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Trump’s recognition of white nationalists will loom as Biden confronts surge in hate crime

InternationalJan 12. 2021Chanting “White lives matter,” “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us,” several hundred white nationalists and white supremacists carrying torches march in Charlottesville on Aug. 11, 2017, during the Unite the Right Rally. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Evelyn Hockstein

By The Washington Post · Matt Zapotosky

When Joe Biden formally announced his entry into the presidential race in 2019, he said he was moved to do so while watching President Donald Trump talk about a white nationalist rally that turned violent in Charlottesville. A woman protesting the racist demonstrators had been killed in the mayhem, but rather than condemning the white nationalists, Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.”

“With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it,” Biden said. “And at that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”

As Biden enters the White House, he will now have to address that threat himself, as hate crimes are on the rise and analysts say white supremacists and other domestic extremists have been emboldened by Trump. The acute challenge he will face was crystallized on Wednesday, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol.

“I wish we could say we couldn’t see it coming,” Biden said Thursday. “But that isn’t true. We could see it coming. The past four years, we’ve had a president who’s made his contempt for our Democracy, our Constitution, the rule of law clear in everything he has done.”

Analysts say a change in presidential rhetoric will help, and the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have been able to take some steps to try to tamp down on domestic extremism, sometimes in spite of Trump. Biden will face pressure to do even more.

Federal appellate judge Merrick Garland, whom Biden has nominated as his attorney general, has a background in prosecuting domestic terrorism cases. He oversaw the prosecution of the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people. He also oversaw the prosecution of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who eluded authorities for years while mailing bombs to people.

At a news conference where his nomination was announced, Garland noted that the Justice Department was founded after the Civil War – in part to enforce constitutional amendments abolishing slavery and ensuring people of color the right to vote – and that the principles at that time remained relevant in the modern era.

“They echo today in the priorities that lie before us, from ensuring racial equity in our justice system, to meeting the evolving threat of violent extremism,” Garland said. “If confirmed, those are the principles to which I will be devoted as attorney general. President elect-Biden understands this.”

Garland also referenced the riots from a day earlier, saying, “As everyone who watched yesterday’s events in Washington now understands, if they did not understand before, the rule of law is not just some lawyers’ turn of phrase. It is the very foundation of our democracy.”

Kristen Clarke, whom Biden nominated to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in an interview before she was chosen for the job that she would like to see that division intensify its efforts to prosecute hate crimes and crack down on white supremacy.

“We need a division that is using its enforcement powers to counteract those efforts, to send a strong message to white supremacists that this conduct will not be tolerated in our country,” said Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “We have seen some prosecutions of the most violent offenders, but they need to do more, given the spike in activity. We need to see more from the Civil Rights Division in this area.”

Some advocates have pushed for a law that would give officials the ability to designate domestic terrorist organizations the same way they do international organizations, and then charge those who support them. Such legislation – which would require congressional approval – would probably run into significant First Amendment and civil liberties challenges.

During the Trump administration, they could never be seriously discussed, because Trump showed little interest in the issue, and his relationship with Congress was not conducive to getting tough legislation passed, said Elizabeth Neumann, who served as the assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy in the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security.

“There was no opportunity for any sort of tough conversation like this to happen because there was a leadership vacuum at the White House,” she said.

Neumann said that Biden simply installing a functioning government to work with Congress to study the issue using normal processes might help.

“If you had the ability to designate a terrorist organization or if you had [the] ability to designate somebody as a domestic terrorist actor, then hypothetically you would be able to watch-list them,” she said, although she conceded that such measures probably would face legal challenges and that domestic terrorist groups may not be as easily tagged as international ones, because they are far less organized.

“Given that many of the groups are not really groups as much as decentralized, amorphous goo, it’s not maybe the panacea that some people assume it might be,” she said.

Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks extremism nationwide, said Biden might consider creating a White House task force to address hate crime. The FBI, he noted, has been tracking steady increases in such offenses – although many police departments don’t adequately report data – and in 2019, his organization tracked the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents ever.

“The reality is, extremists feel emboldened in this environment,” Greenblatt said.

The FBI during the Trump administration charged several suspected members of neo-Nazi or white supremacist groups, including Atomwaffen Division and the Base, in connection with alleged plots, and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray has said repeatedly that he takes domestic extremism seriously. But he also has noted that the FBI’s role is to investigate and arrest those who perpetrate violence, rather than taking aim at a particular ideology. Biden, officials said, will have to look elsewhere to try to prevent white supremacist violence, and to de-radicalize potential attackers.

The Trump administration drew criticism early for not funding a DHS program created to counter violent extremism, and for not focusing on white supremacy. Neumann said that later on, though, the department formulated a strategy and asked Congress for $80 million in new money to focus on preventing violence and intervening with people before they become fully radicalized.

Such funding was included in a $2.3 trillion spending bill for fiscal 2021.

“There’s good news,” she said. “But it’s going to take a while for that to come to fruition.”

Also key for the incoming administration will be leaning on tech companies such as Facebook, whose algorithms can magnify white supremacist content, Greenblatt said.

“Social media has played a central role in radicalizing domestic extremists,” he said. “I think addressing the issues of hate online is imperative if we really want to have an effective whole-of-government solution to stopping the spread of domestic terror.”

Neumann said Biden also will have to contend with the legacy Trump has left behind, as tens of millions of people continue to embrace his conspiracy theories and racist ideas.

“He’s clearly not going to go quietly, so there’s clearly going to be a Trump side to this,” she said. “My concern there is that now we have this massive pool who are vulnerable to getting recruited into a darker movement.”

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Pelosi says staff hid under a table for hours as rioters vandalized her office: ‘A terrible, terrible violation’

InternationalJan 12. 2021House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is shown on Jan. 7, 2021, the day after rioters stormed the U. S. Capitol. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Melina Mara.

By The Washington Post · Jaclyn Peiser

As a pro-Trump mob beat down the door to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office on Wednesday, her staff ran into a conference room, barricaded the door, switched off the lights and cowered under a long table. Eight of them stayed there for 2½hours as rioters pounded on the door and ransacked and defaced the speaker’s office, Pelosi told “60 Minutes” on Sunday.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/a832234a-8d7f-42c0-ac34-713960416b92?ptvads=block&playthrough=false

As the California Democrat walked CBS’s Lesley Stahl through her vandalized office, she again urged Vice President Mike Pence to remove President Donald Trump from office under the 25th Amendment – and promised that Congress will pursue impeachment if he does not.

“Sadly, the person that’s running the executive branch is a deranged, unhinged, dangerous president of the United States,” Pelosi said. “. . . He has done something so serious that there should be prosecution against him.”

Pelosi made the case for impeachment as House Democrats are divided over the move, with some citing concerns that it could interfere with President-elect Joe Biden’s early push to take immediate action on the pandemic and a foundering economy.

Speaking to “60 Minutes,” Pelosi said she would prefer that Trump be removed through the 25th Amendment, which “gets rid of him” immediately. “He’s out of office,” Pelosi added. The amendment allows the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to remove the president if he’s unable to fulfill his duties.

Impeachment would take longer, and it’s uncertain how a Senate trial would play out. But Pelosi said that impeachment and conviction would serve as a just punishment and could prevent Trump from running for office again.

“That’s one of the motivations that people have for advocating for impeachment,” Pelosi said.

Another reason for the urgency, Pelosi said, would be to prevent Trump from pardoning “these people who are terrorists on the Capitol.”

Pelosi said her demands for Trump’s removal are informed by her own terrifying experience during the riots. The speaker told Stahl that her security detail swiftly removed her from the House chamber and rushed her to a safe location.

“I think [it] was universally accepted that what happened was a terrible, terrible violation,” Pelosi said, pausing for what appeared to be an emotional moment, ” . . . of the Capitol, of the first branch of government, the legislative branch, by the president of the United States.”

Pelosi showed Stahl where the rioters broke down her office door and shattered an antique mirror, scattering glass. The mob stole computers and rustled through documents. One man sat at a desk, which has since been removed, and “defamed” it, Pelosi said, posing for pictures while leaning back in the chair and resting his boot on the desk.

That man has since been identified as 60-year-old Richard Barnett of Gravette, Ark. He was arrested Friday and charged with three counts of entering restricted grounds, violent entry and disorderly conduct at the Capitol and theft of public property, prosecutors said.

As the vandals wreaked havoc through Pelosi’s office, her staff members remained hidden under a table, listening as the mob called out for them and their boss.

“They were vocally saying, ‘Where’s the speaker? We know she has staff. They’re here someplace. We’re going to find them,’ ” Pelosi told Stahl.

“The evidence is now that – that it was a well-planned, organized group with leadership and guidance and direction,” the speaker added. “And the direction was to go get people.”

The FBI has confirmed that agents are investigating whether some rioters stormed the Capitol with the intent to kill lawmakers or take hostages.

Once the Capitol was clear, lawmakers returned to work to confirm Biden’s victory. But many Republican lawmakers stuck with their original plan to challenge election results in some states that Trump lost, making baseless claims of mass fraud. Pelosi condemned those lawmakers, which included two-thirds of the House’s Republican caucus.

“These people are enablers of the president’s behavior,” Pelosi said. “I remember when Republicans in the Senate went to see Richard Nixon and said, ‘It’s over.’ That’s what has to happen now.”

Pelosi also reiterated that Trump’s actions were so grave that he deserves severe punishment.

“This president is guilty of inciting insurrection,” Pelosi said. “He has to pay a price for that.”

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Myanmar govt targets militia over Covid-riddled border casinos

InternationalJan 11. 2021

By THE NATION

Myanmar’s government is demanding the resignation of a Border Guard Force (BFG) leader it said controls illegal casinos along the Thai-Myanmar border that are linked with Covid-19 outbreaks in both countries.

Local media report that hundreds more Thais working in a casino in the border town of Myawaddy, Karen state are expected to return to Thailand this week, as infections among returnees rise. Late last week, 17 Thais tested positive for Covid-19 after crossing back over the border from Myawaddy to Mae Sot in Tak province.

A news source in Tak said the Myanmar government has ordered the resignation of three commanders of the BGF, an armed group backed by the country’s military.

Among them is Karen-BGF leader Colonel Saw Chit Thu, who reportedly controls China-backed casinos in Myawaddy Township’s new gambling hub, Shwe Kokko.

“The three commanders are accused of cooperating with foreigners in opening casinos along the Thai-Myanmar border without permission from the government,” said the source. “These casinos are believed to have spread the virus among guests and workers, which include Thai, Myanmar and Chinese nationals, and have caused serious damage to the country.”

Since 2015, Chinese businesspeople have poured investment into Shwe Kokko. The controversial gambling hub now reportedly hosts more than 10 casinos and several thousand Chinese residents.

As of January 9, Myanmar had reported a total of 130,049 cases of Covid-19 and 2,826 deaths.

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Pandemic debt leads to global reckoning

InternationalJan 11. 2021

By The Washington Post · Anthony Faiola, Alexander Villegas, Lesley Wroughton

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica – This nation built Latin America’s model society, enacting universal health care and spending its way to one of the Western Hemisphere’s highest literacy rates. Now, it’s reeling from the financially crushing side effects of the coronavirus as cratering revenue and crisis spending force a reckoning over a massive pile of government debt.

The pandemic is hurtling heavily leveraged nations into an economic danger zone, threatening to bankrupt the worst-affected. Costa Rica, a country known for zip-lining tourists and American retirees, is scrambling to stave off a full-blown debt crisis, imposing emergency cuts and proposing tighter measures that touched off rare violent protests last fall. To keep the lights on, an eco-friendly nation is weighing desperate solutions – including open-pit gold mining, even oceanic fracking.

“Costa Rica is facing a social crisis,” said Ana Rosa Ruiz, an economist at the Costa Rican Technological Institute.

Around the globe, the pandemic is racking up a mind-blowing bill: trillions of dollars in lost tax revenue, increased spending and new borrowing set to burden the next generation with record levels of debt. In the direst cases – low- and middle-income countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America, that are already saddled with backbreaking debt – covering the rising costs is transforming into a high-stakes test of national solvency.

Analysts call it a “debt tsunami”: National accounts are sinking into the red at a record pace.

“I consider the risk to be very high of an emerging-market debt crisis where a lot of countries run into problems at once,” said Harvard University economist Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. “This is going to be a rocky road.”

By the end of 2020, total government debt worldwide was projected to soar by $9 trillion and top 103% of global GDP, according to the Institute of International Finance – a historic jump of more than 10 percentage points in one year. Countries have maxed out their credit to buy medical equipment, set up field hospitals, deploy health-care workers and source vaccines, even as pandemic-related recessions have caused tax revenue to plunge and aid for the unemployed to spike. Countries that rely on tourism, which has ground to a virtual halt, or commodities such as oil that have sunk in price have felt the sting most keenly.

The United States has run up debt at a pace not seen since World War II. But the world’s wealthy nations are better able to cope with growing debt than their poorer counterparts.

Angola, effectively shut out of global markets, is racing to strike a deal with the Chinese, but even that might not be enough to prevent a debt crisis. Sri Lanka, locked in recession, is required to make $4 billion in debt payments this year with only $6 billion in the bank. Brazil’s debt, worsened by a yawing budget deficit, has surged to 95% of GDP – raising alarm over the medium-term ability of the Latin American giant to stay afloat.

The IMF and the World Bank have sought to aid the most vulnerable states, and the world’s wealthiest nations endorsed a plan in October to extend a suspension of debt payments owed to them by the poorest. In November, those nations additionally agreed to jointly work toward some form of debt relief for the poorest nations that seek it from them, and they encouraged private lenders to follow suit.

But analysts say that may not be enough. Thirty-eight low-income countries are either in debt distress, according to the IMF, or at high risk of falling into it. Unless private creditors and wealthy nations step up and agree to concessions or outright debt forgiveness, the pandemic’s fiscal shock could hurl some of those, as well as highly leveraged middle-income countries such as Costa Rica, toward catastrophic national bankruptcies.

Analysts argue that the need for stimulus to keep economies running during this historically challenging period still outweighs the need to balance budgets. Even the IMF, the global guardian of fiscal rectitude, is telling countries that now is not the time to scrimp, lest they jeopardize still-fragile economic recoveries.

Yet even if a repeat of the cascading financial crises seen in Latin America and Asia in the 1980 and 1990s is avoided, the debt surge threatens to linger as a millstone around the necks of nations for years. It will compromise their ability to fight the first global increase in extreme poverty since the 1990s, and to invest in infrastructure projects, education and innovation down the line.

“You could think of it as a big crack in the ice,” said Sonja Gibbs, managing director of global policy issues at the Institute of International Finance. “Suddenly you’re in danger of a number of countries falling off the edge.”

Zambia, once a shining example of Africa’s economic renaissance, is now the Ghost of Crises Future for debt-burdened countries slammed by the pandemic.

The sub-Saharan nation fell into default in November, a result of its high reliance on foreign debt; a pandemic blow to the price of copper, its main commodity; and one of its worst droughts in 40 years. The country is now printing money to survive, forcing a devaluation of the kwacha and creating spiraling inflation that’s spreading misery at the worst possible time.

At the government’s Cancer Diseases Hospital in Lusaka, the capital, doctors say the price of imported drug treatments has doubled. A third of the country’s workers have lost wages, according to a household survey in July; 39% were skipping a meal, and 67% were worried about not having enough food.

Sakala Zulu, a 26-year-old teacher from eastern Zambia, said staples such as eggs and sugar now cost 60% more than three months ago, making it harder to feed his six children. The cost of transport for the 12-mile commute to and from work has risen by 20%.

“Right now, I feel there is no part of my life not affected,” Zulu said.

Zambia is seeking to restructure its debt, but private creditors have shown little willingness to budge. A move to renegotiate substantial loans from China has been cloaked in secrecy.

As things stand, more than half of government spending this year is earmarked for servicing debt alone – leaving little for social programs, health or education.

“What you see now on the ground is reduced spending on key social sectors,” said Ishmael Zulu of the advocacy group CUTS International. “With the high levels of poverty in Zambia, there are many people that are heavily reliant on government programs. These programs are suffering at the cost of increased debt levels. Hospitals that are in small districts and the far-flung areas of the country are suffering at the cost of increased debt servicing.”

– – –

Half a world away, Costa Rica is scrambling to avoid a similar fate.

When the pandemic hit, tourism, the country’s economic lifeblood, dried up and unemployment skyrocketed to more than 24%, draining state coffers of health-care contributions just as the government was struggling to respond to the coronavirus. A tax break for hard-hit businesses and financial aid to out-of-work Costa Ricans dug the fiscal hole deeper.

The ensuing cash crunch forced hard decisions, including emergency cuts. At El Jardín elementary school in northern Costa Rica, Principal Elizabeth Mejía says the operating budget was slashed in half. Teachers are buying their own printers, ink cartridges and paper to distribute assignments to students. Mejía said she’s been told by the government to hold fundraisers to cover maintenance: “They tell us if we need to fix something, that we should go sell tamales.”

In the years after the Great Recession of 2008, Costa Rica ran up deficits and debt to sustain expansive state payrolls and liberal policies. Two years ago, the government attempted what economists describe as a fiscal Band-Aid: a new value-added tax and limits on salary increases for state workers.

Those measures paled in comparison with the proposal last year, when the government of President Carlos Alvarado Quesada, seeking to boost its bid for a $1.75 billion IMF bailout, sought broad tax increases during the pandemic.

Protesters hit the streets, blocking intersections nationwide, clashing with police and slowing commerce in a country that had only recently come out of lockdown.

“People don’t have money to pay their debts,” said Gerardo Zúñiga, an activist who joined the protests with a mask on his face and a rosary around his neck. “Businesses don’t have money to pay for supplies, their employees, their permits and all the social contributions.

“We understand that there has to be some agreement with the IMF, but what we don’t agree with are items where the most vulnerable people are harmed.”

The government backed off that proposal and is now in talks with the opposition, unions, civic activists and industrial groups to find a more palatable solution. But to avoid a painful default like the one the country suffered in 1981, when runaway inflation and spikes in poverty sparked a lost decade, something’s got to give.

With tourism not expected to recover fully for years, politicians and businesses are pushing sources of revenue that run afoul of Costa Rica’s renowned environmentalism. They include open-pit gold mining – effectively an ecological trade-off for what supporters estimate would be 6,500 direct and indirect jobs and a $9.52 billion jolt for the economy.

In August, lawmakers pushed another controversial option: opening Costa Rican lands and shorelines to fracking and oil drilling.

“Our marine territory is 10 times larger than our landmass and we know little about its riches,” lawmaker Patricia Villegas said during a congressional debate. “We have sources of energy that we exploit like hydroelectric, wind, geothermal and solar, but we haven’t wanted to discuss the possibility of taking advantage of gas and oil. Costa Rica is sitting on a gold mine.”

In a country that pledged to rely entirely on renewable energy by 2030, the debt debate is pitting the country’s economic future against cherished environmental ideals. Activists, and the government, say any boost in oil and natural gas exploration runs counter to everything the country has worked for. The nation, they say, must find other ways.

“We’ve launched a decarbonization plan to the world, and those things are fundamental to us as a nation, not just cosmetic,” said Elián Villegas, Costa Rica’s finance minister. “I find those solutions to be very distant from the essence of being Costa Rican.”

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Biden still planning to be sworn in on the steps of U.S. Capitol two weeks after mob attack

InternationalJan 11. 2021Workers put up fencing outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 7. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Matt McClain

By The Washington Post · Emily Davies, Matt Viser

Joe Biden still plans to be sworn in on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20, exactly two weeks after a pro-Trump mob with rioters wielding Confederate flags stormed the building to attack the very nation Biden was elected to lead.

That moment shrouded in symbolism will launch a 59th presidential inauguration set to take place under extraordinary circumstances. The event was already scaled down and subdued by the coronavirus pandemic. And now, the Biden administration has the added weight of showing strength and stability to the rest of the world, which watched in horror as American democracy wavered from the exact place where he is to take the oath of office.

While changes could still be made, as of last week Biden’s inauguration and swearing in were set to take place on the west front of the U.S. Capitol.

“We are confident in our security partners who have spent months planning and preparing for the inauguration, and we are continuing to work with them to ensure the utmost safety and security of the president-elect,” a senior Biden inauguration official said last week, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss security matters. “This will mark a new day for the American people focused on healing our nation, bringing our country together and building it back better.”

Following weeks of historic unrest, the Biden administration is hoping that the inauguration will draw attention toward the importance of national unity and away from President Donald Trump, who said in a tweet Friday that he would not attend the event. He would be the first president to skip his successor’s swearing-in ceremony in 152 years.

Some involved in the inauguration planning, who have been in close contact with security agencies, noted that the security footprint for the event will be much larger than it was Wednesday at the Capitol, when the mob disrupted the Senate and House of Representatives as lawmakers accepted the election results.

The inauguration is deemed a National Special Security Event (NSSE), which brings in a wide range of federal agencies and law enforcement officials that create a wide security perimeter, with road closures and barriers around the Capitol. The Secret Service, the agency responsible for designing and implementing a security operation plan for such events, released a statement Thursday night stressing its readiness for Inauguration Day.

“For well over a year, the U.S. Secret Service, along with our NSSE partners, has been working tirelessly to anticipate and prepare for all possible contingencies at every level to ensure a safe and secure Inauguration Day,” the statement said.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser released a letter Sunday urging Chad Wolf, acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, to take “a very different approach than previous inaugurations given the chaos, injury, and death experienced at the United States Capitol during the insurrection.”

Bowser asked the department to extend the NSSE period and coordinate with other federal agencies to free up the D.C. police to focus on “its local mission.” She also called on Wolf to cancel and deny permits for all demonstrations from Monday to Jan. 24.

Officials say Joe Biden will still be sworn in as president Jan. 20 on the steps of the Capitol, where a mob stormed the building Jan. 6. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Astrid Riecken

Just three days before Wednesday’s pro-Trump demonstration at the Ellipse, the National Park Service adjusted the event permit from 5,000 to 30,000 people, a decision Bowser said “demonstrated the National Park Service’s willingness to approve last minute permits and major adjustments.”

Some Trump supporters have vowed to return to the District of Columbia on Jan. 17, with one online post cited by Alethea Group calling for an “ARMED MARCH ON CAPITOL HILL & ALL STATE CAPITOLS.” Others have discussed a “Million Militia March” on Inauguration Day.

As of Friday, the Park Service had issued only two permits that together allow for 75 people for demonstrations around the Inauguration, according to Mike Litterst, a spokesman for the Park Service.

The Park Service is still processing five permit applications, which include two requests for events expecting 5,000 people. The first of those applications was submitted last January by D.C. Action, a liberal group based in D.C. The second was submitted in December by Black Pact, a nonpartisan political group organizing a march for reparations.

Litterst said he was waiting for instructions from the Presidential Inaugural Committee to “make any adjustments to our facility and our property.”

Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies (JCCIC), and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, said in a statement Thursday that the storming of the Capitol was a “sad and solemn day for our country,” but plans to swear in Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will move forward as planned.

“The outrageous attack on the Capitol, however, will not stop us from affirming to Americans – and the world – that our democracy endures,” they said in the statement.

Paige Waltz, communications director for the JCCIC, said that the committee is working with “institutional partners to conduct a thorough assessment of the inaugural platform, and the other Capitol spaces and grounds that are traditionally used for inaugural ceremonies.”

Waltz added that the committee will not make further comments about the specifics of the event until the assessment is complete.

The District has also ramped up security measures. On Wednesday, Bowser extended a public emergency order through Jan. 21, which allows her to issue curfews, close businesses, halt transit and dip into emergency funds, among other actions, to preserve public safety through the inauguration.

Military officials have erected a seven-foot fence designed to prevent scaling around the periphery of the U.S. Capitol. More than 6,000 National Guardsmen were expected to arrive in the District over the weekend to help support the D.C. police and Capitol Police, U.S. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said Thursday.

The focus on fortification and security may further scale down an event already limited in size by the pandemic. The Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) requested and received permits for Lafayette Square, portions of the National Mall from Third to 14th streets, land surrounding the Lincoln Memorial and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, among others, for the inauguration. The permit requests include plans for a Biden-Harris inaugural celebration at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and an event with stages and tents at the Lincoln Memorial. But even before the pro-Trump attempted insurrection at the Capitol, Biden’s inaugural team had announced that the iconic parade would be virtual and canceled all in-person balls.

In December, the JCCIC said members of Congress would receive only two tickets each, as opposed to the 130,000 they are typically instructed to distribute among their constituents, citing public health concerns.

During the 2017 inauguration, more than 95 percent of hotel rooms were filled across the District, according to a spokesperson for Destination DC, a group that promotes the city to visitors. This year, while comprehensive occupancy data is not available until after the event, there are few signs pointing to a surge in visitors to the District.

Thomas Penny, president of Donohoe Hospitality, which oversees more than 15 hotels in the region, said that reservations at his hotels remain light in late January, with the most noticeable uptick in interest since Wednesday coming from security-related agencies seeking hotel rooms. He said one security-related agency called on Thursday to book 200 rooms for the inauguration.

Emily Mooney, retail strategy manager for the DowntownDC Business Improvement District, said her team has been working closely with the city government and security agencies to communicate with local businesses about expectations for the inauguration and ensure that their landscaping is up to par for the event, no matter the number of people who travel downtown that day.

She said her district would refrain from issuing formal guidance to business owners about boarding up or closing shop unless city leadership suggests otherwise.

“We are preparing as we normally would for inauguration even though we expect a much smaller turnout,” she said. “We fully expect that downtown D.C. will be safe and secure for the inauguration.”

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Republicans wonder whether Trump’s problems will be his undoing

InternationalJan 11. 2021President Donald Trump addresses a Jan. 4 campaign rally in Dalton, Ga., on the eve of the runoff elections lost by Republican incumbent Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford

By The Washington Post · Philip Rucker

WASHINGTON – Whether President Donald Trump is forced from office or serves out the remaining days of his term, he is now destined to slink out of the White House considerably diminished from the strapping, fearsome force he and his advisers imagined he would be in his post-presidency.

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In the wake of the mob attack on the Capitol that Trump incited, some allies have abandoned him, many in the business community have shunned him and Twitter took away his social media megaphone. Many Republicans also hold him responsible for losing their Senate majority with last week’s twin defeats in Georgia, not to mention their House majority two years ago.

Trump had planned to retreat from Washington to plot a comeback that could return him to the White House in four years, but now he will have to contend with a possible second impeachment or perhaps even criminal charges.

With 10 days remaining in his presidency, Trump has become the political equivalent of a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade flying high down New York’s Sixth Avenue, only to be punctured, twist in the wind and deflate as it rounds the corner to the parade’s endpoint at Herald Square.

“The way he handled himself in the last 60 days has tarnished his reputation and his ability to be a future leader – and by botching the Georgia Senate races, his entire economic agenda is about to get overturned by the Senate,” longtime Republican strategist Scott Reed said. “He’s really gone backwards like no one ever would have imagined.”

Despite Trump’s current troubles, he is sure to maintain a grass-roots following. In his statement Friday night reacting to Twitter’s extraordinary decision to permanently ban his account because the president’s messages posed a threat of future violence, Trump effectively laid claim to the 74.2 million “great American patriots” who voted for him in November.

Jason Miller, a senior political adviser to the president, said after speaking with Trump on Saturday that the president plans to spend tens of millions of dollars from his political action committee to help Republicans win back the House and Senate in 2022. He left open the possibility that Trump would run for president again in 2024.

“President Trump is still the biggest name in American politics and the president is still the leader of the Republican Party. He’ll be the most sought-after political endorsement heading into the 2022 midterms,” Miller said. He added: “You can’t censor an entire movement. This is critical to keep in mind for Beltway politicians and pundits who themselves have lost touch with Republican grass-roots activists around the country.”

Still, the new reality for Trump is messy. Frank Luntz, a veteran GOP pollster, conducted a focus group the night after the Capitol attack with 12 Trump voters from 11 different states. He said they fell into three camps: those who believe the fact that President-elect Joe Biden won the election and think it’s time Trump move on; those who think it was stolen from Trump but he still should move on; and those who think it was stolen and Trump should continue to fight.

Luntz was flabbergasted by the sharp, even angry tone of the discussion.

“They were very emotional with each other, very harsh with each other,” he said. “This has never happened in a Trump focus group I’ve done. … Trump voters are like single moms with kids. They back each other, they empathize with each other, because they know the stresses and strains they each have. Not anymore. These Trump voters are ready to declare war with each other.”

That spells trouble for the president, Luntz concluded. “When you’ve got a unified force, you can speak to them as their general and motivate them to change their behavior,” he added. “But when they have broken down into tribes, it’s impossible to deliver a message that reaches everybody. Trump is much less powerful today than he was 72 hours ago.”

Luntz said that when he asked the group of 12 to name their preferred candidate for president in 2024, only two said Trump. None said Vice President Mike Pence.

Wednesday’s attack was a clarifying moment for Trump backers. A handful of administration officials – including two original members of Trump’s Cabinet, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao (who is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell) and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos – resigned in the aftermath.

The scene Jan. 6 outside the Capitol after a mob of Trump supporters breached the building in a violent riot. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Bonnie Jo Mount

On Capitol Hill, McConnell, R-Ky., publicly broke with Trump even before the deadly siege began, warning in a speech Wednesday that “our democracy would enter a death spiral” if the losing side in an election were able to overturn a fair outcome with baseless allegations. McConnell has also told fellow senators and other confidants that he does not plan to speak with Trump again.

Others have joined in. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, told the Anchorage Daily News: “I want him to resign. I want him out. He has caused enough damage.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., long one of Trump’s confidants and golfing buddies, declared on the Senate floor: “Count me out. Enough is enough.”

Sens. Mitt Romney, R-Utah; Patrick Toomey, R-Pa.; and Ben Sasse, R-Neb., also roundly denounced the president for his rhetoric and complicity in the mob attack.

There have been other defections, too. Consider the case of Rep. Nancy Mace, a newly elected Republican freshman from South Carolina, a state the president carried by a sizable 12 percentage points.

Mace worked as a coalitions and field staffer on Trump’s 2016 campaign, and in her congressional campaign last year she touted her work for the president. She featured a photo of him with her, Trump smiling and flashing a thumbs-up. And the president tweeted his support for her four times.

But on Thursday, when a reporter from the State asked whether she still believed in Trump, Mace did not hesitate. “No, I don’t,” she said. “I can’t condone the rhetoric from yesterday, where people died and all the violence. These were not protests. This was anarchy.”

Speaking more generally, Mace told the newspaper that the Trump-incited riot undermined all that he has accomplished as president.

“That legacy has now been wiped out,” Mace said. “It is gone, and we have to start over from scratch.”

Some Trump allies would only speak about the president’s weakened state privately. One evangelical leader, for instance, likened Wednesday’s events, coupled with the election defeats on Tuesday in Georgia, to a torpedo hitting the starboard side of a warship. But the person’s concern about being quoted by name and angering Trump was itself a testament to the president’s enduring, if somewhat diminished, political power.

Brendan Buck, a former adviser to former Republican House speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner who has criticized Trump before, cautioned against declaring the outgoing president politically dead.

“It is folly to suggest that everyone will just turn their back on him,” Buck said. “His power has always rested in the sway he has with voters. It was never because members of Congress particularly cared for him or liked him. I have seen so many times where you thought, this was the moment things would change, but folks went home, they heard from their constituents, their constituents demanded continued loyalty to Donald Trump and they came back refreshed as Trumpers once again.”

Buck argued that any kind of punishment for Trump – be it impeachment or prosecution or merely a censure by Congress – could accrue to his political benefit, a point Miller made as well.

“His whole persona is built on grievance, that he is the champion of regular people while the elites in Washington are against him,” Buck said. “I think that he would reap a lot of political benefit from the impeachment.”

Anthony Scaramucci, a former White House communications director who has since come out sharply against Trump, warned that the outgoing president is capable of a political rebirth – though at 74 years old, he argued, Trump does not have time to waste.

“Unless they put him in a position where he is no longer eligible to run for office and decapitate him politically, it is not clear to me that we’ve seen the last of Trump,” Scaramucci said.

Still, the lessons of history do not favor Trump. U.S. presidents tend to be like new cars parked in a showroom. Once they leave office, they depreciate in value immediately, followed by a steady erosion. Even if they maintain their popularity, as Barack Obama has, or recast their image, as Bill Clinton did through his charity work, they never again command the attention and power they had in office. This has proven especially, painfully true for presidents defeated in their bids for re-election, such as Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

“In American politics, love turns to hatred very quickly,” presidential historian Michael Beschloss said. “How appealing is Donald Trump going to look in a month or two? Is this someone who will be beleaguered by indictments and/or lawsuits? Is this someone who is going to be struggling with financial problems? Those things may not look so appealing, even to people who love him at the moment.”

Beschloss added: “Americans have a tendency, almost in their DNA, to like and respect a president. (Richard) Nixon had a lot of popularity right down until the end, but very quickly he became the embodiment of lying, criminality and bad political ethics, and became so radioactive that he was never invited again to a Republican convention.”

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Democrats split on how hard to push impeachment

InternationalJan 11. 2021

By The Washington Post · Felicia Sonmez, Mike DeBonis, Juliet Eilperin

WASHINGTON – Disagreements are breaking out among Democrats over how aggressively to push for the impeachment of President Donald Trump as House members insist that he face consequences for inciting last week’s deadly assault on the Capitol while President-elect Joe Biden signals that he does not want the effort to interfere with his agenda.

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Both sides are treading carefully, aware that many voters hope Congress will prevent Trump from provoking further violence, but also want Biden to be free to take immediate action on the coronavirus pandemic and a faltering economy. Some Democrats said privately that they are wary of impeachment but unsure how to slow its momentum given the intensifying passions against Trump.

The conflict gives Biden with his first test on what could be an early, incendiary dilemma facing his presidency: how hard to pursue accountability for Trump and those in his orbit.

“There has to be consequences, and that can take various forms,” said Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn. “Clearly impeachment has its own consequences, and we recognize that we don’t want to impact the Biden administration. And we want to ensure that whatever we pursue can be achieved.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on Sunday evening said the House would “proceed with bringing impeachment legislation to the Floor” but announced no firm timeline to do so. First, she said, Democrats plan to pass a resolution calling on Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet to remove Trump under the provisions of the 25th Amendment.

“As the days go by, the horror of the ongoing assault on our democracy perpetrated by this president is intensified and so is the immediate need for action,” she said.

In a sign of the Democrats’ struggles with the issue, Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., a Biden ally and House leader, proposed Sunday that the House vote this week to impeach but wait a few months to submit the articles of impeachment to the Senate for a trial.

Those comments provoked widespread frustration among Democrats, according to aides and lawmakers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to air internal discussions, and they worried that Clyburn’s remarks would undermine the party’s case for Trump’s quick removal: that he is an immediate danger to the nation.

Some Democrats are looking to Biden to take a firm public stance and slam the brakes on impeachment, but top Democrats now see it as increasingly unlikely that the president-elect will go further than his measured warning on Friday that whatever else Congress does, it needs to “hit the ground running” on his agenda when he takes office.

“The train has left the station. I think many are worried about how it gets done, how it’s going to be handled, and how do we make sure it’s not going to divide the country further,” one Democrat said of impeachment. “It’s on a track that, while people have reservations, nobody knows how to stop it.”

On Monday morning, House members plan to introduce responses to Wednesday’s assault on the Capitol and Trump’s role in encouraging it. The earliest action could come Tuesday in the House Rules Committee, which would meet to prepare legislation for the House floor; actual votes on impeachment or other items can occur no sooner than Wednesday – a week before Biden’s inauguration.

As of Sunday afternoon, a draft impeachment resolution had garnered 210 co-sponsors in the House, according to Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., one of its authors.

Pelosi and other Democratic leaders are increasingly determined to hold Trump immediately accountable and force his Republican defenders to choose whether to stand by him – a stance that has been reinforced by members’ personal anger at the breach of the Capitol, as well as the fumbling, often-equivocal GOP response. Several said the Republican calls dismissing impeachment as too divisive have further infuriated Democrats.

“Republicans need to be put on the record,” Pelosi said on a Thursday call with her leadership team, according to two people familiar with her remarks.

Phillips said impeachment would move forward unless Republicans embraced an alternative: “It is now Sunday evening, and we’re still awaiting any proposition from the GOP to hold him to account,” he said. “Many of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are talking about unity. . . . If we want unity within the Congress, I invite a proposition from the GOP to fulfill those conservative principles of accountability and consequence.”

Among those joining the effort Sunday was Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., co-chair of the moderate Blue Dog Coalition, who said in a tweet that Congress has a “constitutional and moral obligation” to hold the president accountable “for inciting violence and insurrection.”

Another prominent Blue Dog – Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., who raised concerns about a rapid impeachment in a Friday teleconference of House Democrats – backed the effort late Saturday. “While I have pushed other remedies for his criminal conduct, impeachment is the tool before us and warranted for his seditious acts,” he tweeted.

House Republicans are planning their own conference call on Monday to discuss their approach.

Democrats must act quickly because Trump is scheduled to leave office on Jan. 20 in any case. And the rage of many Democrats is colliding with Biden’s desire to set up an administration that will immediately face crises – as well the desire to repair a government the Biden team sees as badly damaged and demoralized.

A Senate engulfed in an impeachment trial would struggle to do anything else, and Biden has voiced frustration that senators have not moved faster to confirm his Cabinet picks.

“There is an appetite to better understand where President-elect Biden’s head is at relative to what he believes is in the best interest,” Phillips said, acknowledging that Biden doing so publicly “presents complications.”

The dilemma led to a flurry of alternative proposals Sunday as lawmakers looked for a way to navigate the pressures.

Clyburn said his idea of waiting until after the Biden administration’s first 100 days to send articles of impeachment to the Senate would allow the new president install key members of his team. “Let’s do the people’s work and let’s vote to impeach this president, and then we’ll decide later – or the Senate will decide later – what to do with that,” Clyburn said.

Others said Congress should censure Trump instead of impeaching him, an action that could be taken quickly and possibly attract broader support.

Democratic Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s nonvoting representative in the House, said she plans to introduce such a measure Monday, describing it as “the only way to send a bipartisan, bicameral message without delay to the country and the world that the United States is a nation of laws.”

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., a Trump critic, also suggested that he would back a censure motion.

But other Democrats have expressed worry that if the House and Senate do not act quickly, Trump and his supporters will be emboldened to continue working to overturn Biden’s election, and that the country may be wracked by further threats to the safety of lawmakers, officials and the democratic system.

On Sunday, several high-profile Republicans, including Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, joined the calls for Trump’s removal, potentially making it harder for any Democratic leader to oppose impeachment.

Pelosi told CBS News’s “60 Minutes” that one reason to impeach Trump would be to prevent him from running again in 2024. “There’s strong support in the Congress for impeaching the president a second time,” she said in the interview, which was taped Friday and aired Sunday.

Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., responding to the argument from some Republicans that impeachment would be a “bad start” for Biden as he seeks to unify the country behind an ambitious agenda, said in a tweet that the country “cannot heal until we first get justice.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., a second-term congresswoman who is among the leading voices of the party’s liberal wing, suggested that Democrats should pursue an “all-of-the-above” approach that includes various avenues for ousting the president.

She rejected the idea that removing Trump should take a back seat to Biden’s plans, suggesting Biden’s own safety may be at stake.

“With profound respect, I believe that the president’s safety and the safety of the United States Congress and the security of our country takes precedent over the timing of nominations and the timing of potential confirmations,” Ocasio-Cortez said on ABC News’s “This Week.” “This is an immediate danger right now.”

Some Democrats are pushing for the invocation of the 25th Amendment, which provides for the removal of an unfit president, as a way to resolve the issue quickly without involving Congress. Pelosi said she favors that “because it gets rid of him; he’s out of office.”

But that would require Pence and a majority of the Cabinet to support removing Trump, an unlikely scenario. Some Democrats also cite the 14th Amendment, which prevents individuals from holding office if they have supported insurrection, but that, too, seems remote.

Neither Biden nor Trump spoke publicly Sunday, and the president has been barred from Twitter, his preferred communication channel. White House spokesman Judd Deere said Trump is expected to travel to Alamo, Texas, on Tuesday to mark progress on his border wall.

While Biden did not directly weigh in on impeachment, he reiterated in a tweet Sunday his theme of looking ahead, saying, “In 10 days, we move forward and rebuild – together.”

That echoed the message of the president-elect’s news conference Friday, when he told reporters he was focused on “getting our agenda moving as quickly as possible” and declined to call on Congress to take any particular action against Trump, saying it was their decision.

“We were duly elected, so I think it’s important that we get on with the business of getting him out of office – and the quickest way that that will happen is us being sworn in on the 20th,” Biden said.

One close Biden ally, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the most important thing Republicans can do is stop spreading the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen and help convince Trump’s supporters that Biden is the duly elected president.

“There can only be reconciliation with repentance,” Coons said.

Most Republicans have largely been silent about any consequences for Wednesday’s riot, whether for Trump or the members of Congress who encouraged it. But some on Sunday joined Democrats in calling for Trump to leave office.

Asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” whether Trump should step down, Toomey said, “I think at this point, with just a few days left, it’s the best path forward, the best way to get this person in the rearview mirror for us.”

Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” Trump’s former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said that of all of the things Trump has done, “I could probably defend almost all of them” until this point. But in the riot’s aftermath, he would “seriously” consider voting to impeach Trump if he were still a House member.

On ABC’s “This Week,” Christie, a former Trump backer, said he would also vote to impeach if he were in Congress. “If inciting to insurrection isn’t [an impeachable offense], then I don’t really know what is,” Christie said.

Other Republicans remained wary or opposed to impeachment, including most of those currently in office. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., suggested that it was not necessary because there was little chance Trump would repeat his dangerous actions.

“Now, my personal view is that the president touched the hot stove on Wednesday and is unlikely to touch it again. And if that’s the case, I think we – we get -” Blunt said, trailing off. Then, he added: “Every day we get closer to the last day of his presidency, we should be thinking more about the first day of the next presidency than the last day of his presidency.”

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For anti-Trump Americans, calamity spurs a muted sense of vindication

InternationalJan 10. 2021The American flag flies at half-staff at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 8 as ordered by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in reaction to the death of Officer Brian D. Sicknick of the U.S. Capitol Police after a mob attacked the Capitol two days earlier. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Melina Mara

By The Washington Post · Matt Viser · NATIONAL, POLITICS 

For the past four years, a parade of Democrats and establishment Republicans had shouted alarm about the noxious brand of politics that President Donald Trump had nurtured, saying that it would lead to potentially deadly repercussions and a political repudiation. 

Pro-democracy signs line a fence near the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 9, three days after the building was invaded and vandalized by Trump-supporting rioters. MUST CREDIT: Photo for the Washington Post by Astrid Riecken

Over the course of a 24-hour period last week, both of those fearful predictions came to pass, as the worst aspects of what Trump has wrought were put on full view and he, his party and the nation faced significant consequences. 

First, Republicans lost two Senate races they had been favored to win in the usually conservative state of Georgia, giving Democrats full control in Washington as Trump’s party blamed him for the losses. Next, Trump incited his supporters with false allegations about the November election and directed them to the U.S. Capitol, where the mob mounted a deadly attack on another branch of the government, and on democracy itself. 

Roses are left Jan. 9 at the fence that now surrounds the U.S. Capitol building, three days after it was invaded and vandalized by Trump-supporting rioters. MUST CREDIT: Photo for the Washington Post by Astrid Riecken

It was no outside force, only the actions of Trump and his supporters, that brought on calamity. In its wake was left a shaken nation and a mix of reactions among those who had long sounded the warnings that last week became undeniable. Yet any sense of vindication was buried under the horror of Wednesday’s insurrection at the Capitol.

“It’s finally coming into focus,” said David Bowen, a Wisconsin state assemblyman and Democrat from Milwaukee. “Maybe it was blurred before. But it couldn’t be more clear at this point – even for people who supported Trump for a number of different reasons.”

Bowen found himself dejected Tuesday afternoon when the Kenosha County district attorney announced that no officers would be charged for the shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man who was left paralyzed. By evening, he felt uplifted when Democrats won control of the Senate, which he hopes will allow them to address racial injustices. 

The next day, some of his worst fears came true when the Capitol mob engaged in what he viewed as an attempted coup. But alongside that arose gratification in the widespread condemnation of Trump. 

“To have these shifts of just raw emotions,” Bowen said. “The silver lining was that possibility we are better positioned than ever to have a Congress at the national level that will try to find some national standards around justice for Black people who are seeking change. … For Trump to proudly do nothing on these issues of justice and systemic racism – it’s all coming to a head right now, even in his last days of the presidency.”

The backlash against Trump has been swifter than after past missteps by him, giving longtime Trump opponents the sense that, finally, their warnings about the president’s toxicity have been recognized. Twitter and Facebook have banned him from their platforms, cutting off some of the social media oxygen he craves. Longtime allies, many of whom went along with Trump in sowing doubt about the election results and accommodating his coarsest moments, have abruptly shifted gears. Across the political landscape, the calculus instantly changed, as fear of crossing Trump was replaced with fear of being seen as complicit. 

“Enough is enough,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., one of Trump’s closest allies and a frequent golfing partner of the president’s, said in the aftermath of the mob attack. “I’m out.”

Among Democrats, the emotions of last week were significantly different from November’s. Then the excitement that Biden had defeated Trump – with spontaneous dance parties breaking out in cities – was tempered by the party’s loss of seats in the House and failure to claim the Senate majority. In Georgia, neither Democrat had come close to winning outright, forcing dual runoffs that traditionally favored Republicans. It was a sobering reminder that Trump – who won 74 million votes, the second most in U.S. history behind only Biden – had a potent grip on a much larger swath of the country than many had believed. 

“What really surprised me was that the public did not hold the people who enabled Trump for four years accountable,” said Will Buergey, the Democratic Party chairman in Gogebic County, Mich. “And when I initially saw Nov. 3 results out of Georgia, I was pretty pessimistic about Democrats’ chance to win.”

So the results last week were a welcome shock. Trump’s actions clearly damaged the Republican Party’s chances; his repeated criticism of Republicans over their unwillingness to go along with his false claims about a fraudulent election failed to work, with a majority of voters even in Georgia no longer willing to go along with him. Between the November election and the runoff two months later, it was the Biden-backed Democratic candidates who gained significant ground, not the Trump-backed Republican incumbents.

“I was thrilled,” Buergey said. Finally, he added, “It was a repudiation against Trump.”

Georgians also sensed repudiation in a continuation of the shifts that have happened alongside Trump’s rise or, in some cases, in direct response to it. 

Sheikh M. Rahman, an immigrant from Bangladesh who in 2018 became the state’s first Muslim state senator, saw in the election of the two Democrats – Jon Ossoff, the state’s first Jewish senator, and Raphael Warnock, who will be the state’s first black senator – an outright rejection of the style of politics that Trump practiced.

He sees in the elections a new Georgia, and a new America, too. 

“I do feel gratified,” he said. “Now, we have to deliver.”

Those contests ended just as the country was gripped by the images from the U.S. Capitol, which cut short their celebrations over winning control of the Senate.

Trump’s rhetoric has always been outside the pale. He refused to fully condemn white nationalists after the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017. During a presidential debate he told the Proud Boys, a male-chauvinist organization with ties to white nationalism, to “stand back and stand by.” He ridiculed NFL football players for kneeling during the national anthem as a protest of racial injustice, and he nodded to anti-Semitic tropes. As far back as the spring of 2016, an opponent – now an ally, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas – said Trump “has a consistent pattern of inciting violence.”

But there were few far-reaching ramifications for Trump until recently. 

“It’s been more of an eye-opener,” said Nancy Quarles, a commissioner in Oakland County, Mich., of the impact of last week. “Even people I serve with – Republicans and independents who were looking at not so much him as a person but believed in his philosophies – some of that has turned. They’re not as strongly supporting him.” 

She said the week has been turbulent and, at times, felt like the country has reached an all-time low in its ability to engage in civil discourse – even as she is optimistic about news that she felt got lost: Democrats winning the Senate majority. 

“I’m hopeful. And looking forward to this being over with. And moving on,” she added. “The new administration is going to have their hands full trying to repair everything. They have to pick up the pieces and put it all back together. And I don’t know how long that’s going to take.”

Trump almost certainly will retain a strong and powerful base of support, as he has after every other controversy. There were still 147 Republicans who supported objections to count Biden’s electoral college votes, even after the Capitol was attacked. Trump retains broad support among Republican National Committee members. And Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman he installed to lead the party four years ago, was unanimously reelected Friday without a challenger.

For years, Trump has run roughshod over other Republicans using the same strongman tactics he has used in attempts to thwart Democrats. It has at time muffled his critics, but over the past few days, they, too, have grown more vocal. 

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, the only Republican senator to vote to convict Trump for abuse of power at his impeachment trial, delivered a passionate speech on the Senate floor decrying Trump as “a selfish man” and last week wrote an essay urging the country to heal its “social sickness.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has largely appeased Trump to fulfill his goal of remaking the federal judiciary, delivered a forceful condemnation of Trump for peddling “sweeping conspiracy theories” about the election. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who is McConnell’s wife, became the first Cabinet secretary to resign over the president’s role in inciting the mob to storm the Capitol. 

“If there’s ever any silver lining in an awful, awful, awful day, I think it’s that this has accelerated the march away from Trumpism,” said former senator Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., who has warned his party for years about the perils of following Trump and said he had the feeling last week that, finally, more Americans might be seeing things the way he has for a long time.

“We should not have tolerated so many other elected officials amplifying the president’s falsehoods without calling that out,” Flake said. “That’s what has been frustrating and painful. And I do think it’s changed.”

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Bellingcat breaks stories that newsrooms envy – using methods newsrooms avoid

InternationalJan 10. 2021President Trump supporters stand on the east side of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 before they stormed and breached the building to support the president’s false and baseless claims that he won the election. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael Robinson Chavez.

By The Washington Post · Elahe Izadi, Paul Farhi · WORLD, TECHNOLOGY, MEDIA, EUROPE 

In his hunt to unmask the would-be assassins of a Kremlin critic, Christo Grozev had spent weeks sifting through the shocking amounts of personal data from Russia that has been leaked onto the Internet – including passenger information from over 6 million flights.

But before he could expose the suspected Russian agents who allegedly poisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny – a blockbuster story for which a CNN reporter confronted one of them on his doorstep – Grozev’s investigation hit a brick wall. Free data would only take him so far. So he opened his wallet to pay for some of the most crucial evidence: flight manifests and cellphone metadata that placed the men in proximity to Navalny when he fell sick.

Paying for intel of dubious origins might set off ethical alarm bells in most Western newsrooms. But Grozev is not a traditional journalist.

He’s a Vienna-based Bulgarian radio station manager whose sideline in blogging led him a few years ago to join the global corps of sleuths known as Bellingcat. 

The investigative collaborative – which relies on both paid and volunteer researchers combing through “open-source” digital data available to anyone with the right searching skills – has been responsible for several eye-popping scoops: pinning the crash of a Malaysian airliner in Ukraine to a Russian missile, unmasking spies supposedly behind the poisoning of a Russian double agent in England and dissecting the racist motives of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque mass shooter.

This week, Bellingcat plunged into an investigation of the pro-Trump mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, asking volunteers to help catalogue and preserve the hundreds of videos and photos of the event that have circulated freely online – before the posters choose to remove them – to aid efforts to identify suspects. “At the very least what we’re trying to do here is provide preservation” for the sake of future analysis, Aric Toler, who heads up Bellingcat’s training and research, told The Washington Post on Thursday.

As it has partnered with mainstream news organizations to get its findings to the public – including CNN and the German magazine Der Spiegel for the Navalny investigation last month – Bellingcat’s occasional use of what is essentially a black market for data raises questions for American newsrooms. Grozev said he prefers freely available data, though, and only pays when he has exhausted other means – and when he strongly suspects a state crime has taken place.

“When the government is trying to cover its wrongdoing,” he said, “if the only way to prove the wrongdoing by the state is by acquiring data, then we find that ethically justifiable.”

– – – 

Bellingcat was started in 2014 by Eliot Higgins, at the time an unemployed blogger and gamer in England whose obsessive personal research quest helped him become one of the foremost experts of munitions used in the Syrian civil conflict. Since then, Bellingcat has assembled a worldwide team whose work relies almost exclusively on digital data. 

Their Navalny report, also produced with Russian outlet the Insider, found that the dissident had been trailed for years by at least eight operatives with chemical warfare expertise who worked for the Federal Security Service (FSB), successor to the Soviet-era KGB. The report cited “voluminous telecom and travel data” that also identified three operatives in proximity to Navalny as he prepared to take an August flight that ended in an emergency landing and his medically induced coma. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin denied the murder plot, joking darkly at a news conference that if state agents had wanted to kill Navalny “they would have probably finished the job.” That was the cue for Bellingcat to release the daring Part Two of its investigation – a recording of a phone conversation with one of the alleged operatives in which Navalny himself, impersonating an FSB supervisor, got the man to acknowledge the crime. 

Bellingcat’s work has long drawn attacks from the Russian government, which has referred to them as “pseudo-investigators” and promoters of “fake news.” To underscore their credibility, Bellingcat employs a show-your-work approach, publishing exhaustive reports that walk readers through exactly where they got their data – including leaked records of private information – and how they analyzed it. 

“Credibility is our only asset,” said Grozev, Bellingcat’s lead Russia investigator. “Especially when the Russian government is openly creating this disinformation campaign that we’re nothing but a front for Western intelligence. It’s a very, internally conflicting narrative they’re presenting – ‘everything they put out is fake, but it is also very high quality so it must be Western intelligence.’ “

– – – 

Not long after Grozev took up his hobby of investigating Russian agents, he turned to a broker who sold illegal access to government records. After the resulting story was published, the broker with sent him an angry letter, “to the tune of, ‘I thought you were just a regular, small-time criminal like my other clients, but you are a journalist and that is unacceptable,’ ” Grozev said. “I felt I had offended this person because I’m not a criminal, but a journalist.”

In many Western countries, the idea that you could shell out a couple dollars in cryptocurrency to an automated messaging application and obtain someone’s passport number, cellphone metadata and vehicle registration seems astonishing. But poor data security and rampant corruption in Russia makes it quite simple, and common. In 2019, a BBC reporter exploring the black market for personal data paid about $25 to an online forum and, in less than a day, received a file containing his own passport information dating back to when he was 14.

The supply chain typically begins with low-level government workers who have access to data and a hunger to make money on the side; they use third-party, anonymous platforms to sell this information. While perhaps a technically illicit trade, many customers run these searches for non-nefarious reasons – such as employers doing background checks on potential hires or real estate agents considering business deals, said Toler.

Certainly, there are more questionable uses, such as blackmail, he said. “You also hear a lot of stories about jealous wives who think their husband is cheating on them, so you spend 40 bucks to look at their phone records.”

Journalists in Russia have increasingly turned to the data market as a reporting tool, but the data they obtain doesn’t always tell a clear-cut story. The Insider recently cited records from a leaked database to report that the daughter of a high-ranking Putin official holds French and Russian dual citizenship – something that’s illegal for Russian lawmakers and highly controversial for their family members. 

The woman did not return the Insider’s inquiries, and the French government declined to confirm, citing privacy concerns – so it was only after the story published that she shared with another publication a copy of her French residence permit, suggesting that she may merely have a home there, not citizenship. The Insider had to amend its story. 

The unreliability of such data is one reason Bellingcat does rigorous cross-checking, preferably connecting to “a source we’ve obtained earlier than we started the investigation, before anyone has had the idea to poison the data,” Grozev said. In the case of the Navalny plot, Bellingcat analysts turned to previously verified offline databases to back up their new findings.

For legal purposes, Bellingcat does not use its foundation money to purchase leaked data, instead relying on individual researchers like Grozev to pay for it themselves. So the bigger ethical question the group contends with is how much of this data to make public, Toler said: No one wants to inadvertently reveal information about suspected spies’ relatives or others who are not the direct focus of their investigation.

“It’s kind of a case-by-case basis here, because it’s unprecedented in some ways that you can get the phone records of a spy,” Toler said. “It’s not something you read about in a journalism textbook.”

– – – 

But this approach does raise questions for American news outlets that typically have prohibitions against paying sources in exchange for information – especially when it may, technically, have been stolen.

In its report on the Navalny investigation, CNN cited “thousands of phone records along with flight manifests and other documents obtained by Bellingcat,” without getting into how those records were obtained. 

“At all points when you are using controversial data or controversial reporting techniques, you must disclose exactly what you’ve done,” said Alicia Shepard, a former ombudsman for NPR. “It is incumbent upon CNN to be as transparent as possible, and they are making a lot of assumptions that you’re not going to question where they got the information.”

Shepard said CNN could have addressed this by simply linking to Bellingcat’s own thorough explainer on its online report. “To me, transparency [means] I should be able to read a story and if I had the desire to re-report it, I could check it out.”

A CNN spokesman, Jonathan Hawkins, said the network stands by its reporting and its inclusion of Bellingcat’s research. “Bellingcat has explained its methodology in full and transparent detail.”

Edward Wasserman, media ethics professor and dean emeritus of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, argues that the privacy concerns involved with Bellingcat’s work in this instance are not a substantial argument against the kind of reporting they do. “The wrong being concealed far outweighs the claim of ‘this is mine and you can’t have it,’ ” he said.

Even if Russia has negligently left its data protections so weak, Wasserman warns that journalists should not exploit these kinds of sleuthing techniques to dig up salacious but inconsequential information. But the Navalny case is different, he said. “This is a move against a major political opponent taken by one of the most powerful politicians in the world on behalf of bolstering his claim to power,” Wasserman said. “This is big stuff, and in that respect, you’re not going in for trivial reasons, not just because you’re trying to get a story on deadline, but because you’re trying to expose major criminality – and you’re going about it in a very serious way.”

But now Bellingcat and other journalists may have another issue to contend with: Shortly after the Navalny report, Russia moved to crack down on the leaks that have driven the data black market. Legislation to bolster privacy protections for members of the FSB, military intelligence and other agencies is making its way through the State Duma, Russia’s lower parliamentary body. 

“Seems rather late though,” Higgins, Bellingcat’s founder, tweeted last month. “I guess you could say the Bellingcat is out the bag.”

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

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Capitol siege was planned online. Trump supporters now planning the next one

InternationalJan 10. 2021Rioters surround the Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Photo by Amanda Voisard for The Washington Post

By The Washington Post · Craig Timberg, Drew Harwell, Marissa J. Lang

WASHINGTON – The planning for Wednesday’s assault on the U.S. Capitol happened largely in plain view, with chatters in far-right forums explicitly discussing how to storm the building, handcuff lawmakers with zip ties and disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s election – in what they portrayed as responding to orders from President Donald Trump.

This went far beyond the widely reported, angry talk about thronging Washington that day. Trump supporters exchanged detailed tactical advice about what to bring and what to do once they assembled at the Capitol to conduct “citizens arrests” of members of Congress. One poster said, “[expletive] zip ties. I’m bringing rope!”

Such comments were not confined to dark corners of the Web. They were scooped up and catalogued by researchers who made their findings public weeks before a seemingly unprepared Capitol Police force was overrun by thousands of rioters, in an incident that left one officer, one protester and three other people dead.

The question left unanswered is why didn’t authorities prepare more effectively for a storm that many outsiders saw looming on the horizon – especially when those planning the assault were so open about their intentions?

“Given the very clear and explicit warning signs – with Trump supporters expressing prior intent to “storm and occupy Congress” and use “handcuffs and zip ties,” clear plans being laid out on public forums, and the recent precedent of the plot to storm the Michigan Capitol building while Congress was in session – it is truly mind-boggling that the police were not better-prepared,” said Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which was among the research groups that detailed what was coming in the weeks before the Capitol was attacked. It recapped much of this evidence in a report published Saturday.

Capitol Police spokeswoman Eva Malecki did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday.

The desire to prevent a repeat of Wednesday’s attack helped drive Twitter’s decision to suspend Trump’s account after years in which years he challenged their policies against hate speech and inciting violence. The two tweets the company cited in their announcement Friday night were tamer than many during his candidacy or his presidency, but Twitter said it was particularly concerned about contributing to a possible “secondary attack” on the U.S. Capitol and state government facilities next weekend.

Concerns about more violent incidents appear to be well founded. Calls for widespread protests on the days leading up to the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden have been rampant online for weeks. These demonstrations are scheduled to culminate with what organizers have dubbed a “Million Militia March” on Jan. 20 as Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris are to be sworn in on the same Capitol grounds that rioters overran on Wednesday.

“We all knew that tens of thousands of extremists would converge on DC Wednesday, so there’s no excuse for the resourcing failure,” said Brian Harrell, a former Trump administration Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary for infrastructure protection, now chief security officer for AVANGRID, an energy company. “Law enforcement was ill prepared for an event the entire country knew was coming, and one that [the president] has been signaling for weeks… It’s shocking.”

These renewed calls to action have bristled with violent talk and vows to bring guns to Washington in defiance of the city’s strict weapons laws. A new analysis of such posts by Alethea Group, an organization combating disinformation that draws its name from the Greek word for “truth,” found abundant evidence of threatening plans on a range of platforms large and small.

The aggressive and often hateful chatter has appeared on both mainstream sites such as Twitter and Facebook and niche, conservative sites such as TheDonald.win and Parler. The specified locations include the U.S. Capitol and the Mall in Washington, the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City, and locations in Pittsburgh and Columbus, Ohio. Some events, including an “Armed March on All State Capitals,” include localized events in all 50 states.

“REFUSE TO BE SILENCED,” said one online post cited by Alethea Group, calling for an “ARMED MARCH ON CAPITOL HILL & ALL STATE CAPITOLS” for Jan. 17, the last Sunday of Trump’s polarizing presidency. Another post called for action at “DC & All State Capitols” and was signed by “common folk who are tired of being tread upon” declares: “We were warned!”

Parler’s chief operating officer, Jeffrey Wernick, declined to comment. An unnamed moderator for TheDonald wrote an accusatory email in response to a request for comment that used an obscenity to describe Washington Post reporters but did not respond to the substance of the query.

The bitterness and specificity of the posts cited by the Alethea Group resembles what was publicly reported ahead of Wednesday’s assault. In addition to SITE, the Coalition for a Safer Web sent numerous dispatches warning of the trouble brewing, as did Advance Democracy. Online chatter was organized, in some cases, around hashtags such as #StormTheCapitol and included threats to kill Congressional leaders.

Numerous researchers cited a Trump tweet urging supporters to come to Washington on Wednesday, the day of the presidential vote certification in Congress, that said, “Be there, will be wild!”

One poster responded on a pro-Trump forum, “He can’t exactly openly tell you to revolt . . . This is the closest he’ll ever get.” Another poster, according to the SITE report, called for storming the building to “encircle” Congress and “go after the traitors directly.” Another said, “Bring handcuffs and zip ties to DC” – things that later showed up in numerous images of the riot.

“It’s not so much that the cops weren’t aware of it. It’s almost like they were willfully ignorant of the possibility of violence.” said Marc Ginsberg, president of the coalition who personally shared his findings with government officials. “I felt like crawling into a hole after I saw what happened.”

Warnings even came from private citizens, including activists normally wary of the police. One activist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of backlash from the far-right groups, said she spent her Christmas neck-deep in far-right death threats, wading through online forums that detailed plans to smuggle guns into the District, kidnap Democrat lawmakers and violently attack District of Columbia police and racial justice activists.

What she read disturbed her so deeply that she decided to violate one of the cardinal rules of the District activist groups she has protested among since the summer: Call the police. She called the FBI’s tip line on Monday, Dec. 28 and told the woman on the other end of the phone about detailed threats and plans she had seen shared on forums including Parler, Telegram and threads on the website TheDonald. All proved to be major staging grounds for Wednesday’s attack.

“It was a very difficult decision for me to call the FBI, but who else can you tell? They’re explicitly discussing committing federal crimes – attacking the Capitol, attacking the police, attacking us,” said the activist. “I told them, ‘Look, they’re planning to kill members of Congress and they’re openly discussing bringing guns over state lines.’ I thought if that didn’t get their attention nothing would.”

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment Saturday.

Federal, state and local law enforcement have been aggressively building their intelligence capabilities since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks caught the nation off guard. Subsequent investigation pointed to failures to shared pieces of information gathered by various agencies, prompting the creation of fusion centers and other means for transmitting intelligence in the future.

The spread of social media in recent years – and its widespread use as an organizing tool for activists – has made tracking threats that build online easier.

“There’s a big distance between having information and having a threat assessment,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a think tank. “The question is what they did with the intelligence they had? Did they make a proper threat assessment? If not, why not?”

Similar information is flowing freely to authorities now, as the same online forums light up with the same kind of violent chatter.

Some event listings for the days ahead of the inauguration are openly discussing delivering “justice” for Ashli Babbitt, a rioter and Air Force veteran who was fatally shot by police inside the Capitol on Wednesday.

The aggressive and often hateful chatter has appeared on both mainstream sites such as Twitter and Facebook and niche, conservative sites such as TheDonald.win and Parler.

“REFUSE TO BE SILENCED,” said one online post cited by Alethea Group, calling for an “ARMED MARCH ON CAPITOL HILL & ALL STATE CAPITOLS” for Jan. 17, the last Sunday of Trump’s polarizing presidency. Another post calling for action at “DC & All State Capitols” and signed by “common folk who are tired of being tread upon” declares: “We were warned!”

Cindy Otis, vice president of analysis at Alethea said, “So much of the conversation right now is the general making of threats. There’s a risk of these particular dates leading to violence because that’s the kind of amped-up conversation we’re already seeing from people.”