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    'I never imagined this': Washington prepares for an inauguration under siege

    In easier times, the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal church would be crowded, especially on the Sunday morning before a presidential inauguration a few blocks away.In the midst of a pandemic and a security lockdown following the assault on the Capitol, the street outside was almost deserted. Metropolitan AME, one of the city’s oldest Black American churches, has already been vandalised by the white supremacist Proud Boys, while “liberal” churches have been warned they could be targets once more in the days before Joe Biden and Kamala Harris take office, and the Donald Trump era ends.“You couldn’t imagine this happening in the United States, for the seat of power to have been overtaken like that,” said Angela Walker, a 63-year-old congregant who had come to work in the church kitchen. “It’s just sad.”Metropolitan AME was one of many churches targeted by a Proud Boys mob in December, when they rampaged through town, destroying Black Lives Matter (BLM) signs and looking for people to fight.Enrique Tarrio, the group’s leader who has been charged over the attack, told USA Today his group was not mobilizing as part of inauguration protests, saying: “I feel like this part of the battle is over.”Walker said: “They were here and they have done a lot of damage.” But she quickly added she was unafraid. “I pray that it stops now. I actually truly believe that they will not hit any of the churches again, not here in this city.”She said her conviction was rooted in her faith but also in the presence of thousands of national guard troops. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks there were US warplanes in the air but fewer soldiers on the ground. Less of Washington was locked down.Blocks to the south of the church were blocked off by the national guard detachments with armoured cars, guarding “green” and “red” zones, an echo of the fortified area of central Baghdad that was part of America’s ill-fated war on terror. The presence of a military garrison in Washington, on a scale not witnessed since the civil war, was a reminder that endemic racism remains a greater menace to national security than any external threat.“We have more troops in Washington than we do in Afghanistan right now and they’re here to protect us from our own president and his mob,” Seth Moulton, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, told the Guardian.The Marine Corps combat veteran said the images from the Capitol this week were “shocking”.“I expected this in Baghdad,” he said. “I never imagined this in Washington.”The area around Metropolitan AME was held by the Pennsylvania national guard, posted at junctions, assault rifles hanging from their body armour.“I never thought in a million years that I would be on patrol in the streets of DC,” said one sergeant who said his unit was deployed in Iraq just before he joined up and last year went on military exercises in North Macedonia, codenamed Decisive Strike, meant to prepare them to meet foreign adversaries.The sergeant hoped the current deployment, defending the seat of government against his fellow countrymen, would go down in history as an aberration.“We’ve been through worse before and got through it,” he said. “Hopefully we can soon all go home.”Thomas Porter, vice-president for government affairs at the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, an advocacy group, said: “To many veterans, they’re going to recall the vivid images of their experiences in Baghdad.”The invasion of the halls of Congress, and the knowledge some veterans were part of the mob, has left many veterans angry, Porter said.“We would compare ourselves to countries overseas and we could always depend on a democratic and peaceful transfer of power,” Porter said. “The whole attack on the Capitol was an affront to that.”The heavy military presence represented the closing of a very large stable door after the horse had bolted. The show of force which confronted BLM protests in the summer was glaringly absent when Trump loyalists ransacked the Capitol on 6 January.On Sunday, at BLM Plaza in front of the White House, a few demonstrators talked to journalists near a sign warning: “Domestic terrorists not welcome.”Jade Olivo, 31, had come from New York to demonstrate for Black trans lives. The presence of so many troops in the city was “nerve-racking”, she said. She planned to stay in Washington through inauguration but said she had no idea what the next days might bring.A few blocks to the north, two Washingtonians had paused on a street corner to discuss the strange atmosphere in their city.Emily Turner, 24, had spent part of Saturday walking around the fortified perimeter around Capitol Hill.“I’ve never seen so many guns in my life,” she said.Inauguration is supposed to be a celebratory event, she said, but there was “not so much celebrating going on anywhere”.“It’s just eerie,” said Andy Smith, 33. “I hope it’s not the future of every major event in DC.The militarisation of the Capitol and the shutdowns of businesses, streets and public transportation has had a disproportionate effect on homeless residents of Washington, said Shannon Clark, 27, an organizer with Remora House, a small mutual aid group that distributes supplies. There are small tent encampments throughout downtown, some in close proximity to the Capitol and the White House.“In effect, folks are largely trapped down there,” Clark said. “It’s going to be very difficult for them to get out.”Reports that far-right groups have harassed and targeted unhoused people in the past has only increased concerns, Clark said.On Saturday, Remora House distributed dozens of Metro cards loaded with $10, along with instructions on how to access shelters and stations still open.“People here are hungry,” the group tweeted. “Cold. And scared. People want out.” More

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    'I had no qualms': The people turning in loved ones for the Capitol attack

    Sign up for the Guardian Today US newsletterWhen Alison Lopez discovered her uncle’s sister had been part of the mob that breached the Capitol doors on 6 January, she immediately reported her to the FBI. “I had no second thoughts,” she said.Lopez found out about her in-law’s participation when the woman in question called her aunt from inside the Capitol to brag about “taking back the election”. Lopez, who is 42, said she had known the relative her whole life but had “no qualms” about reporting her.“If I saw my grandmother making bombs in her basement, or my aunt breaking into a home, I would have to intervene as well – it’s just about doing what’s right,” she said.In the week after the attacks on the Capitol, there has been a concerted effort to “unmask” rioters online, with self-styled detectives investigating who’s who in videos and photos posted from the attack. Outing family members – either online or to authorities – has marked a new frontier of the rift Trumpism has created in the US.Lopez said she was horrified but not surprised to see a loved one participate in the riot. Over the last four years she has watched helplessly as members of her family became increasingly entrenched in the world of hateful rightwing conspiracy theories.“These are people who never really identified with politics before, and now they have just let this consume their lives,” Lopez said, adding she does not consider herself a Democrat and has voted for Republican candidates in the past.If I saw my grandmother making bombs in her basement … I would have to intervene as well – it’s about doing what’s rightMore than 140,000 people have sent tips to the FBI reporting participants in the riots on the Capitol on 6 January, resulting in at least 200 arrests. The vast majority of those, according to the Department of Justice, come from friends, family, and other acquaintances of those involved in the attacks.The Massachusetts teen Helena Duke received a flood of support this week when she posted a video outing her own mother, aunt and uncle as having attended the Capitol protests.The 18-year-old said her mother, who appears to be harassing a Black woman in the video shared, previously condemned her for attending Black Lives Matter protests. “If I did nothing, I felt I was as bad as them,” Duke told Good Morning America.The decision to report a family member or publicly out them as espousing dangerous views can make a huge impact in stopping the spread of hate speech, said Talia Lavin, an expert in extremism and white supremacist groups and the author of Culture Warlords.“I applaud the bravery of people who have called out people in their own families for this kind of radicalization,” she said. “When people experience ostracization or disavowal from one’s own family, it can lead to a kind of cooling of extremist sentiment, because individuals are for the very first time experiencing a consequence for what they have so proudly engaged in for so long.”Online sleuthing is not new, especially among hate speech and extremism investigators, who have for years hunted down and outed racists and fascist agitators to employers in hopes to foster accountability. But in the aftermath of the insurrection, the practice has gone more mainstream, with journalists, activists and the FBI tweeting out photos and videos of the riot and encouraging followers to investigate them.Online sleuthing has its drawbacks: a Chicago firefighter faced harassment after being falsely identified as the killer of a Capitol police officer through a blurry video image. Another photo was falsely traced to a man pictured on an Antifa website, a tie that has been definitively disproven.But the chance of mistaken identity is much lower when the accusation comes from a family member or loved one. Leslie, a woman in Chicago who asked that her last name not be used in this story, said she and her sister both submitted screenshots of images their mother posted on social media from the steps of the Capitol during the riots to the FBI.Leslie, who considers herself far left politically, said she had watched in horror as vigilantes stormed the Capitol on 6 January, only to learn days later her estranged mother was one of them.“I almost passed out,” she said of the moment she saw the images. “I was really shocked, she was on the scaffolding we saw people climbing on TV. It was such a helpless, horrifying feeling.”Leslie said she and her three siblings all stopped speaking to their parents after they got sucked into QAnon, movement surrounding a disproven conspiracy theory that Donald Trump is saving the world from a secret cabal of child abusers. She said she watched her evangelical mother go from being a devout Christian to posting hate speech on Facebook and aligning herself with the far right.“I am really, really angry that I have essentially lost my family to a cult,” she said. “I am angry that people were not taking the rise of QAnon more seriously. People kept saying, ‘nobody is actually going to do anything, it is just a bunch of idiots online’.”“Well, the people at the Capitol are the people who were looking at this online,” she said. “This is what happens when you don’t do anything.”Leslie is not alone: support groups have emerged in recent years for the countless Americans who have lost loved ones to the conspiracy theory.Leslie said she is hoping a call from the FBI could serve as “kind of wake up call for them”, she said.“Maybe if she gets a call from the authorities she will realize this is not just a game, this is not just something playing out on Facebook. This is real and people got killed,” she said. More

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    How Trump supporters are radicalised by the far right

    Far right “playbooks” teaching white nationalists how to recruit and radicalise Trump supporters have surfaced on the encrypted messaging app Telegram ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration.
    The documents, seen by the Observer, detail how to convert mainstream conservatives who have just joined Telegram into violent white supremacists. They were found last week by Tech Against Terrorism, an initiative launched by the UN counter terrorism executive directorate.
    Large numbers of Trump supporters migrated on to Telegram in recent days after Parler, the social media platform favoured by the far right, was forced offline for hosting threats of violence and racist slurs after the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.
    The documents have prompted concern that far right extremists congregating on Telegram instead of Parler has made it far harder for law enforcement to track where the next attack could come from.
    Already, hundreds of suspects threatening violence during this week’s inauguration of Biden have been identified by the FBI.
    One of the playbooks, found on a channel with 6,000 subscribers, was specially drawn up to radicalise Trump supporters who had just joined Telegram and teach them “how to have the proper OPSEC [operations security] to keep your identity concealed”.
    The four-page document encourages recruiters to avoid being overtly racist or antisemitic initially when approaching Trump supporters, stating: “Trying to show them racial IQ stats and facts on Jewish power will generally leave them unreceptive… that material will be instrumental later on in their ideological journey.
    “The point of discussion you should focus on is the blatant anti-white agenda that is being aggressively pushed from every institution in the country, as well as white demographic decline and its consequences.”
    The document concludes with its author stating: “Big Tech made a serious mistake by banishing conservatives to the one place [Telegram] where we have unfettered access to them, and that’s a mistake they’ll come to regret!”
    The document is named the “comprehensive redpill guide”, a reference to the online term red-pilling, used to describe a conversion to extreme far-right views.
    The document adds: “Not every normie can be redpilled, but if they’re receptive and open-minded to hearing what you have to say, you should gradually be sending them edgier pro-white/anti-Zionist content as they move along in their journey.”
    Another white nationalist recruitment guide uncovered by Tech Against Terrorism, which is working with global tech firms to tackle terrorist use of the internet, shares seven steps of “conservative conversion”. More

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    Trumpists on top? President exits having cleaved the Republican party in two

    The presidency of Donald Trump may be ending with both a bang and a whimper: one insurrection, two impeachments and no more characters on Twitter. But the legacy he leaves to American politics – and especially the Republican party – will not end neatly with the inauguration of his successor.That’s not just because Trump has toyed openly with the notion of running for president again in four years. Trump may or may not be able or willing to run for elected office again, if he survives his second impeachment trial and the multiple investigations into his business and tax affairs.Whether or not he stalks Washington on social media or television, Trump leaves the nation’s capital having cleaved his own party in two.On one side is the Trumpist base, willing to follow an autocratic leader wherever his whims lead: blowing up democratic and diplomatic norms, while stoking up racial and social divisions. On the other are establishment conservatives, committed to the institutions and culture that have served their traditional priorities: business, national security and suburban privilege.That schism was on display and on the record as 10 House Republicans – including Liz Cheney, the third-ranking Republican leader – voted for Trump’s impeachment this week, joining Democrats for the most bipartisan impeachment vote in American history. That left 197 Republicans voting to support Trump, reflecting the overwhelming sentiment of the party.According to recent polling by Quinnipiac University, Trump may have plunged to a new low of 33% in his approval ratings, but fully 71% of Republicans still think he’s doing a great job as president.Such numbers help explain the wobbling positions of Republican congressional leaders.Senator Mitch McConnell has let it be known that he welcomes Trump’s impeachment but has curiously not taken a position on convicting the outgoing president – except to delay his trial. Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, voted against impeachment while also blaming Trump for inciting insurrection. They are ironically leading a party that once built an entire election campaign around attacking the Democrats for flip-flopping.These are not new divisions for the Republican party: their roots lie in past divisions like Pat Buchanan’s pitchfork rebellion, Ross Perot’s barn-cleaning reforms, Barry Goldwater’s embrace of extremism and Joe McCarthy’s red scare. But no other Republican president since Richard Nixon has left his party in such a conflicted state, and Nixon himself was ejected from the White House by an establishment led by Goldwater himself.Seasoned conservative intellectuals, operatives and analysts are frankly perplexed by what lies ahead.Pete Wehner, a veteran of three Republican administrations and senior fellow at the conservative Ethics & Public Policy Center, is a staunch Trump critic who does not see an immediate path beyond Trumpism.“It was confusing to me before this week and it’s probably more confusing to me after this week what the future of the Republican party is,” he said. “The reason I say that is because prior to this week, the populist, nihilistic Trumpist movement was in the stronger position. Now it’s in a weaker position, but it doesn’t mean it’s in a weak position.”Wehner says the party’s challenges go far beyond the current crop of Republicans in Congress.“For all of my criticism of Republican lawmakers – and I have had a lot – I have always believed that the fundamental problem isn’t them,” he said. “It’s the base of the party that is where the pathologies are. They are very attuned to what the base wants and what their constituents want. A lot of them were acting in ways that weren’t true to what they believed or their philosophy. They felt constrained and pressured and intimidated. They are scared of Trump supporters and don’t want to be defeated in primaries.”Since November, the dynamic has changed inside the Republican party but it’s not at all clear that the change is enough to move the party away from its obsession with Trump himself. For all the jockeying among Trump-like figures – such as senators Ted Cruz of Texas or Josh Hawley of Missouri – there may be no oxygen left after Trump consumes it all for the next four years. There may be even less oxygen for less toxic conservatives like Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Trump’s UN ambassador, or the Nebraska senator Ben Sasse.What’s the plan and who are the leaders to do that? There’s no clear answer as of right now“Before 6 January, there was a much more complex coalition of factions inside the Trump GOP,” says Kevin Madden, a former senior aide to Mitt Romney and congressional Republican leaders. “There was a variation of Trump supporters and skeptics who were at least united against what they believed were the excesses of the political left. That’s how he enjoyed a 90% approval rating.“After January 6, there was a shift and the fracture in the party is more obvious and out in the open. Now it’s a split between Republicans devoted to the rule of law and those who are devoted to Donald Trump above all else. It’s too early to tell how deep that fracture is and whether it can ever be repaired but, as of right now, those devoted to Donald Trump outnumber the others.”Madden is skeptical that anybody can challenge Trump’s hold on the party while he remains a vocal president-in-exile.“Anyone who believes that they can just draft behind him and build or maintain support with his base while Trump himself fades out is embarking on a fool’s errand,” he says. “This was the conceit of the entire 2016 field, thinking Trump was someone else’s fight. Trump has to be confronted, otherwise the party will look and sound like him for the next 15 years. That’s the question for the so-called establishment. What’s the plan and who are the leaders to do that? There’s no clear answer as of right now.”One clear sign of Trump’s domination is that there is no substantive debate about what amounts to Trump’s policy legacy.There is little dispute about the wisdom of Trump’s massive deficit spending, even as Republicans say they will reject deficit spending by the Biden administration. There is little soul-searching about the nativist anti-immigrant policies of the Trump years, including the forced separation of children at the border. And there’s almost no dispute about Trump’s catastrophic response to the pandemic – from his opposition to mask-wearing, to his failures of testing and tracing, to the botched rollout of mass vaccinations.“He hasn’t weakened the Republican party in all respects,” said Wehner. “It’s true that the Democrats have the Senate and the House and the presidency. There’s no question there’s been some cost. But there’s also no empirical doubt that Trump brought in new people and the party won down-ballot in ways that people didn’t foresee. I can’t say that Trump has been a catastrophe for the party when at the state level they are doing pretty well.”Still, Wehner believes that the best outcome for Republicans is an open dispute about its future: “In my view, a figurative civil war is better than the alternative, which is a massacre of the good guys. Our best hope is that there’s a fight for the soul of the party.”Could that dispute lead to a permanent rupture in the party? The United States has a poor track record with third parties, unlike European politics, where multi-party legislatures have long represented the status quo.Michael Barone, the co-author of The Almanac of American Politics and a conservative analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, has heard it all before. “In my 60-plus years of observing these things, I’ve seen numerous prophecies that the Republican party was going out of business, and none of those prophecies has yet come true,” he said “I suppose one will some day.” More

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    Trump heads for new life in Florida, marking end of an era in New York

    When Donald Trump leaves the White House on 20 January, reports indicate that he will not return to his home town of New York City but rather, reside at his Mar-a-Lago home in south Florida. Indeed, Trump formally changed his residency to the so-called Sunshine State in fall 2019.Trump’s seemingly permanent departure to a state known for its large population of elderly retirees marks the end of an era in New York, the city where he grew up and moved from its suburbs of Queens to become an icon of brash Manhattan style and wealth in the 1970s and 1980s.“He made his presence known on the island of Manhattan in the mid 70s, a brash Adonis from the outer boroughs bent on placing his imprint on the golden rock,” the New York Times reported in 1983. “Donald John Trump exhibited a flair for self-promotion, grandiose schemes – and, perhaps not surprisingly, for provoking fury along the way.”Trump’s flashiness arguably encapsulated the unapologetic financial excesses of the 1980s and beyond with him sticking his family name on seemingly everything he got his hands on. There have been 17 properties in New York City that bore Trump’s name over time, NBC News reported.Trump became a tabloid fixture, feeding the papers stories about himself, according to the Hollywood Reporter and other outlets. One of them was the famed New York Post cover about his relationship with Marla Maples, who became his second wife. The headline read: “Marla boasts to her pals about Donald: ‘BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD.’”Trump even had a cameo in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Macaulay Culkin, as the star Kevin, asks him for directions to the lobby of the Plaza hotel, which Trump owned at that time.While Trump’s cultural cachet was bizarre, it had power. Director Chris Columbus said in a December interview with Insider that Trump “did bully his way into the movie” by demanding that he get a role in return for allowing shooting to take place at the Plaza.The majority of New Yorkers are not mourning Trump’s departure. They long seemed ready for it.When news emerged that Trump was changing his residency, Governor Andrew Cuomo said in as statement: “Good riddance. It’s not like Mr Trump paid taxes here anyway. He’s all yours, Florida.”Cuomo’s reaction encapsulated the feelings of many residents. New York is a blue state, and the city still more liberal; since Trump took office, there have routinely been demonstrations against White House policies outside his eponymous properties.New Yorkers’ dislike of Trump hit new highs last spring. His administration’s mishandling of coronavirus was felt especially deeply in New York City, an early US center of the pandemic. City and state officials begged a seemingly uninterested Trump for help.“How on earth do you think that New York City can get back on its feet without federal support?” Mayor Bill de Blasio said. “Mr President, are you going to save New York City, or are you telling New York City to drop dead?”Cuomo, speaking of the coronavirus-spurred financial crisis in September, remarked: “Trump is actively trying to kill New York City. It is personal. I think it’s psychological. He is trying to kill New York City.”Since many New Yorkers feel this way, it’s not surprising that Trump and his clan have nothing left for them here, except for a sea of legal problems.De Blasio announced this week that New York City was cutting its contracts with Trump’s companies for his involvement in spurring a deadly attack on the Capitol. That means Trump will lose $17m in deals to run the Central Park Carousel, Wollman and Lasker skating rinks, and Ferry Point golf course in the Bronx, according to ABC News.Trump’s cronies speculate that Trump’s departure from New York City could also include his business interests, given his dislike of local and state officials, ABC News reported. Meanwhile, the Manhattan district attorney and state attorney general are investigating Trump’s financial dealings.Trump’s departure from the White House also means that civil litigation against him here might finally proceed, as he can no longer cite presidential duties in efforts to delay proceedings.Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, are not expected to be welcomed in New York City’s elite circles when they leave Washington, according to reports. They purchased a $30m property in Miami’s luxe Indian Creek village.Donald Trump Jr and girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle are also relocating to Florida and are eyeing homes in Jupiter. “There is no way they can stay in New York. They’d be tortured in the streets,” a source told the New York Post of Junior’s impending move.As Trump and his family try building a new life, and potential Maga capital, in south Florida, the ostracism they faced in New York might follow them to some degree. Ivanka and Kushner might struggle with the south Florida social scene.The New York Post quoted a source saying: “The Indian Creek country club members are very picky and the word is that Javanka need not apply.”Even Trump’s appearance in Home Alone 2 has come into question, with Culkin supporting social media commentary in favor of removing Trump from the movie. More

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    How US police failed to stop the rise of the far right and the Capitol attack

    Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterThe alleged complicity of some police officers in the attack on the US Capitol has led to fresh questions about how law enforcement and other public agencies around the US have approached a surging far-right street protest movement during the life of the Trump administration.The presence of off-duty officers, firefighters and corrections officers from other agencies around the country in the protest crowd was a reminder of how members of a lawless movement have been able to find a place in their ranks.Since the violent invasion of the Capitol by pro-Trump extremists seeking to overturn the election of Joe Biden, at least two Capitol police officers have been suspended, and at least 12 more are reportedly under investigation for dereliction of duty, or directly aiding the rioters.Some officers were filmed offering apparent assistance or encouragement to the mob – whether by posing for selfies with confederate flag-waving protesters, or directing protesters around the building while sporting a Maga cap.They did this at the same time that colleagues in the DC metropolitan police, a sister agency, say that they were maced, tasered, stripped of their badges and ammunition and beaten by the angry crowd.Mike German, a former FBI agent and fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, said he sees the failure of police to protect the building as following the pattern whereby “militant far-right groups have been given impunity” throughout the Trump era.In what he called a “multifaceted failure” in Washington, German said the central problem was a “failure to recognize a threat for what it was”. Far-right groups, he said, “have been engaging in militancy for months”.Pointing to similar attacks on state capitols in Virginia, Michigan, Idaho, Georgia and Oregon in 2020, German asks “how many times do they have to storm a capitol before it’s taken seriously?”.In the wake of the riot – and near misses for elected officials who the mob had in its sights – former Capitol police officers who have been involved in lawsuits over decades alleging employment discrimination against black officers, have claimed that their sustained and repeated warnings about racism in the department were ignored.Meanwhile, agencies around the country have announced investigations into their own officers who were present at the Capitol riot.In Houston, an 18-year-veteran officer resigned after the Houston police department announced an investigation into his alleged actions at the rally. In Virginia, two officers who participated in the riot, and at one posed for selfies in front of a statue of Revolutionary General John Stark, are now facing criminal charges.The actions of a serving officer in Boston are under investigation, while in California, the Los Angeles police department has launched a joint investigation with the FBI to determine whether or not any of its officers attended.It’s not just rank and file officers who are having to answer difficult questions. In Oklahoma, Canadian county’s pro-Trump Sheriff, Chris West, last Friday denied that he had participated in the riot following the rally, which he said he attended as a “patriotic citizen”, despite social media posts claiming to identify him in the crowd inside the Capitol.West later refused to answer questions from local journalists about deleted Facebook posts in which another Facebook user said that he and West had pushed past Capitol police to enter the building, and in which West himself allegedly aired conspiracy theories about election fraud, and appeared to contemplate a violent response.Elsewhere, Butch Conway, the recently retired 24-year sheriff of Gwinnett county, Georgia, attended the rally but claims not to have participated in storming the Capitol.Other current and former public safety officers were part of the melee. A retired firefighter was arrested for allegedly throwing a fire extinguisher at Capitol police and in Maryland, a corrections officer is being investigated by the Charles county sheriff’s department for their actions at the rally.Some police officers who did not attend the rally have nevertheless expressed support for the crowd’s actions, or promoted the conspiracy theories that spurred them on. In Maine, the chief of that state’s own capitol police, reportedly shared coronavirus- and Black Lives Matter-related conspiracy theories on his Facebook page in recent months.In Pinal county, Arizona, the pro-Trump “constitutional sheriff” Mark Lamb made a speech on 6 January that contained vague allegations of criminal conduct by Hillary Clinton, and urged his listeners to “fight for the constitution”. Last August, near the height of 2020 electioneering, Lamb asserted in a speech to the Arizona Police Association that “the constitution is hanging by a thread”.The large number of police and other sworn officers who either participated in, or sympathized with a large scale act of public disorder once again highlighted the significant number of serving police officers who were discovered to have been radicalized, or even to be members of extremist groups during the period in which Trump has dominated US politics.Between 2015 and 2020, police officers were revealed as having ties to far-right groups such as the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and the League of the South – all three of which had members on the ground at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. In Texas, Florida, Louisiana and Michigan during that time, some officers were even revealed to have been recruited to the Ku Klux Klan.In 2019, Reveal reported that dozens of serving police officers around the country were members of extremist groups on Facebook.This isn’t new … We shouldn’t treat it as if it has come out of nowhereUS authorities have repeatedly nominated the presence of extremists in law enforcement agencies as a national security issue. In 2015, the agency noted that various extremist groups had “active links to law enforcement officers”.German, the Brennan Center fellow, published a report last August on the ongoing problem of far-right militancy among law enforcement officers. He said “law enforcement has become politicized since 9/11, and even more so under the Trump administration”.While the incoming Biden administration has raised the possibility of new anti-terror laws to deal with the threat of far-right violence, Brennan argues that they should instead, through the justice department, ensure that current laws are consistently applied to far-right militants, including those in uniform.“This isn’t new”, he says. “We shouldn’t treat it as if it has come out of nowhere”.He points out that some of those involved in the Capitol riot have been involved in similar incidents over months or years, and because they have been repeatedly caught on tape, “we know their names, we know their criminal histories”.“They’ve been doing it because the police have been letting them do it. They’ve been doing it because the FBI have been letting them do it”, he said. More

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    Trump ally Mike Lindell of MyPillow pushes martial law at White House

    My Pillow founder and Trump supporter Mike Lindell was photographed entering the West Wing of the White House on Friday, carrying notes which seemed to advocate the imposition of martial law.Donald Trump will be replaced as president in five days’ time, by Joe Biden. Trump continues to baselessly claim his election defeat by the Democrat was the result of electoral fraud.The president has now said he disavows the violence he incited at the US Capitol last week when he urged a mob of his supporters to march on the building. The resulting deadly attack on the Capitol led to his second impeachment.Amid proliferating reports of plots to kidnap and kill lawmakers, and with further demonstrations by Trump supporters reportedly planned around inauguration day, Trump remains at the White House unable to use social media and apparently estranged from many of his closest advisers.Lindell has risen to prominence among allies urging the president on in his attempts to deny reality. On his Facebook page on Friday, the mustachioed seller of sleep aids wrote: “Keep the faith everyone! We will have our president Donald Trump 4 more years!’Later a Washington Post photographer caught images of Lindell in which parts of notes he carried were visible. Among visible text were the words “Insurrection Act now as a result of the assault on the”, “martial law if necessary” and “Move Kash Patel to CIA Acting”.The notes also referred to Sidney Powell, an attorney and conspiracy theorist involved in Trump campaign lawsuits meant to overturn election results in battleground states, almost all of which have been unsuccessful.The notes seemed to advocate naming an attorney named Colon, described as “up to speed on election issues” and seemingly based at “Fort Mead”, to a national security role. A current LinkedIn page indicates that a Frank Colon is currently senior attorney-cyber operations for the 780th Military Intelligence Brigade, based at Fort Meade, Maryland.Trump allies, among them the political dirty trickster Roger Stone, have previously advocated the imposition of martial law in the event of electoral defeat.Kash Patel is a Trump loyalist who after the election was moved to the Department of Defense, where he has been accused of obstructing the transition to Biden.The White House pool reporter said Lindell refused to answer questions about his visit on Friday.Earlier, apparently in error, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani tweeted a message in which he claimed to be “working with the FBI to expose and place total blame on John and the 226 members of antifa that instigated the Capitol ‘riot’”.It was not clear which “John” Giuliani meant. The FBI has rubbished Republican claims that leftwing groups, collectively known as “antifa”, were to blame for the attack on the Capitol. Giuliani himself addressed Trump supporters before the riot, telling them he wanted “trial by combat”.The message Giuliani tweeted ended: “I can see what I can do with Kash, I wish I had.”Biden has picked a senior diplomat, Bill Burns, for CIA director, replacing Gina Haspel.CNN’s chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, said he had spoken with Lindell, who confirmed he had met briefly with Trump and was told to give his documents to White House aides. “Lindell also claimed the phrase ‘martial law’ did not appear on the document despite photos,” Acosta tweeted. More