SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
seditious conspiracy
'Enormous Victory': Four Proud Boys Convicted of Seditious Conspiracy for Jan. 6 Attack
One journalist noted that those convicted "identified President Donald Trump's admonition for them to 'stand back and stand by' as a major motivation for recruitment and action."
May 04, 2023
The former chairman of the Proud Boys was among four members of the white nationalist and misogynist group convicted on Thursday of seditious conspiracy for planning and carrying out the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The members now face a maximum prison sentence of 20 years and numerous potential fines.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) proved to a jury in Washington, D.C. that former leader Enrique Tarrio was sufficiently involved in the conspiracy to attack the U.S. Capitol as members of Congress certified the 2020 election, even though he was in a hotel room in Baltimore on the day of the insurrection—having been banned from the nation's Capitol the day before by a judge for burning a Black Lives Matter flag stolen from a church.
Although Tarrio wasn't present on Capitol Hill as thousands of supporters of Republican then-President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol, encrypted messages revealed during the trial showed that the Proud Boys leader wanted a "spectacle" in Washington, D.C. on January 6 and that he said after the attack: "Make no mistake. We did this."
Prosecutors also publicized a document titled "1776 Returns" that they said Tarrio used to map out the planned occupation of Capitol building. The document said the Proud Boys and other far-right, pro-Trump groups including the Oath Keepers would fill federal buildings and at least one news outlet—CNN—"with patriots and communicate our demands."
The document also said the group would maintain control of "crucial buildings in the D.C. area for a set period of time" and would try to get as "many people as possible inside these buildings."
The attack came as Trump and other Republican leaders baselessly claimed that President Joe Biden was not the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, and months after Trump called on the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by" as he repeatedly suggested fraud would be rampant in the voting process.
"These Proud Boys just convicted of seditious conspiracy against the United States identified President Donald Trump's admonition for them to 'stand back and stand by' as a major motivation for recruitment and action," said Todd Zwillich, deputy Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Vice News.
\u201cThe obvious bottom line gets lost: The President of the United States spurred on multiple extremist groups to undertake sedition against the country. And he's running to be president again.\u201d— Todd Zwillich (@Todd Zwillich) 1683212993
Along with Tarrio, Proud Boys chapter leaders Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, and Zachary Rehl were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly asked the jury to continue deliberations over a seditious conspiracy verdict for a fifth member, Dominic Pezzola, who admitted to smashing a Capitol building window with a stolen police shield.
All five members were convicted of other charges including obstruction of an official proceeding and preventing lawmakers and law enforcement agents from carrying out their duties.
Guilty verdicts in seditious conspiracy cases have been rare in the U.S. The Biden administration has successfully prosecuted six members of the Oath Keepers this year for the same crime related to January 6.
Ryan Goodman, former special counsel for the Department of Defense, called the verdict an "enormous victory."
\u201c2. Enormous victory on Count 1 seditious conspiracy.\n\nBANG\n\nhttps://t.co/zMvxEB4h8k\u201d— Ryan Goodman (@Ryan Goodman) 1683212599
"Important victory for accountability, for historical record, for democracy," Goodman said. "The white supremacist paramilitary group would not have taken these actions without Trump's messaging."
Trump is now seeking the 2024 Republican nomination for president.
Keep ReadingShow Less
New Revelations Show Ginni Thomas 'Very Much a Part of Seditious Conspiracy'
New reporting shows wife of Supreme Court Justice pushed at least 29 Arizona lawmakers to overturn 2020 election results.
Jun 10, 2022
Ginni Thomas, the right-wing activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, lobbied far more Arizona state lawmakers than previously known to try to overturn the state's 2020 election results--a revelation that reignited calls on Friday for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases related to the election.
"As obvious as the symmetry between Clarence and Ginni Thomas' work was three weeks ago, it's even more glaring now."
In addition to emailing two state representatives in November and December 2020, calling on them to "choose" electors who would grant former President Donald Trump a victory in the state, Thomas used a platform called FreeRoots.com to call on 27 other state lawmakers to put aside President Joe Biden's victory. The Washington Post, which first reported the news,obtained the emails Thomas sent via Arizona's public records law.
On November 9, as part of a campaign organized by Every Legal Vote--a group that has supported Trump's "Big Lie" that the election was stolen from him--Thomas sent an email saying the lawmakers must "stand strong in the face of political and media pressure" and claiming they had the "power to fight back against fraud."
"The wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice was very much a part of the seditious conspiracy" that culminated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, said Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett on Friday in response to the new reporting.
Prior to the January 6 rally--which she briefly attended--Thomas also wrote to 22 state House members and one state senator on December 13, a day before they were scheduled to count their votes, warning them to "consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don't stand up and lead."
"Never before in our nation's history have our elections been so threatened by fraud and unconstitutional procedures," Thomas wrote.
\u201cGinni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, emailed *29* Republican legislators in Arizona urging them to overturn Biden's victory by appointing fake electors. https://t.co/pcHxW8YwSj\u201d— Mark Joseph Stern (@Mark Joseph Stern) 1654877850
When the letters to two lawmakers were reported by the Post last month, U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) was among the critics who said Thomas's efforts to keep Trump in office represented a "conflict of interest."
Thomas's husband was the lone dissenter earlier this year when the court rejected Trump's bid to block the release of presidential records regarding the January 6 insurrection.
The Thomases have long claimed that they keep their work separate from one another, but journalist Mark Joseph Stern said Friday, "As obvious as the symmetry between Clarence and Ginni Thomas' work was three weeks ago, it's even more glaring now."
Thomas's lobbying of 29 state lawmakers to overrule the will of Arizona voters represented "a completely egregious attack on democracy by the wife of a sitting SCOTUS justice," tweeted Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.).
\u201cA completely egregious attack on democracy by the wife of a sitting SCOTUS Justice. \nHer involvement in 1/6 & prominent role in White Christian Nationalism are undeniable. And yet Clarence Thomas has not recused himself. He must resign or face impeachment. https://t.co/yTayh7gBeN\u201d— Rep. Jared Huffman (@Rep. Jared Huffman) 1654885891
Friday's revelations come two-and-a-half months after the Post and CBS News obtained text messages that Thomas sent to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the weeks following the election, calling on him to "save us from the left taking America down."
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) issued a "friendly reminder that Ginni Thomas has a government position and absolutely should not," referring to her position on the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board, to which Trump appointed her.
"Her egregious actions to push the White House Chief of Staff and others to overturn a free and fair election make her a threat to democracy and should disqualify her for any role of public trust at the Library of Congress or anywhere else in government," said CREW in April.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Clarence Thomas Should Resign and Ginni Thomas Should Be Prosecuted
Forget recusal. This behavior demands far graver consequences.
Mar 29, 2022
In 1969, Richard Nixon and congressional Republicans took down the Supreme Court's most liberal member, Abe Fortas, threatening to send his wife to prison. There's a lesson here for today's Democrats and Clarence Thomas.
Some Democrats are calling on Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from decisions involving Trump's conspiracy to overthrow our government.
They should be calling on him to resign and his wife to be prosecuted.
It appears that Ginny Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, participated in a plot to overthrow the government of the United States. Which is astonishing in and of itself.
But then her husband was the sole vote on the Court to help that same seditious conspiracy:
When Donald Trump sued to block President Joe Biden from passing presidential papers to the January 6th Committee, the only vote on the Court to support Trump's efforts to hide his crime was that of Clarence Thomas.
Which raises the question: what will Congress and the Justice Department do about these crimes?
Fifty-four years ago, Republicans went nuts over an "ethics scandal" involving a Democratic-appointed member of the Court, and their effort produced so much pressure that he resigned.
Will Democrats similarly force a Thomas resignation, giving Biden another SCOTUS nominee?
Is that possibility the reason why Lindsey Graham just "hinted" that if the Senate flips Republican in this fall's 2022 election the GOP will block all Biden appointees to the Court up to and through the 2024 election?
To understand the possibilities, it's essential to know the precedent, how Republicans pulled it off back in 1968/69:
Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas didn't resign until President Richard Nixon's campaign manager and Attorney General, John Mitchell, threatened to bring felony corruption charges against Fortas' wife.
But I get ahead of myself. It's a truly amazing story that most people alive today know nothing about. It started with "dirty movies" being shown in the US Capitol.
I remember the "Fortas Film Festival" because, when it started in the summer of 1968, I was a teenage boy and curious about the movies that Senator Strom Thurmond was showing to his male peers in that meeting room in the Capitol.
Most people in America were probably also curious; the Supreme Court had recently legalized pornography, but watching it back then meant sitting in a sleazy theater in a sleazy part of town with a bunch of sleazy characters.
But the infamous segregationist Senator Thurmond was on a roll in 1968, playing dirty movies back-to-back for any Senator or aide who wanted to show up. TIME Magazine did a feature on it, noting:
"Day after day last week, Thurmond buttonholed his colleagues to watch the films in darkened Senate offices. One aide of Richard Nixon called it 'the Fortas Film Festival.' The Senators were not titillated but shocked, and they left the showings in a grim mood. The screenings apparently swayed some votes away from Fortas. Senators know that middle-class opposition to pornography is rising, and the subject--like the Supreme Court itself--has become a symbol of what is wrong in the U.S."
The newspapers loved it, as similar "film festivals" popped up on campuses across the country. Yale, for example, got into the act, holding their own "Fortas Film Festival" featuring the same movies Thurmond had shown to the Senate. As The New York Timesnoted at the time:
"The main feature of the night was 'Flaming Creatures,' seen [months earlier] by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee during their debate on Justice Fortas' nomination as Chief Justice. ... In the audience was John T. Rich, editor of the Yale Law Journal. 'I figured if Senator Strom Thurmond could see this movie, so could I,' he said."
So...what provoked the Fortas Film Festivals?
It was, purely, a burning desire by conservatives to shift the Supreme Court to the right, amplified by Richard Nixon's vigorous campaign that year to become president in the November election.
It started in the last year of LBJ's presidency.
In June of 1968, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren -- a liberal who'd been appointed by Dwight Eisenhower -- decided to resign from the Court so that President Lyndon Johnson would have a full six months to replace him with another liberal.
LBJ proposed elevating the only Jewish member of the US Supreme Court to become the new Chief Justice (and Homer Thornberry to fill Warren's empty seat), but racist and antisemitic "conservatives" like Thurmond -- and presidential candidate Richard Nixon -- saw the upcoming hearings as a grand opportunity.
They postponed Thornberry's nomination, front-loading the hearings about putting Fortas in charge of the Court, and then ran an inquisition into Fortas over a $15,000 speaking fee he'd taken to address a college group. (Clarence Thomas has also taken $15,000 speaking fees, for the record.)
With that "scandalous" payment -- and his vote on the Court to legalize pornography -- as the excuses, Republicans and Southern "conservative" Democrats like Thurmond arrayed a Senate filibuster to block the liberal Fortas' elevation to Chief Justice.
It dragged out for months; on October 2, 1968 it became obvious the filibuster couldn't be broken and Fortas withdrew his name from consideration for Chief Justice, although he planned to remain on the Court as an Associate Justice like his peers.
By then it was too late for LBJ to elevate another liberal to Chief Justice (Warren stayed on the Court for another half-year to provide continuity) and also too late for LBJ's nominee Thornberry to even be considered to replace Warren's empty seat before the presidential election four weeks later.
But that was just the beginning.
Once Nixon came into office on January 20, 1969 he put ending the Court's "liberal" bent at the top of his agenda. That meant not only replacing Warren (who stayed on until June 23, 1969), but, to tip the Court conservative, getting rid of it's most liberal member, Abe Fortas.
Attorney General John Mitchell ordered the Justice Department to begin an investigation into Fortas' wife, Carolyn Agger, who was a lawyer with the DC firm that had previously employed Fortas.
Rightwing media had claimed -- without evidence -- that documents that might be found in a safe in her office might prove she was involved in a tax-evasion scheme.
There was never any evidence whatsoever, either of Fortas or his wife being corrupt. It was and is not illegal to take a speaking fee: members of the Court do so routinely today. And there was nothing incriminating in her safe.
But Richard Nixon, John Mitchell, and Abe Fortas knew the old legal saw: "A grand jury can indict a ham sandwich."
Mitchell had also dredged up another payment that Fortas had earned, this one $20,000 a year for serving on the board of a charitable foundation (not uncommon for high-end DC lawyers then or now).
This was also totally legal (and nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars Ginny Thomas has taken from rightwing groups since her husband was put on the Court) but Fortas gave back the money anyway.
Not only did that not help: his returning the money was, Nixon charged, proof that it was corrupt in the first place!
Mitchell then announced he was going to have a Justice Department lawyer named William Rehnquist convene a grand jury to look into the "crimes" that right-wingers were claiming Fortas and his wife had committed.
As Nixon's White House Counsel John Dean, who was there and knew the players, wrote in his book on the era (The Rehnquist Choice):
"Did the Justice Department have the goods on Fortas? Not even close. Mitchell's talk was pure bluff. ... Lyndon Johnson's Justice Department had investigated this question [back when Fortas was nominated for Chief Justice in 1968] and found nothing improper.... Reopening of the matter by Richard Nixon's Justice Department was purely a means to torture Fortas."
But faced with the possibility of his wife being dragged through the mud and both of them spending years and a fortune defending themselves, Fortas threw in the towel. He resigned from the Supreme Court five months into Nixon's presidency on May 14, 1969.
With their mission accomplished, Mitchell immediately dropped the threat of the grand jury. As John Dean noted:
"The Fortas resignation meant that Richard Nixon now had two seats to fill on the Court: Earl Warren's center seat and the seat of Associate Justice Abe Fortas, who was leaving the Court at fifty-nine years of age. It also meant that two of the Court's most liberal justices were gone.
"Nixon's aggressive posture toward the high court was paying off in a big way, with the help of John Mitchell and his hard-nosed team at the Justice Department, Rehnquist among them."
So, how will it all play out this time?
- Will the Biden administration or Congress make referrals of Ginny and Clarence Thomas' participation in a seditious conspiracy to the Justice Department?
- If they do, will Merrick Garland pick it up like John Mitchell did in 1969?
- Will Congress take Representative Ilhan Omar's advice and begin impeachment proceedings against Thomas?
- Will the media amplify Democrats' charges against both Ginny and Clarence the way they went after Abe Fortas for months?
- Will Clarence Thomas gracefully resign his position like Fortas did?
- If he does, will Republicans block any more Biden nominees to the Court to replace Thomas?
- Or will the media amplify the voices of Republicans who're saying it's really no big deal, trying to overthrow the government, and that Thomas should stay on the Court?
Stay tuned, I think...this show is just getting started.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular