Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      Participant in Jan. 6 Riot Loses Primary Race in South Carolina

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      A 22-year-old who participated in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol lost his bid to unseat a Republican incumbent in the South Carolina House of Representatives.The defeat of Elias Irizarry in the state primary on Tuesday is the latest in a number of losses that riot participants have suffered at the ballot box in recent months. Most recently, Derrick Evans, a former West Virginia lawmaker who pleaded guilty to a felony for his role in the attack, was defeated in a Republican primary in May for a congressional seat there.Mr. Irizarry graduated last month from the Citadel, the esteemed public military college in Charleston, S.C. He was running in House District 43, a rural area in the northern part of the state. The incumbent, Randy Ligon, will not face a Democratic challenger in the general election, and will serve a fourth term in office.Mr. Irizarry was sentenced to 14 days in jail after pleading guilty to a trespassing charge related to his participation in the 2021 riot. He was suspended from the Citadel for a semester but was later reinstated after a federal judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, wrote a letter to the school stating that Mr. Irizarry had demonstrated “remorse and a determination to make amends.”Before his sentencing, Mr. Irizarry told Judge Chutkan that he was ashamed of his participation in the storming of the Capitol. But in the run-up to the election, his campaign website noted his prosecution for engaging in “nonviolent activities” at the Capitol as proof that he had “always stood for the conservative movement.”That reference to Jan. 6 disappeared from the website last week after The New York Times discussed it with Mr. Irizarry’s federal public defender. In a text message, Mr. Irizarry said he had initially mentioned his involvement in the riot on his website “for the sake of transparency.” More

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      Steve Bannon Is Rallying MAGA World Before Prison Sentence

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      The onetime adviser to former President Donald J. Trump has framed his impending imprisonment as an act of patriotism.Stephen K. Bannon was sitting in the back seat of an S.U.V. on a pleasant Friday evening in Powhatan, Va., enjoying what could be his last weeks of freedom.A day earlier, Mr. Bannon, the onetime adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, had been ordered by a federal judge to surrender by July 1 to begin serving a four-month prison term for disobeying a congressional subpoena.But there was never a question about whether he would show up as scheduled to headline a rally in rural Virginia for Representative Bob Good, the chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus. This kind of thing — this kind of crowd — is what he lives for.“This is ‘War Room,’” Mr. Bannon said proudly as he watched rally goers carrying lawn chairs and blankets spreading out to hear him speak. He was referring to the influential podcast he streams from his Capitol Hill basement for four hours every weekday.He was going to need to find some guest hosts to keep it all going in his absence. But Mr. Bannon, who has long reveled in his infamy, insisted that his impending imprisonment would only make him stronger. He framed it as the ultimate act of patriotism by a MAGA warrior whom the government was bent on silencing in the months leading up to the presidential election.“There’s no downside,” Mr. Bannon said. “I served on a Navy destroyer in my 20s in the North Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf. I’m serving in prison in my 70s. Not a bad book end.”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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      ‘Sedition Panda,’ a Jan. 6 Rioter in a Costume Head, Is Convicted

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      Jesse James Rumson, known as Sedition Panda for the costume head he wore, was found guilty of eight charges related to his participation in the breach of the U.S. Capitol.A Florida man who breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, while wearing a costume panda head was convicted on Friday of assaulting a police officer and other charges related to the events of that day.The man, Jesse James Rumson, 38, who became known as Sedition Panda, was found guilty of eight total charges, two felonies and six misdemeanors, after a bench trial in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.He was convicted by Judge Carl J. Nichols, who has garnered his own headlines for challenging the Justice Department’s use of a federal obstruction law to prosecute Jan. 6. rioters.In a separate case, Judge Nichols, a Trump appointee, dismissed a charge against another Jan. 6 defendant, Joseph Fischer, for violating a federal law that makes it a crime to corruptly obstruct an official proceeding.The judge dismissed the charge in that case on the grounds that the law strictly concerns white-collar crime, saying that it required a defendant to take “some action with respect to a document, record or other object.” An appeals court reversed the judge’s ruling, and Mr. Fischer successfully brought the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is expected to release a decision this summer.Prosecutors have invoked the obstruction law against hundreds of rioters, typically in the most serious cases. But prosecutors did not charge Mr. Rumson with violating that law, and Judge Nichols did not appear to have any reservations about the applicability of the charges prosecutors did bring.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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      The One Thing Voters Remember About Trump

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      What one thing do you remember most about Donald Trump’s presidency? In April as part of the New York Times/Siena College survey, we called about 1,000 voters across the country and asked for their most prominent memory of the Trump years. Here’s what they said, in their own words. “His honesty” Trump supporter in 2024 […] More

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      The Three Faces of Don

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      When I worked at Time magazine in the early ’80s, I bought a frame at the company gift shop that was a mock-up of the Time Man of the Year cover, but it was Mother of the Year. I put in a picture of my mom, looking chic in a suit, holding me as a baby.I gave it to her for Mother’s Day as a goof.But for Donald Trump, whose office at Trump Tower was an infinity mirror of his magazine covers, the annual Time rite has always been a serious obsession. He complained after it was changed in 1999. He asked women at a rally in 2016, “What sounds better, Person of the Year or Man of the Year?”In 2015, when Time made Angela Merkel Person of the Year, he whined that he wasn’t the choice. “They picked person who is ruining Germany,” he sour-grapes tweeted.Even though the prestige of the once-mighty Time had dwindled, Trump was thrilled when he finally got Person of the Year in 2016. About the cover line, “President of the Divided States of America,” he demurred that the country would be “well healed” under his leadership.Well, turns out he was just a heel.In 2017, David Fahrenthold revealed in The Washington Post that the framed copies of Trump on the cover of Time, hung in at least five of the president’s golf clubs from Florida to Scotland, were fakes.The red border of the faux covers was skinnier; even my Mother of the Year frame got that detail right.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 Refuses to Commit to Accepting Election Outcome in Milwaukee Interview

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      Former President Donald J. Trump told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Wednesday that he would not commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election, as he again repeated his lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him.“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that,” Mr. Trump said, according to The Journal Sentinel. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”In an interview with Time magazine published on Tuesday, he also dismissed questions about political violence in November by suggesting that his victory was inevitable.When pressed about what might happen should he lose, he said, “if we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.”Mr. Trump’s insistent and fraudulent claims that the 2020 election was unfair were at the heart of his efforts to overturn his loss to President Biden, and to the violent storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by a mob of supporters who believed his claims. Mr. Trump now faces dozens of felony charges in connection with those events.Mr. Trump’s vow to “fight for the right of the country” also echoes his speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, where he told his supporters that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” before urging his supporters to march to the Capitol.As he campaigns in battleground states this year, Mr. Trump has repeatedly tried to sow doubt about the integrity of the fall election, while repeating many of the same lies that he used to assail the integrity of the 2020 election. Months before any voting has taken place, Mr. Trump has regularly made the baseless claim that Democrats are likely to cheat to win.“Democrats rigged the presidential election in 2020, but we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election — the most important day of our lives — in 2024,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Freeland, Mich.The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Mr. Trump has for years promoted the lie that he won Wisconsin in 2020, and he did so again in the Journal Sentinel interview. Even after Jan. 6, 2021, and years after his exit from office, he has repeatedly pressured Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the top Republican in the State Legislature, to help overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in the state and to impeach the state’s nonpartisan chief of elections.More than 1,250 people have been charged with crimes in connection to the Jan. 6 attack — and hundreds of people have been convicted. Mr. Trump said in a recent interview that he would “absolutely” consider pardoning every person convicted on charges related to the storming of the Capitol. A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with that attack.The former president and his allies have also installed election deniers in influential positions in his campaign and in Republican Party institutions. In March, Trump allies newly installed to the leadership of the Republican National Committee appointed Christina Bobb, a former host at the far-right One America News Network, as senior counsel for election integrity. A self-described conspiracy theorist, she has relentlessly promoted false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.Ms. Bobb was indicted in Arizona last week, along with all of the fake electors who acted on Mr. Trump’s behalf in that state and others, on charges related to what the authorities say were attempts by the defendants to overturn the 2020 election results in Arizona.The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee have made an aggressive approach to “election integrity” — a broad term often used by Republicans to cast doubt on elections that the party lost — central to their efforts heading toward November.Last month, the committee announced a plan to train and dispatch more than 100,000 volunteers and lawyers to monitor the electoral process in each battleground state and to mount aggressive challenges.On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said at the rally in Freeland that his campaign and national and state Republican parties would put together “a team of the most highly qualified lawyers and other professionals in the country to ensure that what happened in 2020 will never happen again.”“I will secure our elections because you know what happened in 2020,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Waukesha, Wis., on Wednesday.Mr. Trump lost Wisconsin by more than 20,000 votes. More

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      Trump Acknowledges He Wanted to Go to the Capitol on Jan. 6

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      Former President Donald J. Trump said on Wednesday that he asked his Secret Service detail to take him to the Capitol after his speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, acknowledging a key detail of his actions that were central to the findings of the House committee established to investigate the attack.During a campaign rally in Waukesha, Wis., Mr. Trump brought up a sensational but disputed element of testimony given to the House Jan. 6 committee by a Trump White House aide: that Mr. Trump had lunged for the wheel and physically struggled with Secret Service agents when they refused to take him to join the large crowd of supporters who were marching toward the Capitol.“I sat in the back,” Mr. Trump said, giving his version of events. “And you know what I did say? I said, ‘I’d like to go down there because I see a lot of people walking down.’ They said, ‘Sir, it’s better if you don’t.’ I said, ‘Well, I’d like to.’”“It’s better if you don’t,” Mr. Trump recounted an agent saying. The former president said he replied, “All right, whatever you guys think is fine,” and added, “That was the whole tone of the conversation.”President Biden’s campaign immediately highlighted Mr. Trump’s comments, amplifying that the former president had intended to participate in what would become an attack by his supporters on the Capitol in an effort to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.It is not the first time that Mr. Trump has spoken of his effort to go to the Capitol on Jan. 6. He has said in several interviews that he regretted not marching on the Capitol with his supporters that day, and that his Secret Service detail prevented him from doing so.“Secret Service said I couldn’t go,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with The Washington Post in April 2022. “I would have gone there in a minute.”Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House aide, later testified to Mr. Trump’s conversation with Secret Service agents during televised hearings held by the House Jan. 6 committee. Ms. Hutchinson was not in the car with Mr. Trump, and said that her testimony to those events came secondhand or thirdhand from what other people had told her that day.In an interview with the same committee, Mr. Trump’s driver, whose name was not disclosed, said: “The president was insistent on going to the Capitol. It was clear to me he wanted to go to the Capitol.”Mr. Trump at the rally on Wednesday portrayed his requests to his Secret Service detail as casual ones.In the interview with investigators for the House panel, the driver said that while he did not see Mr. Trump accost agents or reach for the steering wheel, “what stood out was the irritation in his voice, more than his physical presence.”After Mr. Trump was driven back to the White House by his Secret Service detail, the former president sat and watched the ensuing violence play out on television, according to testimony by an array of former administration officials. After Mr. Trump’s speech at the Ellipse where he repeated his false claims that the election was stolen from him and urged attendees to march on the Capitol, a mob of his supporters overran police barricades to storm the building, temporarily disrupting the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory.In a lengthy interview with Time magazine published on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said he would “absolutely” consider pardoning every person who had been convicted on, or pleaded guilty to, charges related to the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6. He also would not rule out the possibility of political violence after this year’s election.“I think we’re going to win,” he said. “And if we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.” More

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      Mike Johnson, Like Pence, Does What Passes for Brave in Today’s GOP: His Job

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      In the Republican Party of 2024, styled in the image of former President Donald J. Trump, a norm-preserving, consensus-driven act — even a basic one — can be a career-ending offense.The accolades directed at Speaker Mike Johnson in recent days for finally defying the right wing of his party and allowing an aid bill for Ukraine to move through the House might have seemed a tad excessive.After all, a speaker’s entire job is to move legislation through the House, and as Saturday’s vote to pass the bill demonstrated, the Ukraine measure had overwhelming support. But Mr. Johnson’s feat was not so different from that of another embattled Republican who faced a difficult choice under immense pressure from hard-right Republicans and was saluted as a hero for simply doing his job: former Vice President Mike Pence.When Mr. Pence refused former President Donald J. Trump’s demands that he overturn the 2020 election results as he presided over the electoral vote count by Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 — even as an angry mob with baseball bats and pepper spray invaded the Capitol and chanted “hang Mike Pence” — the normally unremarkable act of performing the duties in a vice president’s job description was hailed as courageous.Mr. Pence and now Mr. Johnson represent the most high-profile examples of a stark political reality: In today’s Republican Party, subsumed by Mr. Trump, taking the norm-preserving, consensus-driven path can spell the end of your political career.Mr. Johnson and Mr. Pence, both mild-mannered, extremely conservative evangelical Christians who have put their faith at the center of their politics, occupy a similar space in their party. They have both gone through contortions to accommodate Mr. Trump and the forces he unleashed in their party, which in turn have ultimately come after them. Mr. Pence spent four years dutifully serving the former president and defending all of his words and actions. Mr. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, played a lead role in trying to overturn the election results on Mr. Trump’s behalf.Vice President Mike Pence refused to accede to President Donald J. Trump’s demands that he overturn the 2020 election results as he presided over the certification of the electoral college votes on Jan. 6, 2021, even after a mob assaulted the Capitol. Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesWe 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