Me too
Rick Smith
Washington Post
Tuesday, September 27, 2022 at 5:01 p.m. EDT
‘I hope you suffer’: Ex-D.C. officer confronts Jan. 6 attacker in court
Kyle Young was sentenced to seven years and two months in prison for the attack on police officer Michael Fanone, who was dragged into the mob and beaten
A member of the mob that launched a series of violent attacks on police — including D.C. officer Michael Fanone — in a tunnel under the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, apologized Tuesday as a judge sentenced him to seven years and two months in prison.
Kyle Young, 38, is the first rioter to be sentenced for the group attack on Fanone, who was dragged into the mob, beaten and electrocuted until he suffered a heart attack and lost consciousness.
“You were a one-man wrecking ball that day,” Judge Amy Berman Jackson said. “You were the violence.”
Fanone resigned from the D.C. police late last year, saying fellow officers turned on him for speaking so publicly about the Capitol attack and former president Donald Trump’s role in it. In court Tuesday, Fanone directly confronted his attacker, telling Young, “I hope you suffer.”
“The assault on me by Mr. Young cost me my career,” Fanone said. “It cost me my faith in law enforcement and many of the institutions I dedicated two decades of my life to serving.”
Young pleaded guilty in May to being in the group that attacked Fanone. Documents filed with his plea agreement offer this account:
Young and his 16-year-old son joined the tunnel battle just before 3 p.m., and Young handed a stun gun to another rioter and showed him how to use it. When Fanone was pulled from the police line, Young and his son pushed through the crowd toward him.
Just after that, authorities said, another rioter repeatedly shocked Fanone with the stun gun, and Young helped restrain the officer as another rioter stole his badge and radio.
Young lost his grip on Fanone as the mob moved. He then pushed and hit a nearby Capitol Police officer, who had just been struck with bear spray, according to documents filed with his plea.
Young also pointed a strobe light at the officers, jabbed at them with a stick and threw an audio speaker toward the police line, hitting another rioter in the back of the head, prosecutors said.
In a letter to the court, Young said he cried on the phone with his wife as he left D.C.
“I was a nervous wreck and highly ashamed of myself,” he wrote. “I do not condone this and do not promote this like others have done. Violence isn’t the answer.”
In court, he apologized to Fanone, saying, “I hope someday you forgive me. … I am so, so sorry. If I could take it back, I would.”
Young has a long criminal history. While in prison for producing meth, he faced repeated sanctions for violence. His attorney said that after a difficult childhood, Young had straightened out his life, gotten married, raised four children and started working in HVAC installation. Until Jan. 6, he hadn’t been arrested in a dozen years, his attorney said.
His “conduct on January 6 is isolated to a unique set of circumstances that unfolded that are not likely to be replicated,” wrote his attorney, Samuel Moore.
Jackson said she believed Young had become a good husband and father. But she noted the continued possibility of political violence, with Trump and his allies responding to possible prosecution by “cagily predicting or even outright calling for violence in the streets.”
The sentence she gave Young is close to the eight-year statutory maximum for assaulting a police officer.
Two of the other men accused of involvement in the attack on Fanone have pleaded not guilty. One has admitted dragging Fanone down the Capitol steps; he is set to be sentenced in October.
Rick Smith
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Tucson, AZ 85750
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Rick Smith
Los Angeles Times
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2022 3 AM PT
We have nothing to fear but email fundraising pleas
BY DAVID L. ULIN
Tim Ryan has got to stop texting me. So does Beto O’Rourke. James Carville needs to lose my email address. I can’t take the histrionics anymore. Last week, I received a text from Ryan’s Ohio Senate campaign that began “David — we have a problem.” It went on to detail a “fundraising slump.” All of this as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was announcing his plan to introduce a bill restricting abortion nationwide to 15 weeks after conception.
This is not the time for fear-mongering. This is the time for standing up.
I don’t doubt Democratic politicians understand this. Even as Republicans equivocated — “I don’t think there’s much of an appetite to go that direction,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) — the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) pushed back on Graham’s assertion that his proposal was merely “a minimum national standard limiting abortion.” She warned: “If Republicans get the chance, they will work to pass laws even more draconian than this bill.”
This is an approach that resonates, going on the offensive, engaging in the fight.
Politics, after all, is blood sport, particularly in the divided nation we’ve become. Still, if the fundraising texts and emails I’m receiving are any indication, some candidates have lost sight of this. No one, not even a supporter, wants to be harassed all day and told, primarily, how troubling things are.
Ryan represents a case in point. Earlier this year, I made a donation to his campaign. Now, I hear from him more than I hear from my kids.
I mention my kids because they, too, text or message asking for money. The difference is that I love them.
I know I brought this on myself. I made the choice to donate, and I will donate to Ryan again. He is immeasurably superior to his opponent, J.D. Vance, a millionaire backed by conservative billionaire Peter Thiel. I sent money the first time because I want to see a Democratic majority in the Senate, and here in California, the Democratic incumbent up for reelection, Sen. Alex Padilla, is a lock.
I wanted to help, in other words, and Ohio’s race is one in which I might. What bothers me is the psychology behind the fundraising appeals. Or perhaps strategy is a better word.
“David — this is a five alarm fire,” begins one text from Ryan. “Can I be real with you?” another asks. “I was tossing and turning all night.”
Ryan is hardly the only fear-in-fundraising offender. “I’m sorry to message ya so late, David, but I’m too damn scared not to!” Carville bleated in a recent Democratic Party email, and hourly, it seems, I receive notifications about candidates like O’Rourke in Texas, Raphael Warnock in Georgia or Val Demings in Florida. “David,” reads a message from the latter, “I wish I was reaching out with better news.”
Fear, of course, has become a hallmark of the moment — fear infused with rage. We’re all terrified about a lot of things. The economy and inflation. The preservation of democracy. The defeat of facts and truth by lies and misinformation.
I fret about it all, and I appreciate that Ryan and the others worry about it too.
Yet trepidation is a lousy selling point, especially for someone who aspires to lead. I’m not looking for false bravado — we had enough of that during the last administration — but I wouldn’t mind a bit of fortitude.
Take President Biden as an example. After a rocky start to the year, he has found his voice — and his footing — with both his aggressive, anti-Trumpist Sept. 1 speech in Philadelphia and the White House’s pointed social media critiques of Republicans who accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in Paycheck Protection Program loan forgiveness yet oppose his student debt relief plan.
I know there’s evidence that fear works as a fundraising strategy. “If you send out an email that says, ‘Please give me money so I can, you know, make the roads better, or your life better,’ you’ll raise a little money,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) told CNN in 2021. “If I send out an email that says, ‘If you don’t send me $5 or $10, Nancy Pelosi’s going to destroy your family,’ I’ll raise a lot more.”
Nonetheless, with about six weeks left in the election cycle, I’d like to make a plea for resilience over fear. Yes, democracy is on the ballot, and the stakes could not be higher. And yet I can’t be alone in wanting to vote — and donate — for something rather than reacting, from a defensive crouch, to apocalyptic fears.
Each time my phone goes off, I feel a jolt of anxiety. What‘s the crisis now? But what I’m really starting to worry about is that fear won’t sow support as much as it will wear us out.
Lyndel Meikle
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Bill Wade
True you can get off the lists, but they keep coming up with new lists.
Bill Wade
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Jerry Rogers
Exactly. When you unsubscribe to one they pass your address to another of close political alliance one who contacts you a week or so later, and when you unsubscribe to that one they pass your contact info to another. Each new solicitation insults even minimal intelligence by describing the catastrophic consequences if they do not receive your donation by their midnight deadline. It is all disgusting.
When I had to change email addresses back in Feb I resolved to make all of my contributions by mailing checks. I have been wonderfully free of on-line solicitations ever since.
Jerry
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Duncan Morrow
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