Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      Trump Plans Jan. 6 Pardons and Deportations as First Acts in Office

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump said in a new interview that he will use the opening hours of his presidency to pardon people convicted of participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol assault, begin deportations of undocumented immigrants and increase oil production.He also said during the interview, which Time magazine published on Thursday, that he might supporting getting rid of some childhood vaccines if data shows links to autism. He declined to answer a question about whether he had talked with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia since the November election but said Ukraine should not have been allowed to fire U.S.-made missiles into Russia.Speaking of pardons in Jan. 6 cases, he said: “We’re going to do it very quickly, and it’s going to start in the first hour that I get into office.” He said the pardons would go to “nonviolent” people who were at the Capitol, which was overrun by Trump supporters after he lost the 2020 election. “A vast majority should not be in jail, and they’ve suffered gravely,” he said.The president-elect’s comments came during a wide-ranging interview conducted on Nov. 25 as part of the magazine’s choice of Mr. Trump to be its person of the year. In the interview, which the magazine said lasted more than an hour, the president-elect bragged that he had run a “flawless” campaign and that Democrats were out of touch with Americans.He also said he planed a “virtual closure of Department of Education in Washington,” though he did not explain what that meant. And he said that he might reverse President Biden’s expansion of Title IX protections, which includes prohibitions against harassment of transgender students.Americans “don’t want to see, you know, men playing in women’s sports. They don’t,” Mr. Trump said. “They don’t want to see all of this transgender, which is, it’s just taken over.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Shouldn’t Trump Voters Be Viewed as Traitors?

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      The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on whether voters should be held accountable for their chosen candidate’s behavior.From my perspective, the attack on the Capitol spurred on by Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021, the efforts to nullify the results of the 2020 election with false electors and unfounded court cases and the persistent effort to discredit those election results without evidence amounted to an attempt to overthrow a pillar of our democracy. More to the point, 18 U.S. Code Chapter 115 includes crimes against the nation described as treason, misprision of treason, rebellion or insurrection, seditious conspiracy and advocating the overthrow of government. I hold anyone voting for Trump at least morally guilty for the consequences of Jan. 6 and everything that follows the recent election. Would you agree that people who vote for Trump in light of these circumstances are themselves guilty of treasonous acts? — Name WithheldFrom the Ethicist:Something like three-quarters of Americans, surveys over the past year report, think democracy in America is threatened. To go by exit-poll data, those voters supported Trump in about the same proportions as those who thought democracy was secure. In a study published last year, researchers at U.C. Berkeley and M.I.T. provided evidence that democratic back-sliding around the world — with citizens voting for authoritarian leaders — is driven in part by voters who believe in democracy but doubt that the other side does. The researchers found that such voters, once shown the actual levels of support for democracy among their opponents, became less likely to vote for candidates who violated democratic norms. The general point is that not understanding the actual views of people of other parties — and assuming the worst of them — can be dangerous for democracy.Trump voters, for the most part, don’t think he committed treason. And your position can’t be that unknowingly voting for someone guilty of treason is itself treasonous. Perhaps you think that they should believe him to have been treasonous. Similar issues were aired when Henry Wallace, otherwise a highly dissimilar figure, ran for president in 1948. He had denounced the Marshall Plan, wanted the Soviet Union to play a role in the governance of Germany’s western industrial heartland and — detractors thought — was a Stalin apologist.Historians can debate whether he was a voice of conscience or a pawn of America’s adversaries. But suppose you were among those who viewed him as a traitor. To have extended the indictment to his supporters would have been to criminalize political disagreement. Besides, if voting for someone who has done bad things makes you guilty of them, most voters are in deep trouble. It’s easy to be inflamed by someone with a habit of making inflammatory statements. But there may be a cost when you deem those who vote for the other side as ‘‘the enemy from within.’’ That’s a term that Trump has freely employed, of course. You’ll want to ask yourself whether protecting democracy is best served by adopting this attitude.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ex-N.F.L. Linebacker Hit and Pushed Police During Jan. 6 Riot, U.S. Says

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      Antwione Williams, who played a season with the Detroit Lions, is charged with assaulting officers at the U.S. Capitol.A former N.F.L. linebacker was arrested in Georgia on Thursday on charges that he hit and pushed law enforcement officers during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, one of the first insurrection-related arrests since President-elect Donald J. Trump won re-election, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said.The former player, Leander Antwione Williams, 31, of Savannah, Ga., who played one season for the Detroit Lions, was among the first rioters to breach a police barricade that had been set up on the northwest side of the U.S. Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, according to a complaint and arrest warrant prepared by Brad Fisk, a special agent with the F.B.I.In addition to a felony count of assaulting officers and obstruction of law enforcement during a civil disorder, Mr. Williams faces several misdemeanors relating to disruptive conduct at the Capitol.Footage from the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021, showed Mr. Williams near the front of a crowd a short distance from the U.S. Capitol.The crowd’s efforts to approach the Capitol were temporarily stymied by a line of police barricades and several law enforcement officers, according to photos included in Mr. Fisk’s report. Then, just after 1 p.m., Mr. Williams was seen again near the front of the crowd, pushing through metal barricades as law enforcement officers retreated.As he and the crowd continued to push toward the Capitol, Mr. Williams “grabbed and pushed two officers,” Mr. Fisk wrote.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Proud Boys Leader Convicted of Sedition for Role in Jan. 6 Attack Asks Trump for Pardon

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      A leader of the Proud Boys who was convicted last year of seditious conspiracy for his role in the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, on Wednesday asked President-elect Donald J. Trump for a pardon.The Proud Boys leader, Joseph Biggs, who is serving a 17-year prison term, was the first of dozens of Proud Boys members found guilty in connection with Jan. 6 to formally request clemency for the part he played in the Capitol attack. Other high-ranking members of the extremist organization, including its former chairman, Enrique Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison in his Jan. 6 case, have also signaled they intend to ask Mr. Trump for pardons.Mr. Biggs’s lawyer, Norm Pattis, sent a letter to Mr. Trump on Wednesday requesting clemency for his client that opened by praising Mr. Trump for his “re-election to the presidency.” Mr. Pattis quickly pivoted to asking the president-elect for “a complete pardon” for Mr. Biggs, suggesting that exonerating Mr. Biggs would serve “the broader public interest” in much the same way that the clemency granted to thousands of Confederate supporters helped to heal the nation in the years that followed the Civil War.“These are divisive times,” Mr. Pattis wrote. And he brought up the 2020 election, which many of Mr. Trump’s supporters were challenging on the day of the attack on the Capitol. “Suspicions and bitterness about the election lingers to this day,” he added.“A pardon of Mr. Biggs,” Mr. Pattis went on, “will help close that wound and inspire confidence in the future.”While Mr. Trump repeatedly promised during his recent campaign to pardon the more than 1,500 people charged so far in connection with the Capitol attack, his transition team has not yet put in place a formal policy about how to handle clemency requests like Mr. Biggs’s.Many of the rioters, their families and some outside activists who have supported their cause have been pushing Mr. Trump and his allies to create a formal protocol that would offer a broad version of amnesty to the defendants.Those who support such a move have privately expressed concern about hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters deluging the president-elect’s administration with pardon requests. They would rather see a systemic approach to the issue of pardons worked out in advance of Mr. Trump taking office. More

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      ‘El Estados Unidos de Trump’: el regreso que señala un país diferente

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      La semana pasada, en su mitin de clausura en la Elipse, Kamala Harris despreció a Donald Trump como un caso atípico que no representaba a Estados Unidos. “Eso no es lo que somos”, declaró.De hecho, resulta que eso es exactamente lo que somos. Al menos la mayoría de nosotros.La suposición de que Trump representaba una anomalía que por fin sería relegada al montón de cenizas de la historia fue arrastrada el martes por la noche por una corriente republicana que barrió con los estados disputados y con la comprensión de Estados Unidos alimentada durante mucho tiempo por su élite dirigente de ambos partidos.La clase política ya no puede desechar a Trump como una interrupción temporal de la larga marcha del progreso, un caso fortuito que de algún modo se coló en la Casa Blanca con una estrafalaria y única victoria en el Colegio Electoral hace ocho años. Con este regreso ganador para recuperar la presidencia, Trump se ha establecido como una fuerza transformadora que está rehaciendo Estados Unidos a su imagen y semejanza.El desencanto populista con la dirección de la nación y el resentimiento contra las élites demostraron ser más profundos y más hondos de lo que muchos en ambos partidos habían reconocido. La campaña de Trump, impulsada por testosterona, aprovechó la resistencia a elegir a la primera mujer presidenta.Y aunque decenas de millones de electores siguieron votando contra Trump, este volvió a aprovechar la sensación de muchos otros de que estaban perdiendo el país que conocían, asediado económica, cultural y demográficamente.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jan. 6 Defendants Are Already Angling for Pardons From Trump

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      The president-elect said during the campaign that he would grant clemency to some of those who took part in the assault by his supporters on the Capitol nearly four years ago.The legal consequences of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s victory start with the likelihood that the cases against him will sputter out but could also extend to the cases of hundreds of his supporters who are being — or have been — prosecuted for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump repeatedly promised to pardon some of the 1,500 people charged in connection with Jan. 6, sometimes suggesting that his clemency might extend to leaders of far-right groups like the Proud Boys and to other defendants who assaulted police officers.It remains unclear whether or how fully he will fulfill those vows. But should he issue wide-ranging pardons, it would amount to a repudiation of the largest criminal investigation ever undertaken by the Justice Department and damage, perhaps fatally, efforts by prosecutors to seek accountability for a violent mob attack on the lawful transfer of presidential power.Already, some Jan. 6 defendants are excitedly expressing hope that Mr. Trump might strip them of convictions or free them from prison when he takes office.Only hours after the election was called for Mr. Trump early Wednesday, one convicted rioter, Christopher Carnell, asked a federal judge to push back a hearing in his case, saying he “expected” to receive clemency.“Throughout his campaign, President-elect Trump made multiple clemency promises to the Jan. 6 defendants, particularly to those who were nonviolent participants,” Mr. Carnell’s lawyers wrote. “Mr. Carnell, who was an 18-year-old nonviolent entrant into the Capitol on Jan. 6, is expecting to be relieved of the criminal prosecution that he is currently facing when the new administration takes office.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Expecting Clemency From Trump, Jan. 6 Defendant Requests Sentencing Delay

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      A federal judge promptly denied Christopher Carnell’s request, which was filed hours after President Donald J. Trump won re-election.A North Carolina man who participated in the 2021 Capitol insurrection requested on Wednesday to have his sentencing delayed because he expects President-elect Donald J. Trump to grant Jan. 6 defendants like him clemency, court records show.The request from the man, Christopher Carnell, 22, of Cary, N.C., was filed hours after Mr. Trump defeated Kamala Harris, and it was promptly denied by Judge Beryl A. Howell of U.S. District Court in Washington, according to court records.In February, Mr. Carnell was convicted of felony obstruction and four misdemeanors for his participation in the insurrection, which included entering the United States Capitol, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. Mr. Carnell, who was 18 at the time of the riot, is scheduled to appear in court on Friday so that prosecutors and the defense “can present status arguments,” according to court records.“As of today,” Mr. Carnell’s lawyer, Marina Medvin, wrote, “Mr. Carnell is now awaiting further information from the Office of the President-elect regarding the timing and expected scope of clemency actions relevant to his case.”While campaigning, Mr. Trump repeatedly said that he would pardon people facing charges related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol. Ms Medvin wrote that her client “is expecting to be relieved of the criminal prosecution that he is currently facing when the new administration takes office.”Mr. Carnell entered the Capitol with David Worth Bowman, 23, of Raleigh, N.C. The two men climbed through the scaffolding on the northwest side of the Capitol, entered the building and discussed, photographed and shared images of documents taken off a senator’s desk, prosecutors said.Both men were found guilty of felony obstruction and several misdemeanor charges, including disorderly conduct in a Capitol building.Ms. Medvin did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday. Lawyers for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington also did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.A lawyer for Mr. Bowman did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on Wednesday. He is also to be sentenced on Friday.A courtroom deputy for Judge Howell did not immediately respond to a phone call seeking comment about her decision to deny the delay request. No explanation for the denial of the delay request was immediately accessible in court records.Nearly 1,000 “defendants have had their cases adjudicated and received sentences for their criminal activity on Jan. 6,” prosecutors said earlier this year. Mr. Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Jan. 20, 2025.Sheelagh McNeill More

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      ‘Trump’s America’: His Comeback Victory Signals a Different Kind of Country

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      In her closing rally on the Ellipse last week, Kamala Harris scorned Donald J. Trump as an outlier who did not represent America. “That is not who we are,” she declared.In fact, it turns out, that may be exactly who we are. At least most of us.The assumption that Mr. Trump represented an anomaly who would at last be consigned to the ash heap of history was washed away on Tuesday night by a red current that swept through battleground states — and swept away the understanding of America long nurtured by its ruling elite of both parties.No longer can the political establishment write off Mr. Trump as a temporary break from the long march of progress, a fluke who somehow sneaked into the White House in a quirky, one-off Electoral College win eight years ago. With his comeback victory to reclaim the presidency, Mr. Trump has now established himself as a transformational force reshaping the United States in his own image.Populist disenchantment with the nation’s direction and resentment against elites proved to be deeper and more profound than many in both parties had recognized. Mr. Trump’s testosterone-driven campaign capitalized on resistance to electing the first woman president.And while tens of millions of voters still cast ballots against Mr. Trump, he once again tapped into a sense among many others that the country they knew was slipping away, under siege economically, culturally and demographically.To counter that, those voters ratified the return of a brash 78-year-old champion willing to upend convention and take radical action even if it offends sensibilities or violates old standards. Any misgivings about their chosen leader were shoved to the side.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More