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Washington, DC, sues Proud Boys, Oath Keepers over Jan. 6

By ASHRAF KHALILyesterday

Members of the Oath Keepers on the East Front of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. The District of Columbia has filed a civil lawsuit seeking harsh financial penalties against far-right groups Proud Boys and Oath Keepers over their role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The District of Columbia has filed a civil lawsuit seeking harsh financial penalties against far-right groups Proud Boys and Oath Keepers over their role in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump.

The suit, filed Tuesday in federal court, also names dozens of the groups’ senior members, many of whom already face criminal charges for taking part in the violent attack on the Capitol building while Congress was meeting to certify the 2020 election results.

Karl Racine, Washington’s attorney general, said the lawsuit seeks compensation for damages to the District of Columbia and intends to inflict maximum financial damage on the groups responsible.

“Out intent is to hold these violent mobsters and violent hate groups accountable and to get every penny of damage we can,” Racine said. “If it so happens that we bankrupt them, then that’s a good day.”

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There was no immediate response to emails sent to the groups seeking comment.

The lawsuit cites as its basis a post-Civil War 1871 law known as the Ku Klux Klan Act. A similar tactic was used to secure a $26 million verdict last month against white supremacist groups and individuals responsible for organizing the violent 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which one person was killed after a man plowed his car into a group of counter-protesters.

The lawsuit came as the Justice Department on Tuesday separately charged three more suspected members of the Proud Boys from Pennsylvania for their alleged roles in January’s riot.

The men, Isaiah Giddings and Freedom Vy of Philadelphia and Brian Healion of Upper Darby, are all accused of working with another suspected Proud Boys member, Zachary Rehl — who was arrested in March — to breach the Capitol. Prosecutors say the group traveled together from Pennsylvania and the trio was photographed posing both outside the Capitol and inside the building.

Racine announced the suit Tuesday alongside Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s non-voting delegate in the House of Representatives. Norton said the suit is designed to secure extra funding to support D.C. police officers injured while defending the Capitol building and to serve as a warning to extremist groups.

“They’re going to have to spend money to defend themselves,” Norton said. “Even if we don’t get a penny in restitution, this lawsuit’s deterrent effect will say, ‘Be prepared to spend money to defend yourself because we are coming after you.’ ”

Racine said evidence presented in the multiple federal criminal cases underway already proves “explicit evidence of conspiracy” to commit violent acts in the nation’s capital. He said the lawsuit presents an opportunity to publicly explore and expose the financial support structure of the far-right extremist network.

“I sure hope they try to defend the case,” he said. “We can’t wait to propound searing questions about the finances of these individuals and these groups.”

The Proud Boys emerged from far-right fringes during the Trump administration to join mainstream GOP circles. The Oath Keepers is a militia group founded in 2009 that recruits current and former military, police and first responders.

 

Russia edges closer to war as new arms arrive on Ukraine’s border

A recent sighting of Putin’s notorious Buk missiles on their way to the frontline does not bode well for talks

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited frontline positions in the Donetsk region last week. Photograph: EPA

Andrew Roth in Moscow

Sun 12 Dec 2021 11.45 GMT

A flatbed rail wagon speeding through south-west Russia last week carried an ill omen for negotiations to avert a larger war with Ukraine.

On board was a Buk-M1, the kind of medium-range surface-to-air missile system that became notorious in 2014 after a missile fired from territory controlled by Russian proxies in eastern Ukraine shot down a Malaysian airliner, killing all 298 people aboard.

If Russia goes to war in Ukraine, it still needs to take a number of steps: establishing fuel supply lines, opening field hospitals and deploying air-defence systems such as the Buk that would protect its heavy weaponry and troops near the front.

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Even as Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin were sitting down to talks meant to end the crisis, Russia was inching closer to being ready to launch a full-scale ground invasion of its neighbour.

“These data allow us to conclude that despite the negotiations between Biden and Putin, the concentration of Russian troops in the areas bordering the territory controlled by the Ukrainian authorities continues,” wrote the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) – an online research group that has used social media, railway schedules and other data to reveal details of Russia’s military buildup on the border.

Putin may still decide not to launch an invasion, as he leaves troops near the front as leverage for negotiations. But Russian and western analysts are predicting that this military buildup – the second one this year – portends a series of future crises over Ukraine as Putin seeks to reverse its trajectory towards the west.

Vladimir Putin attended at a press conference in Sochi earlier this month. Photograph: Valery Sharifulin/TASS

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“Even if Putin gets something from the west, serious talks or discussions about guarantees – will that be enough for Putin?” said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the political analysis firm R.Politik. “We are witnessing the dawn of a new geopolitical adventurism from Russia.”

Despite the Putin-Biden talks, the crisis is growing deeper.

On Thursday, Russia’s FSB said it had intercepted a Ukrainian ship in the Sea of Azov near Crimea for failing to obey orders. A day later, Russia closed nearly 70% of the Sea of Azov, a shared body of water also used by Ukraine, for firing drills. Then there is the escalating rhetoric.

Deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov has said Russia and the US may be hurtling towards a repeat of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. And Putin said that the situation in eastern Ukraine “looked like genocide” in a recent meeting, raising fears he could seek a pretext to send his troops into the country.

With its military threat on the table, Russia’s foreign ministry released its list of demands for how to end the crisis on Friday. Chief among them was for Nato to “officially disavow the decision of the 2008 Bucharest Nato summit that ‘Ukraine and Georgia will become Nato members’”.

Putin has spent the last two decades trying to fight Nato expansion, but the possible accession of Ukraine into the military alliance has always touched deeper emotions, and in part motivated him to order the annexation of Crimea and provoke a war in eastern Ukraine that has killed more than 14,000 people.

“I told them: please don’t touch Ukraine or there’s going to be a problem,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, an influential Russian foreign policy analyst, of his discussions with western colleagues about Nato’s enlargement in the 2000s. “There is a real red line. Right or wrong … this kind of engagement with Ukraine on security and military affairs – that is seen here as absolutely unacceptable.”

Lukyanov said Putin saw it as his “duty as president” not to leave the “Ukrainian problem” – meaning its trajectory towards the west – for the next Russian leader.

The US has sought to persuade Russia that Ukraine would not join the alliance any time soon, but on Friday Moscow demanded a more formal declaration. That was a non-starter, Nato head Jens Stoltenberg said within hours of the demand being made public. “Nato’s relationship with Ukraine is going to be decided by the 30 Nato allies and Ukraine – no one else,” he said during a press conference with Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz.

In Ukraine, support for joining Nato has jumped considerably in recent years as the country has sought protection from an increasingly aggressive Russia. And for the nations on Nato’s eastern flank, allowing Russia to dictate the alliance’s policy on Ukraine is seen as the first step down a slippery slope towards recognising a Russian sphere of influence.

A satellite image of a Russian troop location in Voronezh, near the border with Ukraine. Photograph: AP

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“History shows that pledges of neutrality by Ukraine or any other country in the region do nothing to abate Putin’s appetite; rather, they feed it,” wrote Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, in an article published by Foreign Affairs on Friday. “The best way to respond to such ultimatums is to ignore them altogether.”

There are doubts whether Russia really wants to strike any deal at all. Analysts noted that despite Moscow building up its forces for months, Russian diplomats had not prepared any formal documents or even formulated the country’s demands until last week. And the idea of mustering nearly 100,000 troops within striking distance of the Ukrainian border (the US has said that Russia could increase that number to 175,000 by the end of January) just to hold talks with Biden has struck western observers as overkill.

That brings us back to the Buk, which, as CIT noted, had its numbers crudely painted over in an effort to prevent identification. Russia employed similar tactics during its clandestine invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

The clock is ticking. Putin could pull back, but it would be embarrassing to do so without a solid win in hand. And Russia’s demands look impossible to fulfil for the west: “Putin thinks that if Biden wants, he can move mountains, he can convince allies and convince Kyiv [to make concessions],” said Stanovaya. “This problem could lead Putin to demand the impossible and push the stakes so high that everything ends in war.”

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