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Post by Admin on Jan 15, 2021 3:53:55 GMT
Video Message from President Donald J. Trump 1/13/21
Donald Trump released a new video condemning political violence, but the short speech from the Oval Office made no mention of the House’s vote to impeach him for the second time.
“I want to make it very clear: I unequivocally condemn the violence that we saw last week,” Trump said in the video that was posted to the White House’s YouTube channel (watch it above). He added that “no true supporter of mine could ever endorse political violence.”
“We cannot tolerate it,” he said.
The video comes as 10 Republican members of the House joined with Democrats in approving one article of impeachment. Trump is charged with inciting the insurrection at the Capitol last week. At a rally on the Ellipse immediately preceding the event, Trump urged his supporters to march to the Capitol, where Congress was certifying the electoral vote for Joe Biden.
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Post by Admin on Jan 17, 2021 5:26:42 GMT
Jenna Ryan, a Texas real estate broker who took a private jet to Washington to join the attack on the US Capitol, has pleaded with Donald Trump to pardon her after she was arrested by federal authorities.
After surrendering to the FBI on Friday, Ryan said: “We all deserve a pardon.”
“I’m facing a prison sentence,” she told CBS11 at her home. “I think I do not deserve that.”
Turning to look into the camera, she said: “I would ask the president of the United States to give me a pardon.”
On Wednesday, Trump was impeached for inciting the attack on 6 January that left five people dead, including a police officer, and sent lawmakers fleeing for their lives.
Ryan said she had been “displaying my patriotism”, adding: “I listen to my president who told me to go to the Capitol.”
Ryan left a trove of information online. Court papers show she posted a picture of herself taking a private jet to Washington DC the day before the riot, subsequently posing on the steps of the Capitol and beside a window smashed as the pro-Trump mob broke in. “We’re gonna go down and storm the Capitol,” Ryan said in a video posted to Facebook. “They’re down there right now and that’s why we came and so that’s what we are going to do. So wish me luck.”
During a live Facebook video at the scene of the incursion, Ryan stated: “We are going to fucking go in here. Life or death, it doesn’t matter. Here we go.”
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Post by Admin on Jan 18, 2021 5:00:40 GMT
When Luke Mogelson attended President Donald Trump’s speech on the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., on January 6th, he was prepared for the possibility that violence might erupt that day. Mogelson, a veteran war correspondent and a contributing writer at The New Yorker, had spent the previous ten months reporting on the radical fringe of Trump supporters, from anti-lockdown militias to fascist groups such as the Proud Boys. After Election Day, he interviewed Trump supporters who showed up at ballot-tabulation sites, and who believed the President’s lies that the results had been “rigged” and his victory “stolen.” At one post-election pro-Trump rally in D.C., Mogelson witnessed racist violence against Black residents of the nation’s capital. At another event, he watched the host of the white-supremacist Web program “America First” declare, “Our Founding Fathers would get in the streets, and they would take this country back by force if necessary. And that is what we must be prepared to do.” After Trump’s incendiary speech, Mogelson followed the President’s supporters as they forced their way into the U.S. Capitol, using his phone’s camera as a reporter’s notebook. What follows is a video that includes some of that raw footage. Mogelson harnessed this material while writing his panoramic, definitive report, “Among the Insurrectionists,” which the magazine posted online on Friday. (It appears in print in the January 25th issue.) His prose vividly captures how the raging anger and violence of the initial breach of the Capitol was followed by an eerily quiet and surreal interlude inside the Senate chamber, where Mogelson watched people rummaging through desks and posing for photographs. Although the footage was not originally intended for publication, it documents a historic event and serves as a visceral complement to Mogelson’s probing, illuminating report.
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Post by Admin on Jan 19, 2021 19:31:52 GMT
Former Gilmore Girls actor David Sutcliffe has set the record straight about the Capitol riot, addressing so-called rumors that he participated in the Jan. 6 attack in D.C. that left five dead.
Quote-tweeting a video of a rioter smoking weed inside the Capitol, Sutcliffe wrote on Saturday, "There are rumors circulating that I 'stormed the capital.' Not true — though I would have been proud to share a smoke with this great Patriot!"
Sutcliffe is best known for playing Lorelai's (Lauren Graham) ex and Rory's (Alexis Bledel) father on the long-running dramedy Gilmore Girls. He acted in 37 episodes of the series, which ran from 2001 to 2007, and also made an appearance in the 2016 Netflix miniseries Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.
A veteran actor, Sutcliffe made his TV debut in 1995 on the Canadian series Forever Knight. He's also starred in Under the Tuscan Sun, Cake, and Private Practice, and his last roles included guest spots on Insecure in 2017 and The Romanoffs in 2018. Sutcliffe retired from acting a year later and is now a life coach.
EW has reached out to Sutcliffe for comment.
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Post by Admin on Jan 23, 2021 6:17:21 GMT
Former President Trump’s campaign had paid out more than $2.7 million to several individuals and firms behind the Jan. 6 rally in Washington that devolved into a violent insurrection at the Capitol, the Center for Responsive Politics reported on Friday.
Several organizers listed on the event permit granted by the National Parks Service (NPS) and posted online by the Center for Responsive Politics previously held positions within the Trump campaign or had ties to those who did.
Federal Election Commission filings show that the former president’s reelection campaign made payments to several of those individuals through Nov. 23, the most recent day for which financial disclosures are available.
Among those individuals listed on the permit was Maggie Mulvaney, a niece of former U.S. Special Envoy to Northern Ireland Mick Mulvaney, who resigned from his role after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. Maggie Mulvaney’s LinkedIn profile lists her current position as director of finance operations and manager of external affairs for the Trump campaign.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Mulvaney was paid at least $138,000 by the Trump campaign through last November.
Caroline Wren, who served as a national finance consultant for the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee’s joint fundraising operation, was also listed on the NPS permit for the rally as a “VIP advisor.” The Trump campaign paid Wren $170,000 from March to November.
Megan Powers, whose LinkedIn profile listed her as director of operations for the Trump campaign as recently as this month, was also among those whose names appeared on the permit. She was paid about $290,000 by the Trump campaign from February 2019 through November, according to the Center for Response Politics.
The largest recipient of payments from the Trump campaign was Event Strategies Inc., which received more than $1.7 million from the campaign and the former president’s joint fundraising committee.
That firm is owned by Justin Caporale, the Trump campaign’s advance director, and his business partner Tim Unes, who are listed on the rally permit as project manager and stage manager, respectively.
Event Strategies Inc. also received $2.1 million from the Trump-affiliated dark money group America First Policies from 2018 to 2019. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, America First Policies also provided funding to Women for America First, a political nonprofit whose leaders are listed on the rally permit as the event hosts.
The permit designates the Ellipse on the south side of the White House as the site of the event, which is described simply as a “First Amendment rally.”
But the revelation that several of the individuals involved in organizing the Jan. 6 gathering have financial ties to the Trump campaign raises new questions about the role some in the former president’s political operation may have played in an event linked to the violence at the Capitol that same day.
Speaking at the gathering at the Ellipse, Trump himself told rallygoers that they “will never take back our country with weakness” and urged them to “walk down to the Capitol” as Congress prepared to certify President Biden's Electoral College victory.
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