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Family of dead QAnon believer thinks FBI didn’t investigate death because she was at Capitol riot
December 06, 2021
MSNBC host Ayman Mohyeldin this week probed the radicalization of Rosanne Boyland, who died on Jan. 6, 2021 at the Capitol riots, on his latest podcast episode.
The new episode of the podcast, American Radical, dropped Monday and Mohyeldin interviews Boyland's family to ask how she went from an ordinarily happy woman to a quiet, scared conspiracy theorist. Family members recall her presence at Christmas in 2020 but noted she was on her phone the whole time and not engaging with them.
Boyland, like many others before her, went down the rabbit hole of QAnon about a Satanic global child sex trafficking ring run by Democrats. She'd been on YouTube all night when she finally started sending her family members information about it. Boyland was also a recovering alcoholic, and the family feared that she was replacing that addiction with another one: Q.
Her family said that she was outright radicalized by the videos and Facebook posts. They also tried to talk her out of going to Washington, D.C. for the Jan. 6 rally.
READ MORE: Trump trained his MAGA base ‘to view reality as the crisis and violence as the solution’: report
Boyland's family alleges that she never got a full investigation into her death because she was dismissed as nothing more than a supporter of then-President Donald Trump. They want another investigation so that they can find what really happened.
Police body cam videos show Boyland in a crowd of people trying to push past the police line. She goes down and people begin screaming her name. Her friend began dragging people out of the way and tried to save her life.
The medical examiner found that she'd died of a drug overdose of Adderall. The New York Times collected videos that showed they believe Boyland was trampled, though both could be true.
Listen to the podcast here and see the interview with Boyland's family below:
Rosanne Boyland radicalized by youtube died on Jan. 6 www.youtube.com
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David Perdue is now a Trump 'vassal' whose campaign must be stopped at all costs: conservative
December 06, 2021
Conservative Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen made it clear on Monday that he doesn't think much of former Sen. David Perdue's (R-GA) decision to run a primary campaign against incumbent Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.
In his latest column, Olsen takes aim at Perdue for echoing former President Donald Trump's false claims about the 2020 election in the Peach State, which he narrowly lost to President Joe Biden by just under 12,000 votes.
"Perdue, in his announcement video, said Kemp’s refusal to bow to Trump’s pressure is why Republicans lost the Senate runoff," he writes. "Perdue also took aim at Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who also refused to bow to Trump’s demands and certified the November election results. Trump is expected to reward Perdue for his fealty with an endorsement soon, thereby making clear that Perdue is his vassal."
Olsen goes on to argue that a defeat of Kemp at the hands of a Trump-backed challenger will send a chilling signal to GOP officials throughout the country.
"Independents concerned about our democracy should also back Kemp in the Republican primary," he writes. "Kemp and Raffensperger are the national poster children for Republican refusal to kowtow to Trump’s unconscionable demands. If they lose their bids for reelection, Republican officeholders across the country will reassess whether they could withstand similar onslaughts."
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‘Comic buffoonery’: Head of GOP-backed election review asks court to arrest Green Bay and Madison mayors
December 06, 2021
Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who is leading Assembly Republicans’ partisan review of the 2020 presidential election, took an extreme step last week when he asked a Waukesha County judge to order the Waukesha County Sheriff’s Office to arrest the mayors of Green Bay and Madison.
Gableman’s threat to arrest leaders of the opposing party continued his antagonism of Democrats after an appearance in front of the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections earlier in the week resulted in a shouting match with Rep. Mark Spreitzer (D-Beloit).
Gableman’s call for the arrest of Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich and Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway stems from his long and convoluted attempts to compel, through subpoenas, elections-related documents from the cities and testimony from the officials.
Earlier this year, Gableman emailed a request to retain documents to a number of cities across the state from a Gmail account under the name “John Delta.” A number of those cities had the email go into their spam folders. Once the cities received the subpoenas, many of them pointed out that the requested documents had already been provided to the committee that Gableman nominally works for. After working with city staff to narrow and define the request for documents in October, Gableman told WISN that testimony from city leaders might not be necessary.
A continued point of dispute over the testimony of local officials has been Gableman’s desire to interview the mayors in private, rather than in public in front of the Assembly elections committee. A lawsuit over this issue and the testimony of members and staff of the Wisconsin Elections Commission is currently being decided in Dane County Circuit Court.
Attorneys for the cities of Green Bay and Madison have said they reached out to Gableman’s office about the details for potential testimony but never received a response and hadn’t heard anything about the matter until his petition for the mayors to be arrested.
Jeff Mandell, an attorney for Genrich, requested that Gableman’s petition for the mayors’ arrest be dismissed. Mandell says if Gableman’s work weren’t so serious, his actions would be the stuff of comedy.
“If the stakes weren’t so high and what he was seeking wasn’t so serious it would be kind of funny … the intersection between the comic buffoonery of this and the serious consequences and the high stakes that make it not funny,” Mandell says. “I will say this is a pattern we’ve seen where the special counsel does not provide information to, or address the cities from whom he claims to want information, but instead speaks directly to the public or the Legislature and in doing so uses a bunch of fancy legal words to make it sound like what he’s doing is important and legitimate but those words, they are legal words, but they don’t line up with what he’s trying to do. Given he was on the Wisconsin Supreme Court it’s kind of weird.”
In a letter to Waukesha County Judge Ralph Ramirez, Mandell asked for the petition for arrests to be dismissed on a number of grounds. First, Mandell says Gableman is not part of one of the bodies of state government that is empowered to request such an order. Second, he says Waukesha County isn’t the proper place to file this request. Third, he says it’s not clear that a Waukesha County judge has the ability to send sheriff’s deputies across the state to arrest a mayor in a different county. Finally, for such an order to be granted the mayors would have had to be acting unreasonably, which he says is plainly not the case.
“Even he acknowledges he doesn’t have the power to arrest anyone,” Mandell says. “It would be like going to a doctor to get a prescription to give to someone else to get the drugs. More specifically what had happened in Green Bay and with the other cities, there was a provision of documents that was understood to set aside the subpoena requests and with those documents came a statement that if the office of special counsel wanted additional information, they should be in touch and we’d consider the requests. While Mr. Gableman never responded to our response, he did tell a number of media outlets there were no further requirements, ‘How dare you not obey my unilateral changes to these subpoenas I said no longer had any effect.’”
A hearing in the case has been scheduled for Dec. 22 but Mandell says Ramirez could take a number of actions, including dismissing the petition, transferring the case to Dane County to be combined with the already existing lawsuit or waiting for the Dane County case to be resolved.
As Gableman is trying to send sheriff’s deputies after Democratic mayors, his review and the legislators who’ve ordered it are facing their own troubles on the issue of transparency.
Until this week, many of the people who were working and how much they were making, as well as other documents related to the investigation, remained secret. Media outlets and the government watchdog group American Oversight sued for the release of these records in October.
Last month, a Dane County judge ordered that Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester), who has authorized the review, release the records with a Nov. 19 deadline. On Friday, American Oversight asked for the judge to hold Vos in contempt for failing to provide the records.
American Oversight requested that Vos be fined $2,000 for each day he fails to provide the requested records.
“At the same time that his hand-selected Special Counsel is trying to have local officials detained for failing to comply with his contradictory and ridiculous subpoenas, Speaker Vos is flagrantly defying an actual court order to release records to the public,” Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight, said. “This shell game demands accountability and needs to end.”
Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on Facebook and Twitter.
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