Unjustice
Keeping our eye on the ball and the truth. Whatever we’re seeing isn’t normal; remember that.
In Washington DC, the United States saw a new administration take over, and changes are coming fast.
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January 6
January 6, 2021, was a day where our American system of government nearly broke down. In attempting to certify the 2020 presidential election, the Congressional certification was disrupted by a violent insurrection, where Trump supporters stormed of the U.S. Capitol Building.
Nearly 1,600 people were charged for their activities on and leading up to January 6, and some of them were quite violent.[1]
One such defendant is Christopher Michael Alberts, who was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison after he was convicted of nine charges, including six felonies. From the U.S. Attorney’s office in the District of Columbia, his charges included: [2][3]
Engaging in Physical Violence in a Restricted Building or Grounds
Unlawful Possession of a Firearm on Capitol Grounds or Buildings
Act of Violence on Capitol Grounds or Buildings
From the press release announcing Alberts’s sentencing:
“According to the government’s evidence, Alberts arrived at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, wearing a body armor vest containing metal plates, a two-way radio with a throat mic, and a military backpack containing eight bungee cords, a flashlight, a ski mask, a meal-ready-to-eat kit, a first aid kit, military trousers, and a pocketknife. That day, Alberts carried with him, in a holster, a 9-millimeter pistol loaded with 12 rounds of ammunition and an additional bullet in the chamber. Alberts also wore a separate holster containing an additional 12 rounds of ammunition, which included “hollow point” bullets.” [4]
Our laws are intended to prevent such things as “unlawful possession of a firearm on Capitol grounds” and “act of violence on Capitol grounds” and “seditious conspiracy.” Respect for the law means holding people engaging in these activities accountable, especially when they involve a violent disruption of the peaceful transfer of power.
Pardons
Yet, the President, in his first week, pardoned and commuted the sentences for all of the convicted January 6 defendants.
The proclamation stated that the pardons and commutations “end[] a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years…” [5]
To me, this is already a lie.
Regardless of the words from the proclamation, the prosecutions were not unjust, and this will not facilitate a “national reconciliation.” We need to remember the truth of what happened; yes, it was an insurrection. [6]
As Americans, we have the right to tour the Capitol Building. I’ve been there; you can book a tour during the days and times when it’s open. They’ll run you through metal detectors for security purposes, because, you know, the nation’s business is being conducted. I even got to watch U.S. Senators debate on health care legislation.
We don’t have the right to enter the building forcibly. January 6 was not a tourist visit; this was an organized attempt to incite a crowd to disrupt the official Congressional proceeding to facilitate the constitutional and peaceful transfer of power.
Another of the January 6 defendants that was freed is Elmer Stewart Rhodes III, a founder of the Oath Keepers, an American far-right anti-government militia group; his activities leading up to January 6 can be found in the indictment under the heading “Plot to Oppose by Force the 2020 Lawful Transfer of Presidential Power.” [7]
According to the indictment, “[t]he purpose of the conspiracy was to oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power by force, by preventing, hindering, or delaying by force the execution of the laws governing the transfer of power, including the Twelfth and Twentieth Amendments to the Constitution and Title 3, Section 15 of the United States Code.” [8]
The laws for seditious conspiracy were first passed in 1948 and updated in 1994 to lead to a twenty-year sentence for conviction. A grand jury approved the indictment of Rhodes. On November 29, 2022, a jury of his peers found them guilty and sentenced to 18 years in prison. [9]
Rhodes’s sentence was commuted this past week, yet his conviction still stands, and as a condition of his release, the federal courts made sure that in the future he couldn’t get near those his conspiracy threatened four years ago.
From the PBS report, “U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta issued the order two days after Rhodes visited the Capitol, where he met with at least one lawmaker, chatted with others and defended his actions during a mob’s attack on Jan. 6, 2021. Rhodes was released from a Maryland prison a day earlier.
Mehta’s order prohibits Rhodes “from entering the Capitol building or surrounding grounds without the court’s permission.” [10]
In other administration actions, the Trump Justice Department moved to dismiss the charges on the remaining January 6 defendants that hadn’t been tried to date. However, the courts are demonstrating that they’re not just going to go along with everything the administration wants.
In one case against two defendants, who “by their own admission, engaged in criminal assault against law enforcement officers by throwing smoke bombs at officers, as well as property damage and theft,” [11] DC District Court Justice Beryl Howell, while compelled to dismiss the charges due to the seriousness of the charges, allowed for future administrations to pursue the matter if warranted. Pushing back on the Trump Administration’s proclamation for dropping the case, Howell stated:
“No “national injustice” occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election. No “process of national reconciliation” can begin when poor losers, whose preferred candidate loses an election, are glorified for disrupting a constitutionally mandated proceeding in Congress and doing so with impunity. That merely raises the dangerous specter of future lawless conduct by other poor losers and undermines the rule of law. Yet, this presidential pronouncement of a “national injustice” is the sole justification provided in the government’s motion to dismiss the pending indictment.” [12]
Friday Night Firings
In one more action by the new administration described by some as “late-night purge of inspectors general,” [13] President Trump fired inspectors general across 18 federal agencies, including the Departments of Defense, State, Health and Human Services, and Labor.
Based on the report from NBC News: “The legal justification for the firings is murky, given that Congress strengthened protections for inspectors general from undue terminations when it amended the Inspector General Act in 2022.
“The law requires a 30-day notification window between the White House informing Congress of its intent to fire an inspector general and that inspector general being removed from on-duty status. The White House must also provide substantive reasons for why the inspector general is being removed.” [14]
While voicing support of the inspector general law requiring notice to Congress, Republican lawmakers appear willing to stand on the sidelines; Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina “acknowledged that the firings violated statutes but shrugged it off: ‘Just tell them you need to follow the law next time,’ he said.” [15]
And according to Harry Litman, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General and United States Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, this is worth raising the alarm. [16]
Artificial Intelligence
While not flouting the law, the latest spectacle was one involving the most visible decision-focused technology – artificial intelligence.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a private sector investment of up to $500 billion to fund infrastructure for artificial intelligence, aiming to outpace rival nations in the business-critical technology. [17]
For the joint venture named Stargate, a private partnership between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank, the tech leaders credited Trump’s campaign win for the initiative, and Trump claims that 100,000 jobs will be created. [18]
While the announcement was made by Trump at the White House, there is no US government investment of public money, and it was not immediately clear whether the announcement was an update to a previously reported venture; this was an opportunity for big tech investors to publicly credit Trump in an industry where a ton of money is flowing. [19]
Elon Musk, who has closely allied himself with Trump and has his own AI venture through xAI, criticized the venture, saying that “they don’t actually have the money.” [20]. And in a recent post by Gary Marcus, author of Rebooting AI and a critic of Silicon Valley’s approach to AI development, the United States, even with this $500 billion private venture, may have already lost any competitive advantage we had over China in AI technology development:
The race for "AI Supremacy" is over, at least for now, and the U.S. didn't win. Over the last few weeks, two companies in China released three impressive papers that annihilated any pretense that the US was decisively ahead. In late December, a company called DeepSeek, apparently initially built for quantitative trading rather than LLMs, produced a nearly state-of-the-art model that required only roughly 1/50th of the training costs of previous models, — instantly putting them in the big leagues with American companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, both in terms of performance and innovation. A couple weeks later, they followed up with a competitive (though not fully adequate) alternative to OpenAI's o1, called r1. Because it is more forthcoming in its internal process than o1, many researchers are already preferring it to OpenAI's o1 (which had been introduced to much fanfare in September 2024). And then ByteDance (parent company of TikTok) dropped a third bombshell, a new model that is even cheaper. Yesterday, a Hong Kong lab added yet a fourth advance, making a passable though less powerful version of r1 with even less training data. [21]
It’s important to know what is hype, what is favoritism, and what the truth really is. Our challenge is to judge everything we see and hear with a critical eye.
Our decisions will be better as a result.
Narratives
The book I’m reading or movie I’m watching
“Conclave” - Directed by Edward Berger and Screenplay by Peter Straughan
In the film Conclave, Cardinal Thomas Lawrence organizes a conclave to elect the next Pope and finds himself investigating secrets and scandals about the major candidates.
The movie has a powerhouse cast, including previous Academy Award nominees Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and Isabella Rossellini.
Conclave received six Golden Globe Awards nominations, winning Best Screenplay, and recently received eight Academy Award nominations including Best Picture.
GIF Game
Judy Garland in The Pirate
Notes and Sources
[1] – “The Jan. 6 attack: The cases behind the biggest criminal investigation in U.S. history,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, January 20, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2021/02/09/965472049/the-capitol-siege-the-arrested-and-their-stories.
[2] – “Maryland Man Sentenced for Assaulting Law Enforcement Officers and Carrying a Firearm During Jan. 6 Capitol Breach,” Press Release, United States Attorney’s Office, District of Columbia, https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/maryland-man-sentenced-assaulting-law-enforcement-officers-and-carrying-firearm-during
[3] – United States v. Alberts, 1:21-cr-00026 (D.D.C 2021), https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/case-multi-defendant/file/1457576/dl
[4] – “Maryland Man Sentenced for Assaulting Law Enforcement Officers”
[5] – “Granting Pardons and Commutation of Sentences for Certain Offenses Relating to the Event At or Near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021,” January 20, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/granting-pardons-and-commutation-of-sentences-for-certain-offenses-relating-to-the-events-at-or-near-the-united-states-capitol-on-january-6-2021/
[6] – Anderson v. Griswold, No. 23CV32577, ¶¶ 241, 298 (Dist. Ct., City & County. of Denver, Nov. 17, 2023), https://www.courts.state.co.us/userfiles/file/Court_Probation/Supreme_Court/Opinions/2023/23SA300.pdf
[7] – United States v. Rhodes, 610 F. Supp. 3d 29 (D.D.C. 2022), https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1462481/dl
[8] – Ibid.
[9] - Ryan Lucas and Carrie Johnson, “Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes convicted of seditious conspiracy in Jan. 6 trial,” National Public Radio, November 29, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/11/29/1139454126/oath-keepers-stewart-rhodes-seditious-conspiracy-verdict-trial
[10] - Michael Kunzelman and Alanna Durkin Richer, “Oath Keepers founder Rhodes barred from entering Washington without court’s permission, judge rules,” Associated Press, January 24, 2025, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/oath-keepers-founder-rhodes-barred-from-entering-washington-without-courts-permission-judge-rules
[11] - United States v. DeCarlo, CRIMINAL ACTION 21-00073 (D.D.C. Sep. 4, 2024), https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2021cr0073-134
[12] – Ibid.
[13] – “Rebuking Late-night Purge of Inspectors General, House Democratic Ranking Members Demand President Trump Comply with the Law,” Press Release, Committee on Appropriations Democrats, January 25, 2025, https://democrats-appropriations.house.gov/news/press-releases/rebuking-late-night-purge-inspectors-general-house-democratic-ranking-members
[14] - Yamiche Alcindor, Vaughn Hillyard, and Laura Strickler, “Trump fires 18 inspectors general overnight in legally murky move,” NBC News, January 25, 2025, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-fires-multiple-inspectors-general-legally-murky-overnight-move-rcna189261
[15] - Zeke Miller, Eric Ticker, and Will Weissert, “Trump uses mass firing to remove independent inspectors general at a series of agencies,” Associated Press, https://apnews.com/article/trump-inspectors-general-fired-congress-unlawful-4e8bc57e132c3f9a7f1c2a3754359993
[16] – Harry Litman [@harrylitman.bsky.social], Bluesky, January 25, 2025, https://bsky.app/profile/harrylitman.bsky.social/post/3lgkiehcbfs2i
[17] – Steve Holland, “Trump announces private-sector $500 billion investment in AI infrastructure,” Reuters, January 21, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/trump-announce-private-sector-ai-infrastructure-investment-cbs-reports-2025-01-21/
[18] – Ibid.
[19] – Ibid.
[20] – Gary Marcus, “Hot Take on an AI Catfight,” Marcus on AI, January 22, 2025, https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/hot-take-on-an-ai-catfight
[21] – Gary Marcus, “The race for "AI Supremacy" is over — at least for now,” Marcus on AI, January 26, 2025, https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-race-for-ai-supremacy-is-over
Decisions with Mic Farris
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