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      Apple and Parler agreement could restore rightwing platform to App Store

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      Apple said it had reached an agreement with Parler, the rightwing social media app, that could lead to its reinstatement in the company’s app store. Apple kicked out Parler in January over ties to the deadly 6 January siege on the US Capitol.In a letter to two Republican lawmakers in Congress, Apple said it has been in “substantial conversations” with Parler over how the company plans to moderate content on its network. Before its removal from the App Store, Parler was a hotbed of hate speech, Nazi imagery, calls for violence (including violence against specific people) and conspiracy theories.Apple declined to comment beyond the letter, which didn’t provide details on how Parler plans to moderate such content. In the letter, Apple said Parler’s proposed changes would lead to approval of the app.Parler did not immediately respond to a message for comment. As of midday Monday, Parler was not yet available in the App Store and Apple did not give a timeline for when it would be reinstated. According to Apple’s letter, Parler proposed changes to its app and how it moderates content. Apple said the updated app incorporating those changes should be available as soon as Parler releases it.Google also banned Parler from its Google Play store in January, but Parler remains available for Android phones through third-party app stores. Apple’s closed app system means apps are only available through Apple’s own App Store. On Monday, Google reiterated its January statement that “Parler is welcome back in the Play store once it submits an app that complies with our policies”.So far, this has not happened.Parler remains banned from Amazon Web Services. Amazon said in January that Parler was unable to moderate a rise in violent content before, during and after the insurrection. Parler asked a federal judge in Seattle to force Amazon to reinstate it on the web. That effort failed, and the companies are still fighting in court.The Republican political donor Rebekah Mercer has confirmed she helped bankroll Parler and has emerged in recent months as the network’s shadow executive after its founder John Matze was ousted as CEO in February. More

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      Judge orders two Proud Boys leaders held in custody over Capitol attack

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      A federal judge has ordered two leaders of the far-right Proud Boys group to be detained in jail pending trial for their involvement in the 6 January attack on the Capitol in Washington DC.Both were indicted in one of many Proud Boys conspiracy cases to stem from the investigation into the assault on the building that followed a pro-Donald Trump rally.Ethan Nordean of Washington state and Joseph Biggs of Florida, along with two other Proud Boys regional leaders, are charged with conspiring to stop the certification of the 2020 election – and with organizing and leading dozens of Proud Boys to the Capitol.Many of those followers were among the first to breach the building and cause damages in scenes of violence that shocked the world and led to five deaths.“The defendants stand charged with seeking to steal one of the crown jewels of our country, in a sense, by interfering with the peaceful transfer of power,” the US district judge Timothy Kelly said as he explained his decision on Monday. “It’s no exaggeration to say the rule of law … in the end, the existence of our constitutional republic is threatened by it.”The judge’s decision to detain the pair is a reversal of an earlier notion to release them after the Department of Justice argued for pre-trial detention based on new accusations in an updated indictment filed by prosecutors in March.The judge cited profanity-laced social media posts and encrypted messages sent by the defendants, in which Biggs said it was time for “war” if Democrats “steal” the election and Nordean called for militia groups to contact him.Though the evidence does not point to the defendants using direct physical violence against others on the day, Kelly said, their communications and movements before, during and after the riot showed they played a part in planning and leading the efforts that day, celebrated the events of the day and have not expressed remorse.Nordean will be detained in Seattle as opposed to DC after the judge granted his defense attorney’s request to cease the transfer, arguing: “Capitol defendants have been violently assaulted in DC jail.”Another alleged co-conspirator, Charles Donohoe, is set for his own detention hearing later on Monday afternoon. More

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      The Guardian view on an America First Caucus: a warning democracy is under siege | Editorial

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      In 1944, George Orwell felt that the word fascism had “lost the last vestige of meaning” so liberally had it been used. But fascism remains very much alive. Decades after Orwell’s message, one of the challenges today is to identify and name it. Whether the label could be applied to Donald Trump had divided expert opinion, until the 6 January assault on Capitol Hill by a mob whose passions had been inflamed by his speech earlier that day. This melted the resistance historians of fascism like Columbia University’s Robert Paxton felt to using the f-word. The use of violence against democratic institutions, he wrote, “crosses a red line”.If anyone wondered what American fascism might look like then they could start with the proposed congressional “America First Caucus”, which emerged this weekend from the office of extremist Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene. Carrying the torch for Trumpism, this fringe agenda conceals its racial argument behind muscular populist ones. The caucus plans were welcomed by legislators who had fanned the flames of the Capitol riot. Before being elected to Congress, Ms Greene peddled conspiracy theories, made racist statements and indicated support for the execution of Democratic leaders and FBI agents. She renounced those beliefs on the eve of being kicked off congressional committees but made no apology for having held them.The proposed caucus platform contained not so much dog whistles as foghorns for white supremacy. America, the document claims, is based on “respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and decries “post-1965 immigrants” for depressing workers’ wages, highlighting the year when the US ended its policy of giving preferential treatment to western European migrants. It calls for rebuilding the US with an “aesthetic value that befits the progeny of European architecture”. Thankfully the plan exploded on the launch pad. Republican leaders calculated it would hurt their electoral chances in moderate swing seats. Ms Greene disowned the caucus proposals.Fascism not only pursues rightwing policies, it seeks to build up mass-mobilising movements and paramilitary organisations with the aim of establishing a single-party dictatorship. Mr Trump saw armed citizens as a political asset. His heirs see despotism as a viable alternative to the current political structure. In Congress 147 Republican lawmakers promoted Mr Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Republicans in 47 states have 361 proposed laws to restrict voting access on grounds of baseless claims of electoral fraud.Around the world electorates will have to become reacquainted with fascism. Voters must attune themselves to what it looks and sounds like. In the UK, Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer was caught out earlier this year on a national radio phone-in when he failed to recognise a conspiracy theory popular with fascists, and Fox News star Tucker Carlson, known as the “great replacement”. It falsely claims that dwindling white birthrates have been orchestrated by multicultural global elites in an attempt to make whites a minority. There’s no suggestion that Sir Keir agreed with the racist caller but there was criticism in the way he handled the call. There is an urgent and pressing need to recognise both the real threat of fascism as well as the rhetorical and emotional motifs it employs. More

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      Far-right Oath Keepers member is first suspect to plead guilty in US Capitol riot

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      A member of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group and heavy metal guitarist has become the first defendant to plead guilty to federal charges in connection with the insurrection at the US Capitol.Jon Ryan Schaffer, the frontman of the band Iced Earth, has agreed on Friday to cooperate with investigators in hopes of getting a lighter sentence, and the Justice Department will consider putting Schaffer in the federal witness security program, a US district judge said. This signals that federal prosecutors see him as a valuable cooperator as they continue to investigate militia groups and other extremists involved in the insurrection on 6 January as Congress was meeting to certify Joe Biden’s electoral win.Schaffer, a supporter of Donald Trump, was accused of storming the Capitol and spraying police officers with bear spray. He pleaded guilty in a deal with prosecutors in federal court in Washington to two counts: obstruction of an official proceeding, and entering and remaining in a restricted building with a dangerous or deadly weapon.An email seeking comment was sent to an attorney for Schaffer.Schaffer, of Columbus, Indiana, was wearing a tactical vest and baseball hat that read Oath Keepers Lifetime Member on 6 January and acknowledged in his plea agreement that he is a “founding lifetime member” of the extremist group, prosecutors said.The 53-year-old was not charged in the case involving Oath Keepers members and associates, who are accused of conspiring with one another to block the certification of the vote. The case is the largest and most serious brought by prosecutors so far in the attack.Authorities say those defendants came to Washington ready for violence and intent on stopping the certification. Many came dressed for battle in tactical vests and helmets and some discussed stationing a “quick reaction force” outside the city in the event they needed weapons, prosecutors have said.In his deal with prosecutors, Schaffer admitted to being one of the first people to force their way into the Capitol after the mob broke open a set of doors guarded by Capitol police. Schaffer was sprayed in the face with a chemical irritant that overwhelmed officers deployed and left the Capitol while holding bear spray, authorities said.Schaffer has voiced various conspiracy theories, once telling a German news station that a shadowy criminal enterprise is trying to run the world under a communist agenda and that he and others are prepared to fight, with violence.In court documents, the FBI said Schaffer “has long held far-right extremist views” and that he had previously “referred to the federal government as a ‘criminal enterprise’”.He turned himself in to the FBI a few weeks after the riot, after his photograph was featured on an FBI poster seeking the public’s help in identifying rioters.More than 370 people are facing federal charges in the deadly insurrection. More

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      Millions of Americans think the election was stolen. How worried should we be about more violence?

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      Three months after an insurrection at the US capitol, an estimated 50 million Republicans still believe the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, according to a recent national survey. But it’s far from clear how many Americans might still be willing to take violent action in support of that belief.Early research on the continued risk of violence related to Trump’s “big lie” has produced a wide variety of findings. One political scientist at the University of Chicago estimated, based on a single national survey in March, that the current size of an ongoing “insurrectionist movement” in the US might be as large as 4% of American adults, or about 10 million people.Other experts on political violence cautioned that survey results about what Americans believe provide virtually no insight on how many of them will ever act on those beliefs. Researchers who have interviewed some of Trump’s most loyal supporters over the past months say that many of them appear to be cooling down – still believing the election was stolen, but not eager to do much about it. The handful of attempts by far-right extremist groups to mobilize nationwide protests after 6 January have mostly fizzled.“Lots of people talk the talk, but very few walk the walk,” Michael Jensen, a senior researcher who specializes in radicalization at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (Start), told the Guardian. “Only a tiny fraction of the people who adhere to radical views will act on them.”More than 800 people from a crowd of more than 10,000 are estimated to have breached the Capitol building, the acting capitol police chief said in February. Nearly 400 of them are now facing charges.Extremism experts have called the 6 January attack an example of “mass radicalization,” with a majority of people charged in the incident having no affiliation with existing extremist groups, according to early analyses. More than half of the people charged in the insurrection appeared to have planned their participation alone, not even coordinating with family members or close friends, according to one analysis. Nearly half were business owners or had white collar jobs, and very few were unemployed, a sharp contrast with the profiles of some previous violent rightwing extremists.Today Trump’s relative silence and the gradual return to more normal life as more Americans have been vaccinated, have created very different conditions than in the days and weeks before 6 January.“The charismatic leader has been silenced for the most part. He might find his way back into the public spotlight, but as of right now, he’s been effectively muted,” Jensen said.“We were in a really unique situation with the pandemic, and the lockdowns, and people being isolated and fearful. You had a vulnerable population,” he added. Today, “people are getting back to their lives.”The ‘cooling out’In the aftermath of the Capitol attack, a large majority of Americans condemned the rioters and said they should be prosecuted.But research in the past months has also shown that many Republican voters are still loyal to Trump and receptive to lies from him and other Republican politicians about the 2020 election and the insurrection that followed.A March survey from Reuters/IPSOS found that more than half of Republicans endorsed a false claim that the attack was “led by violent leftwing protesters trying to make Trump look bad”, and also said they believed that the people who gathered at the Capitol “were mostly peaceful, law-abiding Americans”.Six in 10 Republicans in that survey also said they believed “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.” That percentage of the sample would correspond with roughly 50 to 55 million Americans, Chris Jackson, the IPSOS senior vice-president for public affairs, told the Guardian.In mid-March, researchers at the University of Chicago attempted to home in on the percentage of Americans who still believed in Trump’s “big lie,” and who also may be willing to act violently as a result, using a nationally representative sample of a thousand American adults.Two-thirds of the respondents said they believed the election was legitimate, the researchers found. Another 27% said they believed the election had been stolen from Trump, but endorsed only non-violent protest. Only 4% said they believed the election was stolen, and also expressed a willingness to engage in violent protest.That 4% would translate to roughly 10 million American adults, said Robert Pape, a political scientist at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats who specialized in global suicide terror attacks, and who pivoted last year to focus on political violence in the United States.Other experts have argued that what survey respondents mean when they say they support using violence to achieve their political goals is far from obvious, according to Nathan Kalmoe, a political scientist at Louisiana State University who has been polling Americans about political violence since 2017.The findings of that research are concerning: as of February, 20% of Republicans and 13% of Democrats now say violence is at least “a little” justified to advance their party’s goals.But only a small fraction of the respondents who had said violence by their side was at least “a little justified” in a previous survey endorsed armed, fatal violence, Kalmoe said, instead mentioning fistfights, property destruction and non-violent actions like insults. “‘Violence’ doesn’t mean mass death or even killing even among the people who think some violence is OK,” Kalmoe said.“There are many steps from attitudes to behavioral intentions to behaviors that stop people from acting violently, even when they hold violent views,” he added. Knowing how many people might complete all of those steps is a “nearly impossible question.”Christopher Parker, a political scientist who studies race and the evolution of American rightwing movements, said that a preliminary finding that 4% of American adults believed the election was stolen from Trump and endorsed violence was a plausible survey result, given that about 7% of American adults had said they participated in a Tea Party event.A March survey by the Pew research center found a similar proportion of Americans expressing the most skeptical view of a crackdown on the Capitol rioters, with 4% saying it was “not at all important” for them to be prosecuted.But it was also very possible that the attitudes of Trump supporters were shifting over time, Parker cautioned, and that the 4% figure from mid-March may already be shrinking.In focus groups with Trump loyalists in Wisconsin and Georgia that Parker worked on, Trump supporters appeared “angry, but also despondent, feeling powerless and uncertain they will become more involved in politics.” Trump voters appeared to be much less threatened by Biden than they were by Obama, the focus groups indicated, and were interested in what Biden’s post-pandemic recovery plan might do for them personally.Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist who is currently conducting interviews in the region, found that in eastern Kentucky, even among dedicated Trump supporters, there’s been a “cooling out.”I think a lot of people have felt abandoned. Trump did not pardon [the Capitol rioters]. He went awayHochschild, the author of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, said that Trump’s most ardent supporters, the ones who believe the election was stolen from him, “are in a squeeze”, feeling threatened by the law enforcement crackdown on the Capitol rioters on one hand, and a sense of abandonment at Trump’s behavior on the other.On 6 January, some Trump supporters “had felt proud, patriotic, defending democracy, and in a day’s time that had turned around to dishonor, criminalization. They were put down. The law was looking for them,” she said.At the same time, “I think a lot of people have felt abandoned. Trump did not pardon [the Capitol rioters]. He went away, disappeared into silence. They feel like: ‘Wait a minute: why isn’t he speaking up for us? Why isn’t he defending us?’”A minority of Trump supporters Hochschild is interviewing today are doubling down on their election fraud beliefs, she said, expressing paranoia about big government taking over, and feeling “monitored and unsafe”. But the majority has “divested emotion from the issue” of “election fraud”. Experts cautioned that even the tiniest fraction of people willing to use violence in support of their extreme beliefs is dangerous, particularly in the US, where political violence in recent years has often taken the form of high-casualty mass shootings in places like churches, synagogues and stores.Hochschild said she is more concerned about further political violence in the long term than the short term. “I do feel there are a lot of people whose position is extreme,” she said. “I just don’t see it mobilized at this point.”“The reality is, when you see 6 January, that was not a large share of Americans that did that,” said Jhacova Williams, a Rand Corporation economist who has studied the after-effects of lynchings in the American south.Still, she said, political violence can have devastating, lasting effects, on both people and on democracies, while being driven by relatively small numbers of people, as long as the majority does not intervene.While lynchings were held in public and attracted crowds, “If you look historically, it wasn’t as if you had masses in the south that were lynching people,” Williams said. “It was a subset of people who were doing that.” More

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      How the far-right group ‘Oath Enforcers’ plans to harass political enemies

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      A national online network of thousands of rightwing self-described “Oath Enforcers” is threatening to unleash harassment tactics on elected officials and government workers around the country, the Guardian can reveal.While the network’s founder insists that the group is neither violent nor a militia, internal chats indicate that some members are planning for confrontations with law enforcement and their perceived political enemies.The chats also indicate that white supremacists and others connected with the militia movement are aiming to leverage the group’s success in recruiting disillusioned supporters of former President Donald Trump and the “QAnon” conspiracy movement, who are being exposed to a wide range of conspiracy theories, white nationalist material, and rightwing legal theories inside the groups.The group’s founder, who makes videos and organizes under the name Vince Edwards, lives off grid in a remote corner of Costilla county, in Colorado’s high desert region. Arrest records from 2016 indicate that he has also used the name Christian Picolo, and other public records associate him with the name Vincent Edward Deluca.Experts say that Edwards’s personal history reflects the potential danger in the spread of sovereign citizen ideology – along with voluminous online propaganda, that history includes an armed standoff with Costilla county sheriffs deputies in 2016.Edwards initially published videos and a printable flyer promoting the formation of “oath enforcement teams” of at least 30 people in every county in the nation during late January 2021, just weeks after his own self-documented attendance at a rally at the national Capitol on 6 January.His initial videos explicitly appealed to QAnon supporters, pointing out that “Q”, the supposed Trump administration insider whose gnomic forum posts animated the conspiracy-minded social movement, had not communicated with the movement since December, and that rather than “trusting the plan”, as adherents are enjoined to do, they should begin taking action.In the wake of the Capitol attack his efforts seem to have resonated with a growing pool of grassroots right-wingers. The Guardian found over 3,100 members in 50 state-based Telegram chats and a national chat. Some state based groups – such as Texas’s, Washington’s, and Alabama’s – were very active and had hundreds of members.The stated aims of the group include posting flyers designed by Edwards, the formation of “constitutional enforcement groups”, for every person to hand out 1,000 of Edwards’s flyers, and the creation of local hotlines to help “enforce the contract we made with our public servants” by live-streaming interactions with them or lodging spurious legal claims against them.In an introductory video entitled “OE training”, Edwards encourages new recruits to the network to emulate so-called “First amendment auditors” (FAAs).Professor Brian Levin is the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism (CSHE) at California State University, San Bernardino. In a telephone conversation he explained that FAAs are a social media driven movement of libertarian provocateurs who “go to sensitive locations to see if law enforcement, security guards, or property owners will interfere with their activities which are annoying, but not usually illegal”.Meanwhile, some local groups show that well known extremists are seeing opportunities in the group’s fast growth.The Oregon Oath Enforcers group, for example, was joined on 5 February by Chester Doles of Dahlonega, Georgia. Doles, a long-time former member of the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi National Alliance, who was imprisoned in 1993 for beating a black man, and later marched in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.Doles received media attention recently as he and other members of the organization he currently leads, American Patriots USA, were among an armed crowd which protested outside the Georgia capitol on 6 January, am action which led Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who had been demonized by the far right for his role in Georgia’s election count, to flee the building.In recent months, Doles has reportedly been seeking to build alliances with Three Percenters and other militia organizations in Georgia.A former member of far-right group Patriot Prayer, Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, joined the Oregon Oath Enforcers chat on 9 February. Toese, a Proud Boy, was a prominent and frequently violent participant in a long string of brawling, contentious street protests in Portland throughout the Trump era. He was jailed in Clark county, Washington, last October after violating the condition of his probation after earlier being convicted for assault over an unprovoked daylight attack on a man in Portland.In a video message to the Oath Enforcers group, Toese said: “You guys organizing? Me and my people will be there to take a stand with you.”Elsewhere in the Oath Enforcers instructional Telegram channel, Edwards and others have shared documents from a range of organizations around the country which promote false legal and constitutional doctrines associated with the so-called sovereign citizen movement.One document is presented as a judgment by a self-styled human rights tribunal, which orders the arrest order for a range of officials and philanthropists including Anthony Fauci and Bill and Melinda Gates for the crime of genocide.The sovereign citizen movement does not hold a universally consistent set of beliefs, but most adherents believe in a false alternative history of the United States, and that the present, and especially the law, reflects a conspiracy ordered by esoteric rules. Many treat all legal and governmental authority as illegitimate.In the Oath Enforcers’s chats, sovereign doctrine is presented side by side with false beliefs about vaccinations and masks, assertions that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, and conspiracy theories about links between antifascist “Antifa” activists and powerful figures like billionaire George Soros.Vince Edwards and Chester Doles did not immediately respond to requests for comment.In intelligence assessments and public statements, federal agencies have advised that sovereign citizens pose an ongoing and specific threat to law enforcement officers.Levin, the extremism researcher, says of the apparent synergies between sovereign citizens and white supremacists that “there has been a realignment on the far-right extremist fringe”, wherein “law enforcement is viewed as an arm of a tyrannical government in much the same way that Sovereign Citizens viewed them decades prior.”Levin adds that “not only is the ideology getting a rebranding, so too are many far-right figures like former Klan Leader Chester Doles”.In a 28 March post on the Oregon Oath Enforcers page, a user reposted white nationalist broadcaster, Vincent James’s commentary on a clash between antifa and far-right street protesters in Salem the previous day.In part, the post read: “Cops never were and never will be your friend. They’re also the American regime. Not allies.” More

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      Why aren't we calling the Capitol attack an act of treason?

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      During Donald Trump’s presidency, the UC Davis law professor Carlton Larson spent a lot of time on the phone telling journalists: “It’s not treason.”Trump’s behavior towards Russia: not treason. All the FBI investigations Trump labeled as treason: also not treason. Then came the 6 January attack on the Capitol by hundreds of Trump supporters. That was treason according to the founding fathers, Larson wrote in an op-ed the next day.But in the three months since 6 January, however, there has been little public discussion of “treason” as the framework for understanding what happened, Larson said. “Everything was ‘Treason, treason, treason,’ when it wasn’t, and now you have an event that is closer to the original 18th-century definition of treason than anything that’s happened, and it’s almost silent. Nobody is using the term at all,” he said.Federal prosecutors have brought cases against more than 300 people allegedly involved in the Capitol insurrection. So far, many of the rioters have been charged with lower-level offenses, like “disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building”. A few members of extremist groups, including the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, are facing more serious conspiracy charges.There has been some public discussion of whether some rioters should face “sedition” charges, including an early comment by then president-elect Joe Biden that the rioting at the Capitol was an “unprecedented assault” on democracy that “borders on sedition”.A federal prosecutor who had been working on the Capitol cases told 60 Minutes in late March that he personally believed “the facts do support” sedition charges against some suspects. Michael Sherwin, the prosecutor, was publicly criticized by a federal judge for the media appearance, and is now the subject of an internal review over whether he spoke out inappropriately.Treason is defined in the US constitution as “levying war” against the United States, or “adhering” to the enemies of the United States and “giving them aid and comfort”. The framers had in mind “men gathering with guns, forming an army, and marching on the seat of government”, Larson said.Sedition, in contrast, is “a broader term for disloyal behavior” against the government, Larson said.There are two main types of sedition in US law: one is sedition associated with speech, or “seditious libel”, a charge which has been repeatedly used in the US to target anti-war and leftist activists, particularly during wartime, according to Jenny Carroll, a professor at the University of Alabama school of law. The other is “seditious conspiracy”, defined under federal law as taking action either to “overthrow” the US government, to use force “to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law of the United States” or “to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States”.While treason is a crime still punishable by death in the United States, the maximum penalty for seditious conspiracy is 20 years.‘If that’s not seditious conspiracy, I don’t know what is’In his book On Treason: A Citizen’s Guide to the Law, Larson argued that Americans were unlikely to mount an internal rebellion against the United States in modern times. Then the Capitol attack proved him wrong.What was distinctive about the Capitol riot, he said, was the use of force, which is necessary for something to count as “levying war” against the United States.He compared the insurrection to the anti-tax Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, which was forcefully put down by George Washington, and resulted in multiple indictments for treason.“If you asked a lawyer in 1790 if [6 January] was an act of treason or levying war against the United States, they would have almost certainly said yes,” Larson said.Yet Larson said he did not expect prosecutors would file treason charges in the 6 January cases, because the charge would probably add too many legal complications. A legal precedent from 1851 set a higher bar for the definition of treason, he wrote, defining it only as an attempt to overthrow the government itself, not simply the obstruction of one particular law.The definition of “seditious conspiracy”, in contrast, seems like a much easier match, Larson and Carroll agreed, particularly because it includes conspiracies “to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law”, which the Capitol invaders appear to have accomplished by forcing lawmakers to hide and delaying the certification of the 2020 election results.“Seditious conspiracy captures the flavor of January 6,” said Steve Vladeck, a federal courts expert at the University of Texas school of law. “You had a whole lot of people – who may not have had exactly the same motive, or may not have committed the exact same acts – who were in a very large degree involved in a common plan, the goal of which was to somehow, in some way, keep President Trump in office.”“If that’s not seditious conspiracy, I don’t know what is.”Seditious conspiracy charges have been rare in US historyIt remains unlikely that the majority of the rioters will face seditious conspiracy charges, experts said.The crime of “seditious conspiracy” requires proof, not just of the action, but of agreement, Carroll said. “The global chatter among US attorneys is that there has been a lot of work to trace electronic communications individuals engaged in to figure out who was talking to who,” she added.“To the extent that there are charges for seditious conspiracy, it would be against particular little cells of people,” Larson said. “It would be impossible to show that all of those people [at the Capitol] had some type of prior agreement with each other.”Sherwin, the federal prosecutor, told 60 Minutes in late March that there were “over 400 criminal cases” in total, but that only 10% of cases were “the more complex conspiracy cases” involving militia groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who “did have a plan”.Seditious conspiracy charges have been rare in US history. That’s largely because seditious conspiracy itself “doesn’t happen that much”, Larson said.In 1995, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman and several followers were convicted of seditious conspiracy in a case related to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Oscar López Rivera, the leader of a Puerto Rican independence group, served 35 years in prison for seditious conspiracy before Barack Obama commuted his sentence in 2017.Some previous attempts by federal prosectors to convict far-right extremists for seditious conspiracy have failed.In 2012, a Michigan judge dismissed sedition charges against the five members of the Hutaree militia, a Christian militia group, ruling that the government’s case had relied too much on “circumstantial evidence”. Members of the group pleaded guilty to lesser weapons charges and were sentenced to time served.In 1988, an all-white jury acquitted 13 white supremacists of sedition charges in a high-profile trial in Fort Smith, Arkansas.More recently, Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, called last summer for prosecutors to file seditious conspiracy charges against demonstrators against police violence in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by police. Barr was particularly focused on protesters in Portland, where there had been property damage to a federal building, Carroll said.This was “entirely inconsistent with how previous protest movements” had been treated, Carroll said, and prompted concern and outrage from legal experts.The US government, Carroll said, “has not been great about being consistent about how it treats different types of dissenters”. “Dissenters calling for change in social conditions or racial conditions or class conditions tend to be much more heavily prosecuted than folks who do things like engage in voter intimidation or engage in acts of white-based maintenance of power.”Sedition laws in the early 20th century, including the Sedition Act of 1918, was “not only focused on World War I”, but “really focused on shutting down socialists and communists, who the government thought were going to be a threat to democracy”, said Roy Gutterman, the director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University.The supreme court at the time upheld convictions of “small groups of dissidents” who were “distributing fliers speaking out against the US government”, Gutterman said. That included socialists passing out flyers advocating that Americans peacefully resist the draft, which the supreme court at the time ruled was not protected as free speech.When a law originally designed to crack down on leftist and labor organizers were used to prosecute a Ku Klux Klan leader after a cross burning in the 1960s, the supreme court set a new standard, concluding that the law violated the Klan leader’s free speech rights. More

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      Oath Keepers founder swapped calls with members during Capitol attack

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      The founder of far-right group the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, his lieutenant, and three members of the militia who guarded Donald Trump ally Roger Stone swapped numerous phone calls in a three-hour period on 6 January when the Capitol was attacked by a mob, prosecutors said Thursday.These exchanges coincided with the initial assault on police barricades outside Congress, and continued into when the three guards breached the US Capitol building, according to the Washington Post.Prosecutors made this claim in a new indictment, which added two of these guards – Joshua James and Roberto Minuta – to an ongoing Oath Keepers conspiracy case. James and Minuta were both previously charged.The case has 12 defendants, who are facing charges such as conspiracy, and obstruction of an official proceeding. Four of these co-defendants, including James and Minuta, have yet to enter pleas. The others have pleaded not guilty.“In response to a call for individuals to head to the Capitol after the building was breached, James and Minuta drove to the Capitol in a golf cart, at times swerving around law enforcement vehicles with Minuta stating, ‘Patriots are storming the Capitol … so we’re en route in a grand theft auto golf cart to the Capitol building right now … it’s going down guys’,” federal prosecutors said.Rhodes has previously denied there was a plan to breach Congress and insisted that authorities were trying to establish a bogus conspiracy. “I may go to jail soon, not for anything I actually did, but for made-up crimes,” he remarked to Texas Republicans during a recent rally in Laredo.Rhodes also implored ex-president Trump’s supporters to “not cower in fear”, maintaining that federal authorities were “trying to get rid of us so they can get to you”. Rhodes also reportedly said: “If we actually intended to take over the Capitol, we’d have taken it, and we’d have brought guns.”Neither Rhodes nor Stone have yet been accused of wrongdoing, The Post noted. More