This one really hits home. I have friends and family who have lost their homes or otherwise been displaced by the awful recent wildfires. The tradition has been to give disaster aid where it is needed —whether that is Florida, North Carolina, or California—without extortion. What crass political opportunism.
A Texas congressman is already on board.
After Daniel Rodriguez pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer during the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021, he was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison by a federal judge who called him a “one-man army of hate.”
Two other men, Albuquerque Cosper Head and Kyle J. Young, were sentenced to more than seven years for their parts in the assault on the officer, Michael Fanone.
On Monday, President Trump pardoned all three of them, lumping them together with nearly 1,600 other people who had been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 riot and who he suggested had been victimized by a politicized prosecution. His grant of clemency comes despite a wealth of evidence about their crimes, including videos used against them by the Justice Department.
Some of the videos document the gruesome moment when Officer Fanone, who rushed to defend the Capitol on his day off, was dragged into the crowd by Mr. Head, beaten by Mr. Young and then attacked with a stun gun by Mr. Rodriguez.
Video from Officer Fanone’s body camera shows Mr. Rodriguez driving the stun gun into Officer Fanone’s neck, causing him to scream. Officer Fanone, who has since left the police force, sustained grievous injuries that day and suffered a heart attack.
Even some close allies of Mr. Trump had opposed granting clemency to those rioters found guilty of violent crimes, especially the more than 600 who were convicted of assaulting or resisting police officers. Of those defendants, nearly 175 used a dangerous or deadly weapon, prosecutors say.
Four years later, the violence they committed is still shocking — and the facts of what happened are right there in the images, many of them now iconic.
Here are some of the most egregious acts of violence that took place during the Capitol attack, as seen in videos….
The State Bar of Texas on Wednesday moved to drop its lawsuit against Attorney General Ken Paxton for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, extending a cascade of legal and political wins for the once-embattled Republican leader.
In a court filing, lawyers with the bar’s Commission for Lawyer Discipline asked the Texas Supreme Court to dismiss the suit, citing the high court’s December decision to toss a separate state bar lawsuit against Paxton’s top aide, Brent Webster, for working with Paxton to challenge the 2020 outcome in battleground states won by Democrat Joe Biden.
The state bar had sought to sanction Paxton, which could have carried a punishment ranging from a private reprimand to disbarment. Lawyers from the bar — which regulates law licenses in Texas — have argued that Paxton, in falsely claiming to have uncovered major evidence of election wrongdoing, forced the battleground states “to expend time, money, and resources to respond to the misrepresentations and false statements.”
The bar’s dismissal motion effectively ends a case that dates back to May 2022. It is Paxton’s second personal legal victory within the last year: In March, prosecutors dropped long-running felony securities fraud charges against Paxton under an agreement that required the attorney general to perform 100 hours of community service and take 15 hours of legal ethics courses. Paxton also agreed to pay around $271,000 in restitution to those he was accused of defrauding more than a decade ago when he allegedly solicited investors in a McKinney technology company without disclosing that the firm was paying him to promote its stock….
In its decision to dismiss the lawsuit against Webster last month, the Texas Supreme Court upheld an earlier ruling by a Williamson County district judge who said that taking Webster’s law license would violate the Texas Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine. In their motion to drop Paxton’s case, state bar lawyers acknowledged that their lawsuit against the attorney general “raises identical separation of powers issues” as those at issue in Webster’s case.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt revealed in amended campaign filings on Thursday that her unsuccessful 2022 congressional campaign owes more than $300,000 in unpaid debts, with Leavitt failing to disclose for years that her campaign took in hundreds of thousands of dollars in inappropriate donations and never paid the money back.
The vast majority of that debt, about $200,000, is owed as refunds to contributors who appear to have donated above the legal limits. Those excessive contributions went unreported for years — until Thursday — when Leavitt’s campaign amended every campaign filing she had ever made with the Federal Election Commission….
The Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office provided the following breakdown of ballots that were reviewed.
According to investigators, indicators of fraud included: