A judge has denied bail to Christopher Cantwell, a neo-Nazi who attained internet infamy after video of him crying about Charlottesville went viral.
According to local news outlets WMUR-TV and NBC29, Cantwell is being held without bail after his first court hearing Thursday morning.
Cantwell is facing charges for pepper spraying a counter-protester on the campus of the University of Virginia. The white nationalist from Keene, New Hampshire had claimed he used the pepper spray in self-defense.
Cantwell is facing two counts of the illegal use of tear gas or other gases and one count of malicious bodily injury with a “caustic substance,” explosive or fire -- all felonies.
He turned himself in to a police department in Lynchburg, Virginia on Wednesday. Cantwell is being held at Albemarle County Regional Jail.
Reacting to a report from NBC that a grand jury convened by special counsel Jack Smith looking into possible criminal actions committed by Donald Trumpwill meet this week, former prosecutor Glenn Kirschner issued a warning that the former president could possibly be put on trial after winning re-election which could be very problematic.
Stating that would be uncharted territory, Kirschner raised the specter of a re-elected Trump attempting to get his prosecution shut down.
Speaking with MSNBC host Jen Psaki, Kirschner said the time between a grand jury indictment and a trial can take a year, thus putting a Trump trial uncomfortably close to election day 2024 and beyond.
"I want to ask you something on the timeline as former FBI Director James Comey said, because he indicated that there could be a rush to try to get these indictments out, if indictments are going to be made, in order to finish the trials before the election. Do you think that timeline is possible?" host Psaki asked.
"Yeah, the timing scares me a little bit, Jen," Kirschner admitted. "Because the Speedy Trial Act in federal court says that from the day you are indicted until the day you are supposed to go to trial, 70 days. Do we ever take a federal case to trial in 70 days? The answer is no, never, because the defense asks for continuances and there are motion schedules set."
"The rule of thumb is about a year from the time of indictment to the time of trial, so where does that put us?' he continued. "Summer of 2024, kind of on the cusp of the 2024 election."
"What keeps me up at night is the case is still pending against Donald Trump and hasn't gone to trial; Donald wins the White House and now, what? He orders his own prosecution dismissed. Now courtesy of the Office of Legal Counsel memo we now cannot prosecute a sitting criminal president. That is the stuff of nightmares and fiction novels," he warned.
Fox News host Arthel Neville accused Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX) of "squirming" after he was asked if FBI documents requested by Republicans could exonerate President Joe Biden.
In an interview on Sunday, Neville reported the FBI would
present a document on Monday that Republicans suspect will show criminal dealings between Biden and foreign countries.
"You're going to finally get to see this," Neville said. "You've done a lot of work to make sure this happens."
"Conversely, if it disapproves, disproves, or dispels suspicions and allegations, will that exonerate then Vice President Biden?" she wondered.
"Oh, no, not at all, because it's just once," Fallon replied. "It's just one document."
"And Joe Biden could have ensured that this investigation ended years ago if he's done nothing wrong by simply opening up his records and sharing them," the lawmaker remarked. "His bank records, Hunter Biden's bank records."
Neville asked Fallon if the FBI could be trusted to investigate former President Donald Trump as fairly as Biden.
"Of course, you hope so," Fallon answered. "But you also don't want to see a two-tiered justice system where one party is protected, and the other one is exposed and thrown under the bus, if you will."
Neville accused Fallon of "squirming" instead of answering her questions.
"So Congressman, I mean, you're doing a really good job of sort of squirming around my questions," she said. "What I see you setting up, quite frankly, is that if this document doesn't give you the evidence that you're looking for, then you're going to keep digging. Even if it does, you're going to keep digging.
"So it seems like no matter what is in this document, no matter what the FBI does or doesn't do, they're political," the host added. "So it just is going to have this malaise of just confusion that will keep going and going and going. And I think that the American public would like to get some firm answers and not to have this process."
In light of President Joe Biden's successful budget negotiations with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) the Washington Post's Greg Sargent suggested Democrats use his strategy to get Republicans to ignore their far-right colleagues and their threats that never come to fruition.
As Sargent noted, Biden in both his 2020 presidential campaign and in the recent budget dealings, was able to isolate the MAGA Republicans as outsiders as he dealt with McCarthy.
As he wrote on Sunday, "Biden is operating from a largely unappreciated theory of MAGA, and in some ways, it’s working," before explaining the budget deal came together " even though the deal’s spending cuts are not close to what Republicans sought. Yes, the outcome legitimizes the debt limit as a tool of extortion and imposes cruel new work requirements on many food stamp recipients. But Republicans didn’t use this showdown to crash or cripple the economy, as some observers (including me) worried they might."
The key, he suggested, is that Biden has made a point of focusing on the differences between MAGA Republicans and conservative lawmakers who abhor their extremism.
"Bidenworld did believe that some MAGA Republicans were willing to default and force global economic cataclysm to harm the president’s reelection, a senior Biden adviser tells me, but also that many non-MAGA Republicans ultimately could be induced not to go that far," he explained. "This illuminates Bidenworld’s broader theory of the MAGA GOP: The way to defeat the MAGA threat to the country is to marginalize it within the GOP coalition — that is, to contain it."
As former Biden senior adviser Kate Bedingfield explained, "He has never hesitated to call out the extreme MAGA wing of the Republican Party. But he gives Republican voters and legislators who reject that wing of the party a place to go.”
To which Sargent added, "Biden also plainly believes that conducting the nation’s business on a bipartisan basis is inherently stabilizing. That sometimes requires treating the opposition — or a large swath of it — as a mostly conventional political party, which risks mitigating perceptions of the threat it poses."
