2020 Election: Predictions, Results and Reactions

[N.E. Brigand]

"The wife of an Iowa Republican who ran for Congress in 2020 was arrested Thursday and accused of casting 23 fraudulent votes on behalf of her husband."

[N.E. Brigand]

Today three active duty U.S. Marines were arrested for their participation in the January 6th insurrection. All three "work in jobs connected to the intelligence community."

[Voronwë the Faithful]

We'll see what happens with the trial of Enrique Tarrio and the other Proud Boys members also charged with seditious conspiracy. And whether the true instigator(s) of the conspiracy are ever charged.

[N.E. Brigand]

Thanks for that update. The second Oath Keepers trial got a lot less attention than the first one (which featured the group's ringleaders), but as Cheney notes at your link, prosecutors were even more successful in this one.

And earlier today, a jury found this guy, Richard "Bigo" Barnett of Arkansas -- seen below on January 6th in the office of Nancy Pelosi, then the Speaker of the House -- guilty of eight counts including obstruction of an official proceeding, entering a restricted building with a dangerous weapon, and stealing an envelope from Pelosi's desk.

[N.E. Brigand]

Cheney notes that at both Barnett's verdict this morning and the Oath Keepers' verdict this afternoon, the mothers of Ashli Babbitt and Enrique Tarrio were in attendance. Babbitt is the insurrectionist who was shot by a Capitol Police officer who was defending members of Congress against the mob's attack. Tarrio is the leader of the Proud Boys and is on trial right now in a different D.C. courtroom for his actions on and around January 6th.

[N.E. Brigand]

A new study finds some evidence that in the 2020 election, Joe Biden performed better in cities where Black Lives Matter protests were most active.

[N.E. Brigand]

Two January 6th defendants who opted for bench trials were found guilty today by Judge Trevor McFadden (a Donald Trump appointee).

Pauline Bauer of Pennsylvania, who was in the Capitol on January 6th, where she called for Nancy Pelosi to be hanged, was found guilty of all five charges against her (including obstruction of an official proceeding). Bauer had argued a "sovereign citizen" defense, i.e., she claimed that the was immune from U.S. laws.

Mick Chain of New Jersey was found guilty of three charges (entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds, and parading demonstrating or picketing in a capitol building.) and not guilty of one charge (disorderly conduct in a capitol building). Chan claimed that he only in the Capitol as a journalist, but well:



FAFO?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

From the ongoing Proud Boys seditious conspiracy trial today (last tweet of the day):

[N.E. Brigand]

Some Jan. 6th defendants have argued that the government's use of electronic "geofencing" data to establish who was on restricted Capitol grounds is overbroad. Today a judge ruled in favor of the government's use of that technique.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Back to the Proud Boys trial.


Hmmm, indeed! It is highly unusual for a trial day to suddenly get cancelled and a hearing scheduled instead. We don't know for sure that it is because of the request to call Trump as a witness, but that is not a bad guess.

ETA: Apparently it is unrelated, but there still is no word as to what it is about.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[N.E. Brigand]

The FBI seized the phone of Congressman Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania who now chairs the Freedom Caucuas, more than five months ago, but hasn't yet been permitted to access the phone's contents. Perry was in frequent communication with President Donald Trump as Trump attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. On Dec. 28, following a "secret, monthslong legal battle," federal judge Beryl Howell ruled that prosecutors could access the phone, but as Politico reported yesterday, her order has been temporarily blocked pending an appeal to be heard in just over three weeks, presumably behind closed doors because this pertains to a grand jury investigation -- and Rep. Perry has the support of a bipartisan House leadership group, including both Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who are nominally involved in order to protect the rights of the legislative branch. Two of the three judges who will hear the appeal were appointed by Donald Trump.

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The Guardian reported yesterday that Donald Trump secretly donated $1 million to the so-called "audit" of Arizona's 2020 election results conducted by the dubious Cyber Ninjas firm that, apparently despite the company's best efforts to prove ridiculous conspiracy theories like the claim that there were bamboo fibers in the ballots that would reveal the election was stolen by China, nonetheless found that Trump had indeed lost.

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The FBI continues to make new arrests of January 6th participants. As Kyle Cheney of Politico notes here, today Isaac Thomas of Michigan was charged with entering a restricted area, disorderly conduct in a restricted area, violence in a restricted area, and doing all of the above while possessing a dangerous weapon, threatening someone on Capitol grounds with the intent of disrupting Congress, obstructing Congress, and obstructing law enforcement officers, and using a dangerous weapon in the course of that activity.

Outside the Capitol, Thomas told a police officer that if he impeded the mob, he would strike the cop with the flagpole he was carrying. When the crowed surged forward and the officer responded with a burst of pepper spray, Thomas urged people to "get him." Then Thomas swung his pole at the cop. A few minutes later, he urged the crowd to "get" another officer, threw a full bottle of Gatorade at a cop's head, and then struck the officer with his flagpole. Thomas was recording himself for much of the day, and after entering the Capitol itself he boasted that "We managed to break our way in, pushed passed all these phony soldiers," and announced his intention to go to the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He filmed himself inside Nancy Pelosi's office urging the public to "take your country back. Take your freedom back for the sake of your families and your children!" Later he joined a crowd elsewhere in the Capitol that was pushing a line of police officers, and after those officers were able to drive the crowd from that chamber, he told them, "Y'all are going to pay for that."

Thomas's girlfriend, Christina Legros, who was also at the Capitol, sometimes with him and sometimes separated, has also been charged with several offenses.

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NBC News reports on the many tips received by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies in advance of January 6th, which received less attention than they should have because of concerns that acting would infringe on the insurrectionists' freedom of speech.

The House Jan. 6 committee concluded that the FBI and other federal security agencies could have prevented a violent mob from overrunning the Capitol had they acted on the large volume of intelligence collected beforehand, the chief investigator told NBC News in an exclusive interview — a judgment the committee left out of its televised hearings and final report.

Former federal prosecutor Tim Heaphy, the committee’s chief investigative counsel, said that while he endorses the panel’s main finding that then-President Donald Trump sparked the riot by urging protesters to go to the Capitol, his probe documented how federal law enforcement failures contributed to the debacle.

Trump “was the proximate cause. But for his words, and deeds, it wouldn’t have happened,” said Heaphy, who led many of the key witness interviews conducted by the committee. “That said, what happened at the Capitol was also affected by law enforcement failures to operationalize the ample intelligence that was present before Jan. 6, about the threats of violence.”

[N.E. Brigand]

There's new reporting in the New York Times today about how the FBI tried to plan for possible disruptions that might happen between the November 2020 election and the January 2021 inauguration, but it never even occurred to them that something like the January 6th insurrection might happen: "The F.B.I. appeared to be blinded by a lack of imagination, a narrow focus on 'lone wolf' offenders and a misguided belief that the threat from the far left was as great as that from the far right, new congressional documents show." This is based on documents obtained by the January 6th Committee but not included in their report. The Times reporter, Alan Feuer, notes that the "FBI also failed to capitalize on informants in the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. One Proud Boy informant said his FBI handlers agreed not to ask about the Proud Boys if he gave them information on Antifa. [The informant was told:] 'You guys [i.e., the Proud Boys] have never caused any problems in this state, so we don't have any reason to be looking into you.'"

I think even a report whose purpose is to emphasize Donald Trump's responsibility for January 6th probably should have included this information, in part because it undermines the false narrative that Trump himself tried to sell: that law enforcement was biased against him and his supporters. In fact, the opposite is true. It's not a coincidence that every FBI director has been a Republican (whether appointed by a Republican or Democratic president). The FBI is a conservative organization whose take on law and order has traditionally shown some favoritism to what used to be called "punching hippies." And Attorney General William Barr had been telling the FBI for nearly two years to focus more of its attention on Antifa and other far left actors, even though there had been a spate of violence from the right and even though "in more than two decades, there had been only one killing by someone the bureau had classified as an 'anarchist violent extremist.'"

Also the FBI wasn't very cooperative with the January 6th Committee, failing to provide "many key documents [the Committee] requested. The Bureau provided about 2,000 documents in total; the Secret Service by comparison offered more than a million electronic communications."

Meanwhile, from one of the reporters live tweeting the Proud Boys trial today, I see this posted just in the past hour: "Jurors are now watching a Proud Boys propaganda/recruitment video that features slogans like 'Fuck Antifa' and 'We are Proud Boys' and 'Loyalty to my president' and shows what is purported to be Antifa attacking civilians and fighting with Proud boys. Agent testifies these videos glorify violence." In the Times reportings, it says that one of the people the Proud Boys have named as a possible defense witness is the FBI informant above. That man, Matthew Walter of Tennessee was in D.C. on January 6th but didn't storm the Capitol (he "spent much of the afternoon following Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and Infowars host, in a mass march toward the Capitol"). Walter says that he told FBI handlers in advance that he would be there, and they replied, "If you go, just don't be an idiot." He also says that the Proud Boys' president, Enrique Tarrio, who had once been an FBI informant and who is a defendant in this trial, knew that he was working with the FBI.

As one person mentions in the comments on the Times story: Donald Trump "had already fired one director for insufficient loyalty to him. That could have trickled down to influence FBI decision-making" -- especially concerning a group like the Proud Boys which Trump had effectively endorsed on live TV during the September 2020 presidential debate.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[Voronwë the Faithful]

From the Proud Boys seditious conspiracy trial

[RoseMorninStar]

Quite an insight into how some people view the world/our country/fellow citizens.

[N.E. Brigand]

In the Proud Boys trial, jurors today were shown texts between the group's leader, Enrique Tarrio, and member Jeremy Bertino, who has pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy for his role on January 6th. On November 8, 2020, the day after all major media outlets called the presidential election for Joe Biden, the Proud Boys were planning various statehouse rallies to protest the results. Tarrio told Bertino that the members shouldn't wear the usual Proud Boys colors. Bertino asked: why not?

And Tarrio replied: "The campaign asked us not to wear colors to these events".

[Voronwë the Faithful]

This definitely seems like a BFD to me!



ETA: Also

[N.E. Brigand]

This Milkshake brings all the boys to the prison yard. (I'm surely not the first person to make that joke today.)

"Milkshake" is the nickname of a Proud Boys member named Dan Scott, who apparently was close to but not in the group's top leadership. His plea deal was released today and does not include any cooperation with the Dept. of Justice.

Speaking of the Proud Boys, here's a nice rundown of more of the chat messages that the government introduced in the conspiracy trial yesterday, including a message in which one of the group's leaders shares a link to video of former Mike Pence aide Olivia Troye saying this on Dec. 31, 2020 about Donald Trump: "This is what he does. He tweets, he incites it, he gets his followers and supporters to behave in this manner, and these people think that they're being patriotic because they're supporting Donald Trump."

And just over three months earlier, after Donald Trump had said, at the first presidential debate in Cleveland, that the Proud Boys should "stand back and stand by," that same Proud Boys leader, Joe Biggs, said in this chat stream, "Trump basically said to go fuck them up! this makes me so happy".