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    Trump impeachment: what you need to know as House moves to a vote

    Donald Trump’s fiery speech at a rally just before the attack on the Capitol is at the center of the impeachment charge against him, even as the falsehoods he spread for months about election fraud are still being championed by some Republicans.A Capitol police officer died from injuries suffered in the riot, and police shot and killed a woman during the siege. Three other people died in what authorities said were medical emergencies.What to watch as the Democratic-controlled House moves to impeach Trump for the second time in 13 months – now with just days left in the defeated president’s term:The Democratic case for impeachment Trump faces a single charge – “incitement of insurrection” – after the deadly Capitol riot in an impeachment resolution that the House will begin debating Wednesday. It’s a stunning end for Trump’s presidency as Democrats and a growing number of Republicans declare he is unfit for office and could do more damage after inciting a mob that ransacked the Capitol.“President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of Government,” reads part of the four-page impeachment bill. “He will remain a threat to national security, democracy and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office.”House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said impeachment is needed despite the limited number of days left in Trump’s term. “The president’s threat to America is urgent, and so too will be our action,” she said.Trump’s actions were personal for Pelosi and many other lawmakers. She was among those forced to huddle in a bunker during the Capitol riots, and armed rioters menaced staffers with taunts of “Where’s Nancy?”The House of Representatives will convene at 9am ET (2pm GMT) and there will follow an initial debate and some procedural votes. Then around lunchtime there should be about two hours of debate on the articles of impeachment, concluding with a vote in mid-to-late afternoon, around 3pm ET (8pm GMT). Voting in the House will take between 40 minutes and an hour. The vote is almost certain to pass, as Democrats have the majority, and several Republicans have already said they will support the move. The next step of the process would then be for the articles of impeachment to be sent to the Senate.How many Republicans will support impeachment?Unlike the last time Trump was impeached, when no House Republicans supported charges against Trump over a call he made to Ukraine’s new president, the current impeachment effort has drawn support from some Republicans.House minority leader Kevin McCarthy of California and his deputy, Louisiana representative Steve Scalise, are again expected to oppose impeachment, but Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, the No 3 House Republican, said Tuesday she will support it.Representatives John Katko, Republican of New York, and Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, also said they would back impeachment, and some other Republicans seem likely to follow.McCarthy, one of Trump’s closest allies in Congress, echoed Trump in declaring that “impeachment at this time would have the opposite effect of bringing our country together”.Will House censure Trump?In a move short of impeachment, McCarthy and other Republicans have floated the idea of a House censure of Trump. Although it was not clear how much support the proposal has, McCarthy said censure or some other mechanism – such as a bipartisan commission to investigate the attack – would “ensure that the events of January 6 are rightfully denounced and prevented from occurring in the future”.Democrats, with the votes to impeach in hand, aren’t buying it.When would articles of impeachment go to the Senate?Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell – who remains in charge of the Senate until Democrats take over, perhaps as early as 20 January – has said that the earliest the Senate could consider impeachment would be 19 January, the day before Trump leaves office and president-elect Joe Biden in inaugurated. Democratic leaders have been exploring how to recall the Senate earlier, though that would still require McConnell’s co-operation. It is therefore likely that any vote to convict Trump would take place after he has already left office, with a trial potentially taking place on 20 January or 21 January. There is a suggestion, however, that the Democratic-controlled House might delay sending the articles to the Senate until after the Biden administration is established and his cabinet picks confirmed by the Senate, so as not to provide a distraction to the start of his term in office. Biden has suggested the Senate split its time between impeachment and his agenda.How many votes are needed in the Senate to impeach Trump?Impeachment needs to be passed by a two-thirds majority in the Senate, which requires 67 votes. Following the Democrats’ two successes in the Georgia runoff elections, the new Senate will be delicately poised 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, with vice president Kamala Harris holding the casting vote. That means that 17 Republican Senators would need to vote to convict Trump. The outgoing president was acquitted easily on both counts in his previous impeachment trial with not a single Republican in the Senate finding him guilty.Will any Republicans in the Senate vote to convict Trump this time?Things might be different in 2021. For a start, the charge is much more simple and straightforward – that Trump is guilty of the incitement of an insurrection, rather than the complicated and murky dealings in Ukraine that were the subject of the first impeachment. So far five Republicans representatives in the House have come forward to say they will vote for impeachment, but, as yet, no Senators. It is difficult to imagine the hardliners like Sens. Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley who voted against Joe Biden’s election victory now swinging behind an attempt to impeach Trump.However, reports from both the New York Times and Axios suggest that those close to Senate leader McConnell appear to believe that he thinks Trump has committed impeachable offences and may be minded to vote to convict in a Senate trial. If that was the case, it would make it easier for other Republicans to do so.If Trump is found guilty, does that stop him from running for president again?Not automatically. However, if convicted, the Senate could follow up with another vote to block him from running for office, requiring only a simple majority to pass. This vote would invoke the 14th amendment, which bars from federal or state office anyone who takes part in insurrection or rebellion. Adopted after the US civil war, the amendment states that nobody should hold office in the US if they have previously “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the US while an elected official.Can the 14th amendment be used even if Trump is acquitted?While it is certain to be disputed and subject to legal challenge, some experts believe that the 14th amendment could be used to bar Donald Trump from running for office again even if he is acquitted. Again, this would only require a simple majority vote in the Senate, which, under Democrat control, would be likely to pass.How will Trump respond?So far, Trump has taken no responsibility for his part in fomenting the violent insurrection, despite his comments encouraging supporters to march on the Capitol and praising them while they were still carrying out the assault. “People thought that what I said was totally appropriate,” he said Tuesday.One significant difference from Trump’s first impeachment: he no longer has a Twitter feed to respond in real time.Stepped-up securityIn a sign of the increase tensions in the wake of the attack, House lawmakers will for the first time be required to go through a metal detector before being allowed to enter the chamber.This new security measure will stay in effect every day the House is in session for the foreseeable future, according to a directive by Timothy Blodgett, the acting House sergeant-at-arms. Blodgett replaced the longtime sergeant-at-arms who resigned after widespread criticism about poor security planning for the 6 January certification vote.Blodgett also told lawmakers they must wear masks during the Covid-19 crisis and that they face removal from the chamber if they fail to do so.Will lawmakers rein in emotions on the floor?While debate on the House is often impassioned, emotions are expected to run unusually high as lawmakers debate impeachment. Not only is it the second time they have voted on such a measure, the debate comes exactly one week after a majority of House Republicans objected to the certification of Biden’s victory, setting the stage for the hours-long siege that rocked the Capitol and the nation.A recent breakout of Covid-19 among lawmakers who were held in lockdown with others who refused to wear masks has only heightened tensions. More

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    ‘They always put other barriers in place’: how Georgia activists fought off voter suppression

    Deborah Scott has been registering voters for well over a decade in Georgia, but about five years ago she began to notice a problem. Georgia Stand-Up, the civic action group she leads, started getting a spike in calls from people who said they filled out a voter registration form but never received an official voter registration card. “We’re like ‘hey, what’s going on here?,’” she said.Scott’s group adjusted their voter registration strategy. After they got someone to register, they started tracking their voter registration and following up with them to ensure it went through. When there was a problem, they would help the voter follow up with local election officials. Sometimes, after that follow-up inquiry, the election officials would “miraculously” discover the registration was there all along, Scott said.Georgia Stand-Up took their strategy into the general election last year and Senate runoff this year, both of which saw extremely high turnout among Black voters. It’s a surge that many have attributed to years of investment by activists like Scott and Democrat Stacey Abrams, to mobilize voters of color, who traditionally have had lower turnout than their white counterparts, and flip the state for Democrats in stunning upsets in both the presidential race (Joe Biden was the first Democrat to carry the state in a presidential race in nearly 30 years) and two US Senate runoffs.As voter suppression has become more brazen in Georgia, overcoming it has become a core part of the work that Abrams and other organizers have done to mobilize the new electorate in the state. This work is not glamorous, focused on helping new voters navigate a bureaucracy designed to make it more difficult to vote. It’s making calls to voters to ensure they know their polling place, explaining how to fill out a mail-in ballot, and making sure they aren’t wrongly purged from the voter rolls. But the multi-year investment in overcoming voting barriers significantly contributed to organizers’ success in Georgia this year.“What we kept seeing was no matter what turnout we had, if we turned out in larger numbers, they always put other barriers in place,” said Helen Butler, the executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, another civil rights group focused on mobilizing voters of color. “We had to go through strategies that would help us to be more proactive.” Georgia Republicans have already signaled they plan to move ahead with new restrictions on vote-by-mail after an election in which a record number of people used the process.Butler said her group had to shift considerable resources to combat voter suppression starting in 2013, when the US supreme court struck down a provision of the Voting Rights Act that required places with a history of voting discrimination to submit voting changes to the federal government for approval before they went into effect. After the decision, her group began sending representatives to local boards of election so they could learn about polling place changes and consolidations and other changes they needed to know about before election day.Those strategies crystallized during the 2018 gubernatorial race, when Abrams lost to Brian Kemp, then the state’s top election official, and Georgia’s voting barriers were thrust to the center of the race. There was harsh scrutiny of state policy that placed 53,000 voter registrations in suspense over small discrepancies, 70% of which were Black voters. Georgia’s practice of aggressively purging hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls became a matter of national attention. For many, the election illuminated how severely restrictive voting rules could affect an election outcome.“There were so many people who had problems with their registration and didn’t discover the problem until they were already at the polls,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, who worked as the Georgia Democratic party’s voter protection director from 2018 to 2019. “And when more than half of voters would vote on election day, it’s too late to fix anything then.”Beyond highlighting severe barriers in Georgia, the 2018 election also highlighted Democrats’ political strength in Georgia, Ghazal added, opening up money and other resources for grassroots groups that previously hadn’t existed. Abrams’ decision to focus on voting barriers in the state after the election only further galvanized support.In recent years, Butler said, her group has stepped up efforts to prevent voters from being wrongfully purged. Regularly monitoring Georgia’s voter rolls, her group will contact voters who are at risk of being purged to inform them of how they can confirm their eligibility. If someone has been purged, they tell them how they can re-register.“We didn’t always do that. We didn’t have to do that until recently,” Butler said.This year, Fair Fight, the organization Abrams started after the 2018 election, had a network of more than 15,000 volunteers to help people overcome barriers to voting. When it looked like Pooler, a city just outside Savannah, wouldn’t offer any ballot drop boxes, Fair Fight texted voters there to get them to push local officials to install one, said Marisa Pyle, the group’s volunteer and rapid response organizer. Once officials announced there would be a drop box after all, Fair Fight followed up with voters and let them know the location. The group took a similar approach to pressure officials to allow early voting on campus at the University of Georgia.“Our goal was to make sure they got [voting information] in a way that was accessible. And when there were access gaps, trying to fill them with advocacy and our volunteer work,” Pyle said.The effort to contact voters doesn’t stop after election day. Once the polls closed in theSenate runoff, Butler and other groups launched an aggressive effort to contact voters who submitted a provisional ballot at the polls – a special kind of ballot election workers are required to offer if there is uncertainty about their eligibility.Butler said her group will often work with voters to help them understand what kind of documentation they need to provide to election officials in the days after the election in order to ensure their ballot isn’t rejected. If they are on the phone with a voter, organizers will sometimes even set up a three-way call with the board of elections to ensure they understand what they need to do to have their vote counted.The approach was deployed deftly in the general election and runoff. This year, when there were polling place changes in Georgia, organizers sent volunteers to the old locations to make sure voters were redirected to the new one. And as organizers knocked on doors trying to turn out new voters, teaching them about the voting process was at the heart of their conversations.As she knocked on doors ahead of the Senate runoff, Lacreasa Acey, a 38-year-old canvasser, said the emphasis on overcoming voting barriers was a big part of the conversations she had with voters. Sometimes, the information she offered could be as simple as telling people where they could vote or showing them how to fill out an absentee ballot.“It’s amazing how so many people are not aware of simple voting information. They don’t know where to go, they don’t know how to mail in ballots or anything like that, so they get frustrated and they say ‘you know what, I’m just not gonna vote at all,’” said Acey, who knocked on doors on behalf of the New South Super Pac, which backed the Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. “I have everything already. I have the answers.” More

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    Riots, effigies and a guillotine: Capitol attack could be a glimpse of violence to come

    A guillotine outside the state capitol in Arizona. A Democratic governor burned in effigy in Oregon. Lawmakers evacuated as pro-Trump crowds gathered at state capitols in Georgia and New Mexico. Cheers in Idaho as a crowd was told fellow citizens were “taking the capitol” and “taking out” Vice-president Mike Pence.As a mob of thousands invaded the US capitol on 6 January, Trump supporters threatened lawmakers and fellow citizens in cities across the country. Compared with the violent mob in Washington, the pro-Trump crowds elsewhere in the country were much smaller, attracting dozens to hundreds of people. But they used the same extreme rhetoric, labeling both Democratic politicians and Republicans perceived as disloyal to Trump as “traitors”.As the FBI warns of plans for new armed protests in Washington and all 50 state capitols in the days leading up to Biden’s inauguration, and fresh calls for extreme violence circulate on social media forums, the intensity of the nationwide pro-Trump demonstrations and attacks last week offer evidence of what might be coming next. Some of the pro-Trump demonstrations on Wednesday did not turn violent. The dozens of Trump supporters who entered the Kansas state capitol remained peaceful, according to multiple news reports. In Carson City, Nevada, hundreds of Trump supporters drank beer and listened to rock music while denouncing the election results, the Reno Gazette Journal reported.But in Los Angeles, white Trump supporters assaulted and ripped the wig off the head of a young black woman who happened to pass their 6 January protest, the Los Angeles Times reported. A white woman was captured on video holding the wig and shouting, “Fuck BLM!” and, “I did the first scalping of the new civil war.”In Ohio and Oregon, fights broke out between counter-protesters and members of the Proud Boys, the neo-fascist group Trump directed in September to “stand back and stand by”. Proud Boys also reportedly demonstrated in Utah, California, Florida, and South Carolina.And in Washington state, Trump supporters, some armed, pushed through the gate of the governor’s mansion and stormed onto the lawn of Democrat Jay Inslee’s house. In Georgia, where lawmakers were evacuated from the state capitol, members of the III% Security Force militia, a group known for its anti-Muslim activism, had gathered outside.An effigy of Gov. Kate Brown is tarred and feathered by pro-Trump Supporters and anti-lockdown protesters at the Oregon State Capitol. pic.twitter.com/XSmHI82cXD— Brian Hayes (@_Brian_ICT) January 6, 2021
    Militia members, neo-Nazis, and other rightwing extremists have discussed multiple potential dates for armed protests in the coming days, researchers who monitor extremist groups say, with proposals ranging from rallies or attacks on state capitols to a “million militia march” in Washington.The FBI’s intelligence bulletin has warned of potential armed protests from 16 January “at least” through inauguration day on 20 January, but researchers say that energy had not yet coalesced around a single event. Public social media forums where Trump supporters have gathered to discuss plans are full of dramatic, contradictory rumors, but experts say that more concrete plans are likely being made in private and in smaller forums that are more difficult to infiltrate.The United States has no shortage of heavily armed extremists who have been openly calling for a new civil war, from members of the Boogaloo Bois – a nascent domestic terrorism group that has been linked to the murders of two law enforcement officers – to militia leaders such as Stewart Rhodes, the Yale-educated founder of an anti-government group that recruits policy and military officers, who was photographed outside the capitol during the mob invasion last week.Accusations at public protests that Democratic politicians are dictators, tyrants and “traitors” and suggestions that white Americans need to seize power back from their elected officials, have been intensifying for more than a year, fueled in part by furious demonstrations against public health measures that forced businesses to close to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, which has disproportionately killed Black and Latino residents.Before they stormed the US Capitol last week, angry crowds of white Americans, some armed with rifles, had staged chaotic demonstrations at state capitols in Michigan, Idaho, California and elsewhere, often calling law enforcement officers “traitors” when they would not let them pass.On 6 January, the news that Trump supporters were forcing their way into the capitol was greeted with cheers at pro-Trump protests in other states. “Patriots have stormed the Capitol,” a protest organizer in Arizona announced, prompting chants of “USA!” according to the Arizona Republic.“Supposedly, they’re taking the Capitol and taking out Pence,” the organizer of an Idaho protest told a crowd of about 300 people, according to the Spokesman-Review. The crowd cheered.In Washington DC, part of the mob at the capitol had been captured on video shouting “Hang Mike Pence!” after the vice-president refused to give in to Trump’s repeated demands to deny the results of the election and name him the winner.Signs and rhetoric linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that Trump is fighting a secret war against a powerful network of elite pedophiles, were present at multiple state events last week.In Salem, Oregon, where an effigy of Democratic governor Kate Brown was tarred and feathered before being burned, the protest outside the statehouse turned violent, as Proud Boys clashed with counter-protesters. In Colorado, an estimated 700 people gathered at the state capitol to protest, many of them not wearing masks, and Denver’s mayor announced he was closing municipal buildings early as a precaution.In Arizona, where 1,000 Trump supporters gathered to protest the certification of Biden’s victory, the guillotine outside the state capitol had a Trump flag on it, and the Trump supporters who had brought it gave an Arizona Republic reporter a written statement, which included a list of baseless allegations of election fraud, and demands for new fraud audits and investigations.“Why do we have a guillotine with us? The answer is simple,” the statement read. “For six weeks Americans have written emails, gathered peacefully, made phone calls and begged their elected officials to listen to their concerns. We have been ignored, ridiculed, scorned, dismissed, lied to, laughed at and essentially told, no one cares.“We pray for peace,” the statement concluded, “but we do not fear war.” More

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    I've been on Parler. It's a cesspit of thinly veiled racism and hate | Malaika Jabali

    “Civil war is coming.”I saw this message on the social media platform Parler in November, about two weeks after the election was called for Joe Biden. The ominous post followed an even more harrowing message from a different user. “[O]ur people have guns too … it’s time for us to use it!!! Just like in old days.” The poster embedded a photograph of a noose.Parler, which has since been banned by Apple’s app store and from Amazon, has billed itself as a “free speech” platform for the “world’s town square”. Last fall, without much digging, I learned that this town square is one where an increasingly violent far right digitally dances with mainstream, influential conservatives.The fact that Parler has a vague air of legitimacy – unlike other platforms known for their explicitly far-right user bases – normalizes racist violence against Black people and anyone associated with them. Like the white police officers and “respectable” public servants who joined the Ku Klux Klan after the US civil war, or the white families who partied under the lynched bodies of Black men, white America has continued its intergenerational love affair with public anti-blackness. The methods have simply mutated. Memes calling for our deaths are the lynching postcards of the 21st century. Shared among the masses, they make casual affairs of Black terror. It’s not enough for the sharers of these memes to simply believe in white violence on a personal level; the collective experience is the point.I joined Parler in November, before various tech companies announced plans to take it offline. It didn’t take long to find a bevy of hashtags and posts romanticizing civil war. By late November, there were over 10,000 posts that included the hashtag #civilwar and its variants. The person who posted “Civil war is coming” was replying to a post by Wayne Root, a conservative media personality with more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. Root leveled the same unproven accusations of voter fraud as Donald Trump, using the same calls for battle that white power groups heeded in their storming of the US Capitol the first week of 2021.While some on the far right will probably retreat into the shadows cast by polling booths and hidden by exit polling data that obscures Trump’s popularity, many have not. Any perception of progress for Black people, even if this progress does not substantively exist, perpetuates violence against us and our perceived allies like leftists, Marxists and Democrats – all named by Parler posters as opposing parties in this hypothetical civil war).To say that Parler’s users, or any Americans who revel in white power tropes and violent memes, are “extremist” is a bit of a misnomer. What we call extremism is, if anything, a common American tradition. Millions of Americans, if they don’t proactively endorse the violence, silently concede to it. They vote for it. They dress it in words like “tradition” and “free speech”.I was raised witnessing it. There is a monument honoring Confederate soldiers in my home town of Stone Mountain, Georgia. The monument isn’t an ordinary statue erected in some mundane public square. It’s a nearly half-acre relief carved into the massive quartz and granite stone for which our town is named. It would take a runner five miles to circle around the rock formation’s base. We took field trips to Stone Mountain in high school, as if it were an amusement park and not the largest Confederate memorial in the world.Stone Mountain has now become a flashpoint for conflict. I hiked the mountain on a recent holiday trip with my mom, days before white men wielding guns protested against the widespread movement to remove Confederate statues. We tried to hike another day, but were blocked from entering. It was closed for the day after Black counter-protesters came back with guns of their own.When you talk to white southerners about honoring the Confederacy, you’ll hear a lot about heritage. I’ve heard it all my life. I heard it when our state flag featured the Confederate symbol throughout my childhood and in the debates to remove it. I read about it when I decided to make it one of my debate topics for a summer college class in my last year of high school. But what you’ll seldom hear is when this heritage has been selectively commemorated. Stone Mountain’s Confederate monument opened on the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination.This is an American tradition of terror – a culture of dehumanizing Blackness that bleeds out into the worldThis, too, is the culture of Parler.“Time to get rid of the yoke calling itself democrats,” someone wrote in response to Wayne Root’s revolution post.“Every town needs to decide on a gather place where an armed citizenry takes over everything … every traitor must be executed,” wrote another.It’s not enough to dismiss the radical right as merely having a difference of opinion, or explain it away as a population of marginalized, working-class white men who can be brought back from the brink by reason and calls for a universal basic income.Universal prescriptions are necessary, but insufficient. This is an American tradition of terror – a culture of dehumanizing Blackness that bleeds out into the world. It is the shots I heard while reporting in Kenosha, blocks from where Kyle Rittenhouse killed two white Black Lives Matter protesters, as it happened. It was the ease of white vigilantes carrying weapons in another public square, Civic Center Park in downtown Kenosha, hours earlier. It is the audacity of those white vigilantes shouting down Philando Castile’s girlfriend, from whom I was mere feet away in the park, as they argued for their right to kill to protect property. Of course, Philando was killed while exercising their revered second amendment right to bear arms, but that right is clearly reserved for some Americans more than others.Parler may be homeless now, but there is an entire world that welcomes the hatred and violence it cultivates. As threatening as it may be, the platform will probably be replaced with something else. It’s the public terror that’s the point. More

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    Biden says he is not afraid to take oath of office outside following Capitol riots – video

    President-elect Joe Biden said he was not afraid to take the oath of office outside on 20 January following the violent riots at the US Capitol. Speaking after receiving his second Covid-19 vaccination, the 78-year-old added the focus now was on holding those who engaged in the riot to account
    Acting US homeland security secretary Chad Wolf resigns – live More

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    Republican congresswoman Mary Miller quotes Hitler during rally – video

    US Congresswoman Mary Miller of Illinois tells a crowd outside the US Capitol: Hitler was right on one thing – “Whoever has the youth has the future.” Our children are being propagandised.’ Miller has since apologised for quoting the Nazi leader at the right-wing rally, issuing a statement on Twitter saying: ‘I sincerely apologize for any harm my words caused and regret using a reference to one of the most evil dictators in history’
    Illinois Republican Mary Miller sorry for quoting Hitler in Capitol speech
    Capitol attack: two men believed to have brought zip-tie handcuffs arrested More

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    'Find the fraud': details emerge of another Trump call to Georgia officials

    While election officials in Georgia were verifying signatures on absentee ballot envelopes in one metro Atlanta county, Donald Trump pressed a lead investigator to “find the fraud” and said it would make the investigator a national hero.The December call, described by a person familiar with it, is yet another link in the chain of the extraordinary pressure campaign waged by the US president on state officials as he sought to overturn the results of the November election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.It is one of at least three phone calls, held over the course of a month between early December and early January, where Trump sought help from high-level Georgia officials in subverting the election – only to be rebuffed each time. Trump lost to Biden in Georgia by 11,779 votes.The call to the investigator preceded Trump’s call on 2 January to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, where he asked election officials to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s win in the state. It occurred as election officials were conducting an audit of signatures on absentee ballot envelopes in Cobb County.The audit, which reviewed more than 15,000 signatures, found no cases of fraud. The Georgia bureau of investigation helped conduct the signature audit.Trump and his allies have for months made false claims about Georgia’s signature verification process for absentee ballots and about the results of the November election. Among other things, they demanded an audit of the signature matches.The White House had no immediate comment. The call was first reported on Saturday by the Washington Post, which said it was withholding the name of the investigator, who did not respond to requests for comment, because of the risk of threats and harassment directed at election officials.Various election officials across the country and Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, have said there was no widespread fraud in the election. Raffensperger and other officials in Georgia have repeatedly disputed Trump’s false claims about the election and said it was conducted freely and fairly.Congress certified Biden’s electoral college win early on Thursday – hours after a violent throng of pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol.During another call in early December, Trump pressed Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, to order a special session of the state legislature to subvert Biden’s victory. Kemp refused.Trump repeatedly lashed out at Raffensperger and Kemp, both fellow Republicans, and others he saw as standing in his way of overturning the election loss.In last week’s call with Raffensperger, Trump urged the secretary of state to change the certified results. “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump said. “Because we won the state.”Raffensperger said in response: “President Trump, we’ve had several lawsuits, and we’ve had to respond in court to the lawsuits and the contentions. We don’t agree that you have won.”Legal experts said the call raised questions about possible election law violations by Trump, and several Democrats in the state have called for an investigation to be opened. More

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    Capitol attack: the five people who died

    Family members and law enforcement have confirmed more details on the now five people who died in an attempted insurrection against the United States on Wednesday, including a Capitol police officer who died from his injuries.The remaining four were among the supporters of Donald Trump who stormed the US Capitol, attempting to halt counts of electoral college ballots that would formally seal Joe Biden’s victory over the incumbent president.“Don’t dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob. Insurrectionists. Domestic terrorists. It’s that basic. It’s that simple,” Biden said in response to Thursday’s attack.Details on the five people killed are below. Brian Sicknick, 42According to statement from the US Capitol police, the New Jersey native joined the force in 2008. Sicknick was reportedly struck in the head with a fire extinguisher while “physically engaging” with the rioters. He collapsed soon after returning to his division before being rushed to a nearby hospital. Sicknick died on Thursday night after being removed from life support.A reported 60 Capitol police officers were injured. According to the Democratic congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio, many were also hit in the head with metal pipes. More than a dozen remain hospitalized.Sicknick’s death is being investigated as a homicide by federal and local authorities.Ashli Babbitt, 35Babbitt, a 14-year air force veteran from San Diego, was among a group of people who could be seen attempting to break down the doors of the US Senate chamber as members sheltered. Cameras captured the moment she was rushed out on a stretcher after being shot by a Capitol police officer. She died at the hospital.“I really don’t know why she decided to do this,” Babbitt’s mother-in-law told Washington’s WTTG.Just a day before the rally, Babbitt tweeted the QAnon conspiracy called “the storm”, in which supporters believe Donald Trump will emerge to overthrow and execute corrupt political elites and enemies.Benjamin Phillips, 50A computer programmer from Schuylkill county, Pennsylvania, Phillips organized a caravan from Pennsylvania to the Capitol grounds for the planned insurrection. Once there, he had a stroke and died, although authorities have not confirmed at what point during the attack.I took a bus from Harrisburg to DC with Trump supporter and trip organizer Ben Philips yesterday. As he drove down, he told me: “It seems like the first day of the rest of our lives.” He died in DC yesterday. My story:https://t.co/DQ5h4AV8aO— Julia Terruso (@JuliaTerruso) January 7, 2021
    Witnesses told the Philadelphia-Inquirer he was last seen looking for parking before the president gave his speech at the “Save America March”.Kevin Greeson, 55A native of rural Athens, Alabama, Greeson died of an apparent heart attack at an unknown point during the events. His family confirmed in a statement that a history of high blood pressure “in the midst of the excitement” contributed to the medical emergency.Greeson posted racist diatribes online and associated with the Proud Boys, a far-right group known for enacting political violence and racial terror.Despite the family’s insistence that “he was not there to participate in violence or rioting” and did not “condone such actions”, Greeson had posted to popular conservative social platforms calling for supporters to “load your guns and take to the streets” in the weeks leading up to the events.“Let’s take this fucking country back,” he posted to Parler. Like many of the white nationalists who participated, Greeson never specifies from whom the country is being taken.Rosanne Boyland, 34The resident of Kennesaw, Georgia, reportedly died of a medical emergency during the riots. Family members later told reporters Boyland had been crushed in the melee.Boyland, an avid Trump supporter, had a criminal history, including being charged with possession or distribution of heroin “at least four other times” in Georgia. Other past charges include battery, obstruction of law enforcement and trespassing.Heartbreak. Exclusive reaction from Rosanne Boyland’s family after finding out the 34-year-old Kennesaw woman was likely crushed to death during the unrest at the US Capital yesterday. @FOX5Atlanta pic.twitter.com/dxLvLRn0bF— Aungelique Proctor (@aungeliquefox5) January 7, 2021
    According to the Daily Mail, Wednesday’s attack was the first Trump event that Boyland ever attended. Her family told local WGCL that although they understood she “was really passionate about her beliefs”, they were shocked and “devastated” to learn she participated in the insurrection.“Tragically, she was there and it cost her life,” Justin Cave, Boyland’s brother-in-law, told WGCL.“I’ve never tried to be a political person but it’s my own personal belief that the president’s words incited a riot that killed four of his biggest fans last night, and I believe that we should invoke the 25th amendment at this time,” he added. More