Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      ‘Stop the Steal’ Is About Not Trusting Voters

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      One of the key points in the unsealed legal filing presented by the special counsel Jack Smith in the criminal case against Donald Trump for conspiracy to subvert the 2020 presidential election is that both Trump and his allies were well aware that he had lost the election. The evidence, Smith says, shows that Trump knew he didn’t have a case. But rather than accept the verdict of the voting public, Trump led the effort to pressure officials to overturn election results.“With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results,” Smith’s prosecutors wrote. “The throughline of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud.”Smith shows that Trump did nothing to stop the mob from forming on Jan. 6 and was indifferent to the safety of both Vice President Mike Pence, presiding over the Electoral College count at the Capitol, and members of Congress. Using evidence collected through interviews with people working in the White House at the time, prosecutors recreated a key moment during the chaos, when Trump was sitting alone in the White House dining room, watching Fox News.“It was at that point — alone, watching news in real time, and with knowledge that rioters had breached the Capitol building — that the defendant issued the 2:24 p.m. tweet attacking Pence for refusing the defendant’s entreaties to join the conspiracy and help overturn the results of the election,” prosecutors wrote. “One minute later, the Secret Service was forced to evacuate Pence to a secure location in the Capitol.”I don’t want to rehash the events of Jan. 6 here — although if JD Vance’s refusal to state the outcome of the 2020 presidential election is any indication, we have no choice but to rehash those events again and again between now and Nov. 5 — but I will say this: It is a misunderstanding of Donald Trump to say that he did this because he rejected his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden. It is probably better to say that Trump tried to overturn the election results because he simply does not accept the idea that voters should be allowed to defeat him.We saw some of this in 2016, when he refused to say whether he would accept the election results, and we’re seeing it now, when Trump has openly said that whether he accepts the results is contingent on whether he wins. Of course, Trump’s allies in states such as Georgia and Arizona are also working incessantly to sabotage the process as much as possible and give the former president some basis for rejecting the results should he lose.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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      2 Men Sentenced for Attacking Officers at Jan. 6 Capitol Riot

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      One of the men, from New Jersey, referred to lawmakers as “traitors” and encouraged other rioters to drag them out of the building by their hair, prosecutors said.A man from New Jersey and another from New York were sentenced to prison on Friday after federal prosecutors said they had breached the U.S. Capitol building and attacked law enforcement officers during the riot on Jan. 6, 2021.The New Jersey man, Michael Oliveras, 51, was sentenced to five years in prison. He broke into the Capitol with rioters and urged them to drag members of Congress out of the building by their hair, according to a news release.Prosecutors said Mr. Oliveras, who lived in Lindenwold, N.J., traveled to Washington to try to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election. According to the release, he documented his attack online, not only posting on social media that he had booked a hotel room near the building to scope it out, but also detailing when he entered the Capitol.Mr. Oliveras, carrying an American flag, marched to the West Front of the Capitol and confronted police officers, the release said. About 10 minutes later, a video he recorded showed him barging into the building and looking for lawmakers, yelling, “Where are they?” He also called them “traitors,” prosecutors said.“Drag them out by their hair,” he yelled, using an expletive.Mr. Oliveras entered and was ejected from the Capitol twice. During an unsuccessful third attempt, he stood in a doorway telling others to “push” and then brawled with officers.He continued with the riot for hours into the evening, marching to the other side of the building and encouraging others as they destroyed media equipment, the release said.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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      Liz Cheney Campaigns With Harris and Calls on Her Party to Reject Trump

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      It was an exercise in unsubtle and unlikely campaign optics: a Democratic vice president who is running for the presidency. A Republican former congresswoman who is the daughter of a staunchly conservative vice president. A small city known as the birthplace of the Republican Party in the middle of a battleground state.On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris and former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the most prominent Republican to endorse her campaign, traveled to Ripon in central Wisconsin where meetings in 1854 helped form the Republican Party. Just a mile away from a one-room schoolhouse where those gatherings were held, the pair tore into former President Donald J. Trump for his role in igniting a riot at the Capitol, and they warned of the threat he poses to democracy should he return to power.Ms. Cheney said that, in November, putting patriotism ahead of partisanship should not merely be an aspiration — “it is our duty.”Her remarks, delivered with an air of somber restraint, were as much a public indictment of Mr. Trump as they were an endorsement of Ms. Harris. Calling his candidacy “a threat unlike any we have faced before,” she called on conservatives to join her in an “urgent cause” to elect Ms. Harris and to reject what she called the former president’s “depraved cruelty.”“I know that she will be a president who will defend the rule of law,” Ms. Cheney said of Ms. Harris, “and I know that she will be a president who can inspire all of our children and, if I might say so, especially our little girls.”The joint appearance was one of the starkest examples to date of how Ms. Harris has endeavored to pitch herself as a unifying president who values pragmatism over partisanship. Her overarching goal is to win over moderate and independent voters who will be crucial to delivering her a decisive victory.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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      Trump Rally in Michigan Dominated by More False Statements

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      Former President Donald J. Trump held a rally on Thursday in the key battleground state of Michigan that was notable mainly for his continued false statements and exaggerations on a number of subjects as varied as the 2020 election and the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene.In the roughly 85 minutes that Mr. Trump was onstage, he repeated a pattern of untrue assertions that have characterized many of his events as the 2024 presidential race heads into its final weeks. The crowd of supporters in Saginaw County, which he narrowly lost four years ago, included Mike Rogers, the former Michigan congressman and the Republican candidate for Michigan’s open Senate seat, and Pete Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican Party chairman.Mr. Trump reiterated his familiar false claim that he had won the 2020 election and made no acknowledgment of new evidence that was unsealed against him on Wednesday in the federal election subversion case. He also said his campaign was up in all polls in every swing state, while several public polls show close races and Vice President Kamala Harris leading narrowly in a number of battlegrounds.Mr. Trump also mischaracterized the state of funding at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, saying that the Biden administration had stolen disaster-relief money allocated to the agency to give to housing for undocumented immigrants so they would vote for Democrats.He cast electric cars as a threat to the auto industry, while at the same time praising Elon Musk, the Tesla chief executive who has endorsed his candidacy and featured him prominently on X, the Musk-owned social media platform.Michigan was one of a handful of swing states where Mr. Trump and his allies tried to overturn his defeat in 2020 through a series of maneuvers that included breaching voting equipment and seeking to seat a set of fake presidential electors. Some of his supporters have been criminally charged in the state, where Mr. Trump was named as an unindicted co-conspirator this year.Mr. Trump spent time in his speech taking satisfaction over his choice of running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, whose debate performance this week was applauded by many.“I drafted the best athlete,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Vance. The audience — several thousand supporters at a recreation center at Saginaw Valley State University, roughly 100 miles north of Detroit — cheered.And he mused, at one point, that instead of being on a beach in Monte Carlo or someplace else, he was running for the presidency again. “If I had my choice of being here with you today or being on some magnificent beach with the waves hitting me in the face, I would take you every single time.”Overall as of Thursday, Ms. Harris led by two percentage points in Michigan, according to The New York Times’s polling average, 49 percent to 47 percent. The vice president is scheduled to return to the state on Friday, campaigning in Detroit and Flint. More

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      How Meta Distanced Itself From Politics

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      In January 2021, after pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, Mark Zuckerberg announced a new priority for Meta: He wanted to reduce the amount of political content on the company’s apps, including Facebook and Instagram.As the United States hurtles toward November’s election, Mr. Zuckerberg’s plan appears to be working.On Facebook, Instagram and Threads, political content is less heavily featured. App settings have been automatically set to de-emphasize the posts that users see about campaigns and candidates. And political misinformation is harder to find on the platforms after Meta removed transparency tools that journalists and researchers used to monitor the sites.Inside Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg, 40, no longer meets weekly with the heads of election security as he once did, according to four employees. He has reduced the number of full-time employees working on the issue and disbanded the election integrity team, these employees said, though the company says the election integrity workers were integrated into other teams. He has also decided not to have a “war room,” which Meta previously used to prepare for elections.Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee laying out how he wanted to distance himself and his company from politics. The goal, he said, was to be “neutral” and to not “even appear to be playing a role.”“It’s quite the pendulum swing because a decade ago, everyone at Facebook was desperate to be the face of elections,” said Katie Harbath, chief executive of Anchor Change, a tech consulting firm, who previously worked at Facebook. 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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      Certification of Election Will Get Extra Security to Try to Prevent Another Capitol Attack

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      In an effort to prevent another attack on the Capitol, the Department of Homeland Security has declared Jan. 6, 2025, to be a special event that requires added security measures when Congress meets to certify the winner of the 2024 presidential election.The designation of a National Special Security Event, announced by Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the director of homeland security, on Wednesday means that significant federal, state and local resources will be directed toward the Capitol a few months from now to increase the security protections and a comprehensive security plan will be put in place.The Secret Service will oversee the security plan.“National Special Security Events are events of the highest national significance,” Eric Ranaghan, the special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Dignitary Protective Division, said in a statement, adding that Secret Service officials, in collaboration with federal, state and local partners, “are committed to developing and implementing a comprehensive and integrated security plan to ensure the safety and security of this event and its participants.”The Capitol was overrun on Jan. 6, 2021, by a pro-Trump mob that sought to halt the counting of the Electoral College votes from the 2020 election to disrupt the certification of President Biden’s victory. The Capitol Police force was caught unprepared for the mob violence, even though Mr. Trump had summoned the crowd to Washington days earlier and promised a “wild” rally.After the attack, during which more than 150 police officers were injured and several people died, the Government Accountability Office recommended consideration of the special security designation. More

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      Fund-Raiser for Jan. 6 Rioters at Trump’s Golf Club Is Postponed

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      A gala event to raise money for some of the rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, set to take place on Thursday at former President Donald J. Trump’s golf club in New Jersey, has been postponed, according to the event website.While Mr. Trump had not been planning to attend the soiree — billed as the J6 Awards Gala — the event attracted attention for the way it reinforced the strong connections he has maintained with those who stormed the Capitol on his behalf at an awkward moment: just as his campaign to return to the White House enters its final stages.The event’s website did not provide a reason for the delay or mention a new date when it might take place. But the primary planner, Sarah McAbee, who runs a nonprofit organization called the Stand in the Gap Foundation, which supports Jan. 6 defendants, said she would try to reschedule it for after the November election, perhaps in February, according to text messages obtained by The New York Times.“I want you to know that we fought until the absolute last minute to have the event,” the text messages said, “but there were multiple issues outside of our control, the main one being safety concerns of attendees and staff.”Ms. McAbee is the wife of Ronald Colton McAbee, a former deputy sheriff from Tennessee who is serving five years in prison after being convicted of attacking police officers at the Capitol on Jan. 6. The event’s location, Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., highlighted the former president’s attempts to normalize the events of Jan. 6, including by often praising those who took part in the Capitol attack.Gala attendees were asked to shell out $2,500 for a single ticket (or $50,000 for a “platinum table” of 12) for the chance to mingle with the families of indicted rioters and to win a custom plaque commemorating “Justice for All,” a song featuring a choir of some of the most violent riot defendants who are now locked up in Washington’s local jail, along with Mr. Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.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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      First Jan. 6 Rioter to Enter Capitol Gets More Than 4 Years in Prison

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      Michael Sparks, 47, was the first rioter to breach the Capitol and among the first to be confronted by the U.S. Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman.The first rioter to breach the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was sentenced Tuesday to more than four years in prison, federal prosecutors announced.In March, a federal jury found Michael Sparks, 47, of Elizabethtown, Ky., guilty on felony charges of obstructing an official proceeding and civil disorder and several misdemeanor charges for being on the premises of the Capitol building on Jan. 6.On Tuesday, Judge Timothy J. Kelly of U.S. District Court in Washington sentenced him to 53 months in prison and ordered him to pay a $2,000 fine. Mr. Sparks will be on supervised release for three years after his prison term ends, prosecutors said.Video footage presented in court showed that Mr. Sparks entering the Capitol building at 2:13 p.m. on Jan. 6 through a window near a door leading into the Senate Wing that rioters had smashed with a police shield.Mr. Sparks was among the initial group of rioters who were confronted by Eugene Goodman, a Capitol Police officer, who helped hold off the mob from reaching members of Congress.The rioters chased Mr. Goodman up a flight of stairs as they demanded to know where Congress was certifying the results of the election, prosecutors said.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