Tag: washington dc
Trump Ignores Nashville Blast, Urging Supporters To Rally In D.C. On January 6

Trump Ignores Nashville Blast, Urging Supporters To Rally In D.C. On January 6

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

President Donald Trump has so far ignored the massive bombing in Nashville, Tennessee that damaged 41 buildings. Instead, he is asking his Twitter followers to rally in Washington D.C. on January 6 to support his overturning an election that he lost over 46 days ago.

"The "Justice" Department and the FBI have done nothing about the 2020 Presidential Election Voter Fraud, the biggest SCAM in our nation's history, despite overwhelming evidence," Trump wrote in a Saturday morning tweet. "They should be ashamed. History will remember. Never give up. See everyone in D.C. on January 6th."January 6 is the day Congress meets to approve the Electoral College's vote. Usually, it's a mere formality before Inauguration Day, but because Trump has remained in complete denial about his loss — including the over 50 "election fraud" court cases he's lost — he has encouraged Congressional Republicans to vote against approving the election results.

The Republican opposition will accomplish very little seeing as majorities in both chambers of Congress would have to vote against the Electoral College results in order to challenge it, something that won't happen in the Democrat-led House. On the contrary, the vote will put Republicans in the awkward position of having to state on the record whether or not they support Trump's baseless attempt to steal the election.

If they don't vote in favor of Trump's lies, Republicans could make themselves targets of supporters eager to end their political careers or target them for violent threats. If they do vote in favor of Trump's lies, they mark themselves as supporting an unprecedented attempt to overturn democracy in the United States.Some Twitter users suspect that Trump may be trying to foment violence in the nation's capital over the election.

In a Saturday morning tweet, George Conway, Republican husband of former Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway, wrote, "It's pretty clear now that @realDonaldTrump's next desperate play is to encourage disruption, if not violence, in Washington on January 6, the day electoral votes are counted before a joint session of Congress."

In a separate Saturday morning tweet, Trump wrote, "A young military man working in Afghanistan told me that elections in Afghanistan are far more secure and much better run than the USA's 2020 Election. Ours, with its millions and millions of corrupt Mail-In Ballots, was the election of a third world country. Fake President!"Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Yaroslav Trofimov commented on the tweet, stating, "Afghanistan's last two presidential elections were so fraud-ridden that the loser and the winner ended up sharing power to avoid civil war…"

Authorities expect the Nashville bombing to be a potential act of terrorism, one that is apparently unimportant to the president.

A Calvin Coolidge Christmas In Washington

A Calvin Coolidge Christmas In Washington

Our little town of Washington is missing Christmas cheer this year. The Capitol dome and the Mall green are under repair, but that’s not it.

Many are melancholic about Donald J. Trump’s un-American idea to ban Muslims from entering the country. Especially, in the Joy and Peace season of Lights, when we’re hurting from the Paris and San Bernardino tragedies.

When a sober President Obama addressed the nation in the wake of the attacks, did he meet the moment?

I was looking for a blast at the National Rifle Association or Congress for blocking legislation that would halt gun sales to the FBI’s terrorist no-fly watch list. Frankly, the president lacked spirit. Nor did he bring comfort, as merry gentleman Franklin D. Roosevelt did in his Fireside Chats.

The White House is decked out for Christmas, but you have to laugh at the 2015 tree ornament. It honors Calvin Coolidge, a flinty Vermonter famous for saying nothing at all. It’s hard to get excited about Coolidge. Come on.

By contrast, Barack Obama was once the young president with the golden voice. Now he seems like King David shorn of his harp and songs he composed to inspire his people. While I remain in his camp, sweet reason is not going to lull the NRA or ISIS.

Some Republicans rebuked their 2016 presidential frontrunner, saying they are shocked, shocked at Trump’s hate talk.

On the Hill, one pithy voice struck me. The new House Speaker, Paul Ryan (R-WI) said Trump’s religion ban “is not what this party stands for, and more importantly, it’s not what this country stands for.”

Well-said by the man from Wisconsin.

Belatedly, there’s an awakening among us that Trump plays with perfect pitch to an anxious, angry constituency that feels left out of the political equation. They are the angry folks — white men — who listen to Rush rave on talk radio by day and watch “Fox News” by night. They may be working class or wealthy. They are not locked out of political ownership, given a Republican congress. But they feel aggrieved against Obama. And Hillary Clinton makes them see red.

Trump speaks directly to their discontent. The economy in wartime, with the Wall Street crisis, has not been kind since. It has been a bleak recovery, as most millennials know in their bones. Washington’s wise men and women say he can’t win, but I’m not so sure. He’s textbook demagogue.

Up the road, things stay tough in Baltimore, where April race riots over Freddie Gray’s hard death in police custody won’t soon be forgot on the streets. One police officer is now on trial; there will be more. “Ain’t nothing changed out here,” was how the story went in The Washington Post.

The Washington Post is leaving its own building. Granted, the city block look was getting old, but great and good journalism happened within those walls. The “Nixon Resigns” headline as the culmination to the Watergate burglary is the paper’s pride and joy. Bob Woodward, 72, had a hearty laugh with his old partner, Carl Bernstein, at the fare-thee-well.

David Maraniss, the Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author, told me:

“When I arrived there in 1977, it had the smell of ink and paste pots and cigarettes and we wrote on typewriters with carbon paper between the sheets and signed 30 at the end of our stories and it was all noise and controlled chaos and the operators Mary and Joyce would field and place calls for you and the floor would start shaking when the presses started running a few floors below. It was a newspaper, and there was such a visceral deeply enjoyable feeling to it all.

“That all disappeared long before the building move. The journalism is in many ways the same, but everything else has changed, some for the better, some for the worse. It was time for the move.”

Bittersweet. I turned into Martin’s Tavern on N Street in Georgetown. The rumble seat, perfect for reading the newspaper, was open and so I sat where the senator, John F. Kennedy, often came for Sunday breakfast. He proposed to the ravishing Jacqueline Bouvier in a nearby booth.

Martin’s opened in 1933 and still serves meatloaf. How sweet it is, with festive holiday lights and all, when time stays a while.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit Creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2015 CREATORS.COM

Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama waves during the National Christmas Tree Lighting and Pageant of Peace ceremony on the Ellipse near the White House in Washington December 3, 2015. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

Suspect Arrested In Washington, D.C., Mansion Killings

Suspect Arrested In Washington, D.C., Mansion Killings

By Michael Muskal, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Daron Dylon Wint was a welder with a violent past who sometimes worked for American Iron Works. Savvas Savopoulos was the company CEO and head of a family that lived in a mansion in Woodley Park, a wealthy and especially safe neighborhood in Washington, D.C., where guards and police are a frequent sight because the official residence of Vice President Joe Biden is nearby.

But that security didn’t protect the Savopoulos household: Savvas, 46; his wife Amy, 47; their 10-year-old son, Philip; and housekeeper Veralicia Figueroa, 57. Three of the four were stabbed or bludgeoned to death before they were found in the ashes of the burned-out home on May 14.

Mayor Muriel E. Bowser described the slayings as “an act of evil.”

Wint had been the prime suspect ever since officials identified his DNA found on a crust left over from a pizza delivered to the home. For days, Wint has led police on a chase to Brooklyn, N.Y., and then to Maryland, where he was arrested by officers with the Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force about 11 p.m. Thursday.

Wint, 34, is scheduled to be arraigned Friday on a charge of first-degree murder while armed.

He showed no emotion and offered no resistance when he was arrested, Dave Oney, spokesman for the U.S. Marshals’ Service, told the Los Angeles Times on Friday. The family of the Savopouloses asked to be left alone to grieve but issued a statement after the arrest.

“While it does not abate our pain, we hope that it begins to restore a sense of calm and security to our neighborhood and to our city,” the family said. “We are blessed to live in a community comprised of close circles of friends who have supported us and grieve with us.”

“Our family, and Vera’s family, have suffered unimaginable loss,” the Savopoulos family said, “and we ask for the time and space to grieve privately.”

The sharp contrast between a family that had it all and a suspect with a history of having little riveted the nation and the neighborhood.

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“For residents of the District who are rightfully scared and want answers as to why and how this family may have been involved, we want to give you as many answers as we can,” Washington, D.C., Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said at a televised news conference Thursday. “What we can tell you right now is that we do believe there is a connection between the suspect in this case through the business. So right now, it does not appear that this was a random crime.”

The bodies were discovered about 1:15 p.m. May 14 in the burned large brick house. Police also found the family’s blue Porsche torched in a church parking lot in Prince George’s County, two miles from the home of the suspect’s parents. Authorities had earlier released a video showing a blurred image of a man running away.

Police said they are still investigating the crime, seeking a motive. At news conferences during the week authorities said they believe that the victims were taken captive May 13 and killed the next day, before their multimillion-dollar home was set ablaze. On the morning of May 14, Savopoulos’ assistant dropped off a package at the house with $40,000.

Police said their records also show a series of phone calls involving Savopoulos, his assistant, a bank, and an accountant in the hours before their bodies were discovered during a fire. A longtime housekeeper has said she received texts and voicemails from Savopoulos and his wife telling her not to come to the house May 14.

Wint had been employed by Savopoulos’ company, American Iron Works, police said. The company is a construction-materials supplier based in Hyattsville, Md., and was involved in major projects.

He was convicted of assaulting a girlfriend in Maryland in 2009, and pleaded guilty in 2010 to malicious destruction of property after he was accused of threatening to kill a different woman and her infant daughter, breaking into her apartment, stealing a television and vandalizing her car, according to published reports.

Also in 2010, Wint was arrested carrying a 2-foot-long machete and a BB pistol outside the American Iron Works headquarters, but weapons charges were dropped after he pleaded guilty to possessing an open container of alcohol.

Wint apparently saw the news report identifying him as a suspect and fled, according to Oney.

Federal marshals and others in the task force had been tracking Wint through the week. They told the media that they thought he had gone to Brooklyn to visit a girlfriend. Authorities missed him in New York on Wednesday night.

By Thursday night, police had gathered more information and officers tracked him to a Howard Johnson Express Inn in College Park, Md., Oney said.
“They focused on the car,” a white Chevrolet Cruze, Oney said.

Wint was a passenger, traveling with two women, one of whom was driving. The Cruze was following a large white truck with two men inside who were believed to be Wint’s friends or relatives.

When the vehicles got to 10th Street and Rhode Island Avenue NE, police used a PIT maneuver, a well-known precision immobilization tactic, to stop vehicles and prevent them from moving by boxing them in among official cars. Officials recovered some cash, though the exact amount was not immediately known.

The other men and two women were taken into custody, Oney said. They have not been named, nor is it known if they will be charged.

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Screenshot via ABC News/YouTube

Police Arrest Mansion Murders Suspect After Pizza Crust Lead

Police Arrest Mansion Murders Suspect After Pizza Crust Lead

Washington (AFP) – After following a DNA lead gleaned from pizza crust, authorities have arrested a suspect in the grisly murder of three members of a wealthy Washington family and their maid.

Daron Dylon Wint, 34, was arrested Thursday night in the nation’s capital, Washington Metropolitan Police said.

Three other men and two women who were with Wint as police pounced late Thursday night were also arrested, a U.S. Marshals Service official said.

The case has shocked the city because of the violence employed in last week’s murders — one of the four bludgeoned victims was a 10-year-old boy — and because the neighborhood where it happened is posh and hardly used to such bloodshed.

The manhunt for Wint began after the DNA was collected from pizza delivered to the slain family’s home and matched to him. The chase stretched all the way up to New York where he was said to have relatives.

In fact he was arrested after having returned from that city, authorities said.

In the crime, businessman Savvas Savopoulos, president and CEO of American Iron Works, a building materials company in Maryland, his wife Amy, their 10-year-old son Philip and the family’s housekeeper Veralicia Figueroa — were found bound and bludgeoned May 14 after a fire gutted the millionaire’s mansion.

Wint used to work for that company, officials say.

The motive of the killing is not known.

But police say that while the family was being held, an assistant of Savopoulos delivered $40,000 in cash to the home.

Savopoulos’s blue Porsche turned up shortly after the murders, abandoned several miles from the crime scene, authorities said. It also had been set ablaze.

Wint is now charged with first degree felony murder while armed.

He was captured with five other people — three men and two women — who were also arrested.

U.S. Marshals tailed two cars as they left a hotel in the neighboring state of Maryland, Commander Robert Fernandez of the U.S. Marshals Service said Friday.

“We could tell that they were together. They were going north bound. They did sort of a strange U-turn and we suspected they may have thought that they were being tailed,” Fernandez said.

“Once we reached a location in DC where we felt we could take them down, we did a pin maneuver on both vehicles and we arrested everyone,” he added.

The Washington Post reported Friday that Wint has had several brushes with the law over the years, often for allegedly violent behavior.

But Wint’s former attorney said on CNN Friday the police have the wrong man.

“It’s not his act. He’s a nice guy. He’s patriotic,” lawyer Robin Fickers said. He said he had defended Wint in six cases in 2005 and 2006 and he was never found guilty.

Fickers said Wint is being tried in the media, criticizing Mayor Muriel Bowser for holding a press conference to name Wint before he had even been questioned.

Fickers also challenged the pizza evidence, saying authorities have not said where the pizza was when it was found.

“Was it in the trash behind the house?” he asked. “I’ve had many cases where the DNA results were thrown out of court because they simply were not valid. And they may well have been contrived in this case.”

Screenshot via CNN/YouTube