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Must was a relative of hers who administered the beating..Capitol riot defendant ‘viciously’ beaten in D.C. jail, lawyer says
CBS NEWS
April 8, 2021
Capitol riot defendant ‘viciously’ beaten in D.C. jail, lawyer says | WTOP News
A Capitol riot defendant was “viciously and savagely” beaten by a guard in a Washington, D.C. jail and may lose sight in one eye because of his injuries.
A Capitol riot defendant was “viciously and savagely” beaten by a guard in a Washington, D.C. jail and may lose sight in one eye because of his injuries, one of his lawyers told the CBS affiliate in the city, WUSA-TV. Ryan Samsel is accused of pushing over barriers and knocking down a police officer – causing her to suffer a concussion – during the January 6 riot.
Samsel is from Bristol, Pennsylvania, in Bucks County, CBS Philadelphia reports.
Samsel has been in federal custody since his arrest in January on charges of forcibly assaulting or interfering with a federal agent, obstructing an official proceeding and obstructing an officer.
This week, another Capitol riot defendant, Ronald Sandlin, told a federal judge during a bail hearing that Samsel was one of a number of defendants in the case who’d been subjected to violence by D.C. correctional officers.
In an interview with WUSA, Elisabeth Pasqualini said Samsel was “viciously and savagely” beaten by a corrections officer in the D.C. Correctional Treatment Facility after the guard zip-tied Samsel’s hands.
She said she was only alerted to the alleged attack when two attorneys representing other defendants contacted her and said her client had gotten “a beatdown” by a guard and was in the hospital.
“He has definitely suffered serious injuries, including a shattered orbital floor, a broken orbital bone, his jaw was broken, his nose was broken,” Pasqualini said, adding that Samsel is currently unable to see out of his right eye and may permanently lose vision in it.
Even before the alleged assault, Pasqualini said, her client was being held in lockdown for 23 hours a day and was having a hard time getting access to hygiene supplies and the shower. She said he’s since been moved to another jail, where he remains under lockdown.
A spokesperson for the FBI’s Washington Field Office told WUSA in an emailed statement that the agency was aware of the allegations but that “as a matter of policy we can neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation.”
WUSA9 also reached out to the D.C. Department of Corrections for comment, but hadn’t received a response as of Wednesday evening.
Samsel isn’t the first Capitol riot defendant to allege poor conditions during confinement, though his allegations are the most serious.
Last month, alleged Oath Keeper organizer Thomas Caldwell was released on bond in part because, his lawyer said, he’s been confined to a wheelchair as a result of not having access to orthopedic treatment while in custody.
Pasqualini said she doesn’t currently plan to file a motion asking for Samsel’s release because the state of Pennsylvania has a detainer on him due to his status as a parolee on January 6.
Records show Samsel is on parole for an assault conviction from 2016 in Pennsylvania and that there’s a separate warrant for his arrest related to an alleged 2019 assault in New Jersey.
Inspector general says police order to hold back riot-control weapons compromised Capitol on Jan. 6
By Karoun Demirjian
April 15, 2021 at 7:03 p.m. EDT
An order to hold back heavy riot-control weapons left Capitol Police at a grave disadvantage as front-line officers, vastly outnumbered, fought to protect Congress from a violent mob Jan. 6, the force’s inspector general told lawmakers Thursday, as he urged an overhaul of campus security.
Inspector General Michael Bolton told the House Administration Committee that a deputy assistant chief of police instructed officers not to use the weapons — including stingballs and 40mm launchers — out of concern that “they could potentially cause life-altering injury and/or death, if they were misused in any way.” Bolton did not identify the chief, but he said that had officers employed such measures, “it certainly would have helped us that day to enhance our ability to protect the Capitol.”
“The takeaway from that is: Let’s provide the training to our officers so they are used appropriately,” Bolton said, later adding: “Training deficiencies put officers . . . in a position not to succeed.”
More than a half-dozen congressional committees and one task force appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) have opened inquiries into how law enforcement missed warning signals and failed to hold back the insurrection, during which hundreds of President Donald Trump’s supporters invaded the Capitol building in a deadly but failed bid to prevent Congress from certifying President Biden’s election win. But Bolton’s investigation, projected to continue for several more months, is expected to produce the most comprehensive analysis of how inadequate training and intelligence-gathering and operational “deficiencies” allowed the Capitol’s first line of defense to be overrun.
To date, the inspector general has produced two interim reports for Congress detailing investigators’ preliminary findings, including that the force lacked the security clearances needed to properly assess warnings that the Capitol might come under attack. He also determined that the Capitol Police had incomplete records of the personnel and equipment on hand to respond to civil disturbances — and that many of the officers did not know how to use the crowd-control weapons at their disposal.
During Thursday’s hearing, Bolton was emphatic that the Capitol Police would have to undertake sweeping procedural changes to be prepared for future threats to the Capitol and Congress. He also called for a “cultural change,” saying that the force must move away from the “traditional posture of a police department” and start acting instead like “a protection agency” focused not on responding to disturbances but on preventing events like the Jan. 6 riot.
The hearing came as lawmakers are readying a supplemental spending package to pay for reforms and enhancements to campus security. Many are based on recommendations from retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, whom Pelosi tasked earlier this year with conducting an evaluation. His team’s draft report, released last month, recommended an expansion of the campus police force and construction of mobile and retractable fencing around the Capitol to be deployed in emergencies.
Pelosi told reporters during a Thursday news conference that she had received a draft of the House Appropriations Committee’s proposal to apportion funds for stepped-up security measures, including plans “to harden the windows, the doors and the rest.”
But when the inspector general was asked Thursday where Congress should be spending its money, Bolton focused on a different answer: training.
“If you want to invest dollars, that’s the place to invest it: training,” he said, lamenting that for too long, police training has been treated as an afterthought to other measures.
Bolton specifically raised lapses in the department’s Civil Disturbance Unit, or CDU, to highlight how a lack of training directly affected the Jan. 6 response. The Capitol Police CDU functions as “an ad hoc unit,” he said, instead of a permanent force with specialized skills.
He called for Congress to adopt incentives to attract officers to the high-risk job and to build a force that is prepared to respond to potentially riotous crowds and threats to the Capitol.
“To be truly effective, you have to have that continuous training,” he testified. “They need to have a stand-alone unit, whatever size the department deems appropriate, and that’s their full-time job.”
Bolton also emphasized that improving the Capitol Police’s capacity to gather, analyze and assess intelligence is vital for responding to future threats.
“We need an intelligence bureau, . . . a full-service, comprehensive bureau,” he said. Bolton has also called for ensuring that civilians and officers tasked with intelligence-gathering operations obtain top-secret clearances, which not all employees currently have.
Bolton is not the first official to call for an overhaul of training, staffing, communications and intelligence operations. In recent weeks, Congress has heard about law enforcement failures and errors from the Capitol Police’s former chief, Steven A. Sund; the current acting chief, Yogananda D. Pittman; and the former Senate and House sergeants-at-arms who resigned after the riot, Michael Stenger and Paul Irving, respectively.
None of those officials have yet spoken with the House Administration Committee — a fact Republicans criticized in their remarks Thursday.
“This is the first hearing that the chair has called on January 6th, more than three months after the attack,” said Rep. Rodney Davis (Ill.), the panel’s ranking Republican, complaining that they had “skipped a step” by not having first called in officials who made the decisions leading up to Jan. 6.
Sund, the former police chief, has accused the two sergeants-at-arms of refusing his requests to call in the National Guard as a backup force before the riot. Under current rules, the police chief must seek permission from the Capitol Police Board, composed of the sergeants-at-arms and the Architect of the Capitol, before deploying additional resources in response to emergencies.
Davis said that any review of the Capitol Police that sidestepped scrutiny of the board would be incomplete. Bolton answers to the Capitol Police Board and does not have jurisdiction over it.
“I’ve said for a long time that an overhaul of the board is needed,” Davis said, complaining that the committee’s probe was not satisfactorily bipartisan. He promised to release “a series of short reports” of his own.
The Administration Committee, made up of six Democrats and three Republicans, is one of at least five House panels that have launched probes into aspects of the Capitol riot, with still others examining questions surrounding forms of domestic extremism that were highlighted by the attack. But most of those inquiries have been slow to get underway.
Many lawmakers expected that such committee-level inquiries would quickly be overshadowed by an independent commission like the one that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a concept that had seemed to have strong bipartisan support in the attack’s immediate aftermath but now has stalled in the face of political disputes over the scope of its authority.
In the Senate, a joint investigation between the committees on rules and homeland security and governmental affairs has made more headway, with a report documenting the failures that led to the mayhem on Jan. 6 expected to be completed next month, according to aides familiar with its progress.
Had the officer who shot her been Black her family wouldve been calling for his badgeDepartment of Justice Closes Investigation into the Death of Ashli Babbitt
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, April 14, 2021
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice will not pursue criminal charges against the U.S. Capitol Police officer involved in the fatal shooting of 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt, the Office announced today.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia’s Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section and the Civil Rights Division, with the Metropolitan Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division (IAD), conducted a thorough investigation of Ms. Babbitt’s shooting. Officials examined video footage posted on social media, statements from the officer involved and other officers and witnesses to the events, physical evidence from the scene of the shooting, and the results of an autopsy. Based on that investigation, officials determined that there is insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution. Officials from IAD informed a representative of Ms. Babbitt’s family today of this determination.
The investigation determined that, on January 6, 2021, Ms. Babbitt joined a crowd of people that gathered on the U.S. Capitol grounds to protest the results of the 2020 presidential election. Inside the Capitol building, a Joint Session of Congress, convened to certify the results of the Electoral College vote, was underway. Members of the crowd outside the building, which was closed to the public during the Joint Session, eventually forced their way into the Capitol building and past U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) officers attempting to maintain order. The Joint Session was stopped, and the USCP began evacuating members of Congress.
The investigation further determined that Ms. Babbitt was among a mob of people that entered the Capitol building and gained access to a hallway outside “Speaker’s Lobby,” which leads to the Chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives. At the time, the USCP was evacuating Members from the Chamber, which the mob was trying to enter from multiple doorways. USCP officers used furniture to barricade a set of glass doors separating the hallway and Speaker’s Lobby to try and stop the mob from entering the Speaker’s Lobby and the Chamber, and three officers positioned themselves between the doors and the mob. Members of the mob attempted to break through the doors by striking them and breaking the glass with their hands, flagpoles, helmets, and other objects. Eventually, the three USCP officers positioned outside the doors were forced to evacuate. As members of the mob continued to strike the glass doors, Ms. Babbitt attempted to climb through one of the doors where glass was broken out. An officer inside the Speaker’s Lobby fired one round from his service pistol, striking Ms. Babbitt in the left shoulder, causing her to fall back from the doorway and onto the floor. A USCP emergency response team, which had begun making its way into the hallway to try and subdue the mob, administered aid to Ms. Babbitt, who was transported to Washington Hospital Center, where she succumbed to her injuries.
The focus of the criminal investigation was to determine whether federal prosecutors could prove that the officer violated any federal laws, concentrating on the possible application of 18 U.S.C. § 242, a federal criminal civil rights statute. In order to establish a violation of this statute, prosecutors must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the officer acted willfully to deprive Ms. Babbitt of a right protected by the Constitution or other law, here the Fourth Amendment right not to be subjected to an unreasonable seizure. Prosecutors would have to prove not only that the officer used force that was constitutionally unreasonable, but that the officer did so “willfully,” which the Supreme Court has interpreted to mean that the officer acted with a bad purpose to disregard the law. As this requirement has been interpreted by the courts, evidence that an officer acted out of fear, mistake, panic, misperception, negligence, or even poor judgment cannot establish the high level of intent required under Section 242.
The investigation revealed no evidence to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer willfully committed a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 242. Specifically, the investigation revealed no evidence to establish that, at the time the officer fired a single shot at Ms. Babbitt, the officer did not reasonably believe that it was necessary to do so in self-defense or in defense of the Members of Congress and others evacuating the House Chamber. Acknowledging the tragic loss of life and offering condolences to Ms. Babbitt’s family, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and U.S. Department of Justice have therefore closed the investigation into this matter.
www.politico.com
Heavy metal guitarist will be first US Capitol rioter to plead guilty
"Based on these debrief interviews, the parties are currently engaged in good-faith plea negotiations, including discussions about the possibility of entering into a cooperation plea agreement aimed at resolving the matter short of indictment," the filing said.
Based on the raw videos I saw, I think it was a brotha that popped her.Had the officer who shot her been Black her family wouldve been calling for his badge
Some politicians are talking big talk but are worried about the Alphabet boyz coming for their azz.
They would throw their infant children into the flaming, outreached arms of Molech to save their own skin.
Had the officer who shot her been Black her family wouldve been calling for his badge
That MF will try to pay Securitas rates or not at all. Grifting Bastard.Trump was in panic mode when he left office.
He extended Secret Service protection for his kids for 6 months when it was suppose to end on January 20th.
He right now is trying to find security for his kids on the level of the Secret Service. Very hard to find mofos who are willing to give their life for his sorry ass kids.
Trump extended Secret Service protection to his adult children and three top officials as he left office
By Carol D. Leonnig and Nick Miroff
Jan. 20, 2021 at 7:44 p.m. EST
In the days before he left office, President Donald Trump instructed that his family get the best security available in the world for the next six months, at no cost — the protection of the U.S. Secret Service.
According to three people briefed on the plan, Trump issued a directive to extend post-presidency Secret Service protection to his four adult children and two of their spouses, who were not automatically entitled to receive it.
Trump also directed that three key officials leaving government continue to receive the protection for six months: former treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, former chief of staff Mark Meadows and former national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien, two people familiar with the arrangement said.
Under federal law, Trump, his wife, Melania Trump, and their 14-year-old son are the only members of his immediate family entitled to Secret Service protection after they leave office. The couple will receive it for their lifetimes, and Barron is entitled to protection until he turns 16.
Former vice president Mike Pence and his wife, Karen Pence, will also receive continued Secret Service security for the next six months under the same law governing protection.
But Trump wanted every family member who had been protected by the Secret Service during his administration to be covered for six additional months, according to the people familiar with his directive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe security arrangements.
That means the expensive, taxpayer-funded security will continue for daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner; son Donald Trump Jr.; son Eric Trump and his wife, Lara Trump; and daughter Tiffany Trump.
The 24-hour protection will focus on Trump’s grown children, although his grandchildren will receive protection that derives from being in proximity to their parents.
A former Trump White House spokesman declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the Secret Service also declined to comment, saying the agency does not discuss the individuals it protects.
A president can order Secret Service protection for any person he chooses, but it is highly unusual for a departing president to provide 24-hour security to relatives who are adults long past their college years. It’s unclear what precedent there is for a departing president to extend this same protection to aides after they have left his administration.
Former Trump White House spokesman Judd Deere declined to comment on Trump’s directives before he left office.
President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush sought extensions to protect their college-age daughters for a short period after they left office.
President Barack Obama’s daughters Sasha and Malia were also granted a short extension of security after he left office in 2017, when they were in high school and on a gap year from college. A Secret Service official declined to say when that protection ended.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the expansion of Secret Service security, did not respond to inquiries about the threat assessment that prompted the Trump decision.
The perk for the Trump family is expected to cost taxpayers millions of dollars and further stress the elite federal security force, which in the past four years had to staff the largest number ever of full-time security details — up to 42 at one point, according to former senior administration officials.
The extension of security for the Trump family comes as the Secret Service has also mobilized protective details for the extended families of President Biden and Vice President Harris.
Full-time security teams are being deployed to protect Biden’s two grown children and seven grandchildren, as well as Harris’s two stepchildren.
The Trump family’s protection has been costly for the Secret Service’s budget, as his adult children traveled widely across the country and around the world for personal vacations and travel related to the Trump Organization, the family company.
From 2017 to 2019, government records show, Trump family members took more than 4,500 trips that required the Secret Service to travel alongside them, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Secret Service protection was extended to 14 members of Trump’s family. In fact, it was extended to his grown children.
Just like those others who said that they had to go to Mexico for a"paid company vacation" or some BS
www.rawstory.com
