Trump Jan. 6 Pardonee Gets Life Sentence After Trying to Take Revenge

A federal judge sentenced a January 6 rioter to life in prison Wednesday for plotting to assassinate the federal agents who’d investigated him.  

U.S. District Judge Thomas Varlan ordered 36-year-old Edward Kelley to spend the rest of his life behind bars, after Kelley was convicted on the charges of conspiracy to murder federal employees, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, and influencing a federal official by threat.

Kelley received his sentencing in front of more than a dozen of the targets on his “kill list,” which had specifically taken aim at individuals working at the FBI’s headquarters in Knoxville, Tennessee. Prosecutors said that Kelley had created the list while awaiting trial in his insurrection case, and that he had attempted to recruit others to help him target the office with car bombs and drones, or attack individuals at their homes or public places. 

Kelley was previously convicted in November 2024 of multiple felonies and misdemeanors related to his participation in the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, where he pushed a police officer to the ground before being one of the first rioters to break into the building. 

He was one of the more than 1,500 recipients of Donald Trump’s sweeping Inauguration Day pardon for violently opposing his loss in the 2020 presidential election. 

Not every January 6 rioter is getting the same shake. Former FBI agent and January 6 rioter Jared L. Wise—who shouted “Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” while the mob attacked law enforcement at the Capitol—will now work alongside former interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin on the Department of Justice’s “weaponization” working group. 

Trump adviser Stephen Miller is up in arms after a federal district court judge dealt a significant blow to Trump’s immigration agenda Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss ruled unlawful Trump’s day-one proclamation shutting down the right to claim asylum at the southern border on the dubious grounds that an “invasion” is occurring there.

In response, Miller claimed that Moss, an Obama appointee, is a “marxist judge” attempting to “circumvent the Supreme Court.” Quote-tweeting that post, Miller added, “The West will not survive if our sovereignty is not restored.”

In his 128-page ruling, Moss said that Trump’s proclamation asserted “sweeping authority” that far exceeds the powers he legally possesses under the Constitution and the Immigration and Nationality Act. And the Trump administration’s “appeal to necessity cannot fill that void.”

Contrary to Trump’s arguments, Moss wrote, the president does not have “the unilateral authority to limit the rights of aliens present in the United States to apply for asylum,” nor does he have the “authority to adopt an alternative immigration system, which supplants the statutes that Congress has enacted and the regulations that the responsible agencies have promulgated.”

The ruling, which applies to all people “who are now or will be present in the United States,” effectively stops the proclamation in its tracks—at least after a two-week stay, during which the president is expected to appeal. In the interim, Moss said the administration “shall take steps to ensure that they … are fully prepared to implement the Court’s order without further delay.”

Deborah Pearlstein of Princeton University noted that Moss’s ruling exemplifies how courts may still rein in Trump’s unlawful actions, even after the Supreme Court recently impeded their ability to do so in a ruling restricting lower courts’ ability to issue nationwide freezes on Trump’s anti-constitutional executive orders.

Moss mentioned that Supreme Court case in his ruling, but cited the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law that directs courts to “set aside” federal actions found to be “not in accordance with law.”

Republican Representative Derrick Van Orden made sure to let reporters know that he wasn’t President Trump’s bitch—as he prepared to vote “yes” on the budget bill that will leave at least 30,000 of his constituents without health care by 2034.

“The president of the United States didn’t give us an assignment. We’re not a bunch of little bitches around here, okay? I’m a member of Congress,” Van Orden said, according to Punchbowl News’s Kenzie Nguyen. “I represent almost eight hundred thousand Wisconsinites.”

Van Orden really had the audacity to take this kind of tone with reporters after a “yes” vote on the House’s previous version of the budget bill. He is also expected to vote “yes” on the new version of the bill approved by the Senate.

Aside from the aforementioned health care cuts, the House-approved version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act would remove $607 million from rural Wisconsin hospitals, placing important care centers like Aspirus Stanley Hospital, the ​​Mayo Clinic Health System-Oakridge in Osseo, and Froedtert Holy Family Memorial Hospital in Manitowoc at risk of shutting down. While the Senate bill includes slightly higher funding for rural hospitals, advocates say it’s still not enough given the cuts to Medicaid.

“It creates Medicaid winners and losers, with Wisconsin at the bottom,” Wisconsin Hospital Association President Eric Borgerding wrote recently in a column for the Wisconsin State Journal.

The bill passed the Senate on Tuesday and is currently under deliberation in the House, with no clear end date in sight.

The monstrous, recently constructed immigrant detention facility in the Florida Everglades, flippantly dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” literally took on water within a day of President Trump visiting the camp Tuesday to commemorate its planned Wednesday opening.

Florida officials have assured the public that the facility, which will cost an estimated $450 million per year to operate, was built to withstand a Category 2 hurricane (though the Naples Daily News notes that winds of recent hurricanes in the area have significantly exceeded Category 2 levels).

A report by the Miami Herald further casts into doubt official claims about the facility’s durability. According to the Herald, “a garden-variety South Florida summer rainstorm” on Tuesday afternoon—of about an inch-and-a-half of rain—caused flooding in the facility.

The Herald reports: “Rainfall seeped through the edges of the facility as the roofs and walls trembled. Drips leaked from above a door frame. The water spread under poles hoisting the Florida and U.S. flags.”

On Wednesday, the Florida Division of Emergency Management told the Herald that contractors, overnight, “went back and tightened any seams at the base of the structures that allowed water intrusion during the heavy storm,” claiming flooding had been “minimal.”

The news validates growing concerns about the condition of the facility, which was jury-rigged on a site known to be prone to flooding.

On Wednesday, two dozen House Democrats, led by Representatives Janelle Bynum of Oregon and Maxwell Frost of Florida, railed against the “makeshift unsafe, unsanitary, overly crowded, and environmentally destructive” facility in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting Director Todd Lyons.

“Detainees will be kept in tents with inadequate sanitation facilities and will face unbearable living conditions, including exposure to deadly pathogens, constant threats from unpredictable flooding and extreme weather events, and daily temperatures averaging 90 degrees, with a heat index often over 100 degrees Fahrenheit,” the lawmakers wrote.

The site, the letter continues, is “known as being one of the most dangerous and inhospitable environments in the United States. This remote swamp is notorious for oppressive heat, relentless humidity, severe storms, and perilous terrain infested with venomous snakes, disease-carrying insects, and large predatory wildlife, including alligators and crocodiles.”

The Trump administration and MAGA more broadly, meanwhile, have relished the cruelty of the facility—which journalist Andrea Prizer, who authored a book on the history of concentration camps, deemed a concentration camp. For example, Trump on Tuesday joked to reporters that detainees will have to be taught to run in a zigzag in order to evade alligators.

The assessment from House Democrats, borne out by reports that the facility apparently had trouble withstanding a commonplace rain shower, continues: “The deliberate placement of vulnerable immigrants into such a hostile and lethal environment is morally reprehensible, inherently cruel, and starkly violates basic humanitarian standards.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is seeking creative ways to staff her agency with sycophants of Donald Trump, Bloomberg Government reported Wednesday.

At the first-ever meeting of Trump’s revamped Homeland Security Advisory Council Wednesday, Noem outright asked the members “how to fire people that don’t like us.”

Noem complained that she was “surrounded by bureaucrats,” and wanted to root out employees who “don’t support what we’re doing.”

Under the leadership of Noem and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the DHS has enacted brutal immigration reform that pushes the boundaries of U.S. law. Their efforts have involved making absurd changes to Customs and Border Control policies, stripping immigrants of their lawful immigration status, and conducting widespread paramilitary raids that target average civilians, not criminals.

In April, Trump announced that he had “revamped” his Homeland Security Advisory Council by once again fishing from the Fox News talent pool, recruiting host Mark Levin and former Fox News contributor Bo Dietl.

The council also included Trump’s disgraced former lawyer Rudy Giuliani, DHS adviser Corey Lewandowski, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, and Florida state Senator Joseph Gruters, who serves on the Republican National Committee and is a close ally of Trump’s.