https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/pastor-darrell-scott-claims-capitol-riot-was-congress-set-up-to-impeach-donald-trump/ar-BB1fGW4x?ocid=msedgntp

Newsweek

Pastor Darrell Scott Claims Capitol Riot Was Congress 'Set Up' to Impeach Donald Trump

Donald Trump ally Pastor Darrell Scott has claimed recent reports revealing that the Capitol Police were told to hold off on their response to the January 6 attack is proof that the riot was a "set up" for Trump take the blame for it.

Scott, founder of the New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and CEO of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, was discussing the finding of Inspector General Michael Bolton's report on his show on iHeartRadio.

The damming report, obtained by news organizations including The New York Times and the Associated Press, found that Capitol Police were warned about the potential for violence on January 6 and that "Congress itself is the target." The review added officers were instructed not to aggressively attempt to disperse rioters and ordered not to use weapons.

It comes after some Capitol Police officers were rebuked for their conduct on the day of the attack and the department was criticised over its failure to fully prepare despite receiving intelligence that far-right extremists were planning on carrying out violence that day.

Scott said that the report reveals details that the public were already aware of, such as that the January 6 insurrection was pre-planned.

If that was the case, he argued, Trump cannot be blamed for inciting the riots with his speech in Washington D.C. that day, which proceeded several weeks of him falsely claiming he lost a "rigged" election because of widespread voter fraud.

"The New York Times just confirmed what we all knew, that the Capitol riots were pre-planned," Scott said. "The Capitol riots were pre-planned, and that they knew days in advance that it was coming.

"The Capitol Police were told to hold back on the response, they were given a stand down order. This was no coup, it was no insurrection, it was no attempt to overturn the election. They were told to stand down.

"It was a setup," Scott added. "It was a setup for those congressmen and senators who hated Donald Trump, to have another impeachment hearing to try to prevent him from ever being able to hold public office again."

Trump became the first president in history to be impeached for a second time over claims he encouraged his supporters to storm the Capitol on January 6. Trump was later acquitted following a Senate trial after 57 senators voted guilty and 43 senators voted not guilty, meaning he did not meet the two-third threshold needed for a conviction.

Scott said that the fact the attack was pre-planned by the mob, which consisted of Trump supporters, showed that it was not "a spontaneous event" at the direction of the former president.

"It was not a spontaneous activity that Donald Trump instigated from the rally they had that morning," Scott said.

Scott added that he is considering "putting my hat back in the ring" and running for Congress in response to all the "gutless" Senators who voted to impeach Trump.

In response to the Office of Inspector General's review, Capitol Police said in a statement that it supports plans for "implementing changes to improve its operational readiness and the physical security infrastructure" to prevent future attacks.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/appeals-court-rejects-academic-s-libel-suit-over-claims-of-affair-with-flynn/ar-BB1fGFvN?ocid=msedgntp

POLITICO

Appeals court rejects academic’s libel suit over claims of affair with Flynn

By Josh Gerstein 1 hr ago

Maine man charged with hate crime offenses for arson of predominantly…

Police investigating homicide in Roy; suspect identified

A federal appeals court handed another legal defeat Thursday to a Russian-born academic who claims she was libeled by press accounts that she says insinuated she had an affair with former National Security Adviser and Defense Intelligence Agency chief Michael Flynn.

The academic, Svetlana Lokhova, sued several news organizations in 2019 over the reports and also named as a defendant Stefan Halper, a United Kingdom-based former professor who was a central figure in the FBI investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

A ruling issued by the Richmond, Va.-based 4th Circuit Court of Appeals Thursday upheld an earlier district court decision throwing Lokhova’s suit out in its entirety.

The appeals court said most of the articles Lokhova claimed were libelous were too old to be included in the suit she filed two years ago. Under Virginia’s one-year statute of limitations for defamation claims, the only publications that were fairly subject to the suit were a Washington Post story and some tweets sent by MSNBC national security contributor Malcolm Nance.

The Post reported that at a 2014 dinner, Halper and a colleague “were disconcerted by the attention the then-DIA chief showed to a Russian-born graduate student…according to people familiar with the episode.”

Writing for the appeals court, Judge Stephanie Thacker said that language could not fairly be read as an attack on Lokhova.

“We conclude that it cannot be reasonably read to defame [Lokhova,] either directly or through implication or innuendo,” wrote Thacker, an appointee of President Barack Obama. “Even if we infer the unnamed graduate student is [Lokhova,] it says nothing of her behavior toward General Flynn – it only addresses his behavior toward her.”

Flynn and Lokhova have denied any affair.

Lokhova asserted that Halper was a source for the news stories. A former Republican political operative in the U.S., in recent decades Halper has been a University of Cambridge professor active in foreign policy circles. Halper hasn’t spoken publicly about his role in the Trump-Russia investigation, but numerous press reports say the FBI dispatched him to covertly contact Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and assess reports that he had information about Russian-backed hacking of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails.

In the new ruling, the appeals court also ruled that Lokhova’s claims against MSNBC over Nance’s tweets fell short because there was no indication Nance was acting for the network when he sent the messages Lokhova sued over.

Judge James Wynn, another Obama appointee, joined Thacker’s ruling in full. Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr. dissented on one point: he said one of Lokhova’s claims based on a hyperlink in a New York Times article should have been considered on the merits.

The district court and the majority on the appeals panel said simply adding a link wasn’t enough to constitute republishing a story and giving Lokhova another chance to sue over it. But Quattlebaum, an appointee of President Donald Trump, said the link to the earlier story did amount to a republication.

In his dissent, Quattlebaum even used the term “clickbait” to refer to the Times’ relatively common practice.

”Here, Lokhova has plausibly alleged that rather than using the hyperlink as a citation, The New York Times used it as a means of redistributing previous material with the goal of expanding its readership,” the judge wrote. Denying plaintiffs the ability to sue over hyperlinks, Quattlebaum wrote, “would effectively permit publishers to hyperlink their way to consequence-free promotion.”

Halper’s lawyers asked the appeals court to impose sanctions on Lokhova’s lawyer Steven Biss, a Charlottesville-based attorney who has drawn notoriety for filing a series of libel suits on behalf of Rep. Devin Nunes, (R-Calif.) now the ranking minority member of the House Intelligence Committee.

Halper’s lawyers said Biss’ handling of the Lokhova case violated bar rules. Thacker was sharply critical of Biss, saying: “His history of unprofessional conduct is long.” She declined to order sanctions though, saying the issue remained up to the district court.