Post Politics Now Trump attacks Jan. 6 committee, Pence and Barr in speech to conservative group

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) will allow state pediatricians and health-care providers to order newly authorized vaccines for kids under 5 after the state this week became the only one in the nation to not preorder the shots, White House officials said.

As Yasmeen Abutaleb, Lori Rozsa and Dan Keating report, DeSantis angrily rejected the White House characterization that he had chosen to reverse course, saying in a statement that “we have never held the position that the state would prohibit health care providers from ordering the vaccine. We have always maintained the position that the State of Florida has chosen not to be involved in the preordering or distribution of the vaccine for children under 5.”

On Thursday, DeSantis had made clear his position that Florida would not be preordering coronavirus vaccines, and that there would not be “any state programs” that would try to secure the vaccine for “infants and toddlers and newborns.”

“That’s not something that we think is appropriate, and so that’s not where we’re going to be utilizing our resources in that regard,” he said.

Parents seeking the shots, DeSantis said Thursday, could get them without help from the state, according to the Miami Herald.

But now, Florida health officials are accepting the orders from providers, which they were not doing before Friday, said Lisa Gwynn, president of the Florida chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, our colleagues report.

“Our main concern now is we aren’t sure when the vaccine will be delivered since we missed the ordering deadline.” she said, noting that parents eager to immunize their children have been frantically calling doctors’ offices.

DeSantis’s stance did not come as a surprise, as our colleagues explain:

The debate over his policies regarding vaccines for the youngest Americans is the latest controversy engulfing DeSantis and his response to the coronavirus amid projections of an omicron-fueled surge in Florida this summer that is already filling the state’s hospitals and as he seeks reelection to a second term and positions himself as a 2024 Republican presidential front-runner eager to wrest the populist mantle from former president Donald Trump.

Read more about this decision here.

Black Americans are kept “hungry and dumb” so that they are more likely to vote Democratic, Republican Carl Paladino, who hopes to represent New York’s 23rd District in Congress, told a Buffalo radio station in 2016.

“Black people deserve better,” the former Buffalo School Board member said while discussing public education on WBEN.

“They shouldn’t be held captive in our inner cities,” Paladino added. “They shouldn’t be held hungry and dumb so as to provide a base for the Democratic Party, that’s what’s been going on. You can’t teach them differently because they’ve been so conditioned to think that way. And that is so, so wrong. And I’ll fight for that stuff until the day I die.”

The interview was first reported by CNN. A spokesman for Paladino declined to comment when contacted by The Washington Post.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), the third-ranking Republican in the House, has endorsed Paladino, who will be competing in the GOP primary in August despite his history of controversial comments.

Paladino has previously been criticized for racist and sexist comments, including saying that he would like to see former first lady Michelle Obama “return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla,” and a May 2020 message on a since-deleted Twitter account where the Trump supporter attacked a woman who had accused the former president of sexual assault.

“Get a life,” he tweeted. “You probably enjoyed the slap at the time.”

YouTube took down a clip uploaded by the Jan. 6 committee to the video platform, saying the video, which featured a clip of former president Donald Trump telling lies about the 2020 election, spread misinformation without the proper context.

The video was one of many uploaded by the House committee, which is investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, as a way to create an online record of its work and share it with a larger number of people.

The video featured former attorney general William P. Barr but also included a clip of a TV interview in which Trump said some of his votes had been given to Joe Biden. The video was short and didn’t include Barr or anyone else specifically calling out Trump’s statement as a lie.

“Our election integrity policy prohibits content advancing false claims that widespread fraud, errors or glitches changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, if it does not provide sufficient context,” said YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi. “We enforce our policies equally for everyone.”

How to watch the Jan. 6 committee hearings and what to watch for

In the wake of the 2020 election, YouTube changed its policies to ban claims that the election was fraudulent or stolen. In the days after Jan. 6, it banned Trump’s channel from the platform, an action that was also taken by Facebook and Twitter on their sites.

YouTube has for years been a key platform used by adherents of misinformation to broadcast false claims about vaccines and election results. During the pandemic, the company began clamping down on lies about covid-19 and the efficacy of vaccines. The 2020 election and the campaign by Trump and his supporters to have its results overturned forced the company to grapple even more with its role as a broadcast platform for false claims that may undermine people’s faith in elections.

The company’s leaders have said repeatedly they don’t want to act as political censors or gatekeepers and have tried to craft policies that they can enforce in a way that appears neutral. That appears to be the reasoning behind taking down the Jan. 6 committee’s clip.

Couy Griffin, founder of “Cowboys for Trump” and the Otero County, N.M., commissioner, was sentenced on Friday to 14 days in jail and a $3,000 fine for entering restricted Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, 2021.

Because he served 20 days in D.C. jail after being arrested last year, Griffin was released Friday.

He has argued that he did not go to the Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election win but to pray with protesters.

After his sentencing, Tom Jackman and Spencer S. Hsu report, Griffin implored reporters to follow up on a number of baseless claims connected to the Jan. 6 attack, including claims that the Capitol’s doors mysteriously opened to attackers that day, that an Arizona man falsely accused of being an FBI agitator was in the crowd, and the possibility that voting machines in New Mexico might have been electronically hacked.

Griffin has had a busy week. He is, after all, part of the Otero County commission that has refused to certify a recent election because they falsely believe that the voting machines used were tampered with. Griffin said he expected to attend a meeting Friday by phone to continue refusing to certify the election’s results until the voting machines are inspected.

The New Mexico Supreme Court has ordered Griffin and the rest of that county’s commission to certify the results of the election.

Read more about Griffin’s case here.

What stations are airing the Jan. 6 committee hearings and at what time? — asks our reader Cleova from Salt Lake City.

The Jan. 6 select committee has scheduled at least two more hearings, which will be next week:

• Tuesday at 1 p.m.
• Thursday at 1 p.m.

There could be a final hearing in September — right before the November midterm elections, The Washington Post’s Amber Phillips reports.

While plans for the hearings have changed last minute — this week, for example, Wednesday’s hearing and its witnesses were postponed due to technical difficulties — here are a few witnesses we can expect in upcoming hearings.

• Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state: The committee has subpoenaed Raffensperger to testify on Tuesday, for a hearing focused on how Donald Trump tried to overthrow election results in swing states he lost. Raffensperger was at the center of Trump’s pressure campaign. Days before the attack, Trump spent an hour on the phone urging Raffensperger to “find” just enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s win in Georgia. Gabriel Sterling, one of the secretary of state’s top aides, who spoke out about threats he and his staff have faced from Trump supporters for certifying Georgia’s results, has been subpoenaed to testify Tuesday.
• Jeffrey Rosen, then acting attorney general: Rosen was the nation’s top law enforcement official during Trump’s final days in office. He was pressured by Trump allies to send a letter from the Justice Department to state officials about false election fraud claims, which would have lent them legitimacy. He refused. Rosen’s deputy at the time, Richard Donoghue, and Justice Department official Steve Engel will also testify. All three had been scheduled to testify on Wednesday morning, in the hearing that got postponed.

Former president Donald Trump, during his remarks in Nashville on Friday, accused the “radical left” of “trying to shred our Constitution, trying to demolish the rule of law.”

“Everything we hold dear, every last tenet of American tradition, is under merciless assault from the radical left,” Trump told the crowd. “These people are taking a sledgehammer to the very foundations of our free society.”

The House select committee probing the pro-Trump insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, has shown evidence in its hearings this month that Trump and his allies were repeatedly told that their efforts to secure him another term in the White House were unconstitutional.

According to the committee’s investigation, Trump tried to convince Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to confirm the results of the election, a move legal experts widely say is not permitted by the Constitution.

Trump, in his Friday remarks, also said the “greatest danger to America is not our enemies from the outside … The greatest danger to America is the destruction of our nation from the people from within.”

He was referring to what he calls the “radical left,” a term used by some on the right to describe Democrats and other left-wing individuals they consider to be “extreme.”

Those investigating the Jan. 6 attack — as well as agencies like the FBI — would agree with Trump’s assessment that individuals within the country pose a threat to democracy, just not the ones he’s referring to.

The Jan. 6 committee showed in the first of its public hearings this month that the right-wing extremist group the Proud Boys was among those leading the invasion of the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election, inspired by Trump’s statements and tweets falsely claiming voter fraud.

Data collected by The Washington Post has also shown that domestic terrorism incidents have soared to new highs in the United States, driven chiefly by white-supremacist, anti-Muslim and anti-government extremists on the far right. Since 2015, right-wing extremists have been involved in 267 plots or attacks and 91 fatalities. At the same time, attacks and plots ascribed to far-left views accounted for 66 incidents leading to 19 deaths.

Former president Donald Trump belittled Mike Pence as a “human conveyor belt” on Friday, a day after the Jan. 6 committee outlined how the then-Republican vice president came dangerously close to a violent mob intent on doing him physical harm.

“Mike was afraid of whatever he was afraid of,” Trump said, mocking Pence. “But as you heard a year and a half ago, Mike Pence had absolutely no choice but to be a human conveyor belt.”

“He had no choice. No matter what, he had to send those votes,” the former president added. “He had no ears, absolutely nothing that he could do. I said, ‘Well, what are you, a robot?’ I actually came up with the word conveyor belt. I thought it was a better word.”

Trump was speaking at the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Nashville to a group of socially conservative supporters. In his speech, Trump continued to repeat lies that the election was stolen and had harsh words for his former vice president.

He recounted telling Pence that if he refused to certify the 2020 presidential election results, “you can be Thomas Jefferson.” Later, “after it all went down, I looked at him one day and I said, ‘Mike, hate to say this, but you’re no Thomas Jefferson.’ ”

“Would anybody like me to run for president?” Donald Trump asked the crowd at the Faith and Freedom conference Friday.

The audience burst into applause and cheers.

“Very nice, thank you very much,” Trump said.

Earlier, the president had said the next Republican president would have to address demonstrators who’ve “set fire to federal buildings and courthouses.”

“I wonder who that will be?” Trump said. The crowd cheered.

The former president, who has not yet made official a bid to run for the White House in 2024 but is widely expected to do so, also laid out plans for what he’d like Republicans to do if they win both chambers of Congress in November.

“When Republicans retake control of Congress, they should turn the table,” Trump said, telling the crowd that Republicans should investigate Democrats for what he described as an “egregious abuse of power that has taken place in the name of January 6.”