Latest news with #January6
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Proud Boys who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 sue government for $100 million
WASHINGTON – Five members of the right-wing extremist group the Proud Boys who stormed the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection and were later pardoned by President Donald Trump are suing the government for more than $100 million. They allege the Justice Department and FBI violated their constitutional rights after arresting and jailing them for their participation in the effort to stop Congress from certifying former President Joe Biden's election victory in 2020. The Proud Boys and their families were subjected to forceful government raids, solitary confinement and cruel and unusual treatment, they argue in their lawsuit, which seeks $100 million in damages plus 6% post-judgment interest. The group, which filed the lawsuit June 6 in a federal court in Florida, includes Henry 'Enrique' Tarrio, Zachary Rehl, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Dominic Pezzola. In 2023, a jury convicted Tarrio, Rehl, Nordean and Biggs of entering a seditious conspiracy against the U.S. government. In several trials, each of the leaders of the group had been issued lengthy prison sentences, ranging from 22 to 15 years. On the first day of his return office in 2025, President Trump issued a sweeping clemency order, granting pardons to almost all of the more than 1,500 defendants who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and issuing sentence commutations to 14 others. In interviews with USA TODAY in February, most of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit defended their actions on Jan. 6 and said unequivocally they would do the same thing again. Some, including Tarrio and Rehl, hinted at the possibility of running for public office in the future. Read more: Sheriff? Congress? Criminal Justice reformer? Freed Proud Boys leaders have big plans 'I am an intelligent individual, and I've done a lot in the community as far as activism is concerned," Rehl said. "So, I'm experienced in that respect, and I believe I can really represent the people in a good way.' Contributing: Reuters Zachary Schermele is an education reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at zschermele@ Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele and Bluesky at @ This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Proud Boys who stormed Capitol sue government for $100 million
Al Arabiya
a day ago
- Al Arabiya
Verdict Against a Pardoned Capitol Rioter Is Only a Partial Victory for a Police Officer's Widow
Coming to court this week, a police officer's widow wanted to prove that a man assaulted her husband during a mob's attack on the US Capitol and ultimately was responsible for her husband's suicide nine days later. A jury's verdict on Friday amounted to only a partial victory for Erin Smith in a lawsuit over her husband's death. The eight-member jury held a 69-year-old chiropractor, David Walls-Kaufman, liable for assaulting Metropolitan Police Officer Jeffrey Smith inside the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will hear more trial testimony before deciding whether to award Erin Smith any monetary damages over her husband's assault. But the judge presiding over the civil trial dismissed Erin Smith's wrongful-death claim against Walls-Kaufman before jurors began deliberating. US District Judge Ana Reyes said no reasonable juror could conclude that Walls-Kaufman's actions were capable of causing a traumatic brain injury leading to Smith's death. Reyes divided the trial into two stages: one on the merits of Smith's claims and another on damages. The damages phase is expected to stretch into next week. Erin Smith claimed Walls-Kaufman gave her husband a concussion as they scuffled inside the Capitol. Jeffrey Smith was driving to work for the first time after the Capitol riot when he shot and killed himself with his service weapon. His widow claims Walls-Kaufman struck her 35-year-old husband in the head with his own police baton inside the Capitol, causing psychological and physical trauma that led to his suicide. Smith had no history of mental health problems before the January 6 riot, but his mood and behavior changed after suffering a concussion, according to his wife and parents. Walls-Kaufman, who lived near the Capitol, denies assaulting Smith. He says any injuries that the officer suffered on January 6 occurred later in the day when another rioter threw a pole that struck Smith around his head. Walls-Kaufman served a 60-day prison sentence after pleading guilty to a Capitol riot–related misdemeanor in January 2023, but he was pardoned in January. On his first day back in the White House, President Donald Trump pardoned, commuted prison sentences, or ordered the dismissal of cases for all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in the attack. Trump's sweeping act of clemency didn't erase Smith's lawsuit against Walls-Kaufman. Erin Smith, the trial's first witness, recalled packing a lunch for her husband and kissing him as he headed off to work on January 15, 2021, for the first time after the riot. 'I told him I loved him,' she testified. 'I said I would see him when he got home.' Within hours, police officers knocked on her door and informed her that her husband was dead. She was stunned to learn that he shot himself with his service weapon in his own car. 'It was the most traumatic words I've ever heard,' she recalled. 'You just don't know what to do.' Walls-Kaufman's attorney, Hughie Hunt, urged jurors to separate emotion and concentrate on the facts of the case. 'This is tragic, but that doesn't place anything at the foot of my client,' Hunt said during the trial's opening statements. Smith's body camera captured video of his scuffle with Walls-Kaufman. In his testimony, Walls-Kaufman said he was overcome by sensory overload and mass confusion as police tried to usher the crowd out of the Capitol. 'I couldn't tell who was pushing who or from what direction,' he said. The police department medically evaluated Smith and cleared him to return to full duty before he killed himself. Hunt said there is no evidence that his client intentionally struck Smith. 'The claim rests entirely on ambiguous video footage subject to interpretation and lacks corroborating eyewitness testimony,' Hunt wrote in a court filing in the case. More than 100 law-enforcement officers were injured during the riot. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick collapsed and died a day after engaging with the rioters. A medical examiner later determined he suffered a stroke and died of natural causes. Howard Liebengood, a Capitol police officer who responded to the riot, also died by suicide after the attack. In 2022, The District of Columbia Police and Firefighters' Retirement and Relief Board determined that Smith was injured in the line of duty, and the injury was the sole and direct cause of his death, according to the lawsuit.
CNN
2 days ago
- Politics
- CNN
What we learned from Ted Cruz vs. Tucker Carlson
CNN — When Sen. Ted Cruz went on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show in 2022, he was there to make amends. The Texas Republican's offense was having called the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol a 'violent terrorist attack.' This kind of view was quickly falling out of favor as Donald Trump moved to sanitize January 6. So Cruz disowned what he had said the day before to a cable host who had just savaged him for it. It was a stunning scene: a US senator feeling compelled to grovel to a cable TV host who had targeted him for saying January 6 was very bad. But it epitomized the MAGA zeitgeist and shifting power dynamics, in which extreme enforcers like Carlson had to be appeased. Three years later, Cruz this week joined Carlson on Carlson's own network for a very different purpose – but also one that recognized the former Fox anchor's heft on the right. This time, Cruz was there to try and marginalize a man who is suddenly a big problem for the Trump administration. Carlson has criticized the Trump-backed Israeli strikes on Iran and strongly opposes the US joining in those strikes, which Trump is increasingly considering. Carlson's opposition had already earned a sharp comment from the president, who called him ' kooky Tucker Carlson.' Cruz was there to argue that maybe this guy that he and other Republicans have been so solicitous of is indeed a crank. After two hours of jousting over foreign policy, it became clear Cruz was trying to paint Carlson as isolationist, amoral, anti-Trump and soft on Russian President Vladimir Putin. He also quite strongly suggested Carlson might be an antisemite – a charge Carlson rejected. After Carlson spent much of the first 40 minutes pressing Cruz on his support for Israel and the support he had received from members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – which Carlson sought to cast as a 'foreign lobby' – Cruz finally went there. 'By the way, Tucker, it's a very weird thing, the obsession with Israel,' Cruz said, noting Carlson hadn't inquired about foreign lobbying from other countries. 'Oh, I'm an antisemite now?' Carlson shot back. 'You're asking the questions Tucker,' Cruz said. 'You're asking, why are the Jews controlling our foreign policy. That's what you just asked.' Carlson accused Cruz of trying to derail his questions by playing the antisemitism card. 'That does not make me an antisemite, and shame on you for suggesting otherwise,' Carlson said. The exchange evoked growing concerns in some corners of the right over Carlson's commentary and programming on Israel and Jewish people. Last year, for example, even some Republicans criticized Carlson for hosting a conversation with a Holocaust revisionist. Carlson said the man 'may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.' This week's interview got no less heated from there. Cruz repeatedly pointed to allegations from the US government that Iran has targeted Trump for assassination, a case in which the Justice Department under then-President Joe Biden brought charges last year. Cruz was trying to tie going after Iran to loyalty to Trump. This led Carlson to question that narrative about Iran targeting Trump, and Cruz again pounced. 'Did we land on the moon? What other conspiracies to you believe? Was 9/11 an inside job?' Cruz said. He added that 'even the looniest Democrat doesn't dispute that.' Cruz accused Carlson of having more or less the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter. 'Oh absolutely, I'm a big leftist,' Carlson responded sarcastically. 'This is so silly.' Cruz went on to ask Carlson if Putin was the United States' enemy. Carlson said Russia was technically our enemy by virtue of the US government's support for Ukraine, but he resisted making a moral judgment. 'I don't want to be enemies with Russia. It doesn't help us at all,' Carlson said. 'It may help some people in the United States, but in general, I don't want to be.' Cruz pointed to another infamous episode involving Carlson and Russia, when Carlson filmed a video in a Russian grocery store in which he fawned over the facility and its offerings. (Even a participant in an alleged Russian influence operation apparently regarded Carlson's video as 'overt shilling.') 'It was just weird,' Cruz said. 'It was like a promo video for Russia.' Carlson got his licks in too. In addition to painting Cruz as too focused on supporting Israel, he ridiculed the senator for not being able to quantify the population of Iran and provide a citation for a specific verse of the Bible he referenced. But after the interview posted, Cruz was quite happy to post a multitude of clips. He said Carlson was 'running interference' for Trump's would-be assassins. He said Carlson was 'obsessed with defending Russia and the KGB thug that runs it.' He promoted someone who praised him for calling out Carlson's 'thinly veiled antisemitism.' And perhaps most tellingly, the Senate Republican Conference on its own feed promoted a bunch of the same content intended to ding Carlson. That would seem to signal this is a concerted GOP effort to deal with a perceived problem. It remains to be seen whether it works. But it's a remarkable turnabout from where things were three years ago. Carlson has been saying these kinds of things for years, but they – and his commentary on Iran – are increasingly political problems for Trump's party that apparently must be dealt with.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
US free-speech rights shredded despite Trump vow to be first-amendment champion
A cornerstone of the Maga movement during the Biden administration was to accuse a mixture of the so-called 'woke left' and the justice department of forcing America into the grips of a free speech crisis. Common complaints were that nobody 'can say anything any more' without being canceled or arrested for extremism. In the same breath, Maga broadly described the January 6 insurrection, which killed a police officer, as peaceful, accusing the Democrats of a communist conspiracy. Donald Trump vowed that when he returned to power, he would bring 'retribution'. So far, he hasn't disappointed, with unprecedented crackdowns on his perceived enemies. But experts say the first amendment is measurably under attack in ways it has not been since the presidency of Richard Nixon. A double standard has also emerged: if you protest, criticize, or publicly object to the president's agenda, you're a target. Katherine Jacobsen, the project coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists in the US, Canada, and Caribbean region, said: 'The thing with the first amendment and free speech in general is that you have to respect everyone's rights to say and print what they think is appropriate, versus just cherrypicking opinions and views that you find to be supportive with your own world views.' Cherrypicking is evidently at play, especially for individuals or institutions defying the Trump administration: Arresting and attempting to deport a Columbia University student who peacefully protested the Israeli war in Gaza and revoking the visas of foreign students who engaged in similar activism. Reversing a Biden-era protection prohibiting government officials from obtaining the confidential sourcework of the press. Denying billions in federal money to Harvard. Dismantling the education department and halting funds to schools practising diversity, equity, and inclusion. 'We've spent years listening to various elites crow about the threat that campuses and workplaces pose to conservative speech, only for them to suddenly lose their voices once campuses brought down the hammer on student protests against Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians,' Ed Ongweso Jr, a senior researcher at Security in Context, told the Guardian. 'Insofar as there is a real threat to free speech, it is from rightwingers interested in using this moment to purge critics and restructure the country and its institutions into forms more hospitable to the cruelty and greed at the heart of their politics.' Nothing, though, has come under more public protest and scrutiny than Trump's recent deployment of 2,000 national guard members and 700 marines to Los Angeles, claiming demonstrators marching against Ice raids there were out of control – even as the LAPD had described those same protests as law-abiding and mostly under control. Running against those actions was one of Trump's first acts in his second presidency – an executive order 'restoring' the first amendment and 'the right of the American people to speak freely in the public square without government interference'. But the current president has always and historically favored using the military to stifle public dissent: In 2020, he called on the national guard from multiple states to quell protesters in the Capitol against the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, while privately advising the military to 'just shoot' them. 'It's quite concerning to have a military deployed in being sent to, quote unquote, help with these protests, because they are not trained to work in US open environments to my knowledge and one can only imagine the way that type of situation could snowball very quickly, in a very scary way,' said Jacobsen about the continued deployment of US troops, trained for war, on American soil. 'Journalists aren't going to be able to report more easily, protesters won't be able to express their first amendment rights more easily.' Ongweso agreed, describing the military missions as a ploy, part of a grander plan to silence 'dissidents, journalists, and critics of the administration' to advance the ubiquity of Maga. Among some of the president's most ardent supporters, these protesters and other leftists are not subject to the same standards of freedom of expression. For example, congressman Jim Jordan criticized some of the protesters for waving Mexican flags in solidarity with the many foreign nationals coming from south of the border who are the targets of Ice arrests. 'We fly the American flag in America,' Jordan posted on X, inferring it was indicative of some kind of foreign invasion. But a community note quickly fact checked him: 'Representative Jordan has an Israeli flag outside of his office door.' Other users also quipped that when the insurrectionists stormed the halls of the Capitol, one man was prominently seen carrying a Confederate flag. 'When it comes to what they've done domestically, here at home, this administration has been no friend to freedom of speech,' said Conor Fitzpatrick, the supervising senior attorney at the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. 'We've seen the administration attempt to retaliate against major law firms for representing causes that the administration is against and we've seen the administration target universities on a seemingly ideological basis.' Fitzpatrick continued: 'So while they might talk the talk when it comes to free speech, they don't walk the walk.' On Sunday, Trump followed up after his controversial and ill-attended military parade in DC by offering his 'unwavering support' to 'ICE, FBI, DEA, ATF, the Patriots at Pentagon and the State Department' to expand their operations and deployments into New York and Chicago, among other American 'Inner Cities'. Fitzpatrick warned that Trump's degrading protections on the first amendment and using new weapons against public assembly only serves to provide another president with the same powers. While Maga cheer on the national guard, the next Democrat in the White House might target them with the same means established by Trump. 'Every infringement on freedom of speech is a tool that the next administration that you don't like can use in the opposite direction,' said Fitzpatrick.
CNN
3 days ago
- Politics
- CNN
Analysis: What we learned from Ted Cruz vs. Tucker Carlson
When Sen. Ted Cruz went on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show in 2022, he was there to make amends. The Texas Republican's offense was having called the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol a 'violent terrorist attack.' This kind of view was quickly falling out of favor as Donald Trump moved to sanitize January 6. So Cruz disowned what he had said the day before to a cable host who had just savaged him for it. It was a stunning scene: a US senator feeling compelled to grovel to a cable TV host who had targeted him for saying January 6 was very bad. But it epitomized the MAGA zeitgeist and shifting power dynamics, in which extreme enforcers like Carlson had to be appeased. Three years later, Cruz this week joined Carlson on Carlson's own network for a very different purpose – but also one that recognized the former Fox anchor's heft on the right. This time, Cruz was there to try and marginalize a man who is suddenly a big problem for the Trump administration. Carlson has criticized the Trump-backed Israeli strikes on Iran and strongly opposes the US joining in those strikes, which Trump is increasingly considering. Carlson's opposition had already earned a sharp comment from the president, who called him 'kooky Tucker Carlson.' Cruz was there to argue that maybe this guy that he and other Republicans have been so solicitous of is indeed a crank. After two hours of jousting over foreign policy, it became clear Cruz was trying to paint Carlson as isolationist, amoral, anti-Trump and soft on Russian President Vladimir Putin. He also quite strongly suggested Carlson might be an antisemite – a charge Carlson rejected. After Carlson spent much of the first 40 minutes pressing Cruz on his support for Israel and the support he had received from members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – which Carlson sought to cast as a 'foreign lobby' – Cruz finally went there. 'By the way, Tucker, it's a very weird thing, the obsession with Israel,' Cruz said, noting Carlson hadn't inquired about foreign lobbying from other countries. 'Oh, I'm an antisemite now?' Carlson shot back. 'You're asking the questions Tucker,' Cruz said. 'You're asking, why are the Jews controlling our foreign policy. That's what you just asked.' Carlson accused Cruz of trying to derail his questions by playing the antisemitism card. 'That does not make me an antisemite, and shame on you for suggesting otherwise,' Carlson said. The exchange evoked growing concerns in some corners of the right over Carlson's commentary and programming on Israel and Jewish people. Last year, for example, even some Republicans criticized Carlson for hosting a conversation with a Holocaust revisionist. Carlson said the man 'may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.' This week's interview got no less heated from there. Cruz repeatedly pointed to allegations from the US government that Iran has targeted Trump for assassination, a case in which the Justice Department under then-President Joe Biden brought charges last year. Cruz was trying to tie going after Iran to loyalty to Trump. This led Carlson to question that narrative about Iran targeting Trump, and Cruz again pounced. 'Did we land on the moon? What other conspiracies to you believe? Was 9/11 an inside job?' Cruz said. He added that 'even the looniest Democrat doesn't dispute that.' Cruz accused Carlson of having more or less the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter. 'Oh absolutely, I'm a big leftist,' Carlson responded sarcastically. 'This is so silly.' Cruz went on to ask Carlson if Putin was the United States' enemy. Carlson said Russia was technically our enemy by virtue of the US government's support for Ukraine, but he resisted making a moral judgment. 'I don't want to be enemies with Russia. It doesn't help us at all,' Carlson said. 'It may help some people in the United States, but in general, I don't want to be.' Cruz pointed to another infamous episode involving Carlson and Russia, when Carlson filmed a video in a Russian grocery store in which he fawned over the facility and its offerings. (Even a participant in an alleged Russian influence operation apparently regarded Carlson's video as 'overt shilling.') 'It was just weird,' Cruz said. 'It was like a promo video for Russia.' Carlson got his licks in too. In addition to painting Cruz as too focused on supporting Israel, he ridiculed the senator for not being able to quantify the population of Iran and provide a citation for a specific verse of the Bible he referenced. But after the interview posted, Cruz was quite happy to post a multitude of clips. He said Carlson was 'running interference' for Trump's would-be assassins. He said Carlson was 'obsessed with defending Russia and the KGB thug that runs it.' He promoted someone who praised him for calling out Carlson's 'thinly veiled antisemitism.' And perhaps most tellingly, the Senate Republican Conference on its own feed promoted a bunch of the same content intended to ding Carlson. That would seem to signal this is a concerted GOP effort to deal with a perceived problem. It remains to be seen whether it works. But it's a remarkable turnabout from where things were three years ago. Carlson has been saying these kinds of things for years, but they – and his commentary on Iran – are increasingly political problems for Trump's party that apparently must be dealt with.
