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Oath Keepers Chief Sentenced To 18 Years In Prison For Capitol Insurrection

Oath Keepers Chief Sentenced To 18 Years In Prison For Capitol Insurrection

Washington (AFP) - The founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia was handed an 18-year prison sentence Thursday for seditious conspiracy in the 2021 attack on the US Capitol, the toughest penalty given yet over the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

Elmer Stewart Rhodes was one of more than 1,000 people charged over the attack which, encouraged by then-president Donald Trump, aimed to block Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the winner of the November 2020 election.

"Seditious conspiracy is among the most serious crimes an American can commit," said Judge Amit Mehta in pronouncing the sentence.

"You present an ongoing threat and a peril to this country," Mehta told Rhodes, who led the Oath Keepers and organized their participation, with a stockpile of arms, in the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters.

"You are smart, charismatic and compelling and that is frankly what makes you dangerous," Mehta said -- rejecting Rhodes' claim that he was a "political prisoner."

The sentence fell short of the 25 years the government had sought, although Mehta accepted the argument that the Oath Keepers' plan to violently block Biden from becoming president amounted to terrorism.

Just ahead of the sentence, Rhodes, wearing an eye patch and dressed in his orange prison jumpsuit, defiantly defended his group and their actions in support of Trump.

"My only crime is opposing those destroying our country," he declared, comparing himself to the famed Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Blame Trump

But his group's stockpiling weapons just outside the city and wearing combat-style gear in an organized push into the building showed a level of planning and preparation for violence not present with many of the others in the crowd.

Rhodes, 57, and Kelly Meggs, 53, leader of the Oath Keepers' Florida chapter, were convicted by a Washington jury in November of the rarely pursued charge of seditious conspiracy -- plotting to overthrow the government or unlawfully opposing its authority.

In the same trial, three other Oath Keepers were convicted of obstructing an official proceeding, as the rioters shut down the Congress and sent lawmakers and vice president Mike Pence fleeing to safety.

During the trial, prosecutors said the Oath Keepers "concocted a plan for an armed rebellion... plotting to oppose by force the government of the United States."

Rhodes' attorneys argued that he himself never entered the Capitol building and that he did not support others doing so.

But Mehta rejected that as mitigating the sentence.

Rhodes was unequivocally the leader of the group and summoned them to Washington with a cache of arms for the violent assault, Mehta said.

"Stewart Rodes is a Yale Law grad and a pretty smart guy," the judge said. "He was the one giving the orders... They were there because of him."

Rhodes' attorney Phillip Linder however said he should not be held responsible for the Capitol attack and pointed his finger at Trump.

"I think what happened on January 6 was deplorable," Linder told the court.

But Rhodes did not plan the uprising, he insisted.

"We need to look at what caused this... Who got the Million Maga rally started?... Who got January 6 started?" Linder said.

"He's not the one that started that rhetoric that got the people ginned up."

Biden Rebuffs 'Extreme' GOP But Expresses Optimism On Avoiding Default

Biden Rebuffs 'Extreme' GOP But Expresses Optimism On Avoiding Default

Washington (AFP) - Talks to avoid a US debt default were on a knife edge Saturday as President Joe Biden warned he would not accept "extreme" Republican demands but said he remained optimistic.

"I still believe we'll be able to avoid a default and we'll get something decent done," he told reporters at the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan.

With the Treasury Department warning that the US government could run out of money as early as June 1 -- triggering massive economic disruption in the world's biggest economy and likely around the globe -- the political battle in Washington has see-sawed without any clear sign of resolution.

Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, are demanding steep budget cuts as a price for allowing an extension of the government's borrowing authority. The White House is seeking to whittle down Republican demands, while arguing that the traditionally uncontroversial annual debt ceiling increase is being weaponized for political gain.

Hopes for a settlement took a blow Friday when Republicans walked out of negotiations, declaring a "pause."

However, the talks restarted hours later, leading White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to say "we are indeed optimistic."

Biden, on the other side of the world for the gathering of rich democracies, was briefed on the situation early Saturday, which was still Friday night in Washington, the White House said.

Biden communications director Ben LaBolt said "Republicans are taking the economy hostage and pushing us to the brink of default, which could cost millions of jobs and tip the country into recession after two years of steady job and wage growth."

While Biden will not accept "extreme" Republican policies, "there remains a path forward to arrive at a reasonable bipartisan agreement if Republicans come back to the table to negotiate in good faith," LaBolt said.

Taxing And Spending

More borrowing is required by the US government just to meet expenditures already made, meaning that refusal by the Republicans to lift the debt ceiling would leave Washington unable to pay its bills, triggering an array of economic shockwaves.

Republicans argue that the more than $31 trillion in US national debt is too high to accept and that there should be agreement on getting the books more balanced, rather than simply authorizing a still-higher debt allowance. They passed three increases in the debt limit without dissent while Donald Trump was president.

Democrats say that they are willing to discuss the budget but that first the debt ceiling needs to be raised without condition so that the existing bills can be paid and US financial credibility preserved.

Briefly calling off the talks on Friday, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said: "We've got to pause," because "we can't be spending any more money next year." He failed to acknowledge that Trump increased the debt by nearly $8 trillion -- an historic record.

Biden's team says the raft of spending cuts being demanded by Republicans are fueled by the agenda of the party's increasingly dominant hard-right wing.

In his statement, LaBolt said that the Republican budget cuts would lead to large-scale job losses and the weakening of social safety nets, while extending tax breaks for the wealthy. The counter-proposal from the White House is to raise taxes on the wealthy to improve revenue and to accept more limited spending cuts.

In his remarks to reporters, Biden expressed a willingness to be patient.

"It's a negotiation. It goes in stages," he said. Asked if he was worried, he replied: "Not at all."

The president leaves Japan for Washington on Sunday, cutting short a trip that had been set to take him to Papua New Guinea and Australia next week.

Biden Cuts Asian Trip Short To Deal With Republicans On Debt And Budget

Biden Cuts Asian Trip Short To Deal With Republicans On Debt And Budget

Washington (AFP) - President Joe Biden's departure Wednesday to the G7 in Japan was meant to launch a geostrategic masterclass on rallying the world's democracies against China. Instead, he will limp into an abruptly truncated journey facing concerns that the US debt ceiling row is about to tear up the global economy.

Biden arrives Thursday in Hiroshima, one of the two cities hit by US atomic bombs in 1945 -- a closing chapter to World War II and the start of an era of US leadership across the Pacific that Beijing now seeks to supplant.

He will meet leaders from the rest of the G7 club -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan -- that has been so crucial in the US-led drive to enforce unprecedented economic sanctions on China-ally Russia for invading Ukraine.

However, visits next week to Papua New Guinea and to a Sydney summit of the Quad, comprising Australia, India, Japan and the United States, were canceled so that Biden can rush back Sunday and negotiate with Republican opponents on the debt ceiling.

For a president who often warns that democracies are in an existential fight to prove their viability against the world's autocracies, it's a sobering moment.

"It's extraordinarily hard... to go to the G7 and talk about economic unity against Russia, economic unity against China, when the dysfunction is coming from inside the house," Josh Lipsky, at the Atlantic Council, said.

Biden downplayed the reshuffling of his schedule, saying, "the nature of the presidency is addressing many critical matters all at once."

But Evan Feigenbaum, a former US diplomat with the Carnegie Endowment, was brutal.

"It's tough to 'compete with China' in the Pacific when you're busy sinking your own boat," he tweeted. "How do we think we look to the rest of the world?"

Candidate Biden Enters Furnace

For Biden, 80, the trip and the debt ceiling mess come at a crucial time. He has just launched his re-election campaign and Americans wary about his age are watching how he copes in the furnace of the presidency at home and abroad.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Biden can multi-task.

"He can travel overseas, and manage our foreign policy and our defense policy and look after our national security commitments in an important region like the Indo-Pacific, and also work with congressional leaders to do the right thing -- raise the debt ceiling, avoid default so that the United States credibility here at home and overseas is preserved," Kirby said.

The risks over the debt ceiling, however, are so huge -- global market panic would be just the beginning of the fallout from a default -- that Biden may spend much of his time trying to reassure fellow world leaders on the state of the US economy, rather than planning how to manage China.

Biden doesn't know whether the increasingly hard-right Republican Party will allow an increase to the debt in time to prevent default. And he also doesn't know whether the left of his own Democratic party will forgive him for the compromises he may have to make to save the situation.

Quad Consolation Prizes

Canceling the Papua New Guinea and Australia stops is a bitter pill for a president who has reinvigorated US diplomacy after the isolationist Trump years.

The Quad, an informal grouping of large democracies interested in restraining aggressive Chinese economic and military expansion across the Pacific, is one of Biden's priorities.

The White House was quick to point out that Biden will already be meeting in Japan on the sidelines of the G7 with his other Quad counterparts.

And a consolation prize for Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was extended in the form of an invitation to a state visit at the White House. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is already booked in for a state visit this June.

But Washington is likely to rue the missed opportunity in Papua New Guinea, where Biden would have been the first serving US president to visit. The symbolism, at a time when remote Pacific island territories and countries have become chess pieces in the geostrategic contest with China, would have been powerful

US-Mexico Border Remains Calm As New Asylum Rules Take Effect

US-Mexico Border Remains Calm As New Asylum Rules Take Effect

El Paso (United States) (AFP) - The US-Mexico border appeared calm on Friday as tough asylum rules come into force, with senior officials in Washington expressing confidence that the new system would work.

Thousands of people remained on the Mexican side of the frontier hoping to enter the United States, but the chaotic surge of migrants that right-wing politicians predicted failed to materialize.

"We are seeing people arrive at our southern border, as we expected, as we have been planning for," Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Friday.

"We are screening and vetting them and if they do not have a basis to remain, we will remove them very swiftly."

Arrangements at the border changed at midnight, as the pandemic-era Title 42 -- a health provision that allowed for immediate expulsion -- expired.

In its place is a regularized immigration rule that threatens illegal border-crossers with five-year bans and possible criminal charges, and requires asylum-seekers to apply from outside the country.

"Our plan will take some time, but our plan will succeed," said Mayorkas.

Up to 10,000 people have tried to enter the country every day over the past week, border officials told the US media.

Many turned themselves in to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) hoping to be registered and "paroled" -- let go because authorities did not have the capacity to house them or expel them.

At the airport in El Paso on Friday, Yoenny Camacaro was hunkered down waiting for a flight to Indiana to reunite with her cousin.

The 23-year-old, who has been granted an appointment with a judge in November 2024, said she was very happy to have arrived in the United States after a long and difficult journey from Venezuela through the jungle and by train.

"It's cold, you don't eat, you can't go to the bathroom, and we depended on food being thrown at us," she told AFP.

"But that's over. Now we're here, we've done it."

In among the relief, there was also tragedy.

US officials said a teenage boy had died in the custody of Health and Human Services, which takes care of children entering the country unaccompanied.

The department gave no details, but Honduran Foreign Minister Enrique Reina said a 17-year-old boy had died in an HHS facility in Florida.

'Calm And Normal'

Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said the number of US-bound migrants crossing his country was ebbing.

He said around 26,500 migrants were waiting in Mexican cities along the long US frontier, and the situation was "calm and normal."

"The flux is dropping today. We have not had confrontations or situations of violence on the border," Ebrard told reporters.

Mexico's national immigration agency has ordered its offices to stop issuing documents authorizing migrants to transit through the country, officials said, in an apparent attempt to curb flows to the US border.

Edith Tapia of the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian nonprofit group, said the new policy limiting the ways in which vulnerable people could claim asylum in the United Sates left them prey to the criminal gangs that roam northern Mexico.

This "will continue to put migrants and asylum seekers at risk and (leave them) without the possibility of... protection," she told AFP in El Paso.

The border policy shift ordered by President Joe Biden has been controversial, with his supporters on the left saying new rules are too strict while opponents on the right have claimed, without evidence, that he is "opening the borders."

His new policy came under immediate legal attack.

In Florida, a federal judge agreed to a request from the state's Republican administration and ordered the border patrol to stop granting parole to border crossers and asylum seekers -- letting them remain in the United States while their cases are reviewed, a process that can take years.

And in Texas, 13 Republican-led states filed a suit declaring parole "illegal."

Parole "creates incentives for even more illegal aliens to travel to the southwest border," they said.

Washington says it is expanding legal pathways to asylum by setting up regional processing centers, bolstering guest worker programs, and granting more admissions for refugees from Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela and other troubled countries.

For asylum seekers, it has launched an app, CBP One, to arrange immigration interviews at the border.

While many have complained of glitches, Amadeo Diaz, 62, was in Tijuana, south of California, with his family for his asylum interview.

The family, from Arcelia in Mexico's south, said they faced kidnapping and other violence in the region where drug cartels wield great power.

"There is a lot of kidnapping, a lot of killing. Innocent people are being killed and that is why we decided to come here to ask for help," said Diaz.