Trump DOJ Punishes Prosecutors for Accurately Describing January 6

Two Department of Justice prosecutors were put on leave Wednesday for accurately describing January 6 as “thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters.”

Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White were prosecuting a separate case involving Capitol insurrectionist Taylor Taranto, who was pardoned by President Trump for his participation in the 2021 riots. Taranto faced separate convictions for being found outside former President Obama’s old home in 2023 with two guns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and a machete.

Valdivia and White only briefly mentioned Taranto’s January 6 involvement in their sentencing memorandum:

On January 6, 2021, thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol while a joint session of Congress met to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election.… Taranto was accused of participating in the riot in Washington, D.C., by entering the U.S. Capitol Building. After the riot, Taranto returned to his home in the State of Washington, where he promoted conspiracy theories about the events of January 6, 2021.

The two prosecutors were furloughed due to the government shutdown, and told they would be placed on administrative leave when the shutdown ends. They were also locked out of their offices, making them the latest federal employees to be punished for refusing to capitulate to President Trump’s narratives surrounding January 6.

The GOP seems to be allergic to acknowledging that January 6 was as violent, if not more, than any leftist “mob” they’ve spent the last five years fearmongering about. Thousands of people broke into the Capitol building with the intention of harming elected officials so that they could wrongfully install Trump as president. Multiple people died on that day, including rioter Ashley Babbitt, and three officers died in the aftermath.

“If you work for the Trump/Bondi Justice Department and tell the truth, you will be fired,” one X user wrote Wednesday. “Federal judges should take note.”

The speaker of the House is apparently in favor of totalitarian rule, so long as Donald Trump is in charge.

The government has been shut down for more than 27 days now. But instead of working to bridge the partisan gulf and restore critical social services to millions of Americans and paychecks to thousands of federal workers, House Speaker Mike Johnson is still hyperfixated on the nationwide No Kings protest that occurred two weekends ago.

Delivering what he clearly believed was a very clever “gotcha,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday that the country would be better off if Trump were king.

“They had a rally a couple weeks ago, they tried to portray President Trump as a king. We pointed out again, the obvious truth, that if Trump was a king then the government would be open,” Johnson smirked. “He’s been trying to do that.”

Johnson then appealed to low-income Americans with his pro-monarchy pitch, arguing that if Trump had singular authority, then he would have already advanced funding for SNAP benefits, which are set to expire November 1. (A coalition of 22 states sued the Trump administration Tuesday for allegedly withholding federal funds set aside specifically to continue the program through the month of November.)

The lower chamber leader has been complaining about the No Kings protests since before they even took place on October 18, trying every which way to leverage the movement to redirect attention away from his failures at the dais. He has falsely claimed that the peaceful, anti-authoritarian protest series—which produced the largest single-day protest in U.S. history—was actually advocating for violence against political officials.

By and large, the multi-month protest series has advocated for Americans’ First Amendment rights and rejected Trump’s agenda. Signage related to the event has emphasized the fight for democracy and against dictatorships. In the same political vein, No Kings participants have used their enormous visual footprint to fight against Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s unchecked authority, turn out for universal health care, condemn the release of disgraced former Representative George Santos, and raise national awareness on the rise of American fascism.

Meanwhile, Johnson appears to be doing everything in his power to keep the government closed. Week after week, he has sent representatives home instead of bringing them in to try to come up with a solution to the shutdown. When asked Wednesday if he would bring lawmakers back to negotiate government funding past November 1, he described doing so as a “futile exercise.” He then blamed Democrats for refusing to pass a continuing resolution that would strip health care away from millions of Americans.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is pretending that he’s never even heard about an ICE agent firing at a faith leader’s face—even though he was first asked about it two weeks ago.

During a press conference Wednesday, Religion News Service’s Jack Jenkins asked Johnson whether an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shooting a pepper ball at a Presbyterian minister outside an ICE facility in Broadview, a suburb of Chicago, had infringed on the faith leader’s freedom of religion.*

“I can’t comment on any of those instances. I haven’t seen or heard any of those videos,” Johnson replied.

But the House speaker had already used that line earlier this month. “I’ve not seen [ICE] cross the line yet,” Johnson said when he was first asked about the widely publicized incident.

Jenkins immediately caught the lie Wednesday. “I asked this question, and you’ll hear me say ‘yes you have’ here—because Johnson was already *directly asked* about one of these instances in one of earlier shutdown press conferences,” he wrote on X.

It’s not clear what’s worse: the idea that Johnson would hear a report about the use of excessive force against a faith leader and never think about it again—or that he actually expects Americans to believe he never heard about it in the first place.

But Johnson wasn’t done. For a guy who won’t comment on a video he claims not to have seen, the Louisiana Republican sure said a lot.

“Religious freedom does not extend and give you the right to get in the face of an ICE officer and assault them, if indeed that was what happened there,” Johnson continued Wednesday.

Crucially, video of the incident shows that the agent was standing on the facility’s roof firing at a clearly unarmed priest standing on the ground. But Johnson is so adamant about the alleged abuse of law enforcement by radical activists that he’s willing to take some creative liberties.

In his daily propaganda press conferences, the House speaker has embraced a sort of strategic blindness when it comes to the misdeeds of Donald Trump’s administration. Johnson even played dumb when asked about a report that ICE had detained scores of U.S. citizens, including children.

* This article originally misstated the ICE facility location.

President Donald Trump has cleared the way for his multiple large-scale construction projects by demolishing the commission that would oversee them.

All six members of the Commission on Fine Arts received an email from the White House presidential personnel office Tuesday night notifying them that they had been terminated, effective immediately, The Washington Post reported.

An official told the Post that Trump planned to replace the members. “We are preparing to appoint a new slate of members to the commission that are more aligned with President Trump’s ‘America First’ policies,” they said.

The official’s statement seems to suggest that Trump is seeking a slate of MAGA commissioners to green-light his every whim, as he attempts to unilaterally transform the nation’s capital into a shrine to his own triumph. The previous commissioners had been appointed to four-year terms by President Joe Biden.

The commission was established by Congress in 1910 to advise the federal government on the art, design, and architectural development of Washington, including major projects at the White House. It’s not clear whether Trump intends to run his plans for a $300 million ballroom or his ridiculous “Arc de Trump” monument past the new commission.

The latest shake-ups come as Trump lays waste to the White House’s East Wing, after promising his grand designs for a space to host diplomats would leave the original building untouched.

It also seems that Trump has allowed his “builder in chief” status to eclipse his actual duties. The president has reportedly become consumed by his large-scale remodeling at the White House, wandering away from his work to survey renovations.

Donald Trump’s updated strategy toward crime in the United States: doing whatever he wants.

The non-monarch told U.S. troops stationed in Japan Tuesday that he was prepared to send “more than the National Guard” to American cities to safeguard and enforce his immigration agenda—a threat that could apparently involve any branch of America’s armed forces.

Speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One on his way to South Korea hours later, Trump clarified that he would do whatever is “necessary” to tackle crime, even if that meant ordering the U.S. military onto American soil.

“I would do that if it was necessary, if it was necessary I’d do that, but it hasn’t been necessary,” Trump said on the plane. “We’re doing a great job without that—is necessary. As you know, I’m allowed to do that.

“And I’d be allowed to do whatever I want, but we haven’t chosen to do that,” he continued. “And the courts wouldn’t get involved. Nobody would get involved. And I can send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. I can send anybody I wanted.”

The president is typically prohibited from leveraging the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement purposes under the Posse Comitatus Act, though one law stands as the major exception to that rule. Trump could use troops to handle domestic issues if he invoked the Insurrection Act, but doing so would require a state of emergency.

The legal loophole has been used by 17 presidents but has not been invoked since 1992, when President George H.W. Bush used it to subdue riots in Los Angeles after the local police force brutalized Rodney King.

In an apparent bid to access the legal grounds, Trump and his associates have tried to fabricate a fictitious bedlam that they claim has taken over Democratic cities.

One such area the president has homed in on is Portland, Oregon, a city better known for Voodoo Doughnuts and cold brew than hellish riots. Late last month, the president ordered the National Guard to the hipster paradise, but his rationale for sending them was not informed by statistics or data—instead, it was because of something he saw on TV.

Other crime stats that have informed his decision to federalize the law enforcement of American cities were completely imagined. When Trump deployed hundreds of National Guard members to Washington in August, he blamed the city’s rising crime data—from 2023. The cherry-picked statistics misrepresented the state of crime in the nation’s capital, which, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department that was touted by Trump’s own FBI, had actually fallen last year by 35 percent.

A month before the presidential election, the Brennan Center for Justice referred to the Posse Comitatus Act as “too flimsy a guardrail” to genuinely protect the nation from a Trump White House, explaining that the principle within the act is protected “more by norms and historical practice” than the law itself. “Unfortunately, we’ve entered an era in which we can no longer rely on tradition to constrain executive action,” Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, wrote at the time.

Trump has floated the idea of leveraging the Insurrection Act for years, though it has picked up steam since his inauguration.