On Monday, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman revealed that former President Donald Trump has taken a redoubled hardline against vaccine mandates in large part because he is spooked about his own base turning on him for his previous comments in favor of the vaccines.
Haberman's comments came in response to New York Times statistics flagged by The Intercept D.C. bureau chief Ryan Grim, revealing that "in counties where Donald Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote, the virus has killed about 47 out of every 100,000 people since the end of June," compared to just 10 out of every 100,000 people who live in counties that voted heavily for President Joe Biden.
Trump, who historically has promoted anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and whose base is among the most vaccine-resistant groups in the United States, has previously made some efforts to promote the vaccine, whose development was spurred along by federal funding appropriated during his administration.
But his efforts have met resistance; at a rally in Alabama, the former president was booed by his own supporters for suggesting people should get vaccinated.
CNN host Jake Tapper on Monday warned that former President Donald Trump likely isn't done trying to overthrow the constitutional order of the United States government.
While discussing Trump's remarks over the weekend at a Georgia rally, in which he doubled down on his false claims about the 2020 election, Tapper said it sounded as though the former president is gearing up for a 2024 run at the White House in which he once again would not accept the election results if he lost.
"I think it is clear if you listen to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and others who care about this issue... Trump is going to try again," he said. "And he's going to be better positioned."
Democratic strategist Michael Starr Hopkins warned that Trump has succeeded in making American elections illegitimate in the eyes of his own supporters in the wake of his 2020 defeat at the hands of President Joe Biden -- and it's setting the United States up for a potential crackup.
"Trump has spent his entire career trying to delegitimize the press and now delegitimize the government," he said. "What do we do when half the country doesn't believe our elections are legitimate? That's how you break down a democracy."
Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) angrily lashed out at the media after an Associated Press report led to accusations that she corruptly abused her office.
According to the AP, Noem's daughter was denied a real estate appraiser license in 2020 by the South Dakota state employee who runs the agency. Noem then called the woman into her office, as well as her daughter.
It wasn't long after that Noem's daughter got her license. One week later, the Secretary of Labor called for the "retirement" of agency head Sherry Bren.
What became even more bizarre is that Bren filed an age discrimination complaint. She then was given a $200,000 check and Bren withdrew her age discrimination case.
"Exactly what transpired at the July 27, 2020, meeting in the governor's office isn't clear. Noem declined an interview request and her office declined to answer detailed questions about the meeting," said the report.
Instead of denying the claim or even saying that the governor wasn't involved in the Secretary of Labor's internal affairs, Noem attacked the media for supposedly smearing her family -- even though the core questions surround Noem's own actions.
"The Associated Press is disparaging the Governor's daughter in order to attack the Governor politically – no wonder Americans' trust in the media is at an all-time low," Noem's spokesman Ian Fury said.
Noem then turned to Twitter to further attack the press, saying that they were going after her daughter and tried to make her daughter the focus of the scandal instead of her own efforts to use the government for her own personal purposes.
Responses to the tweet overwhelmingly called her out for throwing her children under the bus and trying to make the scandal about her kids instead of being about her.
Others called out the hypocrisy of Noem, by pointing to her attacks on President Joe Biden's son Hunter, who doesn't serve in government or work for the White House in any capacity.
Noem's name has been thrown around as a possible replacement of Vice President Mike Pence on the 2024 Donald Trump ticket if the former president attempts to run again.
NEW YORK — “The View” has averted a COVID crisis, but not before a little chaos. Co-hosts Ana Navarro and Sunny Hostin were back on the air Monday, just three days after their COVID tests, which sent Friday’s show reeling, turned out to be false positives. Navarro and Hostin were yanked from the roundtable Friday in the middle of the show, minutes before Vice President Kamala Harris was supposed to walk out, after their test results came back. Navarro said over the weekend that she had subsequently tested negative three times. “It was just an unbelievable set of circumstances and we found out ...
President Joe Biden has a goal for all U.S. electricity to come from zero-carbon sources by 2035. To get there, he's counting on Congress to approve an ambitious package of incentives and penalties designed to encourage utilities to clean up their power sources. That plan, part of the Democrats' proposed budget package, may be in trouble.
We asked Michael Oppenheimer, director of the Center for Policy Research on Energy and Environment at Princeton University, about the potential impact and alternatives the administration has for reaching its goals.
1. Natural gas was often described as a bridge fuel that could ease the transition from highly polluting coal-fired power plants to scaling up cleaner energy like solar and wind. Can it still play that role, as Sen. Manchin suggests?
My position on natural gas has changed over the years. For decades, I and a lot of other people thought natural gas would be a bridge fuel. It emitted about half as much carbon dioxide as coal, and it got much cheaper as hydraulic fracturing expanded to make the U.S. the leading gas producer. Utilities on their own started switching away from coal, and anticipation of the Obama administration's greenhouse gas regulations pushed them faster.
But natural gas has a problem. Its drilling operations, transmission pipelines and distribution systems in cities – every part of that system – are considerably more leaky than the Environmental Protection Agency estimated. Natural gas is composed mainly of methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent per molecule than carbon dioxide, though it doesn't stay in the atmosphere as long.
We also now know that the world is very close to entering a climatic danger zone. The latest IPCC report lays out the scientific evidence in the strongest terms for how human activities, particularly those that burn oil, gas and coal, are unequivocally warming the planet in ways that are causing rapid changes in temperatures, precipitation, ice and sea level, and extreme weather.
One of the quickest things a country can do to slow its climate impact is to eliminate methane emissions. The gas stays in the atmosphere for only about 12 years, compared to centuries or longer for carbon dioxide. Yet even with minimal leakage, natural gas combustion still produces carbon dioxide. If you're trying to plan a U.S. energy future, you don't want to encourage a lot of new fossil fuel infrastructure and exploration. It can't be a bridge for long enough to justify the investment – the climate can't bear it.
2. Can the US slow down the pace of change and give the energy industry more time, like some utility CEOs and Sen. Manchin have suggested?
Climate models show that extreme events, like the heat waves and flooding the U.S. saw this summer, are already more common around 1.5 degrees, and they only worsen after that. It's going to be harder to protect ourselves beyond 1.5 degrees, and much harder beyond 2 degrees. The costs are already getting prohibitive for many communities.
For example, sea level rise is accelerating fast enough that by 2050 in a world headed for 2 degrees of warming, many coastal locations around the world, including in the U.S., will face high-water levels every year equal to or greater than their historical 100-year flooding event. Eventually, in some areas, the daily high tide will bring flooding equivalent to that high-water mark.
I've been working on these issues since 1981, and it's been the same story over and over again from many industry officials and politicians – what's the hurry; let's wait another year. There was always some argument for slowing action down or putting it off indefinitely. That's why we're currently facing one climate disaster after another.
The costs get higher the longer the world delays.
How global temperatures have shifted year by year since 1951.
3. The fossil fuel industry would benefit from billions of dollars in support through the infrastructure bill for carbon capture and storage, which could allow power plants, refineries and factories to continue generating greenhouse gases. Sen. Manchin supports that technology, but can it meet the U.S. goals?
The industry was talking about carbon capture and storage as a silver bullet 20 years ago, yet today there are still only about two dozen commercial-scale projects operating worldwide. In the U.S., most involve ethanol or fertilizer production or natural gas processing plants, and almost all of them send the captured carbon dioxide for use in enhanced oil recovery, a technique for forcing more oil out of wells. Two attempts to build large power plants with carbon capture, in Illinois and Mississippi, generated a lot of buzz in the early 2000s but ultimately failed, with billions of dollars in cost overruns.
The technology was tooexpensive then, and it hasn't gotten cheaper. Our government never found a way to do carbon capture and storage demonstration projects on the scale needed to get out the bugs and reduce the price.
The next question is what are you going to do with all that captured carbon dioxide? There will be local and environmental justice concerns about pipelines and burial. While I recognize that power lines engender opposition, too, why not just spend the effort improving the electric transmission and storage system, to create a smart grid for renewable energy, reserving carbon sequestration for later in the century in case we need to resort to direct air capture of carbon dioxide?
The federal budget isn't the end game. It's only one step. Because Democrats in Congress plan to use the reconciliation process to move this legislation, this bill has to be about financial incentives and penalties. Beyond that, there is still room for EPA to adopt new and stronger regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.
While those can be undone by future presidents, as we saw during the Trump administration, the public and Congress are now starting to understand the price of unrestrained climate change. It's hard to ignore wildfires that force you from your home or storms that flood your street.
That means it will get harder for the next president to simply repeal all the regulations the way the Trump administration tried to do. I believe the value of having a stable regulatory system will become evident very quickly.
My colleagues at Princeton published a report last winter that laid out five pathways to get America to net zero emissions. They focused on a few pillars, emphasizing energy efficiency, electrification, renewable energy, biofuels, nuclear energy and carbon capture. In my view, the first three are promising, the last three problematic.
A rapid transition remains doable – but it's bigger than the slice of the $3.5 trillion now proposed for dealing with climate change. It will require federal mandates, incentives and disincentives to move a lot of private investment away from fossil fuels and into renewables. Mostly, it will require political will and determination – commodities that seem to be the scarcest of all resources.
During the United States' presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump was clearly the preferred candidate of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin. Brian Murphy, who served as undersecretary for intelligence and analysis in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from 2018 until 2020, discussed the Russian government's preference for Trump during an interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos over the weekend — a preference that members of Trump's administration didn't want the intelligence expert to talk about, he said.
Murphy told Stephanopoulos, "In late 2019, early 2020, it was highly classified that President Putin had ordered all of the Russian services to denigrate all of the Democratic candidates and support then-President Trump. So, there was a push-on, across government, at the senior levels — the cabinet officials — to do everything possible to stifle, to get anything out to the American public or our overseers in Congress about that interference. They did not want the American public to know that the Russians were supporting Trump and denigrating what would soon be President Biden."
After the 2020 election, many leaders in Western Europe — including French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson — were quick to congratulate Joe Biden on his victory. Putin, however, waited more than a month to congratulate Biden.
New Hampshire is far from a liberal bastion. The state voted for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016 by a margin of less than one half of one percent, although it went for Joe Biden over the twice-impeached incumbent by seven points. For 30 years, starting in 1978 the Granite State elected a long line of Republican Senators, a history that was unbroken until 2008 by Jeanne Shaheen, the state's former governor.
On Monday, Jonathan P. Baird wrote in the Concord Monitor, "Former President Donald Trump organized a coup to overthrow democracy in America. Although he was not ultimately successful, Trump tried to steal the last presidential election to seize power for himself. In the process, he turned a formerly conservative party into a party of extremists. The Republican Party now poses a fascist threat to democracy."
"Trump's actions during his presidential term crossed many legal and ethical lines," Baird, who is also an attorney, writes. "Arguably, refusing to support a peaceful transition of power after losing the election and organizing an insurrection to topple democracy are his worst crimes."
Noting that "that there is no federal prohibition on charging a former president who committed crimes while in office," Baird observes the "biggest obstacle to prosecution is the seeming lack of will to do it."
But there is plenty of apparent evidence on the side of justice.
"Trump was in cahoots with the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and others to prevent Congress and Vice President Pence from certifying an election winner," Baird argues.
"Trump aided and abetted assault and battery against U.S. Capitol police officers. When he had the opportunity to call off attackers, he refused. There is a strong argument that his speech alone on January 6 incited a riot. Back on December 19, he had tweeted that people should come to Washington D.C. on January 6. He said it would be 'wild.'"
Arizona state Sen. Sonny Borrelli (R) argued on Monday that the results of a so-called audit in his state prove that the 2020 presidential election should be "nullified."
During an interview on Real America's Voice, host Steve Bannon asked Borrelli to react to the results of the audit, which was conducted by a company called Cyber Ninjas.
"What we're seeing right now is a psychological operation," the lawmaker said of the audit results. "What they're trying to do is a psychological operation of disinformation, misinformation."
Bannon wondered if alleged criminal activity found during the audit "rises to the level of nullifying the electors for Joe Biden."
"It's more like nullification," Borrelli agreed. "Because we have evidence of a criminal behavior here and therefore you cannot allow that to happen."
He also disagreed with reports that concluded "Biden won" because the current president gained votes during the audit.
"You know what? Yeah, OK, we verified the numbers, we verified what we have here," he said. "But we have proof fraudulent ballots were in the system because signatures were not verified, so on and so forth."
"I do believe it's important to nullify the results of the presidential election and reclaim the electors," Borrelli added.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has introduced nine separate bills in an effort to undermine President Joe Biden's ability to mandate Covid-19 vaccines.
The Salt Lake Tribunecompiled a list of the bills that Lee introduced last week.
If enacted into law, the bills would allow the United States government to be sued over vaccine mandates and allow anyone to opt-out of mandates on "the basis of a personal belief."
Biden recently announced that all federal employees and contractors would be required to receive a Covid-19 vaccine or be subject to periodic testing. The president has also asked the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to create a policy requiring businesses with 100 or more employees to mandate vaccines.
Read the description of Lee's bills below as compiled by the Tribune.
S.2840 - A bill to permit civil actions against the United States for COVID-19 vaccination mandates.
S.2841 - A bill to require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to publicly disclose information regarding adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccines.
S.2842 - A bill to amend title 10, United States Code, to prohibit the Secretary of Defense from requiring that members of the armed forces receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
S.2843 - A bill to prohibit the imposition of a fine, fee, or taxation on any person for violation of a COVID-19 vaccine mandate issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration or any other executive agency.
S.2846 - A bill to require Federal agencies to acknowledge, accept, and agree to truthfully present, natural immunity pertaining to COVID-19 pursuant to promulgating certain regulations.
S.2847 - A bill to prohibit the Federal Government from mandating vaccination against COVID-19 for interstate travel.
S.2848 - A bill to exempt individuals with a personal health concern from complying with a Federal COVID-19 mandate.
S.2849 - A bill to stipulate that nothing in federal law provides a Federal agency with the authority to mandate that an individual be inoculated by a COVID-19 vaccine.
S.2850 - A bill to exempt individuals from complying with a Federal COVID-19 vaccine mandate on the basis of a personal belief, and for other purposes.
Critics of former President Donald Trump — from liberals and progressives to centrist Democrats to right-wing Never Trump conservatives — were hoping that his influence on the Republican Party would go away after President Joe Biden was inaugurated on January 20. Instead, Trumpism and the Big Lie are as toxic as ever. Historian Timothy Snyder, during a September 26 appearance on CNN's "Reliable Sources," warned that the Big Lie — the false and debunked claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump because of widespread voter fraud — is alive and well on right-wing media outlets. And he stressed that mainstream media outlets need to be much more aggressive in calling out the GOP's war on democracy and game plan for stealing the 2024 election.
Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, told host Brian Stelter that thanks to the persistence of Big Lie, democracy itself is on the line in the United States. The historian stressed that the Trumpian attack on U.S. democracy didn't start with the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol Building.
Speaking from New Haven, Connecticut, Snyder told Stelter, "January 6 begins in 2016. Mr. Trump says, way back then, he's not going to respect the election results. When he's running for office in 2020, he says he's not going to respect the election results. What he's trying to do — what he's, in large measures, succeeded in doing — is creating an atmosphere, precisely, where people don't take the vote itself seriously. They take what he says about it seriously."
When Stelter asked Snyder what "role" right-wing media play in this "scenario," the historian responded, "Right-wing media, with a few honorable exceptions, is one giant safe space for the Big Lie. What's happened is that rather than facts coming up from below to shape stories, we now have one enormous fiction — which is that Mr. Trump won this election. And that one enormous fiction, rather than casting light on things, just casts a huge shadow. Anything that doesn't fit that fiction can't be talked about. Anything which seems like it might somehow support that fiction gets all the airtime."
Snyder's appearance on "Reliable Sources" came only three days after the Washington Post published a sobering essay/op-ed by Never Trump conservative Robert Kagan, who warned that "the United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War." Stelter mentioned Kagan's article to Snyder, who didn't find Kagan's dire warning to be the least bit alarmist. In fact, Stelter and Snyder seemed to agree that Kagan's warning is spot on.
Stelter asked Snyder if the mainstream media need to be spending more time talking about "worst-case scenarios" in the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election, and the historian responded, "Those aren't worst-case scenarios. That's the mainstream…. When you have a two-party system and one of the parties is lining up against democracy, we're not talking about a worst-case scenario — we're talking about a situation where democracy is not something that can be taken for granted as a background to all the other news. Democracy itself is the foreground, and the struggle as to whether this country as to whether this country will be democratic in the future…. is the main story…. The story is whether we have a democracy or not."
Echoing the warnings in Kagan's article, Snyder added that the GOP has a game plan for stealing the 2024 election.
Snyder told Stelter, "The game is we cast doubt on 2020, we pass voter suppression laws…. If we get ahold of the House and the Senate in 2022, we plan not to certify a Democrat if he wins in 2024. We pass memory laws and voter suppression laws at the state level which give the states themselves the right to allocate electors…. We do all of that to aim for an outcome in 2024 in which the guy who loses is nevertheless the winner…. That is not a worst-case scenario. That is happening before our eyes right now."
Two of the Republican "show ponies" accused of fomenting the Jan. 6 insurrection are now decapitating President Joe Biden's ability to protect national security, according to a new report.
Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) have been blocking scores of nominees to critical national security positions in the Departments of Defense, State, Justice and Homeland Security, leaving the United States more vulnerable to attack, argued Daily Beast columnist David Rothkopf.
"Among the lessons we learned from the 9/11 Commission Report is the imperative of swift confirmation of a new administration's nominees, especially in the national security and foreign policy realm," said assistant Secretary of State and department spokesperson Ned Price. "Yet today, some 80 State Department nominees — including some of our most important posts — are pending before the Senate. Some of those have already been voted out of committee on a strong bipartisan basis and merely await a floor vote. The bottom line is that America needs its full team on the field if we are to confront challenges and seize opportunities most effectively. And, right now, we don't have that team at our disposal."
The 9/11 Commission found that only 57 percent of such positions were filled as of Sept. 11, 2001, while today only 26 percent of the new administration's appointees have been confirmed, including just one ambassador.
"That this is not more of a scandal is scandalous," said Loren DeJonge Schulman, vice president for research at the Partnership for Public Service. "The broken and deeply politicized Senate confirmation process made our country less safe then — the 9/11 attacks spotlighted that. It has worsened significantly since that time and it makes us less safe now."
"Our incredible body of federal civil servants is why this trend is an embarrassment, not a continuous disaster," Schulman added. "They serve admirably and responsibly no matter the season. However, there are real limits to the power, reach, authority, and effectiveness of acting officials. Many are performing multiple roles. There is no denying the 'substitute teacher' perception even with the most competent acting officials. Further, long-term utilization of acting officials — particularly when hampered by Senate inaction — actually ends up undermining Congressional oversight."
Cruz put a hold on 30 nominees until the Biden administration agreed to sanction the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project that will bring gas from Russia to Europe, and Hawley threatened to block all nominees until top officials resigned over the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona has reportedly told her Democratic colleagues that she will not support any tax hikes on corporations or wealthy individuals, a stance that could derail the party's plan to fund its sprawling safety net and climate package.
"The right-wing Dems are carrying water for big corporations and billionaires who don't want their taxes to go up."
According to the New York Times, Sinema's "resistance to tax rate increases" that Democrats have proposed to finance their reconciliation bill "has set off a scramble for alternatives, including a carbon tax, international corporate tax changes, and closing loopholes for businesses that pay through the individual income tax system."
Democrats can't afford a single defection in the Senate, a dynamic that gives Sinema and other right-wing lawmakers significant leverage over the reconciliation bill, which is a centerpiece of President Joe Biden's domestic policy agenda. On top of opposing tax hikes, Sinema has also said she won't support a package that includes $3.5 trillion in spending over the next decade, a price tag that progressive lawmakers have characterized as a bare minimum.
"This gives away what is really going on in Congress," Robert Cruickshank, campaign director at the advocacy group Demand Progress, said in response to Sinema's posturing. "The right-wing Dems are carrying water for big corporations and billionaires who don't want their taxes to go up."
The government watchdog group Accountable.US estimates that Sinema has received at least $923,000 in donations from industry lobbying groups that are currently working to kill or water down Democrats' reconciliation package, which has been dubbed the Build Back Better Act. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its leadership boards have donated $448,000 to the Arizona Democrat, Accountable.US found.
"Super-rich corporations have given Senator Sinema nearly a million reasons to vote against making them pay their fair share in taxes," Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, said in a statement. "Make no mistake, if she sides with her wealthy donors and kills popular investments to jump-start the economy, everyday families—including across Arizona—will pay the price."
It's not clear whether Sinema would be willing to tank the entire reconciliation package over Democrats' proposed tax increases, which would partially or completely reverse elements of the GOP's deeply unpopular 2017 tax law. Sinema voted against the Republican tax cuts.
According to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, House Democrats' proposal to fund the Build Back Better Act "would result in a tax cut for the average taxpayer in all income groups except the richest 5%."
On Friday, Biden expressed confidence that congressional Democrats will ultimately approve enough revenue raisers to "pay for" the entire reconciliation package, which is expected to include major investments in green energy, child care, housing, Medicare expansion, and more.
"It is zero price tag on the debt we're paying," the president said in remarks from the State Dining Room of the White House. "We're going to pay for everything we spend."
Sinema's opposition to her party's tax plan was reported as progressive and conservative Democrats continued to fight over the top-line price tag and the specific details of the emerging reconciliation package. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced Saturday that she intends to bring to the floor and pass both the Build Back Better Act and a $550 billion partisan infrastructure bill—which Sinema helped author—within the next week.
"The initiatives of the Build Back Better Act are ones in which President Biden takes a great pride, which House and Senate Democrats share," Pelosi wrote in a "Dear Colleague" letter. "Build Back Better will cut taxes for the middle class, create more jobs, lower costs for working families, and make sure the wealthiest and corporations pay their fair share."
Last month, Pelosi vowed to bring the Senate-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill to the House floor for a vote by September 27. But progressives are threatening to vote down the bipartisan bill if it comes up before Congress approves the reconciliation package, which likely won't be finished by Monday.
Progressives fear that passing the bipartisan bill first would free conservative Democrats to tank or dramatically pare back the reconciliation package.
In an appearance on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)—chair of the 96-member Congressional Progressive Caucus—said that "the votes aren't there" to pass the bipartisan bill before the reconciliation process is complete.
"Ultimately, we're delivering on the president's agenda," Jayapal said. "The Build Back Better agenda is not some crazy agenda that just a few people support. It's actually the vast majority of the Democratic caucus, and there's a few people in the House and a couple in the Senate who aren't quite there yet. But even moderates in frontline districts all support this Build Back Better agenda."
Only a few dozen people, many of them members of a violent extremist organization, showed up at the Arizona Capitol on Saturday for a rally claiming that Donald Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 did nothing wrong and were being held as “political prisoners."
“It was an awesome, awesome day," former state Republican legislator Anthony Kern told attendees about being at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Kern, who lost in 2020 but is again running for the legislature, has said he never breached the Capitol. However, footage reviewed by the Arizona Mirror shows that Kern was present at other parts of the Capitol breached by protesters. During his speech before the crowd, Kern said he arrived two hours after everything “serious" happened.
Their presence was a boon for GOP Rep. Walt Blackman, R-Snowflake.
“The Proud Boys came to one of my events and that was one of the proudest moments of my life," Blackman said to the crowd. Blackman is running for Congress in the 1st District.
One of the speakers, Micajah Jackson, is facing federal charges for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6. The FBI alleges that Jackson participated in a march alongside members of the Proud Boys chapter from Arizona and that he knowingly entered the Capitol without permission.
Jackson claimed on Saturday that the Jan. 6 riot was a setup “coup" by the FBI, the Capitol Police, D.C. Police, Black Lives Matter, antifa, Democratic activists and the “radical U.S. government."
“That's disgusting, that is KGB stuff right there going on," Jackson said. A woman in the crowd shouted back, “It's demonic!"
Blackman was the only elected official who spoke, a last-minute change from how the event was promoted. It originally billed GOP legislators Rep. Mark Finchem and Sen. Wendy Rogers as speakers, as well as a controversial figure named “American Greyson" Arnold.
Arnold has used his social media pages to post memes lauding Nazis as the “pure race" and lament the American victory in World War II. He also called Adolf Hitler a “complicated historical figure." Another time, he posted the logo of Stormfront, the first major hate site on the internet that was founded by Don Black, the former leader of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. The logo is the Celtic Cross, a common white supremacist symbol, emblazoned with the words “White Pride World Wide." “God is on our side because our fight is righteous," he declared.
Shortly after the Mirror inquired about these posts, an event spokeswoman said Arnold was no longer a speaker at the event. However, he still attended the event and was seen with local anti-mask agitator Ethan Schmidt.
Jackson wasn't the only speaker who was arrested by the FBI for their involvement in the events of Jan. 6.
Couy Griffin of Cowboys for Trump was arrested for one count of knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful entry. Griffin claims he didn't know the area was off-limits and has said he wasn't there to disrupt anything.
Another speaker also had connections to the insurrection. Jeff Zink, who is running for Congress against Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, has a son who was arrested for trespassing, assault and damaging property. Zink has said that his son is falsely accused, but the FBI contends that photos from his son's own Facebook page and security camera footage put his son at the scene and show him damaging property.
Zink condemned the destruction and said anyone who did that rightfully deserves to be in prison — but his son does not.
“Somebody else came in and stole what was supposed to be a peaceful protest," Zink said, adding that the Jan. 6 protest that preceded the violent insurrection was not about “Trump or Biden." In fact, it was organized by Trump's allies and was solely focused on disputing and overturning the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Joe Biden.
“You're guilty until proven Democrat," Zink said to cheers from the crowd.
Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.
