The former president has pleaded not guilty to charges related to allegedly hoarding government secrets at his Mar-a-Lago resort and frustrating efforts by the federal government to retrieve them at his arraignment in Miami, Reuters reports
Trump pleads not guilty to 37 federal criminal counts in Mar-a-Lago case More
Two and a half years after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, an estimated 12 million American adults, or 4.4% of the adult population, believe violence is justified to restore Donald Trump to the White House.Though the number of adults who believe this has declined since the insurrection, recent survey data from the University of Chicago reveal alarming and dangerous levels of support for political violence and conspiracy theories across the United States.The university’s Chicago Project on Security & Threats (CPOST) research center has been conducting Dangers to Democracy surveys of American adults on political violence and attitudes towards democracy since shortly after the January 6 attacks. In new data from April shared exclusively with the Guardian, researchers found a continued support for violence to achieve various political goals on both sides of the aisle, and a general distrust for democracy.The results are particularly alarming as the 2024 election approaches without essential safeguards that some lawmakers say could help prevent another violent attack on US democracy.For the next year and a half through the 2024 election, CPOST will be releasing new survey data tracking continued dangers to democracy every three months. The data will be published first with the Guardian. This data will be critical at a time when efforts to erode democracy feel increasingly prevalent in the United States, from candidates who deny the results of their elections to governmental taskforces attempting to prosecute people who unintentionally violate voting laws.“We’re heading into an extremely tumultuous election season,” said Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago who directs CPOST. “What’s happening in the United States is political violence is going from the fringe to the mainstream.”The most recent survey from April 2023 found that an estimated 142 million Americans believe that elections won’t solve America’s most fundamental problems – up from 111 million last September. And one in five American adults still believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, representing very little change from 2021.“What you’re seeing is really disturbing levels of distrust in American democracy, support for dangerous conspiracy theories, and support for political violence itself,” Pape said.Pape said it was important to track sentiments about political violence, comparing it to the kindling for a wildfire. Though many were unaware that the events on January 6 would turn violent, research shows that public support for violence was widespread, so the attacks themselves should not have come as a surprise.“Once you have support for violence in the mainstream, those are the raw ingredients or the raw combustible material and then speeches, typically by politicians, can set them off,” he said. “Or if they get going, speeches can encourage them to go further.”Before the January 6 insurrection, there was chatter on online forums and among far-right groups about potential political violence when Congress met to count electoral votes and certify Joe Biden the winner of the presidential election. But it was Trump’s speech at the White House Ellipse that day that touched off the actual violence, Pape said.That’s why it’s important to track public sentiment about political violence regularly. The instigating event, usually a speech or comment by a person in power, is unpredictable and can set people off at any moment, but the underlying support for violence is more predictable and trackable.The survey found that almost 14% – a minority of Americans, but still a significant number – believe the use of force is justified to “achieve political goals that I support”. More specifically, 12.4% believe it’s justified to restore the federal right to abortion, 8.4% believe it’s justified to ensure members of Congress and other government officials do the right thing, 6.3% think it’s justified to preserve the rights of white Americans, and 6.1% believe it’s justified to prevent the prosecution of Trump.Peter Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University and the author of a forthcoming book on public trust in the military, said that while public support for political violence might seem extreme, a confluence of factors is necessary for actual violence to occur – which is still rare. On January 6, there was a time-sensitive action, an already existing rally, and inciters including Trump who encouraged others to commit violence.“You needed all of that at the same time to turn what would have been latent sentiment of the sort that this survey captures into actual violence,” he said.In addition to wide support for Trump’s big lie about the 2020 election, the survey also found that significant numbers of American adults believe conspiracy theories about the US government, and the number of believers has remained steady over almost two years. For example, 10% of American adults in April said they believe the government is run by Satan-worshipping pedophiles.“The survey confirms what we already knew, which is that rhetoric is really hyperbolic in American political life,” Feaver said. “You can get folks to express support for pretty extreme statements.”An even greater percentage of American adults said they believe in the “great replacement” theory, a white nationalist conspiracy theory that holds there is an active effort to replace white people with non-white populations, including immigrants and other people of color, in white-majority countries.While much of the survey reveals an alarming level of political polarization in the United States, there are areas where the majority of people do agree. Almost 55% of American adults feel like elections won’t solve our most fundamental political and social problems, and close to 50% believe political elites on both sides of the aisle are the most corrupt people in America.Perhaps more optimistically, the largest share of Americans believe in a potential solution to political violence. More than 77% think Republicans and Democrats in Congress should make a joint statement condemning any political violence.“There’s a tremendous amount of opposition to political violence in the United States, but it is not mobilized,” Pape said.CPOST’s research is supported by the University of Chicago, the Pritzker Military Foundation, the Hopewell Fund, and Anti-Defamation League and contributions from the CPOST board of advisers More
An actor known for his roles on the comedy television shows Bob’s Burgers and Mr Show with Bob and David was arrested on Wednesday on charges that he joined a mob of Donald Trump supporters in confronting police officers during the US Capitol riot, court records show.Jay Johnston, 54, of Los Angeles, faces charges including civil disorder, a felony. A federal magistrate judge agreed to free Johnston on $25,000 bond after his initial court appearance in California. A public defender who represented him at the hearing declined to comment.Video footage captured Johnston pushing against police and helping rioters who attacked officers guarding an entrance to the Capitol in a tunnel on the Lower West Terrace, according to an FBI agent’s affidavit. Johnston held a stolen police shield over his head and passed it to other rioters during the attack on 6 January 2021, the affidavit says.Johnston “was close to the entrance to the tunnel, turned back and signaled for other rioters to come towards the entrance”, the agent wrote.Johnston was the voice of the character Jimmy Pesto on Fox’s Bob’s Burgers. The Daily Beast reported in December 2021 that Johnston was “banned” from the animated show after the January 6 attack.Johnston appeared on Mr Show with Bob and David, an HBO sketch comedy series that starred Bob Odenkirk and David Cross. His credits also include small parts on the television show Arrested Development and in the movie Anchorman, starring Will Ferrell.United Airlines records show Johnston booked a round-trip flight from Los Angeles to Washington DC, departing on 4 January 2021, and returning a day after the riot, according to the FBI. Thousands of people stormed the Capitol on 6 January after attending Donald Trump’s “Save America” rally.While the mob attacked police in the tunnel with pepper spray and other weapons, Johnston helped other rioters near the tunnel pour water on their faces and then joined in pushing against the line of officers, the FBI says.“The rioters coordinated the timing of the pushes by yelling ‘Heave! Ho!’” the affidavit says.Three current or former associates of Johnston identified him as a riot suspect from photos that the FBI published online, according to the agent. The FBI said one of those associates provided investigators with a text message in which Johnston acknowledged being at the Capitol on 6 January.“The news has presented it as an attack. It actually wasn’t. Thought it kind of turned into that. It was a mess. Got maced and tear gassed and I found it quite untastic,” Johnston wrote, according to the FBI.More than 1,000 people have been charged with federal crimes for their conduct at the Capitol on 6 January. More than 500 of them have been sentenced, with over half getting terms of imprisonment ranging from seven days to 18 years, according to an Associated Press review of court records. More
Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie announced his presidential run in a town hall at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics in Manchester, New Hampshire. Christie joins the primary as a rank outsider but promises a campaign with a singular focus: to take the fight to Donald Trump, who Christie said was ‘obsessed with the mirror, who never admits a mistake, who never admits a fault and who always finds someone else and something else to blame for whatever goes wrong, but finds every reason to take credit for anything that goes right’. More
The clock had just struck 9pm when Jeff Sabol, a Colorado man accused of dragging a police officer down a flight of stairs at the US Capitol on January 6 and beating him, placed a call from inside Washington’s jail.Dozens of yards and several layers of concrete and razor wire away, on E Street Southeast, Tommy Tatum, a hulking Mississippian who had been present at the Capitol on January 6 but not arrested, stood with a microphone in one hand and a cellphone in the other.“Hey, are you guys out there? We’ve had some technical difficulties for a variety of reasons,” Sabol’s voice rang out from the phone and over a sound system, drawing cheers from a group of about 15 people who had gathered, carrying American flags and wearing shirts with slogans such as “Abolish the FBI”.Sabol’s voice grew echoey, and the sounds of others filled the room behind him. “Thirty seconds!” he cried.And then, the two groups, one confined behind the jail’s walls over charges they attacked the Capitol in a failed attempt to keep Donald Trump from losing power and the other made up of their friends and loved ones on the sidewalk outside, sang the American national anthem in unison: “O say can you see …”Thus concluded the 303rd evening of the “Freedom Corner”, perhaps the only regular public protest by Trump supporters in America’s capital city, where the demand is accountability – not for the former president, but for the government they believe is persecuting them.The target of their demonstration is Washington DC’s city jail, where an overwhelmingly Black inmate population has long endured terrible conditions. Over the past two years, the Freedom Corner protesters have been joined by some of the hundreds of people swept up in the sprawling federal investigation into the violence on January 6, prompting demonstrators to gather outside on a corner sandwiched between the building and the tilted headstones of the Congressional Cemetery to decry the injustice within.“These are really good guys. They’re fathers, they’re uncles, they’re veterans. Most of them have served this country. They fought for us, they fought for our freedom,” said Helena Gibson, a regular attendee of the vigil who was present at the Capitol on January 6 but said she did not enter the building.“Because these are really great amazing mentors, stand-up men, they don’t deserve what’s happening to them.”The storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters immediately after a speech by the then president has been linked to nine deaths, and saw the halls of the 223-year-old building turned into a war zone. Rioters surrounded and beat overwhelmed police officers, sent lawmakers and the then vice-president, Mike Pence, fleeing and attacked with such violence his Secret Service detail asked others to say goodbye to their families for them.But the Republican party’s right wing has invested in downplaying the incident, even though the mayhem played out on live television, was explored in detail by a bipartisan congressional committee who said Trump and his allies may have broken the law, and is the subject of an investigation by special counsel Jack Smith that could lead to charges against the former president.On the same day last March when the Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired an episode of his now-cancelled show featuring footage he claimed proves the January 6 rioters were, in fact, “sightseers”, the Republican congressman Mike Collins tweeted: “I’ve seen enough. Release all J6 political prisoners now.”In the unlikely event that happens, they would be met with open arms on Freedom Corner. Ringed in by orange traffic barriers and watched by several police cars, attendees set out snacks on a portable table, run the banners of Donald Trump and the United States up a flagpole and livestreamed the entire two-and-a-half-hour gathering on multiple cellphones.“I definitely think people committed crimes that day. I mean, it’s never been our opinion, my opinion, that no one should be charged,” said Nicole Reffitt, a Texas woman whose husband, Guy Reffitt, was last year sentenced to seven and a quarter years in prison after a jury convicted him of obstructing Congress, interfering with police officers and threatening his own children – one of whom turned him in to the authorities.“I believe my husband was overly charged. And, you know, and then he was persecuted for the events of that day, and not necessarily for what he really did.”The vigils began last year on the day her husband was sentenced, said Reffitt, one of the first attendees at Freedom Corner, along with Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot dead by police in the Capitol during the attack. Since then, they have attracted activists from across the country.Carrying a pole with a US flag over her shoulder, as some of the rioters did during the attack, Jamie Crowe said she has traveled to Freedom Corner more than 30 times from Pennsylvania “to support the people that are patriots that marched to the Capitol peacefully”.Though polls have found about a quarter of Republican voters approve of January 6, a majority of Americans do not share that view. Crowe said she was not in Washington when the attack happened, but watched coverage on television.Asked how she could view the same images the rest of America did yet reach a different conclusion about the riot, Crowe said: “I love this country more than you can imagine.”As she spoke, the vigil was holding its nightly roll call of those who died and had been arrested. “Hero,” the crowd intoned with the bang of a tambourine after each name.“And we’ll do like we do every night. We’ll say her name,” Tamara Perryman announced after the names were read, then led the crowd in repeating, “Ashli Babbitt, Ashli Babbitt.”“We just want justice, fair justice, like anybody would want,” said Perryman, whose husband, Brian Jackson, was arrested last year on charges related to lobbing a flagpole at officers defending the Capitol.“If throwing that flag was truly assault, then give him his assault charge and let him go home. Because that is not a year in prison, nor is it eight to nine years in prison [the sentence he could face’],” Perryman said.Last year, 34 January 6 defendants, including Reffitt’s husband, Guy, signed a document submitted in a federal court filing asking that they be moved to the US military prison in Guantánamo Bay if conditions in Washington’s jail do not improve.“My husband’s never been in jail, so I had no idea how the system was,” Reffitt said, describing how her husband has endured inedible food and has slept without a pillow, because prisoners are not allowed to have them.“These are humans in here, and this is not how you rehabilitate anybody,” Reffitt said.Melissa Wasser, policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia, sees plenty to protest at the city’s jail. Her group has sued over detention conditions, and documented everything from flooding in the facility’s showers to instances where staff has punished prisoners by withholding food and water.“I’m glad that there there’s been more coverage of the jail in these conditions. Again, you know, it should not have taken the complaints of these white January 6 defendants and their families for people to act on this,” Wasser said. “Local residents, advocates, family members of the mostly Black residents have been raising these problems for years.” A spokesperson for the city’s department of corrections declined to comment.Statistics released in January show 90% of those in the department’s custody are Black in a city where the group makes up about 45% of the population. In a database National Public Radio maintains of January 6 defendants, most appear to be white.“These guys and their families were shocked beyond belief. They could not believe that an American citizen of any stripe, of any race, of any criminal background could be treated this way,” said Joe McBride, an attorney who has represented multiple January 6 defendants, three of whom ended up in the capital city’s lock-up.“These guys were like, ‘I have rights, rights, I have rights.’ And I had to explain to them, at great pain, that their government doesn’t give a flying fuck about them.”But McBride is no fan of detainees’ tendency to call up the Freedom Corner on prison phones to chat, nor of the developing community of counter-protesters.“It was good for a time, but it appears to me that that event has reached its natural conclusion, and could potentially now be causing more harm than good,” he said.In a solidly Democratic city where many residents feel put upon by repeated instances of pro-Trump demonstrators showing up from out of town during his presidency, Freedom Corner may be Washington’s most hated regular protest, and has attracted a dedicated group of opponents.On Monday’s Memorial Day holiday, the Freedom Corner crew marched from the Capitol to their usual spot about two miles away, but were joined along their route by their chief nemesis: a livestreamer named Anarchy Princess.“Terrorists coming, watch out, there’s terrorists behind me,” the counter-protester, wearing a baseball cap and aviator sunglasses, cried into a megaphone as the group walked. “The Nazis are behind me, Trump’s little cry baby losers, they insurrected the Capitol, are behind me. Fuck Ashli Babbitt!”As the group neared their destination, where a large and noisy group of counter-protesters had also massed, video showed Witthoeft – Babbitt’s mother – pushing Anarchy Princess, and later grabbing a megaphone she was using to broadcast siren noises and smashing it on the ground. Police arrested Witthoeft the following day.Witthoeft was released later on Tuesday evening, and told the Guardian she planned to keep the vigils up “until I feel like I’m done doing what I need to do, and I don’t feel that way yet”. Anarchy Princess could not be reached for comment.After finishing their singing of the national anthem on Tuesday evening, the group on the corner trained their eyes on the prison’s windows, where January 6 detainees have, in the past, been able to make their lights flicker in a tribute to their streetside supporters. That wasn’t happening that night.“They’ve moved them so we can no longer see them flashing the lights,” said a protester who went by the pseudonym Dude and sported a gray camouflage National Rifle Association hat.Perryman wasn’t so sure. Earlier in the night, Sean McHugh, who was found guilty in April of charges related to attacking Capitol police officers with bear spray, had called Freedom Corner and said he had to move cells because of a mold outbreak.“Some things truly are coincidence and just a matter of happenstance,” Perryman said. “But it is easy to get into that mindset where, ‘Oh gosh, are they really messing with me or am I just paranoid?’ You know what I mean?” More
A US Senate hearing burst into laughter after Oklahoma Republican senator Markwayne Mullin said ‘I don’t want reality’ during a session on race and education. Mullin was questioning a witness about whether a book meant to teach children about racism was appropriate for early learning classes. After his remark prompted laughter in the hearing room the senator said he ‘misspoke’ and returned to hectoring his witness, Cheryl Morman, president of the Virginia Alliance for Family Child Care Associations More
The US special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election defeat is examining his firing of a cybersecurity official whose office said the vote was secure, the New York Times said.Jack Smith, who is also investigating Trump’s handling of classified documents, has subpoenaed former Trump White House staffers as well as Christopher Krebs, who oversaw the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) under Trump, the Times said, citing unnamed sources.Trump fired Krebs in November 2020, days after Cisa issued a statement calling the 3 November election “the most secure in American history”, as the then-president made his unsupported accusations that the vote was rigged.Cisa, part of the Department of Homeland Security, works to protect US elections. Krebs told associates at the time he expected to be fired.Representatives for Smith declined to comment on the New York Times report. Representatives for Krebs and Trump could not be reached for comment.The frontrunner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, Trump has persisted in making unfounded claims of widespread election fraud and promised pardons for supporters who attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, in a failed effort to block certification of Joe Biden’s victory.Smith is leading a grand jury investigation into Trump’s actions. A special bipartisan House committee last year urged the Department of Justice to charge Trump with crimes including inciting or aiding an insurrection.In Georgia, a county prosecutor is investigating alleged interference in the 2020 election, with charging decisions expected by 1 September.Trump faces several other legal threats, including Smith’s investigation of classified documents found at Trump’s residence in Florida after he left the White House.In March, a New York grand jury indicted Trump for falsifying business records related to a hush money payment to a porn star before the 2016 election. The New York attorney general has sued Trump and his company for alleged fraud. In a civil trial in New York, Trump was found liable for sexual assault and defamation, relating to an allegation of rape.Trump denies all allegations and accuses prosecutors of a political “witch-hunt”. More
The US is at an increased risk of domestic terror attacks by rightwing “lone wolf” actors, experts have warned, as inflammatory Republican rhetoric around a variety of issues seems likely to continue ahead of the 2024 election.The number of attacks by adherents to rightwing ideology has soared since 2016, as Republican lies about election interference, and escalating rhetoric from the right about minority groups, have served to “provide mechanisms” for individuals to become radicalized, an analyst said.As the threat of domestic rightwing terrorism rises, researchers say individuals, rather than organized groups, are now far more likely to commit what analysts call “crimes inspired by extremist ideology”.There have been a series of such attacks in recent years. In May 2022 a white supremacist killed 10 Black people at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York. The attacker said he had chosen the location because it was in a predominantly Black neighborhood. He was sentenced to life in prison earlier this year.A self-described white nationalist killed 23 people and injured 22 in a shooting in El Paso, on the border of Mexico and the US, in 2019, in an anti-immigration attack targeting Hispanic people.In recent years a white supremacist killed nine people at a Black church in Charleston, while just this week a man was arrested after he crashed a rented truck into bollards near the White House. The man subsequently praised Adolf Hitler to investigators and said he intended to “kill the president”, according to charging documents.Michael Jensen, senior researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (Start) at the University of Maryland, said 70% of individuals committing terrorist acts in the US are individuals, or part of “isolated cliques” – small groups of three to four people.“That said, these individuals might be lone actors, but they’re not lonely actors,” Jensen said.“They are embedded in these online ecosystems where they are exchanging ideas with each other all day every day.”Jensen leads the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (Pirus) project, a database tracking how US extremists came to be radicalized.According to the data, 90% of the cases of US terrorists are classed as domestic. Of the domestic extremists, 95% are far-right, Jensen said: white supremacists, Proud Boys, anti-immigrant groups and anti-government groups.There has been a worrying increase in the number of attacks. Prior to 2016, Jensen and his team logged about 150 individuals a year who were “committing crimes inspired by extremist ideology”.Since 2016, the number of people committing such crimes has jumped to about 300-350 cases a year, Jensen said – not including a huge spike in 2021 as a result of the January 6 insurrection.As the number of incidents have risen, there have been changes in how people come to rightwing terrorism.“Before the internet and before social media, how an individual was likely to radicalize is that it was going to be through a face-to-face relationship that they had in the physical world,” Jensen said.“So they had a cousin that was involved in a skinhead gang and they recruited them, or there was a group active in their neighborhood and they saw a flyer and took an interest in it.“It was a much more labor intensive process to get people involved.”With the advent of social media, white supremacist ideas and groups are available “at the click of a button”, Jensen said. Individuals have a much easier path to becoming radicalized.At the same time, the threat of rightwing terrorism has been exacerbated by the normalizing of political violence, or violent rhetoric, by elected officials and media personalities. Prominent figures can provide a gateway for people to commit violence when they demonize immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, or indulge conspiracies like the great replacement theory, Jensen said.“They get this disinformation and conspiracy theories that are a bit more watered down: does not make calls to violence, but they provide the mechanisms for people to follow that narrative to the places where they will encounter that rhetoric.”Susan Corke, Intelligence Project Director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the far right has been “increasingly mobilized since the beginning of the Trump era”.“Currently, the level of mobilization, coordination and sustained focus of the far right’s anti-LGBTQ+, particularly anti-trans, is much worse.“The past year saw unprecedented violence against transgender and gender-nonconforming people, and the most frequent victims were women of color, especially black transgender women,” Corke said.Corke said terror attacks by individuals should be seen within the wider context of hate-filled rhetoric and extremist platforms.“While a shooter or someone who takes violent action may act on their own, I would say that they are not solo actors,” she said.“People do not ‘self-radicalize’ – they exist within social and political structures that perpetuate these ideas, often through deliberate disinformation and active recruitment from groups espousing hateful ideologies.”Corke said the way to combat and prevent rightwing terrorism is to educate young people and work towards early intervention.“Communities and governments need to adopt a public health approach to preventing extremism by engaging communities, mental health experts, social workers and, especially, people involved in the day-to-day lives of young people,” she said.In 2021 a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence – the head of the US Intelligence Community – warned that racially motivated extremists posed the most lethal domestic terrorism threat. It echoed post-January 6 warnings from Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, that the threat from domestic violent extremism was “metastasizing” across the country.But despite the FBI and US intelligence pronouncements, a major problem with combating rightwing terrorism is that law enforcement does not adequately track of instances of violence, said Michael German, a former FBI special agent infiltrated white supremacy groups in the 1990s who now works at the Brennan Center for Justice.“The FBI doesn’t know how many people white supremacists killed last year in the United States. They don’t collect that information,” German said.When attacks by white supremacists do happen, “they often get parsed in a way that minimizes them,” he said. White supremacist violence is frequently recorded under the category of gang violence, rather than domestic terrorism, while attacks conducted by individuals who have far-right beliefs are frequently classified as hate crimes – outside of the domestic terrorism umbrella.“You would think that if the FBI and the justice department had a real interest in significantly suppressing this type of crime, they would at least count them,” German said.German said a significant change from the time he spent undercover to investigating neo-Nazi organizations in the 1990s to the modern environment is the language elected officials use to talk about certain groups.“Back in the 90s there were Republicans who used dog whistle politics, they used phrases and arguments that the far-right militant crowd understood as speaking to them about their issues,” German said.“Now you see sitting politicians who exalt in violence, and call for more of it and call for exonerating the people who committed violence because they committed violence in furtherance of their political cause.”That’s the kind of rhetoric that led to the January 6 insurrection, German said – and could continue to cause problems in the future.“If the government is saying: ‘Do it, and do it for me, and I’ll pardon you, or I’ll pay your legal bills, which are things that are said today. Then it’s easier [for members of the far right] to say: ‘Okay, this is this is authorized.’“That’s how you get 10,000 people attacking the US Capitol.” More
