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      Republican praises January 6 attacker’s ‘good faith and core principles’

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      Seeking leniency for a January 6 rioter charged with assaulting police, the Louisiana Republican congressman Clay Higgins – a former law enforcement officer himself – saluted the man’s “good character, faith and core principles”.In video taken during the attack on Congress on 6 January 2021, the rioter was seen to say: “It’s going to be violent and yes, if you are asking, ‘Is Ryan Nichols going to bring violence? Yes, Ryan Nichols is going to bring violence.’”Nichols, in an affidavit, admitted posting the video, attacking officers with pepper spray and urging rioters on with shouts including, “This is not a peaceful protest”.In court in Washington last week, Nichols, of Longview, Texas, pleaded guilty to two charges: obstruction and assaulting, resisting or impeding police and obstruction of an official proceeding.More than 1,000 arrests have been made over the attack and hundreds of convictions secured, some for seditious conspiracy. Donald Trump, who incited the riot as he attempted to overturn his 2020 presidential election defeat by Joe Biden, faces 17 charges related to his election subversion, four federal and 13 at state level in Georgia.Nine deaths have been linked to the attack staged by the former president’s supporters, including law enforcement suicides.Higgins’ own website describes him as having “spent much of his career dedicated to uniformed service [as] an army veteran and law enforcement officer”. It also says he is “widely regarded as one of the most conservative members of Congress”.Nonetheless, in a letter dated 7 November, he asked the US district judge in Nichols’s case, Royce C Lamberth, to show leniency when passing down sentence.“Sir,” Higgins wrote. “I submit to you this letter in support of Ryan Taylor Nichols. He is a man of good character, faith, and core principles.“I humbly ask that he receive fair consideration of the whole of circumstances regarding his case, condition, and background. He has already served nearly two years in the District of Columbia jail in pretrial confinement, which has been destructive to his physical (liver issues) and mental health (PTSD).”Nichols had been under house arrest since 22 November 2022 and had “not sought to flee nor shown any indication of dangerous activity”, Higgins said.He added: “Prior to his arrest, Mr Nichols had no criminal background and served honorably in the United States Marine Corps. He continued to serve domestically in a search and rescue capacity, even being publicly recognised for his heroic actions on national television.”That referred to Nichols’s commendation by the Louisiana-raised TV host Ellen DeGeneres – in 2018 – and in relation to his work to rescue people and animals stranded by Hurricane Florence.Nichols, Higgins said, “has already paid a tremendous price in time and treasure” for his actions on January 6.“His case must be considered fairly and thoroughly in line with his fundamental constitutional rights.”No date has been set for sentencing. More

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      in US Politics

      Man who stormed US Capitol in face paint files paperwork for congressional run

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      The man who donned face paint and a horned headdress to storm the US Capitol at the 6 January insurrection has filed paperwork for a potential congressional run in Arizona as a libertarian.Jacob Chansley, known as the “QAnon Shaman”, became one of the most recognizable symbols of the insurrection, as media showed him walking the halls of the Capitol and standing at the dais in the US Senate.He pleaded guilty to a felony charge of obstructing an official proceeding and was sentenced to 41 months in prison. He was released early in March.After his release, he resumed posting bizarre messages online. His profile on X, @AmericaShaman, says his nickname is “a straw man they created in an attempt to control the narrative & destroy my public image”. In response to someone asking for a campaign donation link, he said he wasn’t taking donations now and wasn’t sure if he would later because “BIG $$$ is a part of the problem in politics … I intend to run an ENTIRELY different kind of campaign …”As Chansley has a felony, he would not be able to vote for himself until he gets his voting rights restored in Arizona.Chansley filed a statement of interest in running for congressional district 8 with the Arizona secretary of state last week. Writing his name as Jacob Angeli-Chansley, his forms say he would run as a libertarian.The right-leaning eighth district seat will be open in 2024 as Debbie Lesko, the Republican representative, announced she would not seek re-election. Since her announcement, a flood of Republican contenders have entered the race.Republican primary candidates for the seat include the losing 2022 Senate candidate Blake Masters, the Arizona House speaker, Ben Toma, losing 2022 attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh, and a state senator, Anthony Kern, who attended the 6 January event at the Capitol. A handful of others are also running. More

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      ‘I’m more worried today than I was on January 6’: top conservative’s warning to America

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      Michael Luttig knows the eye of the storm. On the night of 4 January 2021, the retired federal judge advised Mike Pence, the vice-president, against trying to overturn the results of the presidential election. Last year on live television he delivered compelling testimony to the congressional panel investigating the January 6 insurrection.Now, with less than a year until the nation goes back to the polls, Luttig recognises that the battle to save the American republic from the demagoguery of Donald Trump is far from over – and he is more worried than ever before.“I am more worried for America today than I was on January 6,” he warns in a phone interview with the Guardian. “For all the reasons that we know, his election would be catastrophic for America’s democracy.”Luttig, 69, is an unlikely hero of the resistance. Born in Tyler, Texas, he was assistant counsel to the president under the Republican Ronald Reagan, and clerked for then judge Antonin Scalia and the supreme court justice Warren Burger. He served on the US court of appeals for the fourth circuit from 1991 to 2006 and was committed to an “originalist” interpretation of the constitution.He endorsed the George W Bush White House’s post-September 11 policy of declaring terrorism suspects “enemy combatants” so that they could be held by the military without charges. He was an advocate of the death penalty – including for the man who killed Luttig’s own 63-year-old father, John, in a carjacking outside his home.Luttig retired in 2006 and entered the private sector, working for Boeing and Coca-Cola before sliding into what seemed a quiet retirement. But at the dawn of 2021, America was on the brink of a constitutional crisis after Trump lost the election to Joe Biden and pressured Pence to reject the outcome.On the night of 4 January, Luttig received a call from old friend Richard Cullen, who was working as a lawyer for Pence. Cullen explained that John Eastman, who had previously clerked for Luttig, was making the claim that Pence had the constitutional authority to stop certification of the election results.Lutting told Cullen to advise Pence that this was flat wrong and further set out his views on Twitter: “The only responsibility and power of the Vice-President under the Constitution is to faithfully count the electoral college votes as they have been cast.”The vice-president duly stood his ground and spurned Trump, who reportedly branded Pence a “wimp” and complained: “I don’t want to be your friend any more if you don’t do this.” On January 6 a mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol and demanded that Pence be hanged, leaving a trail of death, destruction and excrement, but the results got certified all the same.Testifying to the House of Representatives’ January 6 committee in an almost painfully slow and deliberate manner, Luttig recalled: “On that day, America finally came face to face with the raging war that it had been waging against itself for years. So blood-chilling was that day for our democracy, that America could not believe her eyes and she turned them away in both fear and shame.”As Biden was sworn in, proclaiming that “democracy has prevailed”, and Trump slinked back to his Mar-a-Lago redoubt in Florida, there were hopes that the worst of the storm had passed. But it soon became apparent that Trump wasn’t going anywhere. He continued to hold rallies, call the shots in the Republican party and push the “big lie” that he, not Biden, was the true winner in 2020.Now, despite 91 criminal indictments in four jurisdictions, many of which relate to the attempted coup, he is running to regain the White House in 2024. He is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination and, according to a recent New York Times and Siena College poll, leading Biden in five of the six most important battleground states.Should Trump win a second term, the Washington Post newspaper reported this week, he already has plans to use the federal government to investigate or prosecute perceived enemies including his former chief of staff John Kelly, former attorney general William Barr and Gen Mark Milley, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff.A presidency guided by such authoritarian impulses would be “ruinous” for democracy and the rule of law, Luttig predicts. “He did what he did on January 6. He’s continued to maintain for three years that the election was stolen from him. He’s done that with now complete and total support of the Republican party.“All that he has done beginning with January 6 has corrupted American democracy and corrupted American elections and laid waste to Americans’ faith and confidence in their democracy to the extent that today millions and millions and millions of Americans no longer have faith and confidence in their elections.“He’s the presumptive nominee of the Republican party in 2024 and indeed many people believe that he will be the next president.”Luttig, however, has a plan to stop him. In August he joined with the liberal constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe to publish an article in the Atlantic magazine under the headline “The Constitution Prohibits Trump From Ever Being President Again”.The pair argued that section 3 of the 14th amendment automatically excludes from future office anyone who swears an oath to uphold the constitution and then rebels against it. Irrespective of criminal proceedings or congressional sanctions, they contended, Trump’s efforts to overturn the election are sufficient to bar him for life.Luttig elaborates by phone: “The former president is disqualified from holding the presidency again because he engaged in an insurrection or rebellion against the constitution of the United States when he attempted to remain in power, notwithstanding that the American people had voted to confer the power of the presidency upon Joe Biden.“That constituted a rebellion against the executive vesting clause of the constitution, which limits the term of the president to four years unless he is re-elected by the American people. I cannot even begin to tell you how that is literally the most important two sentences in America today.”Luttig draws a fine but important legal distinction between a rebellion against the constitution, as described by the 14th amendment section 3, and rebellion against the United States. He claims that groups that filed lawsuits in Colorado and elsewhere to bar Trump from the ballot are confused on this issue.“They do not yet understand what disqualifies the former president, namely an insurrection or rebellion against the constitution. They have argued the cases as if he is disqualified because he engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States.“That’s why they have, unfortunately, focused their efforts on establishing or not that the former president was responsible for the riot on the Capitol. The riot on the Capitol is incidental to the question of whether he engaged in a rebellion against the constitution.”But he adds: “All of these cases – and there’ll be others in the states – is the constitutional process by which the American people decide whether the former president is disqualified from the presidency in 2024. All of these cases are going to roll up to the supreme court of the United States and it will be decided by the supreme court whether Donald Trump is disqualified.”Even some Trump critics, however, have argued that a legal ruling banning him from the race from the White House would enflame America’s divisions, whereas beating him at the ballot box would be more satisfying. Luttig naturally takes a lawyerly view: “The constitution tells us that it is not disqualification that is anti-democratic. Rather, it is the conduct that gives rise to disqualification that the constitution tells us is anti-democratic.”America’s founding document does not allow for second guessing about the political fallout, he adds. “It is the constitution that requires us to decide whether he is disqualified, whatever the consequences of that disqualification might be.”In the meantime Luttig this week helped form a new conservative legal movement, relaunching an organisation formerly known as Checks & Balances as the Society for the Rule of Law. The move was billed as a nationwide expansion aimed at protecting the constitution and defending the rule of law from Trump’s “Make America great again” movement. Its leadership includes Luttig, the lawyer George Conway and former Republican congresswoman Barbara Comstock.“We believe that the time has come for a new conservative legal movement that still holds the same allegiances to the constitution and the rule of law that the original conservative legal movement held but has abandoned,” Luttig explains. “There’s a split in the conservative legal movement that mirrors the split in the Republican party about Donald Trump.”On other side of that split is the Federalist Society, a group that for decades has played a crucial role in grooming conservative judges – its prominent figures have included Leonard Leo, who advised Trump on his supreme court picks – but has said little about the threat posed by the former president to the constitutional order.Luttig, who, unlike Conway, has never been a member of the Federalist Society, said: “We believe that the Federalist Society has failed to speak out in defence of the constitution and the rule of law and repudiate the constitutional and legal excesses of the former president and his administration and, most notably, failed to repudiate the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.” More

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      in US Politics

      Standing My Ground review: Capitol cop Harry Dunn on January 6 and the Trumpist threat

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      If you think you’ve read everything you need to know about the violent attempt to overthrow the US government on 6 January 2021, this insider’s book by a 6ft 7in African American Capitol police officer will change your mind.Harry Dunn has written a 237-page cri de coeur for himself and for the US. It is a story that is more important than ever when so many crazed Republicans continue to revere the traitor whom the justice department says is directly responsible for this singularly shameful episode in American history.On that terrible day, Dunn and hundreds of his fellow Capitol cops were in hand-to-hand combat with scores of drunken and drug-addled seditionists. The police officers were attacked with everything from metal bike racks to flagpoles and banisters ripped from the stairs of the building.“You could hear the screaming and hollering as the battle raged on,” Dunn writes. “Blood was streaming down officers’ faces. They were yelling, grunting, and trying to force the rioters back. Many of them were blinded and coughing after being doused with pepper spray, bear spray, and even WD-40.”In the years since then, Dunn has beaten back post-traumatic stress disorder with the help of his family, his friends, professional therapists and sympathetic Congress members like Jamie Raskin of Maryland. Raskin took Dunn to lunch after the officer called the congressman’s office to tell him he was the source of an anonymous quote in a story in BuzzFeed which – to Dunn’s delight – Raskin had tweeted out.Since then, Dunn has made dozens of public appearances and written this book, with a single goal: “I want the people responsible for that day, including Trump … to pay a price, just like we paid a price … I will always be standing my ground to make sure our democracy exists. And I’ll ask that you stand with me so that nothing like this ever happens again.”Dunn reserves his greatest anger for those he and his fellow officers risked their lives for in the face of that furious mob. He was “full of rage” when it became clear that “Republicans were walking away from their earlier condemnation of the attack … Congress members … whom I had guarded and protected through State of the Unions [and] inaugurations … had suddenly turned on me. It angered me that loyalty to a single individual could overwhelm otherwise decent people … who had fallen into the darkness and forgotten their oaths of office.”He writes about how the day was particularly traumatic for Black police officers, because they were repeatedly called the N-word, as well as being beaten and sprayed and kicked and pummeled.He compares their treatment by Trump and others to the notorious assault in 1946 of a decorated Black second world war veteran named Isaac Woodard, who was pulled from a Greyhound bus because “the bus driver hadn’t liked the way Woodard asked to use the restroom” outside Augusta, Georgia. Local police officers beat him savagely and “the police chief used his baton to gouge Woodard’s eye sockets until both eyeballs ruptured beyond repair. Woodward was blind from that day forward.”“Now multiply that betrayal by two thousand times,” Dunn writes, “because that’s how many Capitol and Metropolitan police department officers were viciously assaulted by Americans whose democracy we defend every day.”After that, “we were betrayed by our president, many of our elected officials, and thousands of other Americans we had sworn to protect”.Dunn testified before the January 6 House committee and at trials for some of the terrorists who have been convicted for their crimes. Just like Woodard, “we were wearing our uniforms and badges, signifying our service to our nation”. But also just like Woodard, “to them we were throw-away people to be despised, hated and derided … merely because of the color of our skin … January 6 was never about politics. It wasn’t about election fraud. That was an excuse for people to do some shit they had wanted to do in the first place.”Last week’s election results in Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania – like the elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022 – proved once again that a majority of Americans reject the extremist agenda embraced by the Maga movement and its hideous head.Having finally recovered from most of the injuries inflicted on that fateful day in January 2021, Dunn feels he’s “been given a new lease on life, another chance to make a difference and that is what I want to do”. He ends the book with a plea to readers to do exactly what he is trying to do with that second chance: become a tireless foot soldier in the never-ending fight against racism and ignorance and book burning in America.He writes: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
      Standing My Ground is published in the US by Hachette More

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      in US Politics

      Renegade review: Adam Kinzinger on why he left Republican ranks

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      Adam Kinzinger represented a reliably Republican district in the US House for six terms. He voted to impeach Donald Trump over the insurrection and with Liz Cheney was one of two Republicans on the January 6 committee. Like the former Wyoming congresswoman, he earned the ire of Trump and the GOP base.A lieutenant colonel and air force pilot, Kinzinger read the terrain and declined to run again. In his memoir, he looks back at his life, family and time in the US military. He also examines the transformation of the Republican party into a Trumpian vessel. With the assistance of Michael D’Antonio, biographer of Mike Pence, he delivers a steady and well-crafted read.Kinzinger finds the Republicans sliding toward authoritarianism, alienating him from a world he once knew. On 8 January 2021, two days after the Trump-inspired coup attempt, he received a letter signed by 11 members of his family, excoriating him for calling for the president to be removed.“Oh my, what a disappointment you are to us and to God!’ the letter began. “We were once proud of your accomplishments! Instead, you go against your Christian principles and join ‘the Devil’s army’ (Democrats and the fake news media).”The word “disappointment was underlined three times”, Kinzinger counts. “God once.”Elected in 2010 with the backing of the Tea Party, once in office, Kinzinger distanced himself from the Republican fringe. The movement felt frenzied. Hyper-caffeinated. He cast his lot with Eric Cantor, House majority leader and congressman from Virginia. “Overtly ambitious”, in Kinzinger’s view, Cantor also presented himself as “serious, sober and cerebral”. Eventually, Cantor found himself out of step with the enraged core of the party. In 2014, he was defeated in a primary.Cantor was too swampy for modern Republican tastes. Out of office, he is a senior executive at an investment bank.Simply opposing Barack Obama and the Affordable Care Act wasn’t enough. With America’s first Black president in the White House, performative politics and conspiracy theories took over.Kevin McCarthy, deposed as speaker last month, earns Kinzinger’s scorn – and rightly.“I was not surprised he was ousted,” Kinzinger told NPR. “And frankly, I think it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”On the page, Kinzinger paints McCarthy as weak, limitlessly self-abasing and a bully. He put himself at the mercy of Matt Gaetz, the Florida extremist, prostrated himself before Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia extremist, and endured 15 rounds of balloting on the House floor to be allowed the speaker’s gavel – an illusion of a win.McCarthy behaved like “an attention-seeking high school senior who readily picked on anyone who didn’t fall in line”, Kinzinger writes. The California congressman even tried, if feebly, to physically intimidate his fellow Republican.“Once, I was standing in the aisle that runs from the floor to the back of the [House] chamber,” Kinzinger remembers. “As [McCarthy] passed, with his security man and some of his boys, he veered towards me, hit me with his shoulder and then kept going.”Apparently, McCarthy forgot Kinzinger did stints in war zones.Kinzinger also takes McCarthy to task for his shabby treatment of Cheney, at the time the No 3 House Republican. On 1 January 2021, on a caucus call, she warned that 6 January would be a “dark day” if they “indulged in the fantasy” that they could overturn Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump.McCarthy was having none of it. “I just want to be clear: Liz doesn’t speak for the conference,” he said. “She speaks for herself.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat, Kinzinger writes, was “unnecessary and disrespectful, and it infuriated me”.These days, McCarthy faces the prospect of a Trump-fueled primary challenge. But he is not alone in evoking Kinzinger’s anger. Kinzinger also has tart words for Mitch McConnell and his performance post-January 6. The Senate minority leader was more intent on retaining power than dealing with the havoc wrought by Trump and his minions, despite repeatedly sniping at him.When crunch time came, McConnell followed the pack. Kinzinger bemoans McConnell’s vote to acquit in the impeachment trial, ostensibly because Trump had left office, and then his decision to castigate Trump on the Senate floor when it no longer mattered.“It took a lot of cheek, nerve, chutzpah, gall and, dare I say it, balls for McConnell to talk this way,” Kinzinger bristles, “since he personally blocked the consideration of the case until Trump departed.”Kinzinger devotes considerable space to his own faith. An evangelical Protestant, he is highly critical of Christian nationalism as theology and as a driving force in the Republican party. He draws a direct line between religion and January 6. Proximity between the cross, a makeshift gallows and calls for Mike Pence to be hanged was not happenstance.“Had there not been some of these errant prophecies, this idea that God has ordained it to be Trump, I’m not sure January 6 would have happened like it did,” Kinzinger said last year. “You have people today that, literally, I think in their heart – they may not say it – but they equate Donald Trump with the person of Jesus Christ.”In his book, Kinzinger echoes Russell Moore, former head of public policy of the Southern Baptist Convention: “Moore’s view of Christianity was consistent with traditional theology, which does not have a place for religious nationalism. Nothing in the Bible said the world would be won over by American Christianity.”Looking at 2024, Kinzinger casts the election as “a simple question of democracy or no democracy … if it was Joe Biden and Donald Trump, I don’t think there’s any question I would vote for Joe Biden”.
      Renegade is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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      in Elections

      Efforts to keep ‘insurrectionist’ Trump off 2024 ballot to be heard in court

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      A multi-pronged effort to keep Donald Trump off the 2024 presidential ballot as an insurrectionist resumes in earnest, beginning with a court case in Colorado on Monday, the first of two states that will hear legal arguments this week.Those seeking to have the former president ruled ineligible are relying on a civil war-era provision of the 14th amendment to the US constitution that states no person can hold public office if they “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof”.They argue that Trump’s incitement of the deadly 6 January attack on the US Capitol, in which his supporters attempted to block Congress certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, perfectly encapsulates the clause that has yet to be seriously tested in a courtroom.In Denver on Monday, and in Minnesota’s supreme court on Thursday, hearings will commence in cases that could ultimately end up in the US supreme court, regardless of which side wins in the lower court. The rulings are likely to be swiftly appealed, dragging the cases out with next year’s general election only 12 months away.“We’ve had hearings with presidential candidates debating their eligibility before – Barack Obama, Ted Cruz, John McCain,” said Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, listing candidates challenged on whether they met the constitutional requirement of being a “natural-born citizen”.But the arguments against Trump, he said, rely on an obscure clause of the constitution with an “incendiary” bar against insurrection. “Those legal questions are very heavy ones,” he said, noting that even if they are seen as long shots, they raise important issues and have a plausible legal path to success.Among those who support the argument for Trump’s removal from the ballot are the Virginia senator Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate, who told ABC last month that the “language is specific” in the 14th amendment clause.“In my view, the attack on the Capitol that day was designed for a particular purpose at a particular moment and that was to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power as is laid out in the constitution,” he said.“So I think there is a powerful argument to be made.”Dozens of cases citing the amendment have been filed in recent months, but the ones in Colorado and Minnesota seem the most important, according to legal experts. They were filed by two liberal groups with significant resources, and in states with a clear, swift process for challenges to candidates’ ballot qualifications.That means the Colorado and Minnesota cases are taking a more legally sound route to get courts to force election officials to disqualify Trump, in contrast to other lawsuits that seek a sweeping ruling from federal judges that Trump is no longer eligible for the presidency.The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) watchdog group filed the Colorado lawsuit. “By instigating this unprecedented assault on the American constitutional order, Trump violated his oath and disqualified himself under the 14th Amendment from holding public office, including the office of the president,” its filing states.Trump’s lawyers say the provision has not been used in 150 years, and the plaintiffs are interpreting it incorrectly. They contend it was never meant to apply to the office of president, which is not mentioned in the text, unlike “senator or representative in Congress” and “elector of president and vice-president”.They also insist Trump never “engaged in insurrection” and was simply exercising his free speech rights to warn about election results he did not believe were legitimate.The then president was impeached for a historic second time in 2021 for inciting the attack on the Capitol, though he was acquitted by the US Senate.Trump has been predictably dismissive. “This is like a banana republic,” he told the conservative radio host Dan Bongino last month. “And what they’re doing is, it’s called election interference. Now the 14th amendment is just a continuation of that. It’s nonsense.”The arguments in Colorado could feature testimony from witnesses to the 6 January 2021 attack, and other moves by Trump to overturn his 2020 election defeat. He is already facing charges in a federal case in Washington DC and a state case being heard in Fulton county, Georgia, over those efforts.Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      in US Politics

      Sedition Hunters: how ordinary Americans helped track down the Capitol rioters

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      For one rioter at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, wearing a Caterpillar hoodie proved a bad fashion choice. Admittedly, with an American flag-patterned cap and some shades, the garment helped shield his identity as he manhandled a police officer. Yet it came back to haunt him. Investigators used an app and facial-recognition technology to zero in and eventually got their man: Logan Barnhart, a construction worker in Michigan with a passion for fitness. His résumé included bodybuilding and modeling for romance novel covers. While hitting a punching bag in a workout video, he wore some familiar attire: a Caterpillar sweatshirt. Cue the Dragnet music.There was something else remarkable about this investigation: the sleuths were ordinary Americans, part of a spontaneously formed citizen network volunteering their time to track down Capitol rioters. Now their story is shared in a book that takes its name from the movement, Sedition Hunters: How January 6 Broke the Justice System, by Ryan J Reilly, an NBC News justice reporter.“They were really just random Americans who got together and decided they wanted to do something about what happened on January 6,” Reilly says.Those random Americans did not just identify Barnhart. They sought and found other rioters who stormed the Capitol after Donald Trump refused to accept his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden and invited supporters to rally in Washington on the day Congress was to certify the results. Now, one of the Sedition Hunters, Forrest Rogers, is using his talents to siphon out misinformation of a different sort – as a journalist reporting on the conflict between Israel and Hamas for Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a newspaper based in Zurich.In the wake of January 6, the citizen sleuths proved invaluable to the FBI, which Reilly describes as reeling from the fallout of the riots and overwhelmed by the subsequent federal investigation, the largest in American history, as an initial estimate of 800 rioters entering the Capitol ballooned to more than 3,000.While the FBI approached the task with antiquated technology, the Sedition Hunters had all the latest tools, including the app that helped catch Barnhart, which was designed in a garage by one particular sleuth, known only as Alex in Reilly’s book. Many others did such critical work. Like Alex, “Joan” used an article of clothing to pin down a suspect. In her case, it was a blue-and-white sweatshirt from a school in her home town, Hershey, Pennsylvania, worn by a Capitol window-smasher. Its wearer had also been seen inside but all she had was a nickname: “Zeeker.” Joan searched the school’s Facebook page. Zeeker turned out to be Leo Brent Bozell IV, scion of a conservative dynasty.By the time of Bozell’s arrest, two other people had identified him to authorities. Both knew him. Although there are occasional mentions in the book of people who turned in rioters they knew, the Sedition Hunters focused on tracking down hard-to-find individuals who they had never met.“It was easy to get the person virtually if they posted their own crime, built their own case on a social media post,” Reilly says. “Some of them were making efforts to hide their identity in some way.”In his hoodie, baseball cap and sunglasses, one of many faces in a mob, Barnhart was tough to identify. Alex’s app proved a gamechanger. It created a virtual library of images of the attack collected by the Sedition Hunters, which they could now search to unmask the culprit. Each suspect was given a relevant nickname: Barnhart was “CatSweat”, for his Caterpillar garb. Ironically, an image from the rightwing social media platform Parler delivered the coup de grace. Facial recognition technology confirmed CatSweat as Barnhart. His social media accounts yielded further confirmation: a hat he wore in one photo matched his headgear on January 6. On Twitter, he promised Trump he would “be there” at the Capitol that day.Asked if any of the Sedition Hunters were secretly FBI agents, Reilly discounts the possibility with a quip: “They were way too skilled.” More seriously, he adds: “I think that really is what they brought to bear.”The Sedition Hunters sometimes outperformed their professional counterparts. The FBI made some wrong hits. John Richter, a Biden campaign worker, shared his name with a rioter who reached the Senate floor. Guess who was apprehended first? Although the Democratic Richter convinced them they had the wrong guy, with help from his puppy, two years would pass before the feds arrested the actual rioter.“This guy worked for Joe Biden, got him elected,” Reilly says. “He was probably not the man to look for … Stopping the election of a man he worked for did not make a lot of sense.”Reilly also notes that conservative elements within the FBI supported Trump and were lukewarm on investigating those who rioted for him.“Despite what we heard the past seven or eight years from Donald Trump, at its core, it’s a conservative organization,” Reilly says. “A lot of people generally lean conservative. It does not mean they’re all Trump supporters, but there was a lot of whataboutism in the FBI after the Capitol attacks.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionReilly does provide many examples of FBI personnel acting on tips from the Sedition Hunters. After Joan made her initial identification of Zeeker as Bozell and communicated this to the bureau, she kept scanning images from the riots for that blue-and-white sweatshirt. This uncovered further evidence of his violent actions, which she also transmitted. A special agent thanked her, promised to update prosecutors and made good on that vow, an additional charge against Bozell being brought within 24 hours.Reilly is mindful of some developments still on the horizon. There is a five-year statute of limitations for Capitol rioters – 6 January 2026 – so the window to bring remaining fugitives to justice is about two and a half years wide. There’s a wild card too: what happens if Trump wins the presidency again and decides to issue pardons?“I think it’s very real,” Reilly says of that possibility. “He said he’s going to. To me, it really depends on what the extent is going to be … You can easily see him pardoning everybody who committed misdemeanors, something like that.”Of more serious charges, he adds: “I don’t know across the board.”Who knows what will happen. For now, readers can savor the unheralded work of the Sedition Hunters, best summed up in Joan’s reflection about helping bring Bozell to justice: “He probably would’ve gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those meddling sleuths.”
      Sedition Hunters is published in the US by PublicAffairs More

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      in Elections

      Kevin McCarthy dismissed Liz Cheney warning before January 6, book says

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      When Liz Cheney warned fellow Republicans five days before January 6 of a “dark day” to come if they “indulged in the fantasy” that they could overturn Donald Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden, the then House GOP leader, Kevin McCarthy, swiftly slapped her down.“After Liz spoke,” the former Wyoming representative’s fellow anti-Trumper Adam Kinzinger writes in a new book, “McCarthy immediately told everyone who was listening, ‘I just want to be clear: Liz doesn’t speak for the conference. She speaks for herself.’”Five days after Cheney delivered her warning on a Republican conference call, Trump supporters attacked Congress in an attempt to block certification of Biden’s win.McCarthy’s statement, Kinzinger writes, was “unnecessary and disrespectful, and it infuriated me”.Kinzinger details McCarthy’s “notably juvenile” intervention – and even what he says were two physical blows delivered to him by McCarthy – in Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country, which will be published in the US this month. The Guardian obtained a copy.Nine deaths have been linked to the January 6 riot, more than a thousand arrests made and hundreds convicted, some with seditious conspiracy. Trump was impeached a second time for inciting the attack, and acquitted a second time when Senate Republicans stayed loyal. When the dust cleared from the January 6 attack, McCarthy was among 147 House and Senate Republicans who still voted to object to results in key states.Like Cheney, Kinzinger, from Illinois, sat on the House January 6 committee, then left office. Unlike Cheney, who was beaten by a Trump ally, Kinzinger chose to retire.Cheney has maintained a high profile, warning of the threat Trump poses as he leads polling regarding the Republican nomination next year, 91 criminal charges (17 concerning election subversion) and assorted civil threats notwithstanding, and refusing to rule out a presidential run of her own.Kinzinger has founded Country First, an organisation meant to combat Republican extremism, and become a political commentator. In his book, he says he responded to McCarthy on the 1 January 2021 conference call by issuing his own warning about the potential for violence on 6 January and “calling on McCarthy to say he wouldn’t join the group opposing the electoral college states.“He replied by coming on the line to say, ‘OK, Adam. Operator, who’s up next?’”Such a “rude and dismissive tone”, Kinzinger says, “was typical of [McCarthy’s] style, which was notably juvenile”.McCarthy briefly blamed Trump for January 6, swiftly reversed course, stayed close to the former president and became speaker of the House, only to lose the role after less than a year, in the face of a Trumpist rebellion.Kinzinger accuses McCarthy, from California, of behaving less like a party leader than “an attention-seeking high school senior who readily picked on anyone who didn’t fall in line”. And while characterising McCarthy’s dismissal of Cheney’s warning about January 6 as “a little dig”, Kinzinger also details two physical digs he says he took from McCarthy himself.“I went from being one of the boys he treated with big smiles and pats on the back to outcast as soon as I started speaking the truth about the president who would be king,” Kinzinger writes.McCarthy “responded by trying to intimidate me physically. Once, I was standing in the aisle that runs from the floor to the back of the [House] chamber. As he passed, with his security man and some of his boys, he veered towards me, hit me with his shoulder and then kept going.“If we had been in high school, I would have dropped my books, papers would have been scattered and I would have had to endure the snickers of passersby. I was startled but took it as the kind of thing Kevin did when he liked you.“Another time, I was standing at the rail that curves around the back of the last row of seats in the chamber. As he shoulder-checked me again, I thought to myself, ‘What a child.’”Kinzinger is not above robust language of his own. Describing Trump’s Senate trial over the Capitol attack, the former congressman bemoans the decision of the Republican leader in that chamber, Mitch McConnell, to vote to acquit because Trump had left office – then deliver a speech excoriating Trump nonetheless.“It took a lot of cheek, nerve, chutzpah, gall and, dare I say it, balls for McConnell to talk this way,” Kinzinger writes, “since he personally blocked the consideration of the case until Trump departed.” More