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Liz Cheney: Trump Role in Capitol Riot ‘Most Serious Misconduct’ by Any US President

Congresswoman Liz Cheney, one of the leaders of the investigation into the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last year, said Sunday that Donald Trump engaged in the “most serious misconduct” of any U.S. president in history by inciting the mayhem and then refusing for more than three hours to call off the rioters.

Trump is broadly hinting at another run for the White House in 2024 but Cheney, the vice chairperson of the congressional investigative committee, told CNN’s “State of the Union” show on Sunday there is “no doubt in my mind he’s unfit” for elected office and “should never be close to the Oval Office again.”

Cheney, a vocal Trump critic, unleashed her latest broadside against her fellow Republican days after witnesses told the House of Representatives panel that Trump ignored entreaties from White House aides, Republican congressional supporters, conservative television commentators and family members to call off about 2,000 Trump-supporting rioters last year as they tried to keep Congress from certifying that Democrat Joe Biden had defeated him in the 2020 election.

Trump has often assailed the committee investigating his role in fomenting the riot by urging his supporters to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” He has called the nine-member panel the “Unselect Committee of political Thugs and Hacks.”

Trump has criticized several of his former aides for turning against him and testifying about what they saw in the White House on the day of the riot as he watched it unfold on television while sitting in the dining room next to his office.

Trump told a political rally in Arizona on Friday night, “If I announced that I was not going to run any longer for political office, the persecution of Donald Trump would immediately stop. They’re coming after me because I’m standing up for you.”

The rioters rampaged into the U.S. Capitol, vandalized the building, scuffled with police and sent lawmakers and then-Vice President Mike Pence fleeing for their safety. In the midst of the insurrection, Trump derided Pence for not having “the courage” to block certification of the Electoral College vote showing Biden had won.

Trump never inquired about the well-being of his second-in-command even as some of the rioters chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!” and erected a gallows within eyesight of the Capitol. The committee said some of Pence’s security detail called their loved ones to say goodbye for fear they may not make it out of the Capitol alive as the rioters came perilously close to the vice president.  

Trump had privately and publicly demanded that Pence send the election results back to the states Trump narrowly lost so new electors favoring the 45th president could replace the official ones favoring Biden. Constitutional experts say that would have been illegal.     

In the United States, presidents are effectively chosen in separate elections in each of the 50 states, not through the national popular vote. Each state’s number of electoral votes is dependent on its population, with the biggest states holding the most sway. The rioters who stormed the Capitol tried to keep lawmakers from certifying Biden’s eventual 306-232 victory in the Electoral College.    

Last Thursday’s hearing was the eighth over the last two months, with the committee promising to hold more public sessions in September.

Cheney said the committee is still seeking testimony from Steve Bannon, a one-time Trump aide who was convicted Friday of contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with the panel’s subpoena to testify. Shortly before his trial last week, Bannon said he was now willing to testify but no appearance has been scheduled.  

“I think it’s clear Steve Bannon has information the committee needs,” Cheney said.

She cited his commentary days ahead of the November 2020 election that Trump would declare victory the night of the election no matter the vote count at the time, which indeed Trump did. In the early hours after polls closed, Trump was ahead in the vote count but days later lost the election as mail-in ballots heavily favoring Biden were counted.

Cheney also noted that Bannon predicted on January 5, 2021, that “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” leaving the investigative panel to wonder exactly what Bannon knew beforehand about the riot at the Capitol and from whom.

She said the committee is in negotiations to hear testimony from Virginia [Ginni] Thomas, a conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who worked with Trump aides to overturn the Biden victory.

Cheney said the committee hopes Ginni Thomas “will come in voluntarily,” but will consider issuing a subpoena if she does not.

 
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Native American News Roundup July 17-23, 2022 

Here is a summary of Native American-related news around the U.S. this week:

Haaland not hindered by leg injury

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, is recovering from an injury she incurred while hiking in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park on Sunday.

An Interior Department statement released Monday said she had been treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for a broken tibia of her left leg. That didn’t stop her from returning to work Monday when she hosted tribal and Native Hawaiian community leaders as part of the administration’s Tribal Homelands Initiative.

Through that initiative, announced in November 2021, the Interior and Agriculture departments will partner with Native communities to give them greater say in how federal lands and waters are managed. According to an Interior Department press release, the group also discussed the impact of climate change in Indigenous communities, as well as ways that Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) can inform federal policymaking.

Statement from the Department of Interior 7/18/2022

Tribes fight to have Wounded Knee artifacts returned

The Washington Post reported this week on efforts by descendants of victims and survivors of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre to reclaim artifacts stolen from the graves of their ancestors and held for 130 years by the Barre Museum in Barre, Massachusetts.

The massacre occurred at a time when the government believed Plains tribes were plotting rebellion against their confinement on reservations. After tribal police killed Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull on the Standing Rock Reservation, his ally, Minneconjou Lakota leader Spotted Elk, fled south to the Pine Ridge Reservation with about 350 Lakota men, women and children.

The Army intercepted the travelers, who made camp along Wounded Knee Creek at Pine Ridge. On December 29, as the Army attempted to disarm the Indians, a shot rang out, triggering an Army attack that left as many as 300 Native Americans dead.

Soldiers and civilian contractors buried the dead in a mass grave. Many took “souvenirs” of clothing, weapons and hair, which made their way into museums and roadshows across the country.

A traveling salesman donated some of the items to the Barre Museum in 1892; the museum has been reluctant to give them up.

In 1993, a Barre Museum curator told The New York Times that museum officials feared repatriating the objects would “rip a page out of history and bury it.”

Native Americans fight for items looted from bodies at Wounded Knee

CDC reports increase in drug overdoses among Black and Native Americans

A new report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that in 2020, Black Americans and American Indian/Alaska Natives (AI/AN) died from drug overdoses at a much higher rate than white Americans. In just one year, overdose death rates increased 44% for Black people and 39% for AI/AN people. The drug overdose death rate for white Americans rose 22%.

The report says these deaths are being driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, which widened income inequalities and disrupted access to drug abuse prevention and treatment and recovery programs.

Overdose deaths are being driven by fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine and other illegally manufactured opioids.

Overall, 92,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2020, up 30% from 2019.

The study stressed an urgent need for culturally responsive, community-based prevention and treatment services, as well as medication such as naloxone, and access to harm-reduction services, including fentanyl test strips and syringes.

Vital Signs: Drug Overdose Deaths, by Selected Sociodemographic and Social Determinants of Health Characteristics — 25 States and the District of Columbia, 2019–2020

Freedmen want greater voice in Senate committee hearing

Leaders of the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs have invited representatives of the Five Tribes to testify at a July 27 hearing on the status of their Freedmen, the lineal descendants of enslaved African Americans who in the early 1800s accompanied their Native American slaveholders along the Trail of Tears to present-day Oklahoma.

As VOA reported in 2021, the Five Tribes signed treaties in 1866 agreeing to abolish slavery and give the Freedmen “all the rights and privileges of native citizens.”

But Freedmen descendants in four of the Five Tribes are not permitted to vote or run for office in tribal elections and are denied federal housing, health and education benefits.

Freedmen advocates complain they were the last to know about the hearing.

“The Tribes knew about it two or three weeks before we did,” according to Eli Grayson, a descendant of Muscogee Creek Black Freedmen.

He told VOA that only one Freedmen spokesperson was invited to testify: Cherokee citizen Marilyn Vann, president of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes Association.

According to the Committee’s invitation, dated July 20, which Grayson posted on Facebook, Vann will be given five minutes to speak about the plight of Freedmen in all Five Tribes and must submit written testimony by July 25.

“It sounds to me like they want to talk to the Tribes and not to Freedmen,” said Grayson, who said three tribal leaders have so far accepted invitations to speak.

VOA reached out to a panel spokesman, who said it isn’t known who will attend.

“When we do know, we will post it on the committee website,” he said.

Five Tribes to testify at Freedmen hearing in U.S. Senate

Pope Francis to make ‘penitential pilgrimage’ to Canada

Addressing crowds gathered in St. Peter’s Square on July 17, Pope Francis characterized his upcoming trip to Canada as “a penitential pilgrimage.”

Francis will travel to Canada on July 24, where he is expected to apologize for the abuses against Indigenous peoples in Catholic residential schools.

“Unfortunately, in Canada, many Christians, including some members of religious institutes, have contributed to the policies of cultural assimilation that in the past have severely harmed Native communities in various ways,” the pope said. “For this reason, I recently received some groups in the Vatican, representatives of Indigenous peoples, to whom I expressed my sorrow and solidarity for the harm they have suffered. And now, I am about to embark on a penitential pilgrimage, which I hope, with God’s grace, will contribute to the journey of healing and reconciliation already undertaken.”

According to the National Catholic Reporter, when Francis arrives in Edmonton, Alberta, he will not be greeted by political leaders but by First Nations elders and survivors of residential schools. From Alberta, he will travel to French-speaking Quebec City and Iqaluit, in the Arctic Canadian territory of Nunavut.

Earlier this year, from March 28 to April 1, Francis met with First Nations, Métis and Inuit delegations at the Vatican, and after hearing their testimony, he expressed “pain and shame” for the abuses they suffered at the hands of Catholic Church leaders.

The Pope’s words at the Angelus prayer, 17.07.2022

NDN Collective calls on Washington

Representatives from the South Dakota-based Indigenous-led NDN Collective were in Washington this week for talks with administration officials, lawmakers and federal agency leaders to discuss ways in which Indigenous communities can have a greater say in how public land is managed.

“We’ve heard commitments and recommitments to support bills — such as the Advancing Tribal Parity on Public Land Act and the Environmental Justice for All Act — that protect our sacred sites and double-down on consent and consultation in issues that will directly affect Tribal people and our communities,” a spokesman for the group told VOA via email.

On Wednesday, the group called on President Joe Biden to take “bold action on climate” by declaring a climate emergency and listening to decades long calls “to put an end to the era of fossil fuel extraction on our public lands.”

NDN Collective was founded in 2018 in Rapid City, South Dakota, with a stated mission to “Defend. Develop. Decolonize.” In 2020, the group received $12 million from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s Earth Fund. In March, the group filed a lawsuit against a Rapid City hotel owner and called for a citywide boycott of businesses with racist policies and practices.
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California Enacts Gun Control Law Inspired by Texas Abortion Ban

California’s governor signed into law Friday new gun control legislation modeled on a legal approach used in Texas to curb access to abortions.

Last year, well before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to an abortion, the Republican-controlled state of Texas enacted a new law allowing individuals to sue anyone helping to terminate a pregnancy, if a fetal heartbeat could be detected.

The Texas law allowed the individuals who filed the civil complaints, if they won their case, to receive “damages” of at least $10,000.

Officials in the heavily Democrat-leaning state of California, where there is solid support for abortion rights as well as for strict gun control measures, decided to push for new legislation that uses the same legal mechanism.

The law Governor Gavin Newsom signed Friday will allow individuals to seek $10,000 from any person or company that manufactures, sells or transports firearms that are banned in the state, which includes assault rifles and homemade so-called ghost guns.

State Senator Anthony Portantino, speaking at a news conference, was explicit that he and his bill co-authors had the Texas law in mind when they wrote their legislation.

“Frankly, if Texas can use a private right of action to attack women, we can use a private right of action to make California safer,” he said.

Court challenges to the California law, which is set to go into effect Jan. 1, 2023, are expected to follow from conservative organizations and the nation’s powerful gun lobby.

Newsom argued that it was the U.S. Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, that “opened the door” to such a move.

“The Supreme Court said this was OK. It was a terrible decision. But these are the rules that they have established,” he added.

The U.S. high court refused last year to halt the Texas abortion law from going into effect while challenges work their way through lower courts.

Similar Texas-style abortion restriction laws have since been enacted in several other Republican-led states.

Last month, a decision by the Supreme Court also expanded the right to carry concealed firearms around the country.

Newsom at the time called the decision “dangerous” and “shameful.”

Nearly 400 million guns were in circulation among the civilian population in the United States in 2017, or 120 guns for every 100 people, according to the Small Arms Survey.

More than 45,000 people were killed in 2020 by guns, about half of which were suicides, according to data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive.  
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Calls Rise in US Congress to Designate Russia a State Sponsor of Terrorism

As the war in Ukraine approaches the end of its fifth month and Russian attacks on civilian sites are reported on a near-daily basis, pressure is mounting on the Biden administration to officially designate Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism.

This week, according to reporting by Politico, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Secretary of State Antony Blinken that if he does not exercise the power delegated to him by Congress to make the designation, lawmakers themselves will do so.

Russia is already under crippling sanctions, imposed by the U.S. and a host of other countries, but official designation as a state sponsor of terrorism would up the ante in some significant ways. Where the international components of current sanctions have been carefully coordinated, the state sponsor of terrorism designation could trigger a stricter regime of penalties that could apply to third-country parties doing business with Russian individuals and companies.

In addition, the designation would waive Russia’s sovereign immunity in the U.S., opening the door for Americans harmed by the war in Ukraine to file civil lawsuits against the Russian government in U.S. courts.

Administration reluctant

Pelosi is the most senior lawmaker to advocate for the administration to take action, but she is not the first. Earlier this month, Senators Lindsey Graham, a Republican, and Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, traveled to Kyiv to highlight legislation they introduced in May that would make the designation official.

A bill with the same aim was introduced in the House by Representatives Joe Wilson, a Republican, and Ted Lieu, a  Democrat.

However, the Biden administration has appeared reluctant to take that step. In the past, a State Department spokesperson has said that the existing regimen of sanctions is sufficient to achieve the administration’s purposes.

Also, the state sponsor of terrorism designation would trigger “secondary” sanctions that the U.S. would have to apply to individuals and countries outside the U.S. who do business with Russia. Such a designation could complicate efforts to hold together a broad coalition of countries that are putting pressure on Russia to halt its aggression in Ukraine.

A potential new precedent

John Herbst, who served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2003-06, told VOA that, in his mind, there is little doubt that Russia has met the requirements to be designated a sponsor of terrorism.

“I believe that violence directed at civilians for political aims is one of the definitions of terrorism,” said Herbst, now the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. “If that’s right, then clearly the Russian government is pursuing a policy of terrorism.”

However, he pointed out that in the past, nations subject to the designation have been no more than regional powers at most.

The U.S. currently considers four countries to be state sponsors of terrorism: Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Syria. In the past, the list has included Iraq, Libya, South Yemen and Sudan, but those countries have since been removed from the list.

Adding Russia to the list would be a significant departure from past practice and would set a new precedent.

A ‘blunt instrument’

Herbst, who has been a vocal critic of what he calls the Biden administration’s “slow and timid policy of supplying Ukraine,” said that he would support the state sponsor of terrorism designation for Russia but with some reservations.

“I support it, but it’s not my highest priority,” he said. “If the administration was completely sound on weapons and sanctions, we wouldn’t need it at all. Because they’re not, I can see the utility of the designation. But generally speaking, I’m not fond of blunt instruments myself. I’d rather have the flexibility.”

Ingrid Brunk Wuerth, the Helen Strong Curry Chair in International Law at Vanderbilt Law School, agreed that the sanctions that come with a state sponsor of terrorism designation may be more broad than is necessary to further punish the Kremlin, considering that “Russia is under an enormous amount of pressure from U.S. sanctions as it is.”

In addition, though, Wuerth said that she is particularly concerned about the effects of opening up Russia to civil lawsuits filed by Americans.

Loss of ‘bargaining chip’

In theory, U.S. claimants would be entitled to sue to recover damages against Russia — damages that could be paid out from Russian assets currently frozen in U.S. financial institutions.

In the past, she said, frozen assets have been used as a bargaining chip in negotiations with hostile foreign governments. For example, she pointed to the release of frozen Iranian assets as an element of the Algiers Accords of 1981, which ended a long-running U.S. hostage crisis in Iran.

“If we give the money that we have to American claimants, it’s not available as a bargaining chip against Russia,” Wuerth said. In addition, she said, because the law limits those eligible to file lawsuits to American citizens and employees of the U.S. government, it would mean that damages recovered by Americans would reduce the pool of funds available to compensate the Ukrainian government and its citizens.

Wuerth noted that the U.S. is not the only country holding frozen Russian assets, and that if others followed the United States’ lead and allowed their citizens to sue for damages, that would further erode the pool of money that might be used to directly aid Ukraine.

Zelenska address

The discussion about further actions to punish Russia’s aggression against Ukraine took place during the same week that Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, visited Washington and delivered an address to a bipartisan group of U.S. Congress members on Wednesday.

She said that Russia’s “unprovoked invasive terrorist war” is “destroying our people” and recounted the stories of some of the untold number of civilians, many of them children, who have died in the nearly five months since the war began.

“I am asking for weapons — weapons that will not be used to wage a war on somebody else’s land but to protect one’s home and the right to make up a life in that home,” Zelenska told lawmakers. “I am asking for air defense systems in order for rockets not to kill children in their strollers … and kill entire families.”

In her weekly press conference on Thursday, House Speaker Pelosi praised Zelenska’s speech, and made a further case that Russia’s actions in Ukraine have gone beyond waging war, crossing the boundary into war crimes.

Pelosi decried “the tragedy of what is happening to children and women and the rest in the course of this war, how the Russians have used rape as a weapon of war, when it is indeed a war crime.”

She alleged that rape, in particular, is happening not because of the decisions of individual soldiers, but on the orders of Russian commanders, as a means of “demoralizing” the Ukrainian people.

“Congress will continue to stand with Ukraine in their fight to defend democracy, not only for their own people, but for the world,” Pelosi said.
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