Tag: washington dc

Punishing Rioters Is Wise. Bogus ‘Seditious Conspiracy’ Charges Are Not.

The problem with convicting members of the “western chauvinist” Proud Boys on seditious conspiracy charges is that it wrongly elevates a violent tantrum by a bunch of thugs to the level of an insurrection, and it lets officials who prosecute them puff themselves up as saviors of the republic. Worse, the case took liberties with a statute that is probably best forgotten to arrive at its conclusion when normal criminal law could have punished rioters without putting the criminal justice system through contortions.

Prosecutors High on Their Own Supply

“A jury in the District of Columbia today returned guilty verdicts on multiple felonies against five members of the Proud Boys, finding four of the defendants guilty of seditious conspiracy for their actions before and during the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,” the Department of Justice trumpeted last week. “According to the evidence at trial, in the months leading up to Jan. 6, the defendants plotted to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power, and to prevent the Members of Congress, and the federal law enforcement officers who protect them, from discharging their duties.”

“At my Senate confirmation hearing just over a month after January 6th, I promised that the Justice Department would do everything in its power to hold accountable those responsible for the heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy: the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government,” huffed Attorney General Merrick Garland, a man who gives every impression that he tremendously enjoys the smell of his own emissions. “Today’s verdict is another example of our steadfast commitment to keeping those promises.”

And so, we’re told, the republic is safe from those who would rise against it in insurrection. But before we consign former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and codefendants Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, and Zachary Rehl to the history books alongside Mosby and Quantrill, Confederate guerrillas of the sort who inspired the seditious conspiracy statute to begin with, let’s consider an important obstacle: There’s sparse evidence of a meaningful conspiracy “to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States” as required by law.

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Ex-FBI agent who feds say urged Jan. 6 rioters to kill police worked terrorism task force

An ex-FBI official who allegedly urged rioters to “kill” officers during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was previously the supervisory special agent in charge of Homegrown Violent Extremism for the FBI New York Field Office’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a senior law enforcement official told NBC News.

Jared Wise was arrested in Oregon this week, charged with four misdemeanor counts. After he entered the Capitol and exited through a broken window, an FBI affidavit alleges, Wise yelled at officers outside the Capitol.

“You’re disgusting. You are the Nazi. You are the Gestapo. You can’t see it,” he yelled, according to the bureau. “Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you!”

As officers were knocked down in front of him, Wise turned toward the violence and started yelling again, according to the FBI.

“Yeah, f— them! Yeah, kill ’em!” Wise said, according to the FBI. “Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!”

Wise, according to a senior law enforcement official, served in the homegrown violent extremism role from 2014 to 2017.

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Shocking Allegation: Jan. 6th Provocateur Ray Epps Accused of Pedophilia by Adopted Daughter

The adopted daughter of notorious Jan. 6 provocateur Ray Epps, Tiffany, has come forward with startling allegations of pedophilia against the man who raised her.

In recent Twitter Space interviews hosted by independent journalist Dom Lucre, Tiffany Epps revealed she suffered years of physical and mental abuse and sexual molestation at the hands of her adopted father “James” Ray Epps.

After admitting she last spoke to her adopted father at her brother’s funeral six years ago, Tiffany said, “I don’t speak to him, because he’s a — he’s a fuckin’ pedophile. That’s why I don’t speak to him.”

Lucre acknowledged to Tiffany the FBI looks for people who are “compromised” to hire as assets.

Tiffany evidently brought receipts, with Lucre showing a certificate of adoption from the state of Arizona showing James Ray Epps and his wife Robyn indeed adopted her.

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D.C.’s Test Scores and Absenteeism Rates Are Getting Worse, so Why Are More Students Graduating?

The high school graduation rate in Washington, D.C., is climbing. However, student school performance seems to be falling dramatically. While more and more seniors graduate high school, test scores are down and absenteeism is up.

According to a recent report from the D.C. Policy Center, graduation rates at D.C. public schools and public charter schools have been steadily rising since the 2018–19 school year. In 2022, 75 percent of all students graduated high school in four years, up seven percentage points from 2019. However, this progress is not reflected in measurements tracking students’ academic achievement. On state assessments, the percentage of high school students that “met” or “exceeded” expectations in the math test declined from 18.4 percent in 2019 to just 11 percent in 2022. English scores stayed the same. Absenteeism is also up, with the percentage of students absent for more than 10 percent of the school year reaching a staggering 48 percent in the 2021–22 academic year, increasing from 29 percent three years prior.

Based on academic achievement and school attendance data, fewer D.C. public school students should be graduating high school. Yet the steady rise in graduation rates remains. Why, then, are so many more kids getting high school diplomas?

The answer isn’t exactly clear. One possible reason is increasing grade inflation, meaning that students who haven’t actually learned course material are getting passing grades anyway. There’s an “increase in policy that we’re seeing to not fail students,” Max Eden, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, tells Reason. “You know, 50 percent as the lowest grade kind of policy, which is being picked up in more and more especially urban schools across the country,”

Eden also suggests that D.C. could also be failing to follow its own policies around attendance requirements for graduation. It wouldn’t be the first time District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) have made this blunder. In 2018, an audit of DCPS found that, despite the district’s sharp rise in graduation rates, the increase “was entirely attributable to schools systematically not enforcing their own policies,” says Eden. “And it’s not as though in the wake of these revelations … D.C. really clamped down and you saw the graduation rates plummet. They kind of didn’t do anything to change their policy because they could not stand to have their graduation rates decrease further.”

Unfortunately, graduating kids without necessary academic skills doesn’t lead to better outcomes. Just because more DCPS students are graduating high school doesn’t mean more of them are leaving with important skills.

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Thousands of Hours of Jan. 6 Video Hidden, Withheld from Defendants, Court Filing Says

The U.S. Department of Justice has withheld thousands of hours of video recorded at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, from January 6 criminal defendants, and U.S. Capitol Police might have held back more than 1,300 hours of security video from a congressional oversight committee, a new federal court filing alleges.

Defendant William Pope contends in an update to a previous court filing that he and others charged with crimes at the Capitol that day need access to what should be more than 152,000 hours of video. That is if Capitol Police preserved it all.

“Americans have historically been skeptical of opaque government processes, and that skepticism has never been more intense than it is now regarding January 6,” Pope wrote in a 17-page court filing before U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras.

“Concealment of the Capitol CCTV is fueling public speculation that there is more to January 6 than is being reported.”

Pope, who is representing himself, is seeking full access to the U.S. Department of Justice evidence database so he can use it in his defense.

Pope dissected a declaration from Capitol Police general counsel Thomas DiBiase introduced by federal prosecutors in his case. He also compared it to an earlier DiBiase declaration. In his new filing, Pope calls these documents the “dueling dubious DiBiase declarations.”

“Despite hundreds of January 6 CCTV clips now being public, Mr. DiBiase still believes other footage from those same cameras must be hidden from the American people,” Pope wrote.

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Team Biden’s charging 1,000 more with Jan. 6 crimes to perpetuate a fake political emergency

The Biden administration is planning to charge another thousand Trump supporters with crimes related to the Jan. 6 Capitol clash.

This will perpetuate an atmosphere of political emergency that justifies President Joe Biden’s war on domestic extremism.

But a change in federal judges has turned the Jan. 6 trials into a kangaroo court and makes a mockery of sending nonviolent Trump supporters to prison for threatening American democracy.

More than a thousand people have already been charged with Jan. 6 offenses.

That is equal to almost half of the total number of protesters who entered the Capitol that day.

A corrupt numbers game is at the heart of the Biden propaganda-prosecution campaign.

The more people indicted for Jan. 6, the easier it becomes for the Biden reelection campaign to portray the president as the savior against right-wing tyranny.

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Top Democrat On J6 Committee: We Actually Didn’t Review Any Of The Surveillance Video

After Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired Capitol surveillance footage this week exposing yet more falsehood from the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 and leaving Democrats and their media allies irate, the committee chair on Wednesday said the panel never actually analyzed the crucial footage.

On Monday’s edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News aired the footage of the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, undermining the select committee’s narrative of a “deadly insurrection.” Given access to the video by Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Carlson’s team reviewed over 40,000 hours of footage, which offered proof the committee manipulated audio and video to dramatize the riot for its made-for-TV hearings in an election year.

But in a Wednesday night statement to CNN, select committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., claimed the panel never analyzed the blockbuster footage Fox News aired this week.

“I’m not actually aware of any member of the committee who had access,” Thompson said. “We had a team of employees who kind of went through the video.”

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Capitol Cop Sicknick’s Family is ‘Outraged’ After J6 Security Footage Proves He Wasn’t Murdered

The family of Capitol cop Brian Sicknick says they are “outraged” and are calling for Tucker Carlson to be “silenced” after he aired J6 security footage from the US Capitol building that shows Officer Sicknick was unharmed by election integrity protestors before dying of a stroke the following day. Initially, The New York Times claimed in a now-retracted and proven false report that Sicknick had been beaten to death with a fire extinguisher. Uni-party politicians and their associated media outlets have continued to regurgitate the false claim in an effort to paint January 6th demonstrators as killers and insurrectionists.

The video footage revealed by Tucker Carlson on his Fox News program, Tucker Carlson Tonight, shows Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, himself a Trump supporter, walking about the Capitol building and waving at demonstrators AFTER he was supposedly killed by “insurrectionists.”

The Democrats, together with the Sicknick family, who are calling for Tucker Carlson and other J6 truth-tellers to be “silenced” in the wake of the narrative disruption, have insisted for over two years, along with their corporate media allies, that Sicknick was murdered during the anti-fraud demonstrations. First, they claimed that he was killed after receiving a beating from a fire extinguisher. Then, after a medical examiner ruled that Sicknick died a stroke, they claimed that he died as a result of a fire extinguisher beating, which we now know never happened. 

Though their claims were patently false, the narrative surrounding Officer Sicknick’s death played a central role in the formation of Nancy Pelosi’s J6 Committee, and in the hunting down of American Citizens for exercising their 1st Amendment rights.

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Undercover DC Police Officer Pushed Protesters Toward Capitol, Climbed Over Barricade: Court Filing

Three undercover Metropolitan Police Department officers joined the march of protesters up the northwest side of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021—including one who climbed over a barricade and pushed others toward the Capitol, and another who walked behind Ashli Babbitt and predicted that “someone will get shot,” according to newly disclosed court documents

New court motions filed by Jan. 6 defendant William Pope of Topeka, Kansas, also show MPD bicycle officers stopping four armed men in plainclothes on Jan. 6. The men turned out to be federal agents. Video included with Pope’s filings also shows uniformed MPD officers saying, “we were set up” to fail on Jan. 6.

Information in the court papers will rekindle the debate about the role that undercover officers and agents played in the riots of Jan. 6 and why the U.S. Department of Justice and federal judges have kept the evidence under seal and away from public view.

“This video clearly evidences undercover law enforcement officers urging the crowds to advance up the stairs and scaffolding towards the Capitol on January 6,” Pope wrote in one motion. “The government may claim that incidents like this did not happen, but the facts show they did.

“Since the government cannot be trusted to disclose these facts,” Pope wrote, “it becomes even more important that defense teams, including Pro Se defendants, be able to directly examine the evidence.”

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