News

Trial begins for Proud Boys leaders charged with seditious conspiracy | CNN Politics

Published

2 years ago

December 19, 2022

Trial begins for Proud Boys leaders charged with seditious conspiracy | CNN Politics

CNN
—

Leaders of the right-wing extremist Proud Boys will face trial beginning Monday for his or her alleged conspiracy to cease Joe Biden from assuming the presidency, one other take a look at for the Justice Division’s effort to punish the far-right political motion linked to fierce allies of former President Donald Trump.

Federal prosecutors intend to show that 4 leaders of the Proud Boys – Enrique Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl – plotted and broadly inspired violence within the construct as much as January 6.

When the riot, allegedly initiated by a member of the Proud Boys, broke out on the Capitol, Nordean, Biggs and Rehl stood again whereas others – together with the fifth defendant Dominic Pezzola – took motion, prosecutors argue.

To show their case, prosecutors will probably function the testimony of a number of Proud Boys who pleaded responsible to prices linked to the conspiracy together with two alleged leaders and shut allies of Tarrio. Prosecutors may even closely rely upon the defendants’ personal phrases in texts and social media posts, in addition to recorded planning conferences and movies from the riot.

Attorneys for the 5 defendants have argued that they had been merely protesting on January 6 and have additionally urged that the federal government is overcharging their purchasers. In courtroom hearings, protection attorneys have additionally mentioned the group had no actual, cohesive plan to assault the Capitol that day.

The trial towards the Proud Boys is scheduled to begin on Monday with jury choice in DC federal courtroom. All 5 defendants have pleaded not responsible to the indictment and face a most sentence of 20 years in a federal jail.

Enrique Tarrio, 38, is the longtime chairman of the Proud Boys.

Ethan Nordean, 31, is a Proud Boys chief from Washington state. Nordean, who goes by the moniker “Rufio Panman” after a member of Peter Pan’s Misplaced Boys, rose to prominence in 2017 after a video of him knocking out an anti-fascist protester in a single punch went viral.

Joseph Biggs, 38, is an Military veteran and Proud Boys chief from Florida. Biggs beforehand labored as a correspondent for Infowars, a far-right outlet that peddles false conspiracy theories.

Zachary Rehl, 36, is a former Marine and the president of his native Philadelphia chapter of the Proud Boys.

Dominic Pezzola, 44, is a Proud Boy from New York who goes by the nicknames “Spaz,” “Spazzo,” and “Spazzolini.” Pezzola is a former Marine.

Ex-FBI Deputy Director on the message the Oath Keepers jury verdict sends to home extremists

In line with the indictment, leaders of the Proud Boys started planning for a “battle” within the speedy aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.

“If Biden steals this election, [the Proud Boys] shall be political prisoners. We gained’t go quietly…I promise,” Tarrio allegedly posted on-line within the days after the election was referred to as for Joe Biden.

By December, members of Proud Boys had began attending Washington, DC, rallies en masse. A few of the protests broke out in violence and the Proud Boys, who’re recognized for avenue preventing, had been within the center.

When Trump introduced the January 6 rally on Twitter, Tarrio and others determined to create a brand new nationwide chapter of the Proud Boys for the occasion referred to as the Ministry of Self Protection (MOSD) based on courtroom paperwork. The MOSD was allegedly made up of greater than 90 “hand chosen members” and “rally boys” – members who had been prepared to interrupt the legislation – and had been inspired to not put on the normal Proud Boys uniform of black and yellow polos once they got here to DC.

The MOSD, Tarrio allegedly knowledgeable new members, would have a “high down construction.” He, Biggs and Nordean had been considered because the MOSD leaders, prosecutors say. A number of others together with Rehl had been additionally a part of MOSD management.

Tarrio was arrested in Washington, DC, on January 4, 2021, for burning a DC church’s Black Lives Matter banner in December and bringing high-capacity rifle magazines into the district. He was ordered by a choose to go away the town. In encrypted management chats, Tarrio allegedly informed different members he hoped his arrest might encourage individuals to lash out violently towards police.

A bunch of roughly 100 Proud Boys met on the Washington Monument the morning of January 6, prosecutors say. A number of of the members, together with Biggs and Rehl, allegedly had walkie-talkie model radios, and Nordean and Biggs each used a bullhorn to direct the group as they marched to the Capitol.

The group arrived on the Capitol round quarter-hour earlier than Congress was set to begin the joint continuing to certify the 2020 election, based on movies from that day, and walked to an entry level on the west facet of the constructing. A Proud Boy named Ryan Samsel was the primary to cost and breach barricades on the Capitol grounds, prosecutors say, and he spoke to Biggs only one minute earlier than appearing.

Because the battle on the Capitol ensued, members of the hand chosen MOSD together with Pezzola might be seen in movies constantly on the entrance strains of the riot, prosecutors say. Nordean, Biggs and Rehl allegedly stayed again, opting to comply with as soon as others had already damaged by means of police strains.

When the mob arrived on the Capitol doorways, Pezzola used a stolen police riot defend to smash a window, prosecutors say. The primary members of the mob to breach the Capitol constructing, allegedly together with Pezzola and Biggs, entered by means of that window. The Senate suspended its session minutes later.

Tarrio watched the chaos unfold from Baltimore, allegedly posting publicly on social media “Don’t f***ing go away” and “Make no mistake…We did this…”

The Justice Division has already efficiently prosecuted a seditious conspiracy case towards leaders of the Oath Keepers, which might act as a mannequin for prosecutors as they flip to the Proud Boys.

Each Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and Tarrio didn’t enter the Capitol through the hours-long breach, however throughout his trial, prosecutors efficiently argued that Rhodes acted like a basic overseeing his troops on January 6, a story prosecutors will probably make use of towards Tarrio.

In contrast to the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys have an extended historical past of violent motion – a historical past that prosecutors will probably use to persuade a jury that the group has a propensity towards violence and that the riot on the Capitol was not out of character.

In earlier courtroom filings, prosecutors have mentioned that Tarrio, Biggs, Nordean, Rehl and different Proud Boys leaders inspired their followers to “flip your brains off somewhat bit,” and used these followers as “instruments” to attain their bigger plan to intervene with the joint congressional continuing.

If the Justice Division secures convictions for Tarrio and different Proud Boys leaders, the group will live on, Rachel Carroll Rivas, a senior analysis analyst on the Southern Poverty Regulation Heart who research extremism informed CNN.

“It’s not hierarchical like a number of militia actions,” Rivas informed CNN, noting the group doesn’t rely upon anyone chief to behave and acquire energy.

The group’s aim, Rivas mentioned, is concentrated on “creating chaos, creating worry by means of a way of uncertainty and a scarcity of feeling of security,” which she says is supposed to guide fewer individuals talking up towards the group.

Click to comment

News

Trump Is Trying to Gain More Power Over Elections. Is His Effort Legal?

Published

7 hours ago

March 26, 2025

Press Room

Trump Is Trying to Gain More Power Over Elections. Is His Effort Legal?

President Trump pushed on Tuesday to hand the executive branch unprecedented influence over how federal elections are run, signing a far-reaching and legally dubious order to change U.S. voting rules.

The executive order, which seeks to require proof of citizenship to register to vote as well as the return of all mail ballots by Election Day, is an attempt to upend centuries of settled election law and federal-state relations.

The Constitution gives the president no explicit authority to regulate elections. Instead, it gives states the power to set the “times, places and manner” of elections, leaving them to decide the rules, oversee voting and try to prevent fraud. Congress can also pass election laws or override state legislation, as it did with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Yet Mr. Trump’s order, which follows a yearslong Republican push to tighten voting laws out of a false belief that the 2020 election was rigged, bypasses both the states and Congress. Republican lawmakers in Washington are trying to pass many of the same voting restrictions, but they are unlikely to make it through the Senate.

The order’s most eye-catching provisions are the requirements of proof of citizenship and the return of mail ballots by Election Day.

But the order, which threatens to withhold federal funding from states that do not comply with it, includes a range of other measures.

It seeks to give federal agencies, including the Elon Musk-led team known as the Department of Government Efficiency, access to state voter rolls to check “for consistency with federal requirements.” It aims to set new rules for election equipment, which could force states to replace voting machines that use bar codes or QR codes. And it instructs the U.S. attorney general to hunt for and prosecute election crimes.

Is this legal?

Probably not all of it, legal experts say — and voting rights groups and state attorneys general are already signaling that they will file challenges.

Several experts predicted that provisions of the order might well be found unlawful, though they said that others, like directions to Mr. Trump’s attorney general and other cabinet members, fell within legal bounds.

“It’s an attempt at a power grab,” said Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The president has been seen in the past as having no role to play when it comes to the conduct of federal elections, and this attempt to assert authority over the conduct of federal elections would take power away from both an independent federal agency and from the states.”

What parts might be challenged?

A central question surrounds Mr. Trump’s attempt to use the Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency that Congress created in 2002 to help election officials with their work, to enforce the proof-of-citizenship requirement.

Currently, Americans may register to vote in federal elections either through their state or by using a federal form created by the E.A.C. The form includes a box that registrants check to attest, under penalty of perjury, that they are U.S. citizens, but it does not require documentation as proof.

The executive order would force the E.A.C. to change that process to require a passport, state identification that includes citizenship information or military identification.

Legal experts dispute that Mr. Trump has the authority to force the agency, which Congress designated as “independent” and which includes two commissioners from each party, to take any action.

“He can ask nicely,” said Justin Levitt, a professor of constitutional law at Loyola Marymount University who served in the Biden administration. “But he thinks he’s got a power that, at least so far, he does not have. It would take a change in the law and the Supreme Court affirmatively approving a radical expansion of power of the executive.”

Legal experts say the provision requiring all ballots to arrive by Election Day also probably exceeds the president’s legal authority, particularly the threat to withhold federal funding from those states that do not comply. (Seventeen states currently allow mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they arrive soon afterward.)

“If the president is basically usurping the power of the purse by imposing limits on these grants that Congress itself did not impose, that could be the basis for constitutionally challenging these conditions,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School.

Mr. Trump’s attempt to force states to turn over voter data to Mr. Musk’s team and federal agencies recalls a similar program from the first Trump administration, a commission on “election integrity” led by Kris Kobach, who is now the Kansas attorney general.

The commission sought data from all 50 states, but 44 of them refused to comply. The Republican secretary of state in Mississippi told the commission to “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.”

What is the potential impact on voters and elections?

If the full order were to stand, it could potentially disenfranchise millions of Americans and cost state and local governments millions of dollars.

About 21.3 million people do not have proof of citizenship readily available, according to a 2023 study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a voting rights and democracy group. Nearly four million people do not have the documents at all because they were lost, destroyed or stolen. The executive order does not allow for birth certificates to prove citizenship.

It is also unclear whether women who have changed their surname after marriage will face new hurdles in proving their citizenship.

The order could also lead election officials to throw out sizable numbers of ballots that arrive after Election Day. For example, in Nevada’s two largest counties in the 2022 general election, about 45,000 ballots arrived after Election Day and were counted, according to state data. In Washington State, Kim Wyman, a Republican former secretary of state, estimated that “about a third of the ballots in any given election” arrived on the Wednesday or Thursday after Election Day.

The order could put states in deep budget holes, as well. Many states, including the battlegrounds of Georgia and Pennsylvania, use voting machines with bar codes or QR codes. Replacing them would cost millions of dollars that the order does not provide.

Republicans won in 2024. Why do they want to change voting laws?

Mr. Trump has made specious claims about voter fraud for decades, but since his 2020 election loss and the 2021 Capitol riot, he has pushed the issue to the center of Republican politics.

Even though voter fraud is exceedingly rare, nearly every speech of Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign included false claims that noncitizens were voting in American elections. He also railed against mail voting, even as Republican groups successfully pushed more of the party’s voters to cast ballots that way.

Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project, a conservative advocacy group tied to the activist Leonard Leo, said the executive order was simply enforcing laws already passed by Congress. He referred to a ruling from a federal appeals court that found that Congress’s selection of a federal Election Day meant all voting must be completed by that day, with no late-arriving ballots permitted.

“The executive order is acting well within the four corners of those existing laws, so we’re not breaking new ground in terms of legal authority,” Mr. Snead said. “We’re not breaking new ground in terms of the relationship between the federal government and the states.”

News

Top Federal Reserve official says market angst over inflation would be ‘red flag’

Published

9 hours ago

March 26, 2025

Press Room

Top Federal Reserve official says market angst over inflation would be ‘red flag’

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free

Signs that investors in the US bond market are baking in higher inflation would be a “major red flag” that could upend policymakers’ plans to cut interest rates, a top Federal Reserve official warned.

The remarks from Austan Goolsbee, president of the Chicago Fed and a voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee, come just over a week after a closely watched University of Michigan poll showed households’ long-term inflation projections hit the highest level since 1993.

“If you start seeing market-based long-run inflation expectations start behaving the way these surveys have done in the last two months, I would view that as a major red flag area of concern,” Goolsbee told the Financial Times.

The Fed last week nudged up its inflation outlook and slashed its growth forecast, as Donald Trump’s tariffs cascade across the world’s largest economy. Still, the central bank’s chair Jay Powell expressed confidence that inflation expectations remain in check, citing a subdued outlook in markets.

The five-year, five-year rate — a measure of markets’ assessment of price growth over the second half of the next decade — is 2.2 per cent. In contrast, consumers in the UMich poll forecast inflation of 3.9 per cent over the long term.

Goolsbee, who served as a top economic adviser to then-president Barack Obama, said that if investor expectations begin to converge with those of American households, the Fed would need to act: “Almost regardless of the circumstances, you must address that,” he said.

Central bankers everywhere view keeping longer-term inflation expectations “anchored” as a crucial part of their job. If the public no longer trusts them, a vicious circle of higher wages and price increases could ensue.

Keeping expectations under control now matters even more than usual, with the Fed struggling to bring inflation back in line with its 2 per cent inflation goal after the US economy suffered the biggest rise in prices since the 1980s, an increase fuelled by pandemic-era supply constraints.

Alberto Musalem, president of the St Louis Fed and another FOMC voter, told journalists on Wednesday: “I am very attuned to the fact that businesses and households only a few years ago went through an episode of high inflation and are likely to be more sensitive to that should inflation rise again for whatever reason.”

Musalem also echoed Goolsbee’s concerns over consumers’ concerns over higher prices seeping into other measures, saying in a speech earlier in the day that the Fed would need to maintain — or even consider tightening — monetary policy should medium- to longer-term expectations “begin to increase actual inflation or its persistence”.

The personal consumption expenditures price index, one of the Fed’s preferred measures, was 2.5 per cent in January.

Goolsbee said the central bank was no longer on the “golden path”, witnessed in 2023 and 2024, when inflation was seemingly falling back to 2 per cent, without derailing growth or raising unemployment. It had now entered “a different chapter”, where “there’s a lot of dust in the air”.

The Fed has acknowledged Trump-induced uncertainty over the outlook for inflation and growth have waylaid its plans to cut interest rates from the current “restrictive” level of 4.25 per cent to 4.5 per cent.

Though officials still expect to make two quarter-point cuts at some point this year, the central bank held borrowing costs for the second meeting in a row last week.

Powell acknowledged that, partly in response to tariffs, “there may be a delay in further progress over the course of this year” on inflation.

Goolsbee said he believed borrowing costs would be “a fair bit lower” in 12-18 months from now, but cautioned it may take longer than anticipated for the next cut to come because of economic uncertainty.

“My view is that when there’s dust in the air, ‘wait and see’ is the correct approach when you face uncertainty,” he said. “But ‘wait and see’ is not free — it comes with a cost. You gain the ability to learn new information, [but] you lose some of the capacity to move gradually.”

Goolsbee, who serves a district that covers Michigan, home to many of the major US carmakers, said the next three to six weeks would be “a critical period [when] we’re going to resolve a series of policy uncertainties”.

“When I’m out talking to executives here in the district, they are frequently citing April 2nd as a key point of their uncertainty,” Goolsbee said, referring to Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day”, when the president plans to unveil “reciprocal” tariffs on US trade partners.

“They don’t know what’s going to happen with tariffs, they don’t know how big they’re going to be, they don’t know whether there will be exemptions, how they would apply to the auto sector, especially, because of its integration with Canada and Mexico.”

News

Federal judge who drew Trump's anger picks up new case against administration

Published

9 hours ago

March 26, 2025

Press Room

Federal judge who drew Trump's anger picks up new case against administration

President Trump takes questions from reporters during an Ambassador Meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House on Tuesday, where he addressed the news that Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was accidentally added to a Signal group chat of top administration officials, where highly sensitive national security information was discussed.

Win McNamee/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

hide caption

toggle caption

Win McNamee/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

A federal judge in Washington who has caught the ire of President Trump for his role in the case involving the deportation of alleged gang members will also preside over a case involving the administration’s use of a messaging app to discuss military operations.

Chief Judge James Boasberg will oversee a new lawsuit brought against several senior national security officials after a reporter was unintentionally added to a Signal group chat where the planned bombing of Houthi targets in Yemen was discussed. Intelligence experts say the use of the chat group to discuss such operational matters is highly unusual. The White House denies that the matters discussed were classified.

Members of the Salvadoran army stand guard at the CECOT prison in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on March 16.

While judges typically do not have control over what cases they are assigned, this latest assignment comes shortly after Boasberg has been in the spotlight while overseeing another high-profile case involving the Trump administration’s deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador.

Boasberg imposed a temporary restraining order on the action, but the administration is in the process of appealing.

Trump has criticized Boasberg’s handling of that case, calling him a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge” in a post on social media and arguing that the American public elected him to curb illegal immigration.

“I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do,” Trump said. “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!

James Boasberg shown here on Monday, March 13, 2023.

The statement raised concern in the legal community and prompted Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to say in a rare statement that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”

As chief judge of the federal district court, Boasberg has dealt with legal matters involving Trump in the past. Notably, he ruled former Vice President Mike Pence had to testify in front of a grand jury in the Justice Department’s probe into Jan. 6.

The latest legal challenge, this time over the Signal group chat, was brought by American Oversight, a watchdog group. The group alleges that the use of Signal violates federal law that covers the preservation of government records.

The Pentagon in Arlington, Va., is seen from above.

The lawsuit is directed toward the National Archives as well as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — who were all present in the Signal group chat.

That discussion was first reported in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the magazine, who was the reporter accidentally added to the chat.

NPR disclosure: Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR, chairs the board of the Signal Foundation.