Will Ed Martin's enthusiastic support of Jan. 6 insurrectionists lead to a full pardon for Stewart 'Bloody Civil War' Rhodes?
Peter Montgomery at People For The American Way's RWW:
Ed Martin’s enthusiastic support for Jan. 6 insurrectionists created bipartisan Senate opposition to his confirmation as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, along with his right-wing extremism and record of ethically and legally dubious abuses of power while serving as interim U.S. Attorney.
After Senate opposition forced President Donald Trump to withdraw Martin’s nomination, Trump rewarded his loyalty with a few titles at the Justice Department, including pardon attorney. News broke this week that Martin is considering recommending a full pardon for Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who repeatedly threatened bloody civil war in the weeks leading up to the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
When Trump issued mass pardons for nearly everyone convicted in the Jan. 16 attacks, he commuted the sentences of Rhodes and more than a dozen other Oath Keepers and Proud Boys convicted of the most serious crimes. Rhodes had been sentenced to 18 years of jail for seditious conspiracy and other charges, but Trump set him free. Rhodes later appeared standing behind Trump at a political rally.
Trump’s commutation got Rhodes out of jail but kept his conviction intact. Now Martin is considering whether to recommend a full pardon for Rhodes and his fellow conspirators.
Far-right pardon machine Ed Martin floats pardon for Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who made threats of a “bloody civil war” in the aftermath of the 2020 elections.
Nine people were convicted or pleaded guilty to either federal or separate state charges in a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy at USA Today:
President Donald Trump said he will consider pardoning people convicted for conspiring during the COVID-19 pandemic to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
“I will take a look at it,” Trump said during a May 28 event at the White House in response to a reporter’s question. “I did watch the trial. It looked to me like somewhat of a railroad job.”
The Justice Department charged 14 people from an anti-government group called the Wolverine Watchmen in a plot to kidnap Whitmer for her role in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, and nine were convicted or pleaded guilty to either federal or separate Michigan state charges. Barry Croft Jr., 47, of Bear, Delaware, described as a ring leader of the group, got the longest federal prison sentence at more than 19 years.
“I’ll be honest with you,” said Trump. “It looked to me like some people said some stupid things, you know, they were drinking and I think they said stupid things.”
Defense lawyers for Croft and Adam Fox, who is serving a 16-year federal prison sentence for kidnapping conspiracy and conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, have accused the FBI of engaging in entrapment by infiltrating the group as informants and undercover agents.
What an irresponsible idea by TACO Trump to even consider the pardons of the domestic terrorists who plotted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) over COVID mitigations angst.
A group of far-right media figures has announced the formation of a militia group that is dedicated to “mobiliz[ing] to DEFEND this Republic from any enemy.” The newly formed group includes Rumble streamers Pete Santilli and Stew Peters, who have both called for political opponents to be killed. The militia has established several social media accounts with the apparent aim of recruiting members, including an account on Instagram.
On June 3, podcaster and alleged January 6 participant Jake Lang announced a “NATIONAL CONSTITUTIONAL MILITIA” called the “North American Patriot and Liberty Militia,” or “NAPALM” for short. Lang claimed that NAPALM was “organized and ready to mobilize to DEFEND this Republic from any enemy. Forgien or Domestic.” Lang — who wrote that he would serve as “national chairman” of the militia group — “faces multiple charges of assaulting law enforcement officers” and has been held in jail ahead of his September trial for his alleged crimes and what a judge called “a continued willingness to engage in violence.”
The militia’s site, which was linked in the announcement post, claims that the militia already has “over 20,000+ members across all 50 states,” including “active Sheriffs, military, veterans, emergency responders, doctors, farmers, entrepreneurs, and blue collar Americans.”
[...]
To promote and recruit for the militia, the group established public, state-specific Telegram groups for people to join and then be vetted for more private chats. The militia urges people to “make your Telegram account anonymous before joining,” and a message in the public groups details next steps “to get you placed in your Vetted County Militia chat where you can message back and forth with other members & the Leadership.”
A group of far-right social media influencers such as Couy Griffin and Stew Peters are recruiting to form a new right-wing extremist militia called North American Patriot and Liberty Militia (NAPALM).
You’ll often hear hardcore right-wing Trumpists refer to themselves as “patriots.” Repeatedly. Donald Trump himself regularly refers to his devoted followers the same way. And because the word has a common, generic meaning, most of us glance over its use without giving it much attention.
We should be, because the word is actually a kind of code, a signal of team membership. Certainly, its use has an obvious propaganda purpose: If the people who support Trump are “patriots,” then his opponents by right-wing logic must be unpatriotic and unAmerican. But more importantly, identifying as one signals to others your affiliation with the far-right “Patriot Movement”—better known to some as the militia movement or “constitutionalists.” And understanding this is central to understanding that this movement is the nexus of the right’s insurgent war on democracy.
“Patriots” has become the word that far-right ideologues, including various pundits and politicians, and their army of followers use to identify one another. “Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for us as patriots to stand up,” admonished Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance this week in calling for support for Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse. Tucker Carlson titled his pseudo-documentary promoting a conspiracy theory that “the left” is now persecuting conservatives “Patriot Purge.” The Jan. 6 insurrectionists currently under arrest in the D.C. Detention Facility call the section where they are held the “Patriot Wing.”
[...]
Trump supporters elsewhere who celebrated the insurrection applied the label as well. A Stop the Steal protest organizer in Illinois told a local TV station: "Well, now the patriots are waking up and we're taking our country back. As you've seen in D.C., they've stormed the Capitol and they are making their voices be heard. So, that's what we'll continue to fight for."
And after Trump’s coup attempt failed, and he angrily blamed the loss on the Republican Party for failing to support his every dictate—at one point announcing he intended to leave the GOP, and create his own third party. The name he intended to bestow on his new entity was the “Patriot Party.” He only backed down after Republican leaders mollified him by assuring him they would be dutifully loyal to him in the future.
The insurrectionists’ use of the name Patriots, however, is not simply the generic one suggesting people with a deep love of American democracy. In reality, you’ve never met a more seditionist lot; well before the attack on the Capitol, it was common for them to speak among themselves of overthrowing the government and “the globalists,” and preparing for civil war. Their notions of patriotism revolve around enforcing authoritarian adherence to “legitimate” leadership figures and not around the democratic values America of our historical traditions.
In psychological terms, it’s an expression of a deep need to see oneself, and to be seen by others, as heroic. The dynamics of achieving that heroic status inform everything they do and say, particularly their constant reification of concocted enemies against which they set out to do battle. In the 1990s, the threat was the “New World Order” and its black helicopters; in the 2000s, it became an invading horde of immigrants, combined with the threat of Islamist terror. Under Trump, it became “antifa” and Black Lives Matter and critical race theory.
In practical terms, it is an identification with the far-right conspiracist Patriot movement that, for the past 30 years, has been generating such antigovernment activities as organizing so-called “citizen militias,” as well as violent “sovereign citizen” extremists, border-watching “Minutemen” vigilantes, armed “III Percent” gun fanatics, and more recently, street-brawling “Proud Boys”—all of them built around an alternative far-right universe comprising conspiracy theories.
Indeed, while the Patriot movement has been typically described over the decades since it began organizing in the 1990s by researchers who have monitored them as “antigovernment,” that term may not give the most accurate sense of their ideology. Given that many of them deny they are opposed to government—they in fact believe government would be just fine if they were in charge, as they believed they were under Donald Trump; they simply oppose any kind of liberal democratic government—and that many of them are unmistakable in their hostility to democratic principles and democracy itself, it is more fundamentally an antidemocratic movement.
Their hostility to democracy is reflected in one of the movement’s embedded truisms: “America is a republic, not a democracy” (which is, as historian George Thomas explained in detail in The Atlantic, is not just a historically wrong claim, it’s a dangerously toxic one). It’s also reflected in the movement’s historic animus directed at ethnic and religious minorities, as well its openly seditionist rhetoric, and its bedrock belief that liberal democratic government is secretly in the hands of an evil “globalist” (or “communist” or “Marxist,” depending on the conspiracy theory) cabal. That hostility became starkly manifest on Jan. 6.
While the Patriot movement has often been considered synonymous with the militia movement of the 1990s, it really is more of an umbrella term encompassing a range of far-right extremists, including so-called “sovereign citizens” and “constitutionalists.” In the post-alt-right era, it has been adopted for identification by an even broader range of ideological warriors, including the Alex Jones Infowars crowd and the Proud Boys.
Larry Hopkins of the United Constitutional Patriots was arrested on Saturday.
Luke Barnes at ThinkProgress:
The leader of the United Constitutional Patriots (UCP), a militia group that filmed itself detaining asylum seekers near the U.S.-Mexico border last week, embraced the same rhetoric used by other far-right extremists, including allegedly saying his group was plotting to assassinate Hillary Clinton and George Soros, as well as making a reference to the sovereign citizen movement.
Larry Mitchell Hopkins was arrested by federal agents on Saturday after he was charged with being a felon in possession of firearms and ammunition. Hopkins’ group emerged into the limelight last week after footage emerged showing UCP members apprehending hundreds of migrant families at the border, all while heavily armed and despite having no authority to do so.
According to the criminal complaint, the UCP had previous run-ins with the law — including one 2017 incident after the FBI received a tip that the group was engaged in “militia extremist activity” in Flora Vista, New Mexico.
[...]
Hopkins’ reference to high-profile Democrats, as well as his use of the phrase “common law wife,” are common fixtures in some far-right circles. Both Soros and Clinton are villains in conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and QAnon. Soros and Clinton were also both targets of Cesar Sayoc, an ardent supporter of President Donald Trump who sent homemade pipe bombs to several Democratic figures who criticized the president. According to The Daily Beast, Hopkins claimed that Trump had also personally asked him about “Muslim immigration” and produced a radio show that spread rumors about the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Hopkins’ use of the phrase “common law” is significant as it is often used by sovereign citizens, a fringe group who believe, in a nutshell, that the United States government is illegitimate. Sovereign citizens, as a result, often violently oppose authorities of the government.
It’s unclear why the UCP has been allowed to operate in a semi-legitimate fashion. The criminal complaint shows that the FBI has had evidence on Hopkins since 2017, but only took action this week. Likewise, although Border Patrol said it did not condone any assistance from the UCP, the vigilantes could be seen readily helping Border Patrol officers when the initial video emerged last week.
Hundreds of armed civilians are already encamped along the border, drawn by President Donald Trump's hyperbole about a migrant caravan "invasion."
Mary Papenfuss at HuffPost:
Armed bands of civilian militia members are traveling to the southern U.S. border, where President Donald Trump has ordered thousands of active-duty troops to rebuff the approaching migrant caravan.
About “200 unregulated armed militia members [are] currently operating along the southwest border,“ says a planning document for Army commanders leading the 5,200 troops Trump has deployed at the border, according to Newsweek. The groups “operate under the guise of citizen patrols supporting” border officials, the document says, pointing out “reported incidents of unregulated militias stealing National Guard equipment during deployments.”
The U.S. Border Patrol late last month warned landowners in Texas to expect “possible armed civilians” to come onto their property because of the caravan, The Associated Press reported.
Militia groups ― heavily armed organizations that train members in paramilitary techniques ― often are right-wing extremist organizations. The Southern Poverty Law Center identified 689 active anti-government extremist groups in 2017. Of those, 273 were militias.
One militia group, the Texas Minutemen, has 100 volunteers heading to the Rio Grande to block migrants now traveling through Mexico, leader Shannon McGauley told The Washington Post. The untrained volunteers plan to dig in along border spots with camouflage clothing, flak jackets, semiautomatic weapons, night-vision goggles and aerial drones with thermal sensing equipment to locate people in darkness, McGauley said. They’ll also come with camping gear and food supplies.
Militia leaders echo Trump’s pre-election, anti-migrant hyperbole that the migrants are “invaders” and that the borders must be protected. Photos and videos of the caravan show large numbers of mothers and children.
“We believe our nation is under attack by foreigners who refuse to accept the rule of law on how to become a citizen in the United States,” Howie Morgan, the political action director of the Minuteman Project militia, told Newsweek. He said he hoped to see “thousands” of civilians join troops to defend the border.
The Minuteman Project — in conjunction with the Texas Minutemen — issued an “urgent” call to action last week on its website urging members to set up camp along the border for 90 days.
The organizations are “calling out to everyone to converge on the U.S.-Mexico border immediately to support U.S. law enforcement and military organizations already there. Your presence is needed everywhere along the 2,000-mile border from San Diego, California, to Brownsville, Texas,” the website says.
The Minuteman Project website, warning of a “large number of criminals” crossing the border, also encourages people to establish their own armed groups. “Several U.S. law enforcement officers and civilians have been murdered by international bandits in these areas,” the website declares.
The group calls on volunteers to follow the law and confer with law enforcement before taking any action. “We want survivors, not casualties, so proceed with extreme caution!” It also urges members to “use extreme caution when confronted by mainstream media. “They are not your friends. They work for their globalist, open-border $$-sponsors-$$,” says the site.
The Patriots of the Constitution militia put out a call last month for a “full deployment” to make a “stand to secure our border from a mob of migrating immigrants,” the Albuquerque Journal reported.
Trump said last week that rocks thrown by immigrants should be considered a firearm, and that the military would fight back. He later said he was suggesting that rock-throwing immigrants would be arrested — not shot.
The Nigerian army posted a video of Trump equating rocks with rifles on its Twitter account as an apparent defense of troops shooting some 45 protesters a week ago.
If President Barack Obama really is planning to implement martial law under the guise of a military training exercise beginning Wednesday, hundreds of civilian volunteers will be ahead of him.
If President Barack Obama really is planning to implement martial law under the guise of a military training exercise beginning Wednesday, hundreds of civilian volunteers will be ahead of him.
The Houston Chronicle, in a story published Friday, spoke with a leader of the Texas branch of a civilian surveillance group calling itself "Counter Jade Helm." Eric Johnston, 51, told the newspaper that he's expected to coordinate 20 volunteers throughout the Lone Star state who will monitor incoming troops.
"If a team member sees two Humvees full of soldiers driving through town, they're going to follow them," Johnston told the newspaper. "And they're going to radio back their ultimate location."
The operation dubbed "Jade Helm 15" is expected to take place across seven states from July 15-Sept. 15. A map from the U.S. Army had labelled Texas as "hostile territory" for the purposes of the training exercise, generating suspicion among Texas residents and giving fuel to an Internet conspiracy theory machine that churned out hundreds of rumors about martial law and secret detention centers inside shuttered Wal-Marts.
The organizer of "Counter Jade Helm" is a former Marine named Pete Lanteri, 44, who currently resides in Arizona. He told the Chronicle that the whole group already has 200 volunteers that include former military and law enforcement officers, with the largest contingent of volunteers based in Arizona.
"We're going to be watching what they do in the public," Lanteri told the Chronicle. "Obviously on a military base they can do whatever they want. But if they're going to train on public land we have a right as American citizens to watch what they're doing."
Both Johnston and Lanteri told the newspaper that they do think the military is up to no good. Yet Lanteri said he's been screening out interested volunteers who've wandered too deep into the "Jade Helm 15" conspiracy theory fever swamp.
"Once I saw the freaking nut-jobs coming out of the woodwork I was spending half my day discrediting what they were posting," Lanteri told the newspaper. "No nut-jobs will be put in the field."
In Texas, the citizen surveillance group supplements state oversight that's already been put in place. Back in May, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) requested that the State Guard monitor "Jade Helm 15" to insure that residents' civil liberties were protected.
Army Special Operations didn't respond to questions about the civilian operation, according to the Chronicle. But the military did offer a statement that assured the training exercise will have little to no impact on the communities where it is taking place.
"This training exercise will go mostly unnoticed; not interfere with private citizens and not violate their privacy and rights," the statement read, as quoted by the Chronicle. "It will not disrupt their economies or livelihoods. State and local officials will receive updates as the exercise progresses and they are equally committed to ensuring the training occurs smoothly."
