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The post NYPD officers charge at group of protesters and diners, arresting people on sidewalk appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>A large group of New York City police officers charged at protesters, diners and pedestrians in Manhattan’s West Village on Saturday night, arresting 12 people and raising questions about the aggressive response.
After raiding a peaceful art protest in Washington Square Park, NYPD officers rushed the group on a nearby street around 8 p.m., according to NBC New York. The protesters at the scene had walked towards the police precinct house in the neighborhood because officers had seized their music equipment.
Police said in a statement they “responded to a large disorderly group obstructing vehicular traffic in the vicinity of 10 Street and Hudson Street within the confines of the 6 Precinct.”
But photos and videos from the incident appeared to show a different scene. Images captured from different angles seem to depict a small group of protesters on one side of the street and dozens of officers on the other side.
After a message played on a loudspeaker saying, “Please be advised that pedestrians are not permitted to walk in the street or roadway,” the police ran towards the protesters on the opposite sidewalk, grabbing people and arresting them. Videos show some people trying to flee, as police pushed them into diners eating an outdoor meal.
People who weren’t part of the small protest said they found themselves running away from the police.
Molly Dillon, a policy advisor to New York state senator Alessandra Biaggi, told NBC News she was in the neighborhood when she saw “the massive amount of police officers.”
“All of the sudden the police all at once came running across the street toward the people watching them,” Dillon said. “People were not in the street. People were not chanting. People were stopped to look at the 100 or 200 NYPD gathered around milling about.”
“As soon as the police started running my friends and I ran down the sidewalk and up against the wall of the restaurant behind us next to a table of diners who allowed us in there,” she said.
Dillon added she noticed very few of the officers were wearing masks and there was no social distancing.
Rebecca Fishbein, a journalist and author who was at the scene, said on Twitter she was “walking down Hudson after a micro-wedding on the water, not there in a reporting capacity.”
“Don’t recommend running from the cops in heels,” she wrote, adding that “no one was even in the street” when the police rushed at them.
“I’ve lived in New York for 31 years and this was the most unhinged thing I’ve ever seen,” she said.
The NYPD said a statement that “a group of roughly 150 demonstrators came to the 6th precinct and blocked traffic,” and they took people into custody “after multiple warnings to clear the sidewalk.”
In total, police arrested 12 people, eight of whom received summonses for disorderly conduct, the NYPD said.
Brad Hoylman, a New York state senator for Manhattan, said his office was in touch with police about their use of force on Saturday evening.
“We’re exhausted of seeing video after video, and hearing from constituents in person, of inexplicable escalations that undermine an already fragile trust,” he wrote on Twitter.
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]]>The post Barr told prosecutors to charge violent protesters with sedition: Report appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Attorney General William P. Barr told federal prosecutors last week to charge violent demonstrators with a range of offenses, including sedition, a charge usually reserved for someone plotting to overthrow the government, according to a report Wednesday.
Citing people familiar with the conversation, The Wall Street Journal reported Mr. Barr issued the instructions in a conference with U.S. attorneys across the country.
Also in the call, Mr. Barr warned that the violent protests across the country could get worse as the Election Day approaches, according to the report. Mr. Barr urged the prosecutors to consider a number of federal counts when lodging charges, including sedition, a rarely used law, the Journal reported.
Mr. Barr also urged prosecutors to file federal charges whenever possible, according to the report.
A Justice Department spokesperson did not return a request for comment.
So far, the Justice Department has filed federal charges against more than 200 defendants arrested during the rioting and looting that has spread across the country since the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died in the custody of the Minneapolis police.
However, the charges lodged are largely firearms violations, arson, and offenses related to failure to obey law enforcement.
Sedition is punishable by 20 years in prison and is the act of inciting revolt or violence against the government or a lawful authority with the goal of overthrowing it.
In order to score a conviction for sedition, prosecutors must prove that the defendant conspired to overthrow the government or harm government officials, including federal law enforcement. Simply advocating a government overthrow or injuring federal agents is protected as free speech under the First Amendment.
The last major sedition case in the United States is believed to have occurred in 2012. In that case, a federal judge in Michigan threw out the case against seven members of a U.S. Christian-based militia, ruling that prosecutors failed to prove that the defendants did more than talk about their hatred of the government.
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]]>The post Feds charge four men with attack on Andrew Jackson statue appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Four men have been charged with damaging and trying to tear down the Andrew Jackson statue near the White House, federal prosecutors announced Saturday night.
One, Connor Matthew Judd, has already been arrested and appeared in court Saturday.
The other three were at large as of the announcement, prosecutors said. They are identified as Lee Michael Cantrell, Ryan Lane and Graham Lloyd.
Prosecutors said all four were caught on video using straps to try to pull down the statue, which stands on federal land in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House. The statue was targeted earlier this week as an outgrowth of the Black Lives Matter protests that have roiled cities across the country over the last month.
The four men also give a flavor of the protest: Mr. Judd, 20, is a resident of Washington, D.C.; Mr. Cantrell, 47, is from Virginia; Mr. Lane, 37, is from Maryland; and Mr. Lloyd, 37, is from Maine.
“This office remains steadfast in its commitment to protect the sacred First Amendment right of individuals to peacefully protest, but these charges should serve as a warning to those who choose to desecrate the statues and monuments that adorn our nation’s capital: your violent behavior and criminal conduct will not be tolerated,” said Michael R. Sherwin, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
Mr. Judd appeared Saturday in Superior Court but the case will be transferred to U.S. District Court, the Justice Department said.
Attorney General William P. Barr had said on Thursday that charges would be coming. He said agents were scouring video of the park to see who could be identified among the protesters.
President Trump has insisted those who tried to bring down the statue face charges in order to send a signal. Over the last couple of days he has been posting federal law enforcement “Wanted” posters to Twitter with photos of some of those the U.S. Park Police is attempting to apprehend for the statue attack.
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]]>The post Twitter exec in charge of effort to fact-check Trump has history of anti-Trump posts, called McConnell a ‘b… appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Twitter’s “Head of Site Integrity” Yoel Roth boasts on his LinkedIn that he is in charge of “developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules,” like the one that led Twitter to slap a new warning label on two of President Trump’s tweets concerning mail-in balloting on Tuesday — posts that Twitter conspicuously deemed “misleading,” even though bipartisan panels of experts have agreed with the president that absentee balloting increases the risk of voter fraud.
However, Roth’s own barrage of anti-Trump, politically charged tweets seemingly calls into question whether he should be creating rules for the president and other Twitter users, especially when Twitter is under fire for its alleged left-wing bias.
Roth has previously referred to Trump and his team as “ACTUAL NAZIS,” mocked Trump supporters by saying that “we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason,” and called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a “personality-free bag of farts.” (Last August, Twitter suspended McConnell’s Twitter account, prompting the GOP to threaten to cut off advertising on the site until Twitter relented.)
In September 2016, Roth tweeted, “I’ve never donated to a presidential campaign before, but I just gave $100 to Hillary for America. We can’t fu-k around anymore.”
When Trump won the November 2016 election, Roth dejectedly chalked the development up to “[Bernie] Sanders protest voters, and racism,” before sounding more optimistic notes.
“I’m almost ready to stop dwelling on how my friends are complicit in the election of Donald Trump,” he said on Jan. 7, 2017. “Almost.”
“Massive anti-Trump protest headed up Valencia St,” Roth wrote on Jan. 20, 2017, followed by a “heart” emoji and the words “San Francisco.”
Indeed, Roth sometimes opened up about his heart on the social media platform. “‘Every time a cute boy uses an Android phone, I die inside’ is the new ‘Every time a cute boy tells me he’s a Republican, I die inside,'” he said in 2011.
“I occasionally worry that my mother WASN’T joking all those times she told us she was voting Republican,” he wrote in 2012.
Occassionally, Roth appeared to sarcastically float ideas for Twitter engineers to consider. “Idea: A bot that retweets random tweets with #BernieOrBust whenever Donald Trump does something wretched,” Roth said in May 2017.
For the most part, though, Roth urged his followers to unite, especially after Trump’s inauguration.
“The ‘you are not the right kind of feminist’ backlash to yesterday’s marches has begun,” Roth wrote on Jan. 22, 2017. “Did we learn nothing from this election?”
Also on Jan. 22, 2017, Roth compared senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
Exacerbating matters, Roth previously authored a slew of posts bluntly referring to what he calls “trannies.” In 2010, he wrote: “It wouldn’t be a trip to New York without at least one big scary tranny.” In 2012, he tweeted: “A 10 block cab ride can seem so much longer when the driver tells you about that time he thought a tranny hooker was a ‘real girl.'”
“Tranny hookers in Birkenstocks. Philadelphia: a city of contradictions,” he musted on July 24, 2011.
“All the fags took him to heart,” Roth wrote on March 21, 2009, referring to Christian Siriano of “Project Runway” fame.
When another user criticized his language, Roth held his ground. “Trans is a category worth being linguistically destabilized in the same way we did gay with ‘fag,'” he wrote. “Sorry, but I don’t subscribe to PC passing the buck. Identity politics is for everyone.”
Yoel says on his personal website that he received his PhD in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania by “studying privacy and safety on gay social networks.”
“These are the kids that are fact checking the President of the United States,” remarked Heather Champion, a commentator on social media. Several of Roth’s tweets were first resurfaced by The New York Post’s Jon Levine early Wednesday morning.
Roth’s most polemical and political posts, which do not carry any warning label, were under scrutiny as Trump accused Twitter of “interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election” by again acting out of apparent left-wing bias. The president vowed to take action.
Earlier Tuesday, Trump wrote: “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mailboxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!!”
Within hours, Twitter then appended an unprecedented label to the bottom of the tweet reading, “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.” Clicking that label brings readers to a paragraph reading in part: “Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud. … Fact-checkers say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud.”
TRUMP CAMP FIRES BACK AFTER TWITTER LABELS ITS VIDEO ‘MANIPULATED MEDIA’
Twitter’s warning label was placed on Trump’s tweets even though a Twitter spokesperson acknowledged to Fox News that Trump’s tweet had not broken any of the platform’s rules, and despite the fact that several experts have called mail-in balloting an invitation to widespread fraud, as Trump said in his tweets.
“Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud,” read the conclusion of a bipartisan 2005 report authored by the Commission on Federal Election Reform, which was chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker.
“Twitter ‘fact-checkers’ really suck,” wrote Dan Bongino, a Fox News contributor. He linked to a 2012 article in The New York Times headlined, “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises.” The article states that “votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show.”
The brouhaha erupted just two months after Twitter flagged a video uploaded by the Trump campaign as “manipulated media,” only to rebuff the campaign’s efforts to have the platform flag a similar video uploaded by the Biden team.
Roth and Twitter did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment early Wednesday. In March, Roth sat for an interview with NPR, in which he emphasized that he was working to combat “election disinformation.”
“I think in 2020, we’re facing a particularly divisive political moment here in the United States, and attempts to capitalize on those divisions amongst Americans seem to be where malicious actors are headed,” Roth said. “This is a similar pattern to what we saw in 2016 and 2018, but one of the things that we’ve seen from not only Russia but a wide range of malicious actors is an attempt to capitalize on some of the major domestic voices that are participating in these conversations and then double down on some of those activities.”
On May 25, Roth took a seemingly cavalier attitude towards criticism, tweeting, “Somehow, regularly being told by internet strangers that I’m a soulless corporate shill is still less harsh feedback than I got from anonymous peer reviewers in my past academic life.”
The Trump campaign, however, was less amused.
“We always knew that Silicon Valley would pull out all the stops to obstruct and interfere with President Trump getting his message through to voters,” Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement. “Partnering with the biased fake news media ‘fact checkers’ is only a smoke screen Twitter is using to try to lend their obvious political tactics some false credibility. There are many reasons the Trump campaign pulled all our advertising from Twitter months ago, and their clear political bias is one of them.“
And late Tuesday, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla, noted on Twitter that “The law still protects social media companies like @Twitter because they are considered forums not publishers. But if they have now decided to exercise an editorial role like a publisher then they should no longer be shielded from liability & treated as publishers under the law.”
That was a reference to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which broadly protects online content platforms from liability. For example, a defamatory comment posted by a Twitter user would not ordinarily lead to liability for Twitter, even if the platform allows the defamatory content to remain online after becoming aware of it.
Calls to reform the law have largely gone unheeded in recent years, even as sites like Twitter take on a more dominant role in national discourse. (Copyright law, which has a strong constitutional foundation, ordinarily does require sites like Twitter to remove offending content, or face liability.)
Reaction to Twitter’s actions among commentators was almost uniformly negative. The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto pointed out that Twitter hadn’t fact-checked Trump’s charge that the platform was interfering improperly in the election. “Hmm, no fact check on this so I guess it must be true!” he wrote.
“It wouldn’t be a trip to New York without at least one big scary tranny.”
— Twitter “Head of Site Integrity” Yoel Roth
Separately, GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel observed that Alabama’s secretary of state, John Merrill, told CNN earlier in the day that five of the six voter fraud convictions during his tenure related to absentee balloting.
In a post retweeted by the Trump campaign, The Daily Caller’s Logan Hall noted that Twitter has not appended a warning label on tweets from Chinese government representatives engaging in a propaganda campaign to blame the U.S. for the spread of coronavirus. “The deeper problem: many of the big tech companies that people hold near and dear to their hearts have no actual allegiance to America or American values,” Hall wrote.
“Wow,” wrote Michael James Coudrey, the CEO of Yuko Social, a social media engine for politicians and organizations. “Look what Twitter is doing to the President of the United States [sic] tweets. They are attaching a link then saying according to CNN and Washington Post, what he is saying is unsubstantiated. This is insane.”
NADLER IN 2004: PAPER BALLOTS SUSCEPTIBLE TO FRAUD
President Donald Trump speaks during a Memorial Day ceremony at Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine, Monday, May 25, 2020, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
A Twitter spokesperson told Fox News earlier Tuesday that Trump’s tweets “contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots,” and that “this decision is in line with the approach we shared earlier this month.”
Twitter acknowledged Trump’s tweet “is not in violation of the Twitter Rules as it does not directly try to dissuade people from voting — it does, however, contain misleading information about the voting process, specifically mail-in ballots, and we’re offering more context to the public.”
Twitter did not respond to Fox News’ inquiries about whether consideration was given for The Washington Post or CNN’s political leanings, or why its warning label appeared to be contradictory — saying both that there was “no evidence” that mail-in balloting leads to fraud, and at the same time, that there was indeed evidence that mail-in balloting had been linked to fraud, although only “very rarely.”
However, Republicans have long argued that many states fail to adequately clean up their voter rolls. Last year, California was forced to remove 1.5 million ineligible voters after a court settlement last year when California’s rolls showed a registration of 112 percent.
And, data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission indicates that roughly 28 million mail-in ballots have disappeared in the past decade.
“Elections in 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018 saw more than 28.3 million ‘unaccounted for’ mail ballots,” a report from the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) recently assessed.
“Putting the election in the hands of the United States Postal Service would be a catastrophe. Over the recent decade, there were 28 million missing and misdirected ballots,” PILF President and General Counsel J. Christian Adams said in a statement. “These represent 28 million opportunities for someone to cheat. Absentee ballot fraud is the most common; the most expensive to investigate; and can never be reversed after an election. The status quo was already bad for mail balloting. The proposed emergency fix is worse.”
Election integrity has become one of the upcoming election’s most prominent issues. On May 20, Trump threatened to withhold federal funds from Michigan if it pursued mail-in balloting — a questionably constitutional move, given general prohibitions against the federal government forcing state action on matters ordinarily within states’ jurisdiction.
“Michigan sends absentee ballot applications to 7.7 million people ahead of Primaries and the General Election,” Trump wrote. “This was done illegally and without authorization by a rogue Secretary of State. I will ask to hold up funding to Michigan if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!”
The Republican National Committee (RNC) earlier this month launched ProtectTheVote.com, a digital platform that the GOP says is part of its all-hands-on-deck effort to “protect against the Democrats’ assault on our elections” as progressives push for sweeping changes, including vote-by-mail and more ballot harvesting, amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The launch came after the RNC and Trump campaign doubled their legal budget to $20 million after an initial commitment of $10 million in February, saying they wanted to “fight frivolous Democrat lawsuits and uphold the integrity of the elections process.”
That was a message echoed by Trump in a tweet last month: “GET RID OF BALLOT HARVESTING, IT IS RAMPANT WITH FRAUD. THE USA MUST HAVE VOTER I.D., THE ONLY WAY TO GET AN HONEST COUNT!”
Suspicion of big tech has reached a critical mass in recent months. Also on Tuesday, Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey discovered that YouTube was censoring comments critical of the Chinese government. YouTube called the censorship a mistake, but offered no details; Republicans, in turn, sought a closer look.
“Is Project Dragonfly going global?” wrote Indiana Republican Rep. Jim Banks, referring to Google’s since-scrapped search engine that would have censored results to appease the Chinese government. “Google must stop imitating #CCP censorship practices now. “
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