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      FBI informant testifies for Proud Boys defense that January 6 ‘not organized’

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      An FBI informant who marched to the US Capitol with fellow Proud Boys on January 6 testified on Wednesday that he did not know of any plans for the far-right extremist group to invade the building and didn’t think they inspired violence that day.The informant, who identified himself in court only as “Aaron”, was a defense witness at the trial of the former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and four lieutenants charged with seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors say was a plot to keep Donald Trump in the White House after the 2020 election.The informant was communicating with his FBI handler as a mob breached police barricades at the Capitol on 6 January 2021.The Proud Boys “did not do it, nor inspire”, the informant texted his handler. “The crowd did as herd mentality. Not organized.”The handler’s response was redacted from a screenshot a defense attorney showed to jurors.“Barriers down at capital [sic] building. Crowd surged forward, almost to the building now,” the informant texted.The informant said he contacted the agent because he saw it as an “emergency situation”. He testified that the FBI didn’t ask him to go to Washington or march with the Proud Boys that day.“If there was any violence and all that, they would have wanted to know,” he said of the FBI.“Aaron” is one of several Proud Boys associates who were FBI informants before or after the January 6 attack. He is the first to testify at one of the most important trials to come out of the justice department investigation of the Capitol riot.Prosecutors have employed an unusual theory that Proud Boys leaders mobilized a handpicked group of foot soldiers – or “tools” – to supply the force necessary to carry out their plot by overwhelming police and breaching barricades. The informant who testified on Wednesday was not one of those “tools”.Defense attorneys have argued there is no evidence the Proud Boys plotted to attack the Capitol and stop Congress certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory.The informant testified that marching from the Washington Monument to the Capitol appeared to be a photo opportunity for the Proud Boys.“I didn’t know the specific purpose other than just being on the streets and being seen,” he said.Earlier in the trial, jurors heard from two former Proud Boys members who agreed to cooperate with the government after they were charged with riot-related crimes. Those witnesses, Matthew Greene and Jeremy Bertino, testified they did not know of any specific plan to storm the Capitol. Greene said group leaders celebrated the attack but did not explicitly encourage members to use force.Tarrio, a Miami resident who was national chairman of the group, and the other Proud Boys could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted of seditious conspiracy.Also on trial are Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola.Nordean, of Auburn, Washington, was a Proud Boys chapter leader. Biggs, of Ormond Beach, Florida, was a self-described organizer. Rehl was president of the chapter in Philadelphia. Pezzola was a member from Rochester, New York.The informant, who joined the Proud Boys in 2019, said he was not a group leader and did not know any of the leaders on trial.The trial started in January. Prosecutors rested their case on 20 March. Jurors are expected to hear several more days of testimony from defense witnesses before they hear closing arguments.Nordean’s attorney, Nicholas Smith, called the informant as a witness. The witness said the FBI interviewed him within 10 days of returning home from Washington.“It wasn’t very specific,” he said. “Just a lot of random questions.”The informant entered the Capitol on January 6 and was inside for about 20 minutes. He said he felt justified in entering the Capitol because he thought he could prevent rioters from destroying items of “historic significance”.“I didn’t want to be in there any longer than I had to,” the informant testified.The defense attorney Carmen Hernandez asked: “When you entered the Capitol, did you think that was something minor?”“I wasn’t thinking like that at the time,” the informant said.The informant said he believed he would not get into trouble with the FBI for something “minor” like breaking a window, as long as it could be seen as an “act of self-preservation” in a confrontation with antifascist activists. More

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      Mike Pence must testify before grand jury investigating January 6 – reports

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      Former US vice-president Mike Pence must testify in front of a grand jury investigating Donald Trump’s election subversion and incitement of the January 6 attack on Congress, a federal judge reportedly ruled on Tuesday.Multiple news outlets reported the ruling, which remained under seal.Trump and Pence himself have both sought to stop Pence from testifying in the justice department investigation of Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.At issue are conversations between Pence and Trump leading up to January 6 and the attack on the Capitol, which is now linked to nine deaths, more than a thousand arrests and hundreds of convictions.Lawyers for Trump cited executive privilege, the concept that communications between a president and aides are protected.Lawyers for Pence argued he was protected by the separation of powers, via the vice-president’s role as president of the Senate, which he performed on 6 January 2021, the day supporters who were told to “fight like hell” by Trump tried to block certification of Biden’s win.On Tuesday, James E Boasberg, a judge in federal district court in Washington DC, reportedly rejected both arguments.Pence is not expected to have to answer questions about his own actions on 6 January 2021, when he was spirited away from a mob which chanted about hanging him while a makeshift gallows went up outside.Pence has described that experience in a book, So Help Me God, published ahead of an expected run against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. He has also criticised Trump’s actions in public remarks. Trump has said the January 6 Capitol attack was Pence’s fault.On Tuesday, Pence was reportedly considering an appeal. Robert Costa, a CBS correspondent and co-author with Bob Woodward of the bestselling book Peril, about Trump’s attempt to cling onto power, said: “Pence has said he might see this all the way to the supreme court.”The Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe has described Pence’s defence as “meritless”, saying: “Pence needn’t file a foolish appeal just to prove his [pro-Trump] credentials. He’s done enough in that regard. Now he needs to show he’s law-abiding.”Reporting the ruling on Tuesday, the Associated Press said it set up the “extraordinary scenario of a former vice-president potentially testifying against his former boss in a criminal investigation”.Trump faces legal jeopardy on multiple fronts.An indictment is expected in New York, over a hush money payment to an adult film actor. His attempted election subversion is under investigation in Georgia and at the federal level. Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, is also investigating Trump’s retention of classified material.Authorities in New York have mounted a civil suit over Trump’s business affairs. In the same state, Trump also faces a defamation trial over an allegation of rape from the writer E Jean Carroll.Trump denies all wrongdoing, claiming to be the victim of prosecutors motivated by political and racial animus.He continues to lead polling regarding the Republican nomination for president. More

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      Trump’s verbal assaults pose risks to prosecutors and could fuel violence

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      Donald Trump’s demagogic attacks on prosecutors investigating criminal charges against him are aimed at riling up his base and could spark violence, but show no signs of letting up as a potential indictment in at least one case looms, say legal experts.At campaign rallies, speeches and on social media Trump has lambasted state and federal prosecutors as “thugs” and claimed that two of them – who are Black – are “racist”, language designed to inflame racial tension.He has also used antisemitic tropes by referring to a conspiracy of “globalists” and the influence of billionaire Jewish financier George Soros.Trump’s drive to undercut four criminal inquiries that he faces is reaching a fever pitch as a Manhattan district attorney’s inquiry looks poised to bring charges against Trump over his key part in a $130,000 hush money payment in 2016 to adult film star Stormy Daniels with whom he allegedly had an affair.In his blitz to deter and obfuscate two of the criminal investigations, Trump has resorted to verbal assaults on two Black district attorneys in Manhattan and Georgia labeling them as “racist”, even as he simultaneously battles to win the White House again.In a broader attack on the four state and federal investigations at a Texas rally on Saturday Trump blasted the “thugs and criminals who are corrupting our justice system”, while on his Truth Social platform last week he warned of “possible death and destruction” if he’s charged in the hush money inquiry.But now Trump’s incendiary attacks against the federal and state inquiries is prompting warnings that Trump’s unrelenting attacks on prosecutors could fuel violence, as he did on January 6 with bogus claims that the 2020 was stolen from him and a mob of his backers attacked the Capitol leading to at least five deaths.“Trump’s incendiary rhetoric, amplified through his social media postings and his high decibel fearmongering in Texas, pose clear physical dangers to prosecutors and investigators,” said former acting chief of the fraud section at the justice department Paul Pelletier. “With Trump’s actions promoting the January 6 insurrection serving as a cautionary tale, the potential for violent reactions to any of his charges cannot be understated.”Ex-prosecutors see Trump reverting to tactics he’s often deployed in legal and political battles.Trump’s invective say experts won’t deter prosecutors as they separately weigh fraud, obstruction and other charges related to January 6 and other issues, but echo scare tactics he’s used before as in his two impeachments, and may help Trump’s chances of becoming the Republican nominee by angering the base which could influence primary outcomes.“None of these accusations about the motives of prosecutors, however, will negate the evidence of Trump’s own crimes. A jury will focus on the facts and the law, and not any of this name calling. The Trump strategy may work in the court of public opinion, but not in a court of law,” said Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney for the eastern district of Michigan.That may explain why Trump has received more political cover from three conservative House committee chairs, who joined his effort to intimidate Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, by launching investigations to obtain his records and testimony, threats that Bragg and legal experts have denounced as political stunts and improper.The legal stakes for Trump are enormous, and unprecedented for a former president, as the criminal inquiries have been gaining momentum with more key witnesses who have past or present ties to Trump testifying before grand juries, and others getting subpoenas.Two investigations led by special counsel Jack Smith are separately looking into possible charges against Trump for obstructing an official proceeding and defrauding the US government as he schemed with top allies to block Joe Biden from taking office, and potential obstruction and other charges tied to Trump’s retention of classified documents after he left office.Further, Fulton county Georgia district attorney, Fani Willis, has said decisions are “imminent” about potentially charging Trump and others who tried to overturn Joe Biden’s win there in 2020 with erroneous claims of fraud.Much of the probe’s work has involved a special grand jury that reportedly has recommended several indictments, with a focus on Trump’s high pressure call on 2 January 2021 to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger beseeching him to just “find” 11,780 votes to help block Joe Biden’s win there.Trump has denied all wrong doing and denounced the inquiries as “witch hunts”.Little wonder though that Trump’s squadron of lawyers has lately filed a batch of motions in Georgia and Washington DC with mixed success to slow prosecutors as they have moved forward in gathering evidence from key witnesses and mull charges against Trump.“Blustering in court or in the media about the supposed bias or racism of the Fulton county and Manhattan county prosecutors will not convince a court to remove a democratically-elected prosecutor, and certainly the Republicans in the House of Representatives have no legal authority ability to influence the course of criminal justice in New York state proceedings,” said Fordham law professor and ex-prosecutor in New York’s southern district Bruce Green.Green stressed: “None of Trump’s moves, such as calling prosecutors racists, are likely to throw any of the prosecutors off their game: prosecutors tend to be focused, determined and thick-skinned.”Likewise, ex-US attorney in Georgia Michael Moore told the Guardian the Trump attacks on the two black prosecutors are “completely baseless. The charges of racism against the prosecutors is more of an indication of the weakness of his claims than most anything else he has said.”Moore scoffed too at the moves by Trump’s House Republican allies.“It’s rich to me that the Republicans in the House claim to be the party of limited government, but as soon as they get in power and look like they might lose another election, they immediately use their big government power to meddle in a matter that purely belongs to the local jurisdiction.”NYU law professor Stephen Gillers sees similar dynamics at play in Trump’s tactics.“Trump cannot stop the judicial process, although he can try to slow it. But he can undermine its credibility through his charges and by mobilizing his supporters. I see what he’s doing now as aimed at them, just as he tried to discredit the election returns in their eyes and anger them with baseless charges over the “steal”.The weakness of Trump’s legal moves was revealed in two court rulings in DC requiring testimony before grand juries from former top aides including ex-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the January 6 inquiry, and one of his current lawyers Evan Corcoran in the classified documents case.The two rulings should give a good boost to the special counsel in his separate investigations of Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss on January 6 when Congress met to certify Joe Biden’s win about which Meadows must now testify, and Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar a Lago after he left the White House about which Corcoran has to testify.As the four investigations intensify, more aggressive moves by Trump and his lawyers to derail potential charges in Georgia, Manhattan and from the special counsel are expected before, as well as after, any charges may be filed.“If I were on the prosecution teams in Manhattan or Georgia, I would expect Trump to assert every defense he can think of, including accusing the prosecutors of misconduct,” McQuade said.A judge on Monday ordered Fani Willis to respond by 1 May to the Trump team’s motion seeking to bar her from further investigating or charging Trump, and wants all testimony from some 75 witnesses, including Meadows and Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, before the special grand jury rejected.The judge’s order was in response to a Trump legal motion that McQuade said “appears to be baseless”.Former Watergate prosecutor Phlip Lacovara told the Guardian that Trump’s lawyers are deploying different legal tactics in the investigations.“The Georgia strategy is partly a strategy of delay,” in which the Trump team is “raising dozens and dozens of objections, many of which are specious, in the hope that one will be sufficient to work on appeal and to keep him out of jail,” Lacovara said.In Manhattan, he added, they’re trying “to create the impression that this is a highly visible political stunt to exclude Trump from running”.That tactic could help in “trying to pollute the jury pool” since a hung jury would be good for Trump. “All he needs is one juror who believes this is all a concocted plot.”Former DoJ officials and experts expect Trump and his lawyers will keep up a frenzied stream of hyperbolic attacks and legal actions.“This is more of what we saw during the election,” said former deputy attorney general Donald Ayer who served in the George HW Bush administration. “He throws up gibberish and obstruction.” More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene led delegation to visit Capitol attack defendants in jail

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      A jail in Washington DC has become the latest focal point of the US culture wars after a congressional delegation led by the Republican extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene visited defendants charged in 2021’s deadly January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol and championed them as “political prisoners”.Greene high-fived the detainees and shook their hands, according to the Associated Press. As the tour group was leaving, the defendants chanted “Let’s go Brandon!”, an offensive phrase denigrating Democratic president Joe Biden.Greene was joined by fellow far-right Republican members of the House oversight committee during a two-hour tour of the DC jail on Friday. The group included extremist Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert, who embraced Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot dead by police as she participated in the Capitol riot, NBC News reported.This is at least the second visit that Greene has made in a campaign to reframe the incarcerated January 6 rioters from alleged violent insurrectionists into martyrs of the far-right cause. This time, however, her stunt was joined by Democratic members of the oversight committee who attended the tour so that they could hold their Republican peers to account, they said.“We won’t let Marjorie Taylor Greene and these … extremists tell lies about the insurrectionists and their attack on our democracy,” one of the Democratic visitors, Robert Garcia of California, said before the tour began.In a later interview with MSNBC, Garcia said he had seen Greene and Boebert and other Republican delegates treat the January 6 defendants “like celebrities, they were interacting with them, they were patting them on the back. It was completely shameful to see – these were people who tried to overthrow our government and they were being treated like rock stars and heroes.”A second Democratic representative, Jasmine Crockett of Texas, drew on her previous experience as a public defender to assess the relative merits of the conditions in which the prisoners were being held. She said that what she saw was far preferable to routine conditions in state lockups in Texas or Arkansas.“Listen, this is so much different and so much better. I don’t think the January 6ers would want to go the other way,” she was reported to say by the New York Times.The idea that the January 6 defendants being held in DC are patriotic political prisoners appears to have first emerged as a marketing message to raise money for the inmates’ legal fees. Within weeks of their detention, online crowdfunding sites had been set up for the prisoners and their families.One of the sites, American Gulag, was created by the founder of the conspiracy theory outlet Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft. It describes the rioters as “good Americans whose only crime was being invited into a political building”. It has so far raised almost $180,000.The celebration of the rioters as political prisoners then appears to have moved into the Republican mainstream. Donald Trump has called the prosecution of those who participated in the insurrection – which was inspired by his own lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him – “persecution of political prisoners”.At the first official rally of his 2024 White House campaign, the former president played a recording of the Star-Spangled Banner sung by the so-called J6 Prison Choir, which consists of men convicted for their participation in the Capitol attack. It reached the top of the iTunes chart.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAn investigation by Just Security has found that there are 20 Capitol attack inmates still being held in the DC jail, out of a total of about 1,000 who have been arrested over the insurrection. Of those, 17 have been charged with assaulting law enforcement officers during the attack.Of the remaining three, two are members of the extremist militias the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and one has already been convicted.The 20 who have been lionized by Greene as political prisoners include Thomas Ballard, who has been charged with assaulting law enforcement officers with a baton, and Christopher Quaglin, a member of the Proud Boys who is accused of pepper-spraying officers.Garcia, speaking for the Democratic members of the jail delegation, observed that the prisoners were being housed in a newer part of the institution where conditions were among the best in an institution whose standards have drawn criticism. “They were outside, they each had tablets where they can communicate, watch movies, text their families, talk to their attorneys,” he said.Greene has rebutted the description, claiming that the inmates had been made to clean and repaint the prison before the congressional visit to make it look good. She ridiculed the Democrats, saying: “Either they like jails … or are easily fooled by fresh paint.” More

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      Witness expected to testify for defense at Proud Boys trial was government informant

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      Federal prosecutors disclosed on Wednesday that a witness expected to testify for the defense at the seditious conspiracy trial of the former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and four associates was a government informant for nearly two years after the January 6 US Capitol attack.Carmen Hernandez, a lawyer for Zachary Rehl, a former chapter leader in the far-right group, asked a judge to schedule an immediate emergency hearing and suspend the trial “until these issues have been considered and resolved”. Lawyers for the other four defendants joined in Hernandez’s request.Hernandez said in court papers the defense was told by prosecutors on Wednesday afternoon the witness they were planning to call on Thursday had been a government informant.The judge ordered prosecutors to file a response to the defense filing by Thursday afternoon and scheduled a hearing for the same day, putting testimony in the case on hold until Friday. The US attorney’s office did not immediately comment.In her court filing, Hernandez said the unnamed informant participated in “prayer meetings” with relatives of at least one of the Proud Boys on trial and had discussions with family members about replacing one of the defense lawyers. The informant has been in contact with at least one defense lawyer and at least one defendant, Hernandez wrote.It is the latest twist in a trial that has been bogged down by bickering between lawyers and the judge. Defense lawyers have repeatedly asked the judge to declare a mistrial.The trial in Washington federal court is one of the most serious cases to emerge from the January 6 attack. Tarrio, Rehl and three other Proud Boys – Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean and Dominic Pezzola – are charged with conspiring to block the transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.Tarrio, a Miami resident, was national chairman for the far-right group, whose members describe it as a politically incorrect men’s club for “western chauvinists”. He and the other Proud Boys could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted of seditious conspiracy.Defense attorneys have argued there is no evidence the Proud Boys plotted to attack the Capitol and stop Congress certifying Biden’s victory.Hernandez did not name the informant in her filing but said he or she was a “confidential human source” for the government since April 2021 through at least January 2023. Prosecutors knew in December the person was a potential witness, she said.It is not the first time government use of informants has become an issue in the case. Defense attorneys have pushed for more information about informants.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAn FBI agent, Nicole Miller, testified last week that she was aware of two informants in the Proud Boys, including one who marched on the Capitol.Hernandez said there were “reasons to doubt the veracity of the government’s explanation and justification for withholding information about the (confidential human sources) who have been involved in the case”.Law enforcement routinely uses informants in criminal investigations but methods and identities can be closely guarded secrets. Federal authorities have not publicly released much information about their use of informants in investigating the Proud Boys’ role on January 6. More

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      Why Dominion is already the winner of the $1.6bn lawsuit against Fox News

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      As Fox News continued to broadcast lies about Dominion voting systems and the 2020 election, Tucker Carlson, one of its star hosts used one word over and over to describe what the network was doing – “reckless”.Those messages were the first pieces of evidence Justin Nelson, a lawyer representing Dominion, displayed on Tuesday as he began his argument for why a judge should rule the network defamed his client. “Reckless was a meaningful word” – in order to win the case, Nelson has to prove that Fox acted with “actual malice” – that its hosts, producers, and executives knew the statements were false or acted with reckless disregard to the truth.“Unlike every other single defamation case, we have in their own words the fact that they knew it was false,” Nelson said.It was an example that illustrated how the core of Dominion’s $1.6bn case against Fox are the words that came from the mouths of Fox’s employees. Regardless of what happens in the case going forward, Dominion may have already won: the messages offer a significant historical record of how top officials at one of America’s most powerful media organization aired information they knew was false when American democracy was under attack.The case has received an extraordinary amount of public attention and represents one of the most aggressive efforts to hold a party accountable for efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in the violent insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January.There was the Fox employee who reviewed a script for Jeanine Pirro’s show and wrote that it was “rife with conspiracies”. There was the internal fact-checking operation, the Brain Room, which debunked the claims about Dominion and circulated it to Fox employees. There was another Fox employee who joked he was so familiar with fact-checked emails he received from Dominion that he had them “tattooed” on his body. There was the Fox employee who noted that any time Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell came on the network it was “guaranteed gold”, even as the network knew the claims they were pushing were false.Fox’s defamation defenses, while potentially legally potent, will not wipe out what has already been revealed. Erin Murphy, a lawyer representing the network, said in court this week that Fox can’t be held liable because it was merely airing allegations from representatives of the sitting president. Any reasonable viewer, she said, would have understood that they were allegations. Even if top Fox executives were generally aware of what was being broadcast and didn’t believe it, Murphy argued, that’s not enough to hold them liable. Eric Davis, the Delaware judge seemed skeptical of some those arguments.Tucker Carlson’s messages, Murphy pressed on, aren’t really relevant to whether other Fox officials knowingly broadcast false information.A jury will ultimately decide on the liability issues, but seeing one of the network’s most visible stars forcefully disagreeing with what was going on on-air will likely be what endures in the mind of the American public.Undergirding the litigation is also a dueling vision about the power of Fox and the role that it plays in American media. As Murphy, Fox’s lawyer, told it, Fox is just another news network where conservative opinions are sometimes sprinkled in on air. Its decision to air the allegations about Dominion were merely an attempt to help its viewers understand, she said, once comparing their work to C-Span, which strictly airs political proceedings with no commentary or narrative.But Dominion’s lawyers painted a more realistic picture of Fox, emphasizing the immense influence it has among conservatives. When the network chose to air the false claims about Dominion, it wasn’t just airing allegations, the lawyers said, it was pumping it into the veins of the American public. Fox didn’t just give Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani airtime, the network made them household names.There was a “deliberate decision … to release the kraken,” Rodney Smolla, another Dominion lawyer said on Tuesday, referring to Powell.Stephen Shackleford, another Dominion lawyer, made a similar point in his argument on Wednesday. He noted that when Powell began appearing on Fox, she hadn’t been formally hired by Trump and was being shut out of meetings at the White House. Fox still chose to give her a platform.“Sidney was hunting for someone to make her relevant and Fox made her relevant,” said Stephen Shackleford, another lawyer representing Dominion. “While it doesn’t matter legally, the historical record needs to be clear.”The full trial in the case is scheduled to begin on 17 April. More

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      Four Oath Keepers members convicted of obstruction in January 6 trial

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      Four people associated with the far-right Oath Keepers militia were convicted on Monday of conspiracy and obstruction charges stemming from the insurrection at the US Capitol in 2021 by extremist supporters of Donald Trump in a failed attempt to keep him in office, in the latest trial involving members of the antigovernment group.A Washington DC jury found Sandra Parker, of Morrow, Ohio, Laura Steele, of Thomasville, North Carolina, William Isaacs, of Kissimmee, Florida, and Connie Meggs, of Dunnellon, Florida, guilty of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and other felony charges.In a rare loss for prosecutors, Sandra Parker’s husband, Bennie Parker, was acquitted of obstruction as well as one conspiracy charge, and a sixth defendant – Michael Greene, of Indianapolis – was acquitted of two conspiracy charges.Jurors said they couldn’t reach a verdict on another conspiracy charge for Bennie Parker and the obstruction charge for Greene, so the judge instructed them to keep deliberating. All six defendants were convicted of a misdemeanor trespassing offense.Conspiracy to obstruct Congress and obstruction of Congress both carry a sentence of up to 20 years behind bars.They were the third group of Oath Keepers members and associates to be tried on serious charges in the riot that temporarily halted the certification of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 election, and left dozens of police officers injured. Unlike other Oath Keepers, they were not charged with seditious conspiracy – the most serious offense prosecutors have levied so far in the January 6 Capitol attack.The verdict comes as the prosecution on Monday rested its case in another high-profile Capitol riot trial, against former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and four others who are charged with seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors say was a plot to forcibly overturn Biden’s election victory.Authorities said Sandra Parker, Connie Meggs, Issacs and Steele were part of the group of Oath Keepers who stormed into the Capitol after marching in military-style “stack” formation up the steps of the building.More than half of the roughly 1,000 people have been charged with Capitol riot-related federal crimes have pleaded guilty, including more than 130 who pleaded guilty to felony crimes. Of the 400 who have been sentenced, more than half have gotten terms of imprisonment ranging from seven days to 10 years, according to an Associated Press tally. More

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      YouTube reinstates Trump’s account after suspension over US Capitol attack

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      YouTube said on Friday it was lifting restrictions on Donald Trump’s official account which were imposed after the violent January 6 attack on Congress.Leslie Miller, vice-president of public policy, told Axios Trump’s “ability to upload new content is restored”.Miller said YouTube had “carefully evaluated the continued risk of real-world violence, balancing that with the importance of preserving the opportunity for voters to hear equally from major national candidates in the run up to an election.“This channel will continue to be subject to our policies, just like any other channel on YouTube.”Trump videos YouTube deemed to incite violence would not be reinstated, Axios reported.Twitter and Facebook have already lifted bans imposed in the aftermath of the Capitol riot. Trump has not returned to either, preferring his own platform, Truth Social.Trump will now be able to buy campaign ads on YouTube.The insurrection Trump incited on 6 January 2021, in an attempt to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden, is now linked to nine deaths.More than a thousand arrests have been made and hundreds of convictions secured. Authorities have reportedly indicated more arrests to come.Trump was impeached but acquitted in his Senate trial when enough Republicans stayed loyal.Running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, he enjoys clear leads in polling.He also faces civil and criminal legal jeopardy over the Capitol attack, other election subversion efforts, his retention of classified material, a hush money payment to a porn star, his financial affairs and a defamation trial arising from an allegation of rape.Trump denies all wrongdoing.He has also recorded a charity single in aid of imprisoned January 6 rioters.Twitter and Facebook have already lifted bans imposed in the aftermath of the Capitol riot. Trump returned to Facebook on Friday afternoon with a brief video clip for his 2024 presidential run with “I’M BACK” as the caption. He has not returned to Twitter, preferring his own platform, Truth Social.Jenna Ellis, a lawyer who worked on Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, referred to the new owner of Twitter, who lifted that platform’s Trump ban in November, when she said of Trump’s YouTube return: “You have to wonder whether this would have ever happened without Elon Musk.” More