He is one of the most consequential—and complicated—individuals involved in the events of January 6.
Ryan Samsel, then a 37-year-old Pennsylvania barber, drove to Washington on the morning of January 6, 2021 with his girlfriend to watch Donald Trump’s speech. Unable to hear the president, they walked east towards Capitol Hill where a large group, including members of the Proud Boys, had assembled.
On Monday, David Zuckerman wrote a good piece about Peggy Noonan and her WSJ editorial concerning former President Donald Trump. Noonan argues that electing Donald Trump again would destroy the Republican party. Peggy may be right, and I hope that she is.
Trump’s success in 2016 was, in large part, due to the way that he took the mechanisms of the Republican political machine and used them to secure victory. He ran a third-party-style campaign within the structure of the Republican party. The “party” as a corporate entity was against him, but grassroots Republicans in name and philosophy were all in for candidate Donald Trump. The “party” has never forgiven him for that.
The former president may or may not have a convincing legal defense. But he will have a strong political argument to make about our two-tiered justice system.
As we’ve been observing here for the last couple of weeks, it appears that an indictment of former president Donald Trump by the Biden Justice Department’s special counsel, Jack Smith, is imminent. The indictment would be based on Trump’s unlawful retention of national-defense intelligence at Mar-a-Lago, his resort club and estate in Palm Beach, and it would center on his obstruction of a federal grand jury’s probe of that retention.
It is now well established that the FBI has become thoroughly and possibly irreparably corrupt and politicized, serving as a thuggish arm of the Leftist establishment rather than any kind of law enforcement agency. Its decline accelerated during the tenure of the intensely partisan Leftist apparatchik James Comey as FBI director, but in the six years since Donald Trump removed Comey from office amid a storm of controversy, the lanky corruptocrat has shown not the slightest hint of introspection, much less regret. Instead, he just went on MSNBC to warn that a new Trump administration could see the president weaponizing the justice system. Well, Comey certainly knows all about weaponizing federal agencies for partisan purposes.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Two Florida men who stormed the U.S. Capitol with other members of the far-right Oath Keepers group were sentenced Friday to three years in prison for seditious conspiracy and other charges — the latest in a historic string of sentences in the Jan. 6. 2021 attack.
David Moerschel, 45, a neurophysiologist from Punta Gorda, and Joseph Hackett, a 52-year-old chiropractor from Sarasota, were convicted in January alongside other members of the antigovernment extremist group for their roles in what prosecutors described as a violent plot to stop the transfer power from former President Donald Trump to President Joe Biden after the 2020 election.
The mother of the woman shot and killed by Capitol Police on during the January 6 riot was arrested on Tuesday night following a violent confrontation with a protester outside the Washington DC prison where the rioters are being held.
Micki Witthoeft’s daughter Ashli Babbitt died inside the Capitol, and her mother has since become a passionate defender of those trying to overthrow the 2020 election.
Ashli Babbitt’s mother, Micki Witthoeft, is arrested and charged with assault. pic.twitter.com/nEeSiVdDDs
— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) May 31, 2023
Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, was sentenced on Thursday to 18 years in prison, after being convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 attack on Congress.
Prosecutors sought a 25-year term. Lawyers for Rhodes said he should be sentenced to time served, since his arrest in January 2022.
Before handing down the sentence on Thursday, the judge told a defiant Rhodes that he posed a continued threat to the US government, saying it was clear Rhodes “wants democracy in this country to devolve into violence”.
Did Durham simply throw up his hands in surrender?
On August 8, 2016, lawyer Lisa Page was the special assistant to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Peter Strzok was the deputy assistant director of FBI Counterintelligence. On that day, they emailed each other as follows:
Page: [Trump’s] not going to become president, right? Right?
Strzok: No. No, he’s not. We’ll stop it.
Even FBI officials working the case admitted that it had been opened on the flimsiest of grounds.
The vaporousness of the predication for the FBI’s Trump–Russia investigation, “Crossfire Hurricane,” was described Tuesday in our editorial on the Durham Report (and in my post the same day). For years, I have maintained that the probe was opened on false pretenses. But now that we have Special Counsel John Durham’s careful and comprehensive account of the debacle, the bureau and its allied Russiagate agonistes ought to be humiliated. They deranged the country for years over what, at the time they opened the case, FBI leaders knew was a grossly irresponsible basis for commencing any serious investigation, let alone for intruding the bureau into the politics of a presidential election. The damage this sordid affair has done to the FBI as an institution may not be reparable.
A D.C. police lieutenant was arrested Friday after he was accused of telling the leader of the far-right Proud Boys that he would be arrested for his actions after a December 2020 pro-Trump rally in Washington, obstructing the investigation ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack and lying to federal investigators afterward.
For the last seven years, conventional wisdom has told us a singular story about the FBI and Hillary Clinton. That story had a clear headline: the FBI was out to get her.
Let’s go back to 2016, when the FBI was investigating both major presidential candidates in the run-up to the election.
At the time, the bureau was looking into Donald Trump’s campaign’s ties to Russia as well as Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.
The lying sharks swim and circle with impunity.
Federal prosecutors last week announced the indictment of U.S. Representative George Santos (R-N.Y.) on a host of charges, including misuse of federal campaign funds and wire fraud, almost all of them resulting from his pathological lies.
Certainly, Santos deserved the attention of prosecutors for lying on federal documents and affidavits that may have helped him win a congressional seat as well as personal lucre.
Yesterday in these pages Margot Cleveland rightly noted that the most damning finding in the 306-page report from Special Counsel John Durham is not necessarily the FBI’s scandalous Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016, but that the egregious abuses of power detailed in the report cannot be remedied “absent a curing of the corrupted hearts and minds of law enforcement and intelligence agencies.”
Nobody went to jail, hardly anyone lost their jobs, some cashed in.
Peter Strzok, the man of a thousand sneers, reacted to the release of the Durham report by screenshotting the report’s footnote of his own book and recommending people buy it.
Despite being fired from the FBI, the disgraced former agent got a book deal, “Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump” as well as co-hosting a podcast with ‘Mueller, She Wrote’s Allison Gill and scoring an adjunct professorship at Georgetown University.
Both the far-left New York Times and Washington Post refuse to return Pulitzers for spreading the lie former President Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election.
Would Hitler return a fake Pulitzer?
