Trump supporters storm the US Capitol: News and updates

While it’s not yet clear whether former President Donald Trump will face legal consequences for his role in the January 6 insurrection, those who stormed the Capitol continue to do so as two developments made evident this week.

On Wednesday, one of the rioters — Richard Barnett, who is known for being photographed with his feet on a desk in then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office — was sentenced to four and a half years in prison after being convicted on eight charges by a jury, including civil disorder.

On Friday, the Republican National Committee officially stated that the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, which left at least five dead and about 140 injured, was “legitimate political discourse.”

In a two-page censure resolution condemning Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their participation in the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack, the RNC wrote that “Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse, and they are both utilizing their past professed political affiliation to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes.”

On Thursday, federal prosecutors charged Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and 10 others with seditious conspiracy for their role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

That charge — the most serious yet to come out of the investigation — is one of several in the indictment unsealed Thursday, which alleges Rhodes and his co-defendants brought small arms to the Washington, DC, area; engaged in combat training to prepare for the attack; and made plans to stage quick-reaction forces to support insurrectionists.

A few days after the Capitol insurrection last January, the FBI got two tips identifying an Ohio man named Walter Messer as a participant, and both cited his social media posts about being there. To verify those tips, the FBI turned to three companies that held a large amount of damning evidence against Messer, simply as a result of his normal use of their services: AT&T, Facebook, and Google.

AT&T gave the FBI Messer’s telephone number and a list of cell sites he used, including one that covered the US Capitol building at the time of the insurrection, per the criminal complaint against Messer. Facebook told the FBI that the phone number provided by AT&T was linked to Messer’s Facebook account, where he posted several selfies from inside the Capitol during the riot.

A $1.9 billion emergency funding bill to boost security at the US Capitol in the wake of the January 6 insurrection barely passed the House on Thursday. The measure, which would also provide additional personal security for lawmakers facing an intensifying wave of threats and harassment in Washington and their home districts, received no Republican support, and exposed fissures within the Democratic Party over the issue of increasing funding for any police force.

The bill ultimately passed on Thursday, following last-minute negotiations led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with 213 votes for the bill and 212 against.

On Sunday, a second House Republican suggested that, if a congressional commission examining the January 6 attack on the US Capitol materializes, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) could soon receive a subpoena to testify.

Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) joined former Republican House conference chair Liz Cheney (R-WY), who was ousted from that job Wednesday, in suggesting that a subpoena could be on the table for McCarthy, telling CNN’s Dana Bash on State of the Union that “I would suspect Kevin would be subpoenaed.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) renewed her call for a congressional commission to investigate the January 6 Capitol insurrection in a “Dear Colleague” letter sent to her Democratic House colleagues Friday.

The letter, sent to mark 100 days since the attempted revolt, indicated that Pelosi recently sent another proposal to Republican House leadership seeking to create a formal group in the vein of the 9/11 Commission.

Though the Senate voted to acquit former President Donald Trump of inciting the Capitol insurrection on Saturday, some Democrats are still seeking to ensure that he and his associates, as well as the far-right hate groups that participated in the attack, are held accountable.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, sued Trump, his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and two far-right groups, the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers, on Tuesday, claiming that they conspired to interfere with Congress’s certification of the 2020 election results.

The number of active hate groups in the United States has fallen by about 10 percent in the past year. This isn’t necessarily good news.

There were 838 active hate groups this year, compared to 940 in 2019, according to an annual report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The organization attributes the drop to the fact that these groups have become more diffuse and difficult to track, largely because of changes in technology. The pandemic has also played a role in limiting in-person activities.

On Monday night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) discussed her experience during the Capitol Hill attack in a lengthy Instagram livestream. It is one of the most harrowing accounts of the insurrection that has been made public to date — and a testament to just how devastating the event was to our democracy.

At 1 pm on January 6, Ocasio-Cortez remembers trying to decide what she wanted to eat for lunch. All of a sudden, she started hearing a series of loud bangs on the doors leading into her office. She runs over to an aide she refers to as “G” — her legislative director, Geraldo Bonilla-Chavez — who tells her to “run and hide.”

A Wall Street Journal investigation has found a number of key allies of former President Donald Trump — including far-right media personality Alex Jones and Julie Jenkins Fancelli, heir to the Publix supermarket fortune — helped to fund the rally that preceded the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 that left five dead.

According to reporters Shalini Ramachandran, Alexandra Berzon, and Rebecca Ballhaus, Jones pledged $50,000 of his own money to the event, and organized additional funds, including a $300,000 contribution from Jenkins Fancelli, who is a major GOP donor.

Two members of the Proud Boys, a far-right hate group, have been charged with conspiracy for their involvement in the violent storming of the US Capitol on January 6.

On Friday night, federal prosecutors announced the charges against Dominic Pezzola, 43, of Rochester, New York, and William Pepe, 31, of Beacon, New York, saying they “engaged in a conspiracy to obstruct, influence, impede, and interfere with law enforcement officers engaged in their official duties in protecting the U.S. Capitol and its grounds on Jan. 6, 2021.”

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says Senate Democrats are engaging in “cancel culture” for filing a request with the Ethics Committee to investigate his role in the January 6 Capitol insurrection. His response was to file his own complaint.

“Your baseless allegations are in that sense unfortunately typical of today’s leftwing cancel culture, a culture that tramples on the democratic traditions that left and right once defended together,” Hawley wrote to senators in filing his complaint.

On January 20, Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. Though the tradition of the transfer of power provided many with hope on Wednesday, the inauguration happened under the shadow of a violent insurrection.

Just two weeks before, thousands of Americans, in the shape of a largely white mob, stormed the very building where Biden took his presidential oath. The mob, under the spell of fabrications about the presidential election being stolen — especially in states with high Black populations — sought to “take back the country” through violence. The scene, just one day after Democrats secured control of Congress through the election of a Black senator and a Jewish senator in Georgia, mirrored coup attempts from the Reconstruction era.

Within days of the January 6 Capitol insurrection, outgoing President Donald Trump’s internet presence was in upheaval. Trump’s social media accounts were suspended across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, and TikTok.

The same was true for many of Trump’s more extremist followers. Twitter suspended more than 70,000 accounts primarily dedicated to spreading the false right-wing conspiracy theory QAnon. Apple, Google, and Amazon Web Services banned the right-wing Twitter alternative Parler, effectively shutting down the site indefinitely (though it’s attempting to return) and relegating many right-wingers to the hinterlands of the internet.

Capitol Police may have allowed nearly every member of a mob of pro-Trump rioters to enter, vandalize, and leave the Capitol building scot-free, but internet sleuths and official investigators are determined to hold them accountable. The reckoning is underway: Several people have now been charged with riot-related crimes, and law enforcement officials promise more charges are to come.

There were few immediate consequences for the riots that left dozens injured and five dead; only about a dozen of the hundreds of invaders were arrested at the scene. In the days that followed, however, law enforcement and civilians alike have doggedly attempted to identify those who participated. Due to the brazenness of many members of the mob, investigators have plenty of evidence. The result: As of January 19, more than 100 people have been arrested for the Capitol riots, and their social media posts are often cited in the complaints against them.

On President Donald Trump’s final full day in office, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blamed him by name for the riot that occurred at the US Capitol on January 6.

“The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people, and they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government which they did not like,” McConnell said Tuesday on the Senate floor.

Parler, the largely unmoderated social network popular with conservatives, often found fans by lampooning Big Tech. But after the site got knocked off the internet the weekend following the US Capitol insurrection, it’s more apparent than ever how even fringe services must rely on mainstream technology providers. Now Parler is apparently trying to rebuild — with or without Big Tech’s help.

Earlier this month, it was reported that Parler had registered its domain with Epik, a web hosting service that has previously housed Gab, the far-right forum used by the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter. Epik had previously said that it had no relationship with Parler, though at least one leader at the company seems open to working with the platform, and told Recode it wanted to help Parler build out stronger moderation of its content.

Before he evolved into an extremist, Anthime Joseph “Tim” Gionet, better known on the right-wing internet as “Baked Alaska,” was Extremely Online.

Gionet, whom the FBI arrested Friday for his role in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, spent years chasing clout across the web. And in doing so, he left a track record of a bizarre — but familiar — downward spiral into white supremacy.

Facebook has temporarily banned ads for gun accessories and tactical gear through at least January 22, two days after President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.

The decision comes after BuzzFeed News reported that, despite concerns from employees, the tech company had advertised body armor, gun holsters, and other military equipment alongside content about election misinformation and the Capitol riot.

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) issued a scathing critique of President Donald Trump, right-wing media, and the influence of the QAnon conspiracy theory among mainstream conservatives in an essay published Saturday in the Atlantic, arguing that the January 6 storming of the US Capitol should be a warning sign that something has gone deeply awry in Republican politics.

“The violence that Americans witnessed—and that might recur in the coming days—is not a protest gone awry or the work of ‘a few bad apples,’” Sasse wrote. “It is the blossoming of a rotten seed that took root in the Republican Party some time ago and has been nourished by treachery, poor political judgment, and cowardice.”

An overwhelming majority of Americans disapprove of the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, but most Republicans say President Donald Trump bears no responsibility for the assault — and nearly half (48 percent) say Republican lawmakers didn’t go far enough in supporting the president’s efforts to overturn the election results, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The poll, which surveyed 1,002 US adults from January 10 to 13, paints a striking picture: It finds a national consensus on the impropriety of what transpired at the Capitol but also reinforces familiar divisions on who is to blame for the episode.

Four US House committees have jointly opened an investigation into what law enforcement and intelligence agencies knew about the potential for violence against Congress in the days and weeks leading up to the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.

“Security and logistical preparations before January 6 were not consistent with the prospect of serious and widespread violence,” reads a Saturday letter cosigned by the chairs of the Intelligence Committee (Adam Schiff, D-CA), Homeland Security Committee (Bennie Thompson, D-MS), Oversight Committee (Carolyn Maloney, D-NY), and Judiciary Committee (Jerry Nadler, D-NY).

As investigations of last week’s riot at the US Capitol continue, one thing has become abundantly clear: The people involved were not just “fringe” elements, disconnected from the mainstream of society.

Prominent among the rioters was a group with a lot of institutional and social power — police officers and other law enforcement officials. Indeed, nearly 30 sworn officers have been identified so far as attendees to the rally leading to Wednesday’s riot, according to NPR.

US Capitol Police were aware of the potential for violence specifically targeting Congress on January 6, at least three days before pro-Trump insurgents overwhelmed USCP officers and stormed the US Capitol, according to a Friday scoop by the Washington Post.

A January 3 memo from the Capitol Police intelligence division, parts of which were obtained by the Post, highlights the threat of violence by supporters of President Donald Trump in striking detail — and only adds to confusion about how the attack occurred anyway.