US crime

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Maine shootings highlight Republican senator’s voting record on gun control

      by

      The Republican senator Susan Collins is facing sharp criticism for her previous voting record on gun control after a mass shooting in her home state of Maine that killed 18 people and injured more than a dozen.Collins, a US senator for Maine since 1997, received backlash to a statement she posted after a mass shooting on Wednesday in Lewiston, in the south of Maine. The attack happened when a gunman opened fire at a local bowling alley and restaurant.In statement after the shooting, Collins thanked those showing support, including Joe Biden. “As our state mourns this horrific mass shooting, we appreciate the support we’ve received from across the country, including the call I received from President Biden offering assistance,” Collins said.But many on social media criticized Collins for her previous stances on gun control and her votes that have helped prevent stronger laws from being put in place around firearms.“You helped make this happen,” wrote one user on X, formerly known as Twitter.“Vote for sensible gun laws,” another commenter said.In her 26-year career as senator, Collins has voted down several Senate amendments on gun control, according to data from Vote Smart, a nonpartisan non-profit that collects data on candidates’ voting records.In 2013, Collins rejected two Senate amendments that would have banned the sale of assault rifles and limited access to firearm magazine capacity.Collins has also supported allowing loaded guns in state parks and the concealed carrying of firearms across state lines, two Senate amendments she voted for in 2009.More recently, Collins was one of 15 Republicans who voted for the 2022 bipartisan gun bill, which ended nearly three decades of congressional inaction on the issue.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe legislation expanded background checks for gun owners under the age of 21 and toughened laws against gun trafficking, among other initiatives.Collins had a “B” rating with the National Rifle Association (NRA) as of May 2022, the New York Times reported. She has received $18,000 in funding from the gun rights advocacy group.A representative of Collins could not be reached by the Guardian. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis takes plea deal in Georgia election subversion case

      by

      Jenna Ellis, the lawyer for Donald Trump who was also facing criminal charges for attempted election subversion, is taking a plea deal, pleading guilty to one count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings.In Fulton county on Tuesday, Ellis became the fourth of 19 defendants to plead guilty as part of the wide-ranging racketeering charges into Trump and allies in the 2020 election in Georgia. Last week, both Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro pleaded guilty before their trials were to start. Scott Hall, an Atlanta bail bondsman, has also pleaded guilty.Ellis pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting false statements and writing. She was sentenced to five years’ probation, ordered to pay $5,000 restitution to the Georgia secretary of state, 100 hours of community service, and to write a letter of apology. She also agreed to cooperate with prosecutors testify truthfully against the remaining defendants in the case.During a plea hearing on Tuesday, prosecutors detailed how Ellis appeared at a December 2020 hearing in the Georgia senate with Rudy Giuliani and Ray Smith in which they made numerous false allegations about voter fraud in Georgia.“The false statements were made with reckless disregard to the truth,” prosecutors said, and were part of a plan to get the Georgia legislature to set aside the valid results of the presidential elections.Ellis came to tears as she addressed the court, saying she was relying on information that more experienced lawyers provided her and should have investigated further. Had she known what she knows now, she said, she would have declined to represent Trump.She added that she looked back on “the whole experience with deep remorse”.“I relied on others, including lawyers with many more years of experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information,” she said. “What I should have done, but did not do, your honor, was make sure that the facts the other lawyers alleged to be true were in fact true. In the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges to the election in several states, including Georgia, I failed to do my due diligence.”She ended by apologizing to the court and the people of Georgia.All of the defendants who have pleaded guilty have received similar plea deals.Ellis had been charged with violating state anti-racketeering laws and solicitation of violation of an oath by a public officer. She was granted $100,000 bail and previously pleaded not guilty.Ellis has been an outspoken critic of her former friend in recent months, calling Trump a “malignant narcissist” in an interview back in September.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said. “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”The 38-year-old was speaking on her show on American Family Radio, a rightwing evangelical network run by the American Family Association, a non-profit that by its own description has been “on the frontlines of America’s culture war” since 1977.Ellis was a relatively obscure lawyer until she joined the Trump campaign in 2019 after Trump liked her defenses of him on television. Soon, the campaign described her as a “senior legal adviser” despite her lack of experience in election law and minimal legal experience overall.Her cooperation with prosecutors could be particularly bad news for Giuliani, with whom she traveled across the country, appearing at hearings in battleground states convened by state lawmakers to lay out false allegations of fraud. She and Giuliani also tried to convince state lawmakers to appoint alternate sets of electors. Ellis also wrote a memo on 5 January 2021, laying out a strategy for Mike Pence not to count electoral votes from states that had swung the election for Biden, according to the indictment in the Georgia case.Since being indicted, Ellis has complained that Trump was not helping pay legal fees for those charged in Georgia. Earlier this year, she was censured by the state bar in Colorado, where she holds her law license, for her election falsehoods. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump faces new peril in federal 2020 election case after lawyer pleads guilty

      by

      Donald Trump’s chances of being convicted in the federal 2020 election subversion case may have increased after his top election lawyer took a plea deal in the 2020 election case in Fulton county and admitted that the effort to create fake slates of electors was fraudulent.The immediate consequence of Kenneth Chesebro’s plea deal is that he could incriminate the former president in Georgia, given one of his plea conditions involved testifying truthfully against other defendants.But Chesebro could also separately incriminate Trump in the federal criminal case in Washington, should the special counsel Jack Smith use his new admission to bolster the case that Trump conspired to defraud the United States in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.The former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell also took a plea deal last week, underscoring the remarkable run of victories for the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, who has separately defeated repeated efforts from multiple Trump allies to transfer their criminal cases to federal court.But while Powell’s plea agreement was particularly notable, in large part due to her personal notoriety and her infamous pitch to Trump at an explosive White House meeting to have the military seize voting machines, the development with Chesebro could be more legally significant.The Chesebro-devised fake electors scheme ultimately became the central part of the strategy pursued by Trump and his allies to stop or delay the January 6 congressional certification of the election results.Trump’s eventual plan involved trying to use the existence of the fake electors to pressure his vice-president, Mike Pence, to declare at the certification that the election results in battleground states that Trump actually lost remained in doubt, and could therefore not be counted.At issue for Trump is that Chesebro’s plea deal in Fulton county required him to admit guilt to count 15 in the indictment – that Trump and Chesebro and others violated the law in filing the fake electors certificate – and thereby affirm that the fake electors were indeed fraudulent.The plea deal also required Chesebro to tape a statement for Fulton county prosecutors, evidence that appears to have been sufficiently helpful in proving their cases against the other co-defendants that he was granted an arrangement under which he faced no jail term.It remains unclear how Chesebro’s plea is being viewed by the special counsel, and even if he were subpoenaed to testify in Washington, Chesebro could assert his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination.But if Chesebro does testify in Georgia, it could be a boon for the special counsel who would have the ability to use that testimony in their case, and have Chesebro testify about the facts contained within the statements. The contents of the statement are not public, but are almost certain to touch on the fake electors scheme.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the 45-page federal 2020 election indictment, the conspiracy to defraud the United States was described as the use of dishonesty, fraud and deceit to impair the counting and certification of the election results.The admission from Chesebro that the slates, which are being alleged as the vehicle used to commit the conspiracy, were fraudulent could bolster the charge that Trump and his allies fundamentally did use deceit to stop Congress from certifying the election results.After Chesebro took the plea deal, Trump’s lead lawyer told reporters that his “truthful testimony” would help the former president. “It appears to me that the guilty plea to count 15 of the Fulton county indictment was the result of pressure by Fani Willis and her team and the prosecution’s looming threat of prison time,” Steve Sadow said.The lawyer for Chesebro also downplayed his admission. “While Mr Chesebro did take responsibility for conspiracy to commit filing false documents, I want to make something clear: he did not implicate anyone else. He implicated himself in that particular charge,” Scott Grubman said in an interview on MSNBC.But the reality for Chesebro is that he might have little option but to become a cooperating witness against Trump in the federal case. Chesebro was identified as unindicted co-conspirator five in the federal indictment, and prosecutors could pressure him with charges because of his guilty plea. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Pro-Trump lawyer accepts plea deal in Georgia ‘fake electors’ case

      by

      Kenneth Chesebro, the attorney who allegedly devised the “fake electors” plan to prevent Joe Biden from winning the 2020 election, has accepted a plea deal and will avoid going to trial in the Fulton county racketeering case involving Donald Trump and 17 others.The last-minute plea deal marks the second major victory in as many days for prosecutors, who can now compel him to testify against his former allies in Trump’s inner circle to bolster their case.Chesebro appeared in court on Friday and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit filing false documents. His plea agreement is for five years of probation, $5,000 in restitution, 100 hours of community service and an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia. Most importantly, it requires that he turn over any evidence in his possession and truthfully testify at all hearings and trials involving the case’s co-defendants, including Trump.Attorney Sidney Powell, who was also set to stand trial beginning on Friday, accepted a plea deal on Thursday, potentially pressuring Chesebro into doing the same. ABC reported that two days ago he had rejected a plea offer from prosecutors to avoid jail time by pleading guilty to the conspiracy charge.Fifteen additional co-defendants, including Trump, are set to stand trial next year as a part of the racketeering case brought by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis. Both Powell and Chesebro’s cases had been severed from the larger racketeering case because they filed demands for a speedy trial.Chesebro played two key roles in Trump’s post-election efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He wrote a pair of early December memos laying out a strategy for fake pro-Trump electors to meet in the six states where Trump lost to preserve a path forward to challenge the election in court and potentially on 6 January in Congress, and he laid out the legal argument that the vice-president could reject states’ electors during the election certification – while suggesting that Vice-President Mike Pence should recuse himself to avoid a conflict of interest.His decision to flip on Trump and his allies is potentially the most damaging for the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and the Trump attorney John Eastman, with whom he worked closely to devise the legal plot to challenge the election.Chesebro had faced seven felony counts, including a conspiracy count and six additional charges related to a plan to create “alternate electors” to falsely certify that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election. His plea deal came shortly after jury selection for his trial had begun on Friday.Attorneys for Chesebro and representatives for the Fulton county district attorney’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe decisions by Chesebro and Powell to take plea agreements could significantly strengthen Willis’s case against Trump, since both attorneys played key roles in the former president’s attempts to cling to office. Both have significant knowledge of the inner workings of the plot, and could offer new information at trial. More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump given limited gag order in criminal case over efforts to overturn 2020 election

      by

      Donald Trump has been issued a limited gag order by the federal judge overseeing the criminal case over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, prohibiting him from making public statements attacking prosecutors, court staff and potential trial witnesses.The former president was not prohibited from generally disparaging the Biden administration, the US justice department and the trial venue of Washington DC, and will continue to be allowed to allege that the case was politically motivated.Those were the contours of a tailored protective order handed down on Monday by Tanya Chutkan, the US district judge who said she would enter a written ruling at a later date but warned Trump’s lawyers that any violation of the order could lead to immediate punitive sanctions.The ruling was the culmination of a two-hour hearing in federal district court after prosecutors in the office of the special counsel Jack Smith had asked the judge to impose restrictions on Trump’s attacks that they felt could intimidate witnesses – and Chutkan agreed.“There is a real risk that witnesses may be intimidated,” Chutkan said as she explained her decision from the bench, adding that just because Trump was a 2024 presidential candidate and the GOP nomination frontrunner did not give him free rein to “launch a pre-trial smear campaign”.At issue were dozens of public remarks by Trump and Truth Social posts from him disparaging the case since he was indicted in August on charges he conspired to reverse his 2020 election defeat and obstructed the transfer of power, including the January 6 congressional certification.The judge separated into five categories Trump’s inflammatory comments about: the trial venire of Washington DC, the Biden administration and the justice department, Smith and his staff, Chutkan and her staff, as well as people who might be called to testify at trial.Chutkan appeared to have decided that she would not restrict Trump from disparaging the trial venue because biased jurors could be filtered out before trial. She also indicated she would not restrict Trump from attacking the government because it would be within the scope of political speech.But the judge took issue with Trump’s attacks on the special counsel. Chutkan repeatedly asked Trump’s lead lawyer John Lauro why the former president needed to call Smith a “thug” in order to suggest that the criminal case against him was politically motivated.In a contentious moment, Lauro asked rhetorically what Trump was supposed to do “in the face of oppression”. Chutkan sharply raised her finger and instructed him: “Let’s tone this down.”An aggrieved Lauro retorted: “If your honor wants to censor my speech.”The judge also took issue with Trump’s track record of attacking court staff. Chutkan suggested she was less concerned by Trump’s personal attacks on her as an “Obama-appointed hack” but was disturbed by his recent post in his New York civil fraud trial where he disparaged the judge’s clerk.Lauro tried to insist that the New York case was the New York case, and he repeated his assertion that nothing like that happened in this case. Chutkan disputed that claim with an exasperated laugh earlier in the hearing.The judge appeared most unconvinced by the Trump legal team’s contention that the former’s president’s statements against certain potential trial witnesses were not intimidating or might chill other witnesses from testifying against him at trial.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionProsecutors had flagged, among others, attacks on Gen Mark Milley, the former chair of the joint chiefs of staff. “In times gone by,” one post said, “the punishment would have been DEATH! A war between China and the United States could have been the result of this treasonous act. To be continued!”The Trump legal team had argued that prosecutors had no evidence that people like Milley or Trump’s former attorney general William Barr had felt intimidated by the former president’s criticisms of them, adding that they were high-profile public figures who were used to political rhetoric.But Chutkan remained skeptical. She told the Trump legal team that the ex-president, as a criminal defendant, did not have unfettered first amendment rights and did not get to respond to every criticism levelled by Milley or Barr or others.The point was buttressed by the assistant special counsel Molly Gaston who argued to the judge about Trump: “He isn’t campaigning – he’s using his campaign to intimidate witnesses and pollute the jury pool.”Before Chutkan finally made her decision, she ran through a list of four hypothetical Trump statements that she had drawn up. She asked Lauro to say whether he thought the statements violated the conditions of Trump’s release conditions about intimidation or should be permissible generally.The hypotheticals included one about if “Barr was a slimy liar”. Lauro responded half-jokingly he did not want to say that the truth was a defense but insisted that it was not intimidating.Chutkan appeared to disagree and suggested it impermissibly cast doubt on Barr’s testimony. More

    • 225 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      The trials of SBF and DJT: Trump isn’t clean on crypto but he did warn us about it

      by

      The New York fraud trial of Sam Bankman-Fried kicked off this week. The 31-year-old former crypto billionaire faces two substantive counts of wire fraud, for acts allegedly perpetrated against the customers of FTX, the crypto-futures exchange he founded, and five related counts of conspiracy. If convicted on all charges, he faces up to 110 years in prison.As fate would have it, his case is being heard a few buildings away from where one Donald J Trump sits on trial for fraud. Like the 45th president – DJT, if you will – SBF has a tough row to hoe.Even if Bankman-Fried is acquitted, he stares at another trial, slated for March 2024, on five more counts of fraud. The men’s paths remain entwined. At that same moment, Trump will be both deep into the Republican primary and likely standing trial in connection with January 6.Furthermore, filings show that as of early August, Trump held $2.8m in a cryptocurrency wallet, with as much as $500,000 in ethereum, a cryptocurrency. On top of that, his collection of non-fungible tokens generated $4.87m in licensing fees. The NFTs are a collection of virtual trading cards, featuring illustrations of Trump as superhero, cowboy or astronaut. Really.Not that Trump has always been in favour of crypto.“I am not a fan of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” he tweeted in 2019.Sound familiar? Prosecutors say Bankman-Fried relied on smoke and mirrors to gain access to political power. According to his indictment, he used customers’ assets “to lobby Congress and regulatory agencies to support legislation and regulation he believed would make it easier for FTX to continue to accept customer deposits and grow”.He is also alleged to have “misappropriated customer money to help fund over $100m in political contributions in advance of the 2022 election”, while seeking to “conceal the source of the funds used for the contributions”.Trump and his party, however, were not the chief recipients of such largesse. Bankman-Fried tended to donate to Democrats. Conservatives were therefore annoyed. They sought to portray Bankman-Fried as a leftist, on top of being a crook. Once upon a time, though, he met Ron DeSantis for no apparent reason other than the fact Florida’s hard-right governor wanted to meet. Now, as a presidential candidate, DeSantis has emerged as a crypto advocate. His campaign continues to sink, however.We know more about such meetings now, thanks in large part to Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, a new book by Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball, The Big Short and other bestsellers about how capitalism works – and doesn’t.For instance, Jerry Jones, a Republican and owner of the Dallas Cowboys NFL team, showed up at a Beverly Hills party also attended by Hillary Clinton, a passel of Kardashians, Doug Emhoff, the husband of the vice-president, Kamala Harris – and Bankman-Fried.Bankman-Fried had allure. Exactly why continues to puzzle political players. His money doesn’t explain everything. But it does shed light on plenty.In summer 2022, Lewis writes, Bankman-Fried met Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, with the goal of stopping Trump-aligned extremists snagging Republican nominations. It was a high-level meeting – high enough that for one evening, Bankman-Fried even swapped his beloved cargo shorts for a suit.“At that moment, Sam was planning to give $15m to $30m to McConnell to defeat the Trumpier candidates in the Senate races,” Lewis writes.Bankman-Fried also explored paying Trump $5bn not to run in 2024, Lewis writes. Nothing came of that.Now, as Bankman-Fried sits in court, McConnell, 81, remains in the minority, his health in public decline. But McConnell remains a reliable soldier, his hold on his caucus unchanged.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe crypto industry, meanwhile, scrambles to salvage its image from the damage done by Bankman-Fried.“The idea that one man and one company dictated an entire industry was frustrating for a lot of people,” Kara Calvert, head of US policy at Coinbase, recently told Politico. “At the end of the day, the industry is so broad-based. Nobody wants to let the whole future of technological development in the United States be dictated by a criminal.”Bankman-Fried has not been convicted of anything. But it does seem extraordinary that he rose so high so fast, and that so many political leaders were so eager to help.“From the beginning, I had thought that crypto was pretty dumb,” wrote Zeke Faux, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg and a fellow at New America, in Number Go Up, his unflattering take on crypto and Bankman-Fried. “And it turned out to be even dumber than I imagined.“There was no mass movement to actually use crypto in the real world … from El Salvador to Switzerland to the Philippines, all I saw were scams, fraud, and half-baked schemes.”In September 2021, El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender, the first country to do so. The rightwing Heritage Foundation ranks the country’s economy the 114th most free. Freedom House, more mainstream, rates El Salvador partly free. It’s not a flattering ad for crypto.In the US, major advocates include Eric Adams, the mayor of New York; Robert Kennedy Jr, a conspiracy theorist and likely third-party presidential candidate; and Cynthia Lummis, the Wyoming Republican senator who opposed certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 win just hours after the attack on Congress.Such names should tell us something – as should Trump’s crypto holdings mentioned above. But anyone who still believes might also care to recall Trump’s earlier words.“Unregulated crypto assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity,” he tweeted, more than four years ago. “We have only one real currency in the USA … it is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the world, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States Dollar!”Strange as it seems to say it, the man had a point. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Trump lawyers urge dismissal of 2020 election indictment, arguing immunity while in office

      by

      Lawyers for Donald Trump have urged a federal judge to dismiss the criminal case over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, advancing a sweeping interpretation of executive power that contends that former presidents are immune from prosecution for conduct related to their duties while in office.The request to throw out the indictment, handed up earlier this year by a federal grand jury in Washington, amounts to the most consequential court filing in the case to date and is almost certain to precipitate a legal battle that could end up before the US supreme court.In their 52-page submission to the presiding US district judge, Tanya Chutkan, Trump’s lawyers essentially argued that Trump enjoyed absolute immunity from criminal prosecution because the charged conduct fell within the so-called “outer perimeter” of his duties as president.The filing contended that all of Trump’s attempts to reverse his 2020 election defeat in the indictment, from pressuring his vice-president, Mike Pence, to stop the congressional certification to organizing fake slates of electors, were in his capacity as president and therefore protected.Whether Trump’s motion to dismiss succeeds remains uncertain: it raises novel legal issues, such as whether the outer perimeter test applies to criminal cases, and whether Trump’s charged conduct even falls within a president’s duties.Prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, could counter that Trump cannot make either argument. The outer perimeter test is widely seen as applying to only civil cases, for instance, and Trump is alleged as having acted not in his capacity as a president, but as a candidate.The Trump lawyers repeatedly suggested that the outer perimeter test – used by the supreme court in Nixon v Fitzgerald (1982) in which the justices found that presidents have absolute immunity from damages liability for acts related to their presidential duties – should apply to criminal cases.“To hold otherwise would be to allow the President’s political opponents to usurp his or her constitutional role, fundamentally impairing our system of government,” wrote Trump’s lawyers Todd Blanche, John Lauro and Gregory Singer.But Trump faces an uphill struggle, given a federal judge in Washington last year ruled in a separate civil suit against Trump that not everything he did as president was covered by presidential immunity. That case, Blassingame v Trump, is now under appeal at the DC circuit.At the heart of the Trump legal team’s filing was the extraordinary contention that not only was Trump entitled to absolute presidential immunity, but the immunity applied regardless of Trump’s intent in engaging in the conduct described in the indictment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“An allegedly improper purpose for an official act does not rob the act of its official character,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. “A president’s purpose or motive is once again irrelevant to whether his acts fall under the outer perimeter of his responsibilities.”Trump’s lawyers argued that his attempts to seek investigations into supposed election fraud were protected because, as the head of the executive branch, he had an obligation to “take care” to enforce federal election laws through his tweets and directions to the justice department.The Trump lawyers also claimed that all of the conduct in the indictment was protected, notably including the fake electors plot, since it was related to him trying to get Pence to act in a “certain way” on 6 January 2023 – though omitting that “way” was to unlawfully stop the certification.Trump’s latest filing adds to the issues that the judge presiding in the case will have to decide in the coming weeks. Chutkan is scheduled to first hear oral arguments on 16 October about whether to issue a limited gag order against Trump to limit his public attacks against prosecutors. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Man in Maga hat charged over shooting of Indigenous activist at statue protest

      by

      An Indigenous justice activist is fighting for his life after a man wearing a hat with the Donald Trump slogan “Make America great again” allegedly shot him during a protest against the reinstallation of a statue honoring a Spanish conquistador in New Mexico.Jacob Johns was shot on Thursday morning in the northern New Mexico city of Española while demonstrating against plans to again erect a Juan de Oñate statue that previously had been taken down and put in storage. First responders flew Johns to a hospital in Albuquerque by helicopter after he was wounded.By Friday, he was recovering from emergency surgery, said a message on an online GoFundMe campaign set up in his support.The suspected shooter – 23-year-old Ryan Martinez – was arrested on charges of attempted murder and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. On Friday, a judge ordered Martinez held without bond through at least the weekend.Johns was part of a crowd who had gathered at the Rio Arriba county annex building to celebrate officials’ postponement of plans to re-erect a statue of Oñate there. The conquistador and his Spanish compatriots carried out a 1599 massacre of hundreds of members of a pueblo tribe in what is now New Mexico.Crews had torn down Oñate’s statue from a spot in the community of Alcalde and had taken it into storage in 2020 amid racial justice protests ignited by a Minneapolis police officer’s murder of George Floyd weeks earlier. But there were plans to stand the statue back up near the county annex, though protests forced officials to delay the monument’s reintroduction.A cellphone video posted on social media showed that a fight broke out near where a crowd was celebrating the postponement. At one point, the video showed the man identified as Martinez jump over a waist-high barrier and try to grab another man.Two more men then grappled with Martinez, who is seen leaping back over the barrier, grabbing a pistol from his waistband and aiming the weapon at those with whom he was tussling as voices yell, “Let him go!”Martinez, clad in a turquoise hooded sweatshirt, appeared to fire once. A voice shouted in pain, and Martinez ran toward a parking lot, according to the video. The recording then showed the driver of a white car speed away, honking the horn.In the moments before the shooting, the video in question captured a red hat getting knocked off Martinez’s head as he struggled with other men during the confrontation.Still images of Martinez taken earlier in the day showed that hat bore the “Make America great again” slogan.Additionally, according to the Daily Beast, a social media profile matching Martinez’s details featured the phrase “Fuck Joe Biden”. The profile also declared “Trump won”, echoing the false conspiracy theory that the former president was denied re-election by fraudsters.Police in Española later arrested Martinez and booked him into jail.Martinez’s arrest came after the second shooting surrounding a face-off of protesters and counter-protesters near the Oñate statue. In June 2020, during a rally calling for the statue’s removal, Steven Baca shot Scott Williams and was arrested on a count of aggravated battery with great bodily harm.Baca pleaded guilty to unlawful carrying of a deadly weapon as well as aggravated battery for pulling a protester down by her hair. Prosecutors dismissed the charge pertaining to the shooting, the Albuquerque Journal reported.The GoFundMe for Johns, the victim of Thursday’s shooting, described him as being a Hopi Native American.A photo from the Albuquerque Journal showed Johns – of Spokane, Washington – holding up a sign that read “Do Not Resurrect Oñate” next to a speaker before the shooting that wounded him in the upper torso. In that photo, Johns and the speaker stood before another pair of signs that read: “Not today Oñate.”Johns’s GoFundMe campaign described him as a climate activist, artist, musician and father to a teenage daughter. As of Friday, the campaign had raised more than $31,000 that organizers said were meant to help cover his medical bills as well as other family needs during what would “likely be a very lengthy recovery period”. More