2021 Trump-Incited Insurrection at Capitol Building

[popillol]

Why so shocked? Its no great leap from supporting Modi to supporting Trump, and there are enough first & second generation Indians in the US to get a few dedicated Trump supporters.

Back when DE was on his quest to completely humiliate himself on the topic of US politics he claimed California was going to turn 'purple' off the back of some bizarre claims from a guy who ran a pro-Modi group in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if that guy was on the 'stop the steal' train.

Hello Bigella, I remember you replying to surfgun that Sky News Australia is some marginal channel whose views don't even cross 10,000. Well, now a days, its youtube videos get 100,000 views easily! I sense a change in the force, lol. Did you set the ball rolling inadvertently for its views to go up? :P

[Oracle]

Why so shocked? Its no great leap from supporting Modi to supporting Trump, and there are enough first & second generation Indians in the US to get a few dedicated Trump supporters.

American-Indians generally vote for democrats, which is what surprised me about the flag. Now, well, IMV, they see democrats as 'people of colour' loving, 'human rights' holding, 'immigration supporting' etc party. But, those same American-Indians support Modi in India. Distorted view? Nah, in American they vote democrats to save their skin, and they support Modi in India to skin muslims. Here is where I'll digress a little. I support Modi (policy-wise), but I don't support Trump. You can open a thread and I will gladly participate. Modi is from a centre-right party, which is not against minorities. From Trump, to Bolsonaro, to Orban, Modi doesn't talk shit, nor does he encourage shit. Whatever some Indians in American think, Modi will not bring to action some of their evil mentality.

Back when DE was on his quest to completely humiliate himself on the topic of US politics he claimed California was going to turn 'purple' off the back of some bizarre claims from a guy who ran a pro-Modi group in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if that guy was on the 'stop the steal' train.

Can't comment on this. I haven't read those posts. But, who is a pro-Modi guy in US, or UK, or India? Anyone who has business interests in India. Smart people keep connections with all sort of politicians, and curse them on the dinner table.

One more thing, American far-right = Indian far-left. This is my observation.

The problem BF, is, that dic*he$$ shouldn't have used the Indian flag to riot, vandalise, and try to subvert a legal election victory. These people are a disgrace to democracies worldwide.

[Oracle]

Oh, look a French flag too!
Why did the courts not hear them out even when 13 states filed a lawsuit? You don't give legal space and then want people to simply roll over? Atleast the courts should have heard it. Why was it not important enough for the Honourable Judges? Were they busy doing disco party? lol

Feeding more conspiracy theories?

[popillol]

Feeding more conspiracy theories?

You talk about Indian flags in the scene and go on a rant, I want to know your rants about French flags on the scene.

[kato]

Germany has issued a formal travel advice warning Germans that in particular in the DC area "protest actions including use of firearms may continue" with the situation insecure until at least the 20th.

[Albany Rifles]

Some asked how did the US Capitol Police allow this to happen. A former chief of the USCP has many of the same questions...


https://www.npr.org/2021/01/06/95421...-been-breached

Former Capitol Police Chief On Why The U.S. Capitol Has Been Breached


January 6, 20219:05 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Terry Gainer, former chief of the Capitol Police and former Senate sergeant-at-arms, about how Capitol Police reacted to pro-Trump extremists breaching U.S. Capitol.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Both chambers of Congress are back in session after several hours delay because pro-Trump insurrectionists breached the Capitol building. Well, just how this happened, how one of the most secure buildings there is could be breached, will be examined and pored over for months to come, possibly longer. Earlier, I spoke with Terry Gainer. He was chief of the Capitol Police from 2002 to 2006 and then the Senate sergeant-at-arms from 2007 till 2014. I started by asking, how was a mob able to penetrate the U.S. Capitol?

TERRY GAINER: Well, there are some failures we're going to have to figure out, Mary Louise. And, you know, I was up there for nearly 10 years in those two positions, so we've done a lot of things to try to make it secure. We've made suggestions from a security point of view that have been rejected. But all that notwithstanding, they breached the Capitol. And I wouldn't have bet a million dollars that that would have been easily done or so easily done, so I had to definitely suspend my disbelief. And the protesters were on the Senate and House floor doing what they were doing, that they were attacking the police officers in there. But I was pleased that the police officers, both inside and outside the building of the Capitol Police, did one of their primary jobs, and that is to protect the leadership, the members and the staff notwithstanding how scary it was for everybody. We never like to see property damage, but that's secondary to the main job of protecting people. But that having been said, I feel like we security types have failed somehow to let this get this way. And the darn president of the United States did not help any of us by inciting people as he did.

KELLY: Were you watching along, listening along with the rest of us as events transpired today?

GAINER: I sure was, trying to move, frankly, between the channels and reaching out and not interfering with both the contacts and the people you know because like I say, I lived and breathed that, as many have, of the security there. The House and Senate sergeant-of-arms are personal friends. They're both dignified, superior, former assistant directors of the Secret Service. The chief of the Capitol Police is a great guy who has a good staff. He once worked for me as my chief of staff when I was in MPD, so I'm confident in them as I will be confident in how we're going to have to dissect what went wrong.

KELLY: Talk to me about the training that Capitol Police get. Nobody could have anticipated quite how things spiraled out of control today, but how is it supposed to work?

GAINER: Well, they're full law enforcement - federal law enforcement officers, and they're trained at the federal law enforcement training center in Quantico. And they go through about a six-month training there. Then they come back and go to a training facility in Maryland. And they are - do training - regular training on a weekly and daily basis, depending on the rotation it is. So they are well-versed in their duties. And I think - I don't think individual officers or sergeants weren't doing what they were supposed to do. But somehow, clearly, we lost control of the steps and the areas around the exterior of the Capitol where the skin of the Capitol can be a bit more vulnerable because we don't anticipate that vigilantes and riotous people are up there that close.

KELLY: Just before I let you go, I know you don't want to throw any colleagues, former colleagues under the bus. But as you were speaking to people, as you have watched events play out, are you able to put your finger on any identifiable security lapses, things that should have been done and maybe weren't or at least that you have questions about?

GAINER: Well, the would-have-should-have-could-have is pretty easy. In retrospect, the fence should have been up. In retrospect, there should have been more officers brought in. But again, I do respect them as I've been second-guessed enough times - that they thought they had this under control. I think I'm not trying to throw all the blame, but there is a certain responsibility that the president of the United States had inciting these people to be so angry and hateful not only what he said today, not only what he tweeted today but what he's been doing since he lost this election. So it's hard to control people who are so hateful and so hurtful.

KELLY: All right, a lot of questions that we will be looking for answers to as we try to...

GAINER: There will be.

KELLY: ...Investigate exactly what happened here.

GAINER: Yup, yup.

KELLY: Mr. Gainer, thank you for your time.

GAINER: Thank you.

KELLY: That was Terry Gainer, former chief of the Capitol Police and former Senate sergeant-at-arms.

[Albany Rifles]

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/a...-werent-ready/

Capitol Rioters Planned for Weeks in Plain Sight. The Police Weren’t Ready.




Trump supporters flood the Capitol after breaching barricades on Wednesday. (Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images)



JANUARY 7, 2021
by
Logan Jaffe

Lydia DePillis

Isaac Arnsdorf

David McSwane
This story is part of an ongoing collaboration between ProPublica and FRONTLINE that includes an upcoming documentary.

The invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday was stoked in plain sight. For weeks, the far-right supporters of President Donald Trump railed on social media that the election had been stolen. They openly discussed the idea of violent protest on the day Congress met to certify the result.

“We came up with the idea to occupy just outside the CAPITOL on Jan 6th,” leaders of the Stop the Steal movement wrote on Dec. 23. They called their Wednesday demonstration the Wild Protest , a name taken from a tweet by Trump that encouraged his supporters to take their grievances to the streets of Washington. “Will be wild,” the president tweeted.

Ali Alexander, the founder of the movement, encouraged people to bring tents and sleeping bags and avoid wearing masks for the event. “If D.C. escalates… so do we,” Alexander wrote on Parler last week — one of scores of social media posts welcoming violence that were reviewed by ProPublica in the weeks leading up to Wednesday’s attack on the capitol.

Thousands of people heeded that call.

For reasons that remained unclear Wednesday night, the law enforcement authorities charged with protecting the nation’s entire legislative branch — nearly all of the 535 members of Congress gathered in a joint session, along with Vice President Mike Pence — were ill-prepared to contain the forces massed against them.

On Wednesday afternoon, a thin line of U.S. Capitol Police, with only a few riot shields between them and a knot of angry protesters, engaged in hand-to-hand combat with rioters on the steps of the West Front. They struggled with a flimsy set of barricades as a mob in helmets and bulletproof vests pushed its way toward the Capitol entrance. Videos showed officers stepping aside , and sometimes taking selfies , as if to usher Trump’s supporters into the building they were supposed to guard.

A former Capitol policeman well-versed in his agency’s procedures was mystified by the scene he watched unfold on live television. Larry Schaefer, a 34-year Capitol Police veteran who retired in December 2019, said his former colleagues were experienced in dealing with aggressive crowds.

“It’s not a spur-of-the-moment demonstration that just popped up,” Schaefer said. “We have a planned, known demonstration that has a propensity for violence in the past and threats to carry weapons — why would you not prepare yourself as we have done in the past?”

A spokesperson for the Capitol Police did not respond to a request for comment.

In recent years, federal law enforcement agencies have stepped up their focus on far-right groups, resulting in a spate of arrests. In October, the FBI arrested a group of Michigan extremists and charged them with plotting to kidnap the state’s governor. On Monday, Washington police arrested Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the far-right group the Proud Boys, on charges of burning a Black Lives Matter banner.

Conversations on right-wing platforms are monitored closely by federal intelligence. In September, a draft report by the Department of Homeland Security surfaced , identifying white supremacists as the biggest threat to national security.

The warnings of Wednesday’s assault on the Capitol were everywhere — perhaps not entirely specific about the planned time and exact location of an assault on the Capitol, but enough to clue in law enforcement about the potential for civil unrest.

On Dec. 12, a poster on the website MyMilitia.com urged violence if senators made official the victory of President-elect Joe Biden.

“If this does not change, then I advocate, Revolution and adherence to the rules of war,” wrote someone identifying themselves as I3DI. “I say, take the hill or die trying.”

Wrote another person: “It’s already apparent that literally millions of Americans are on the verge of activating their Second Amendment duty to defeat tyranny and save the republic.”

The easily overpowered police force guarding the Capitol on Wednesday posed a stark contrast to the tactics deployed by local police during this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. Then, the city felt besieged by law enforcement.

Protesters are tear-gassed as the police disperse them near the White House on June 1, 2020. (Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images)

On June 1, following a few days of mostly peaceful protests, the National Guard, the Secret Service and the U.S. Park Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse a nonviolent crowd in Lafayette Square outside the White House to allow Trump to pose with a Bible in front of a nearby church.

“We need to dominate the battlespace,” then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said on a call with dozens of governors, asking them to send their National Guard forces to the capital.

On June 2 — the day of the primary election in Washington — law enforcement officers appeared on every corner, heavily armed in fatigues and body armor. Humvees blocked intersections. Buses full of troops deployed into military columns and marshaled in front of the Lincoln Memorial in a raw show of force. Police kettled protesters in alleys. Choppers thudded overhead for days and sank low enough over protesters to generate gale-force winds.

Such dominance was nowhere in evidence Wednesday, despite a near-lockdown of the downtown area on Tuesday night. Trump supporters drove to the Capitol and parked in spaces normally reserved for congressional staff. Some vehicles stopped on the lawns near the Tidal Basin.

The contrast shook Washington’s attorney general, Karl Racine, who seemed to be almost in disbelief on CNN Wednesday evening.

“There was zero intelligence that the Black Lives Matter protesters were going to ‘storm the capitol,’” he remembered, after ticking down the many police forces present in June. “Juxtapose that with what we saw today, with hate groups, militia and other groups that have no respect for the rule of law go into the capitol. … That dichotomy is shocking.”

The question of how law enforcement and the national security establishment failed so spectacularly will likely be the subject of intense focus in coming days.

David Carter, director of the Intelligence Program at Michigan State University, said that sometimes, the best intelligence in the world doesn’t translate into adequate preparedness. Perhaps the security officials responsible for protecting the Capitol simply could not envision that a crowd of Americans would charge through a police line and shatter the glass windows that stood as the only physical barrier to entering the building.

“I go back to the 9/11 commission report,” Carter said. “It was a failure of imagination. They didn’t imagine something like this. Would you imagine people were going to break into the Capitol and go into the chambers? That failure of imagination sometimes makes us drop the ball.”

[TopHatter]

A Mob and the Breach of Democracy: The Violent End of the Trump Era

WASHINGTON — So this is how it ends. The presidency of Donald John Trump, rooted from the beginning in anger, division and conspiracy-mongering, comes to a close with a violent mob storming the Capitol at the instigation of a defeated leader trying to hang onto power as if America were just another authoritarian nation.

The scenes in Washington would have once been unimaginable: A rampage through the citadel of American democracy. Police officers brandishing guns in an armed standoff to defend the House chamber. Tear gas deployed in the Rotunda. Lawmakers in hiding. Extremists standing in the vice president’s spot on the Senate dais and sitting at the desk of the speaker of the House.

The words used to describe it were equally alarming: Coup. Insurrection. Sedition. Suddenly the United States was being compared to a “banana republic” and receiving messages of concern from other capitals. “American carnage,” it turned out, was not what Trump would stop, as he promised upon taking office, but what he wound up delivering four years later to the very building where he took the oath.

The convulsion in Washington capped 1,448 days of Twitter storms, provocations, race-baiting, busted norms, shock-jock governance and truth-bending from the Oval Office that have left the country more polarized than in generations. Those who warned of worst-case scenarios only to be dismissed as alarmists found some of their darkest fears realized. By day’s end, even some Republicans discussed removing Trump under the 25th Amendment rather than wait two weeks for the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.

The extraordinary invasion of the Capitol was a last-ditch act of desperation from a camp facing political eviction. Even before the mob set foot in the building on Wednesday afternoon, Trump’s presidency was slipping away. Democrats were taking control of the Senate with a pair of Georgia runoff election victories that Republicans angrily blamed on the president’s erratic behavior.

Two of his most loyal allies, Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, broke with Trump as never before, refusing to go along with his bid to overturn a democratic election after remaining behind him or standing quiet through four years of toxic conflict, scandal and capriciousness.

And following the attack on the Capitol, even more Republicans abandoned him. While most Republicans in the House stuck with him, he lost more than half of the Republican senators who started the day on his side of the battle, leaving him just six on the first Senate vote when deliberations resumed after the rioters were removed.

“What we have seen today is unlawful and unacceptable,” said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., who reversed plans to join Trump’s effort. “I have decided I will vote to uphold the Electoral College results, and I encourage Donald Trump to condemn and put an end to this madness.”

Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the third-ranking Republican in the House, said Trump was responsible for the violence. “There’s no question that the president formed the mob, the president incited the mob, the president addressed the mob,” she told Fox News in comments she then posted online. “He lit the flames. This is what America is not.”

Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, another senior Republican, said he had no more interest in what Trump had to say after the events that forced lawmakers to flee their own chambers. “I don’t want to hear anything,” he told reporters. “It was a tragic day and I think he was part of it.”

The cascade of criticism came even from within Trump’s circle, as advisers expressed deepening concern about how far he has been willing to go to undo an election he lost. At least three aides, Stephanie Grisham, Sarah Matthews and Rickie Niceta, resigned, with more expected to follow. After he initially offered only mild statements calling on the mob in the Capitol to be peaceful, several members of Trump’s team publicly implored him to do more.

“The best thing @realDonaldTrump could do right now is to address the nation from the Oval Office and condemn the riots,” Mick Mulvaney, who served as his chief of staff and still served as a special envoy, wrote on Twitter. “A peaceful transition of power is essential to the country and needs to take place on 1/20.”

Others debunked their own former boss’s brazenly false fraud allegations. “Dear MAGA- I am one of you,” wrote Alyssa Farah, who just stepped down as Trump’s communications director last month, noting that she has worked not just for Trump but also the conservative Freedom Caucus in the House. “I campaigned w/ Trump & voted for him. But I need you to hear me: the Election was NOT stolen. We lost.”

Moments after Biden went on live television to deplore the “insurrection” at the Capitol and call on Trump to go before cameras, the president posted a recorded video online that offered mixed messages. Even as he told supporters it was time to withdraw, he praised them rather than condemning their actions and repeated his grievances against people who were “so bad and so evil.”

“I know you’re hurt,” he told the rioters. “We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now.” He added: “We love you. You’re very special.” Rather than calming the waters, the video was seen as further roiling them — so much so that Facebook and Twitter took it down and temporarily suspended Trump’s accounts.

Tom Bossert, the president’s former homeland security adviser, called out his former boss. “This is beyond wrong and illegal,” he said on Twitter. “It’s un-American. The President undermined American democracy baselessly for months. As a result, he’s culpable for this siege, and an utter disgrace.”

While Washington has seen many protests over the years, including some that turned violent, the uprising on Wednesday was unlike anything that the capital has seen during a transition of power in modern times, literally interrupting the constitutional acceptance of Biden’s election victory.

The assault on the Capitol was the first by a large, hostile group of invaders since the British sacked the building in 1814, according to the U.S. Capitol Historical Society. Four Puerto Rican nationalists entered peacefully in 1954 and sat in the House visitors gallery, at which point they pulled out guns and opened fire, injuring five lawmakers. In 1998, a gunman walked into the Capitol and killed two members of the Capitol Police.

But none of them was egged on by an American president the way that Trump seemed to do on Wednesday during a “Save America March” on the Ellipse south of the White House just as Congress was convening to validate Biden’s election.

“We will never give up,” Trump had declared. “We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that’s what this is all about.”

As the crowd on the Ellipse chanted, “Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump!” the president lashed out at members of his own party for not doing more to help him cling to power. “There are so many weak Republicans,” he growled and then vowed to take revenge against those he deemed insufficiently loyal. “You primary them,” he said.

He singled out Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican who angered him by not intervening in the election, calling him “one of the dumbest governors in the United States.” And he went after William Barr, the attorney general who debunked his false election complaints. “All of a sudden, Bill Barr changed,” he groused.

Other speakers, including his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, castigated Republican lawmakers for not standing up for the president. “Let’s have trial by combat,” exhorted Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who has served as the president’s personal lawyer.

“The people who did nothing to stop the steal — this gathering should send a message to them,” Donald Trump Jr. said. “This isn’t their Republican Party anymore. This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party.”

But the question is for how long. Trump faced the end of his reign much as he began it, with a fervent hard-core base but without the support of most Americans. He won in 2016 through the Electoral College with nearly 3 million fewer votes in the popular tally than his opponent and lost by 7 million in November. He did not earn the approval of a majority of Americans in major surveys for a single day of his tenure, unlike any of his predecessors in the history of polling.

Had it not been for the attack on the Capitol, the break by Pence and McConnell would have been a political earthquake by itself. Pence rebuffed the president’s demand that he use his role as presiding officer over the Electoral College count to reject electors for Biden. And McConnell gave a forceful speech repudiating Trump’s effort to nullify the election.

“If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral,” McConnell said before the Capitol was overrun.

Pence released a letter saying he did not have the power to do what the president wanted him to do. “Vesting the vice president with unilateral authority to decide presidential contests would be entirely antithetical” to the constitutional design, he wrote.

He added: “It is my considered judgment that my oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not.”

With Pence unwilling and unable to stop the count, the president’s supporters made it their mission to do it themselves. And for several hours, they succeeded. But after they were finally cleared out of the ransacked Capitol, lawmakers resumed the process of ending the Trump presidency.

Even Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of his strongest allies, essentially declared the Trump era done as he opposed the attempt to override the election results. “Enough’s enough,” he said on the floor. “It is over.”
___________

[TopHatter]

Bill Barr Says Trump Betrayed His Office

Former Attorney General William Barr says President Donald Trump’s conduct as a violent mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol was a “betrayal of his office and supporters.”

In a statement to The Associated Press, Barr said Thursday that “orchestrating a mob to pressure Congress is inexcusable.”

Barr was one of Trump’s most loyal and ardent defenders in the Cabinet.

His comments come a day after angry and armed protesters broke into the U.S. Capitol, forcing Congress members to halt the ongoing vote to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s election and then flee from the House and Senate chambers.

Barr resigned last month amid lingering tension over the president’s baseless claims of election fraud and the investigation into Biden’s son.
_________

[JRT]

"Let's have trial by combat !!!" - Rudy Guiliani, on Wednesday 06 January 2021, shortly before the insurrectionists' riot, the seditionists' assault on the United States Capital building that occured during a joint session of Congess convened within to count the electoral votes and to certify the election of the president and vice president, the acts of domestic terrorism that included planting pipe bombs at the RNC and DNC headquarters buildings, the planting of improvised explosive devices around the Capitol.

[tbm3fan]

Mo Brooks, gotta love a fellow with an imagination. I thought they accused ANTIFA of being violent and dangerous. Apparently they are also clever. Not only that but they are both fascist and leftist at the same time. Damn guys are switch hitters. Sometimes I wonder about Alabama.

Here's Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, speaking on the House floor, on Wednesday night:

"I don't know if the reports are true, but the 'Washington Times' has just reported some pretty compelling evidence from a facial recognition company showing that some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters, they were masquerading as Trump supporters and in fact, were members of the violent terrorist group ANTIFA."

And this from Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks on Thursday morning: "Evidence growing that fascist ANTIFA orchestrated Capitol attack with clever mob control tactics."

Uh, what? The Washington Times report is an incredibly thinly sourced piece of "journalism" that rests its entire headline on a retired military officer telling the paper about a facial recognition firm that claimed it saw Antifa activists in the crowd. And the facial recognition company the Times cited said Thursday morning that it had no idea where the paper had gotten its information. What was Brooks' "evidence?" "A Congressman warned me on MONDAY of a growing ANTIFA threat," he tweeted. Well, I'm convinced!

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/07/polit...ump/index.html

[TopHatter]

Proud Boys boast they caused 'absolute terror' during Capitol riot

The Proud Boys are celebrating their role in the US Capitol insurrection on Wednesday by taking a virtual victory lap on social media.

The group - a Southern Poverty Law Center designated hate group that was told to "stand back and stand by" by Donald Trump during a presidential debate earlier this year - posted messages boasting and taking credit for the riot.

"For several hours, our collective strength had politicians in Washington in absolute terror. The treacherous pawns (cops) were also terrified," a Proud Boy wrote on the group's Telegram social media page.

On Parler, another social media platform that welcomes extremists banned from Twitter and Facebook for violating those sites Terms of Service agreements, the Proud Boys openly supported the Capitol insurrection.

"Doesn't look like they're destroying the capital. Looks like they're liberating it," the group wrote. "God bless America and all her patriots."

Prior to the rally, the leader of the Proud Boys, Henry "Enrique" Tarrio was arrested for burning a Black Lives Matter sign that was stolen from a church in Washington DC. He was also found in possession of high capacity firearm magazines.

A DC judge banned Mr Tarrio from entering the District.

The group is being sued by the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law for what it calls a "racist attack on Metropolitan AME church," which "was one of several levied against churches targeted for their support of the Black Lives Matter Movement."

Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Trump loyalist, echoed right-wing conspiracy theories during the Congressional count last night, alleging that the Trump and Confederate-flag waving, largely white, unmasked and vocally supportive group of the president's supporters that stormed the Capitol were actually antifa plants.

In addition to that claim being utterly unsubstantiated by facts, the Proud Boys announced their intention to dress in black and wear masks - which is how anti-fascist protesters generally dress at protests - during the 6 January march into Washington DC.

Mr Tarrio wrote on the Proud Boys' Parler feed that the group would be "incognito and we will spread across downtown DC in smaller teams. And who knows ... we might dress in all BLACK for the occassion."

Videos from the riot show that some of the first individuals to attack the fence and get into fist fights with police were dressed mostly in black.
___________

Yeah, "antifa"...

[statquo]

[TopHatter]

Six Republican lawmakers among rioters as police release photos of wanted


DC police release photos of alleged members of Trump mob (DC Police)

At least six Republican state legislators took part in events surrounding the storming of the US Capitol. West Virginia Delegate Derrick Evans posted a video of himself entering the building but later deleted it, The New York Times reported.

Tennessee state lawmaker Terri Lynn Weaver told the Tennessean that she was “in the thick of it” during the rally before the storming of the Capitol. She said there was “Just a whole heck of a lot of patriots here". She later tweeted a picture of the mob at the base of the Capitol, saying: “Epic and historic day gathering with fellow Patriots from all over the nation DC.”

Virginia state Senator Amanda Chase denied that any violence had taken place, despite the overwhelming evidence, and later accused the police of murder after the shooting of a California woman inside the Capitol. "A veteran who was brutally murdered by Capitol Police today,” Chase wrote on Facebook according to the Henrico Citizen.

“These were not rioters and looters; these were Patriots who love their country and do not want to see our great republic turn into a socialist country. I was there with the people; I know. Don’t believe the fake media narrative," she wrote.

Missouri State Representative Justin Hill skipped his swearing-in ceremony to be in DC. He marched to the Capitol but didn’t enter, the St Louis Post-Dispatch reported him as saying.

Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano made sure that a busload of people could be in DC. He said in a video that he didn’t participate in the clashes with police, The Hill reported.

Michigan State Representative Matt Maddock was also at the scene, according to The Hill.

This comes as the FBI and DC Police released images of people wanted on federal charges for violently storming the US Capitol. They are trying to track down 36 people after 68 were already arrested after violent clashes with police as the Trump-supporting mob broke into the Capitol, forcing members of Congress to evacuate and seek shelter in undisclosed locations. Four rioters died and 56 officers were injured in the ensuing chaos. One officer remains in hospital after being beaten and tased by the mob.

Charges include inciting a riot and weapons violations. Rioters scaled the Capitol building, defaced statues, committed countless acts of vandalism and fought with police.

The suspects include Holocaust deniers, White supremacists, and conspiracy theorists.

Several of them have already been identified online, such as 32-year-old Jake Angeli, sometimes called the "QAnon Shaman" according to the Arizona Republic. Shirtless and wearing horns and a fur, the Trump-supporting QAnon conspiracy theorist was seen in numerous images from the Capitol on Wednesday.

An unnamed man was fired from his job at a Maryland marketing firm after wearing his company badge while storming the Capitol.

But many have yet to be identified. Former Deputy Director of the FBI Danny Coulson told Fox News that: "It didn't just happen," asserting that inciters of the riot were to blame. "There were people there that came to do it and generated it and caused this horrible mayhem," he said.

Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen said in a statement: "The Department of Justice is committed to ensuring that those responsible for this attack on our Government and the rule of law face the full consequences of their actions under the law."

"Some participants in yesterday’s violence will be charged today, and we will continue to methodically assess evidence, charge crimes and make arrests in the coming days and weeks to ensure that those responsible are held accountable under the law.”

"We still have a significant amount of work ahead of us to identify and hold each and every one of the violent mob accountable for their violent actions," Metropolitan Police Department chief Robert Contee said.
___________

[TopHatter]

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos resigns in protest: “There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me.”

Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao resigns in protest: "Yesterday, our country experienced a traumatic and entirely avoidable event as supporters of the President stormed the Capitol building following a rally he addressed....it has deeply troubled me in a way that I simply cannot set aside"

Eh, hang on, I thought this was the work of "antifa"