005.The Stanford findings also come amid an effort by Democrats in Congress to push nationwide changes that would require states to offer no-excuse balloting nationwide. Republicans staunchly opposed that effort, saying it is part of a broader set of reforms to help Democrats’ political prospects.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletter“The results of our paper do not offer a clear recommendation for the policy debate around vote-by-mail, but they do suggest that both sides of the debate are relying on flawed logic,” the study says. “Vote-by-mail is an important policy that voters seem to like using, and it may be a particularly important tool during the pandemic.”Overall, states that adopted no-excuse absentee voting in 2020 saw around a 5.6 percentage-point increase in turnout compared to 2016. States that still required an excuse saw a 4.8-point increase. The researchers were unconvinced that the modest difference in turnout represented an even minor bump in turnout because of vote-by-mail, noting there was random variation in turnout between elections.To better understand the effects of mail-in voting, the researchers focused on Texas, where they compared turnout among 65-year-olds able to vote without an excuse under state law to that of 64-year-olds, who still needed an excuse. When they did the comparison, they found “no noticeable increase” in turnout among the 65-year-olds who did not have to provide an excuse to vote by mail.They reached a similar conclusion when they looked at partisanship in Texas. Sixty-five-year-old Democrats embraced absentee voting in 2020 while Republicans continued to vote early in person. Overall, being able to vote easily by mail did not produce “large effects on the partisan composition of overall turnout in 2020”.Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who closely tracks voter turnout, said there were factors not discussed in the study that were important to consider when assessing turnout. Some of the biggest increases in turnout from 2016 to 2020 were in states where voters automatically receive a ballot, he said. Several of the states where there was no-excuse absentee voting also still had a wide range of hurdles – like showing photo ID or getting a notary signature – that could make it harder to cast a ballot.“Mail ballot usage is a better way to examine the effect of laws and policies than simply whether or not a state had a particular policy, since there are often many policies that affect mail ballot usage, such as all-mail ballot elections, ID requirements, dropbox accessibility, return deadlines, etc,” he said.Even if mail-in voting did not ultimately boost Democrats, officials told the Guardian last year that the process made it easier to target, track and encourage voters to cast a ballot. Jay Tucker, the chair of the Democratic committee in Pike county, Pennsylvania, said it was useful for the party to be able to see who had requested a ballot and had yet to return it during the election. Those efforts, he said, helped cut into Trump’s margins in the county.While the researchers found mail-in voting did not have a major effect on turnout in 2020, they noted that it could be more consequential in contests where interest is typically lower, like a midterm.“When voter interest is high, such as in 2020, even low-propensity voters … could base their decision to vote on the convenience of doing so, turn out at the same rate whether or not they can take advantage of no-excuse absentee voting,” they wrote.“When voter interest is low, there is likely to be more room for altering the costs of voting to affect turnout.” More