Capitol police were overrun, 'left naked' against rioters

WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite ample warnings about pro-Trump demonstrations in Washington, U.S. Capitol Police did not bolster staffing on Wednesday and made no preparations for the possibility that the planned protests could escalate into massive violent riots, according to several people briefed on law enforcement's response.

The revelations shed new light on why Capitol police were so quickly overrun by rioters. The department had the same number of officers in place as on a routine day. While some of those officers were outfitted with equipment for a protest, they were not staffed or equipped for a riot.

Once the mob began to move on the Capitol, a police lieutenant issued an order not to use deadly force, which explains why officers outside the building did not draw their weapons as the crowd closed in. Officers are sometimes ordered against escalating a situation by drawing their weapons if superiors believe doing so could lead to a stampede or a shootout.

In this instance, it also left officers will little ability to resist the mob. In one video from the scene, an officer puts up his firsts to try to push back a crowd pinning he and his colleagues against a door. The crowd jeers “You are not American!” and one man tries to prod him with the tip of an American flag.

“They were left naked,” Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Ca. said of the police in an interview with AP. She had raised security concerns in a Dec. 28 meeting of House Democrats and grilled Steven Sund, the Capitol Police chief, during an hourlong private call on New Year’s Eve. “It turns out it was the worst kind of non-security anybody could ever imagine.”

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Impeachment push builds, 2 GOP senators want Trump to resign

WASHINGTON (AP) — With impeachment planning intensifying, two Republican senators want President Donald Trump to resign immediately as efforts mount to prevent Trump from ever again holding elective office in the wake of deadly riots at the Capitol.

House Democrats are expected to introduce articles of impeachment on Monday and vote as soon as Tuesday. The strategy would be to condemn the president's actions swiftly but delay an impeachment trial in the Senate for 100 days. That would allow President-elect Joe Biden to focus on other priorities as soon as he is inaugurated Jan. 20.

Rep. Jim Clyburn, the third-ranking House Democrat and a top Biden ally, laid out the ideas Sunday as the country came to grips with the siege at the Capitol by Trump loyalists trying to overturn the election results.

“Let’s give President-elect Biden the 100 days he needs to get his agenda off and running,” Clyburn said.

Pressure was mounting for Trump to leave office even before his term ended amid alarming concerns of more unrest ahead of the inauguration. The president whipped up the mob that stormed the Capitol, sent lawmakers into hiding and left five dead.

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US diplomats in extraordinary protest against Trump for riot

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a highly unusual move, American diplomats have drafted two cables condemning President Donald Trump’s incitement of the deadly assault on the Capitol and calling for administration officials to possibly support invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.

Using what is known as the State Department's “dissent channel,” career foreign and civil service officers said they fear last Wednesday's siege may badly undermine U.S. credibility to promote and defend democratic values abroad.

“Failing to publicly hold the president to account would further damage our democracy and our ability to effectively accomplish our foreign policy goals abroad,” according to the second of the two cables, which were circulated among diplomats late last week and then sent to State Department leadership.

The cable called on Pompeo to support any lawful effort by Vice President Mike Pence and other Cabinet members to protect the country including through “the possible implementation of the procedures provided for in Article 4 of the 25th Amendment, if appropriate.” The amendment allows for the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to declare a president unfit for office, and the vice president then becomes acting president.

The cables were an extraordinary protest against a sitting U.S. president by American diplomats, who have long complained that the Trump administration has ignored and diminished their role and expertise. The dissent channel is normally used to oppose specific foreign policy decisions. The two most recent cables appear to be unprecedented in their scope and characterization of the president as a danger to the country.

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Vaccine rollout confirms public health officials' warnings

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Public health officials sounded the alarm for months, complaining that they did not have enough support or money to get COVID-19 vaccines quickly into arms. Now the slower-than-expected start to the largest vaccination effort in U.S. history is proving them right.

As they work to ramp up the shots, state and local public health departments across the U.S. cite a variety of obstacles, most notably a lack of leadership from the federal government. Many officials worry that they are losing precious time at the height of the pandemic, and the delays could cost lives.

States lament a lack of clarity on how many doses they will receive and when. They say more resources should have been devoted to education campaigns to ease concerns among people leery of getting the shots. And although the federal government recently approved $8.7 billion for the vaccine effort, it will take time to reach places that could have used the money months ago to prepare to deliver shots more efficiently.

Such complaints have become a common refrain in a nation where public health officials have been left largely on their own to solve complex problems.

“The recurring theme is the lack of a national strategy and the attempt to pass the buck down the line, lower and lower, until the poor people at the receiving end have nobody else that they can send the buck to,” said Gianfranco Pezzino, who was the public health officer in Shawnee County, Kansas, until retiring last month.

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Lawmakers who voted against Biden are denounced back home

Republican members of Congress who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s presidential victory, even after a mob broke into the Capitol, are being denounced by critics in their home districts who demand that they resign or be ousted.

Protesters, newspaper editorial boards and local-level Democrats have urged the lawmakers to step down or for their colleagues to kick them out. The House and Senate can remove members with a two-thirds vote or censure or reprimand with a majority.

Rep. Madison Cawthorn “needs to be held accountable for his seditious behavior and for the consequences resulting from said behavior,” a group of Democratic officials wrote in a letter asking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to expel the North Carolina freshman who took his oath of office on Jan. 3.

Cawthorn said he had a constitutional duty to vote against Biden. He condemned the violence in Wednesday's attack, but compared it to last summer's protests over police brutality. Those demonstrations never breached a government building during official business.

A Capitol police officer died and an officer shot and killed a woman in the mob. Three other people died from medical emergencies in the chaos, which forced lawmakers and staff members to go into hiding as the rioters roamed the halls of one of America’s most hallowed buildings.

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Oaths questioned as Trump's backers fight against loss

Before they take office, elected officials swear to uphold the U.S. Constitution. But what happens when they are accused of doing the opposite?

As some Republicans in Congress continued to back President Donald Trump's doomed effort to overturn the election, critics — including President-elect Joe Biden — alleged that they had violated their oaths and instead pledged allegiance to Trump.

The oaths, which rarely attract much attention, have become a common subject in the final days of the Trump presidency, being invoked by members of both parties as they met Wednesday to affirm Biden's win and a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.

“They also swore on a Bible to uphold the Constitution, and that’s where they really are stepping outside and being in dereliction of duty,” said former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican who served as EPA administrator during former President George W. Bush's administration. “They swore to uphold the Constitution against all our enemies, foreign or domestic, and they are ignoring that.”

The oaths vary slightly between government bodies, but elected officials generally swear to defend the Constitution. The Senate website says its current oath is linked to the 1860s, “drafted by Civil War-era members of Congress intent on ensnaring traitors.”

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Possible virus exposure for lawmakers sheltering during riot

WASHINGTON (AP) — House lawmakers may have been exposed to someone testing positive for COVID-19 while they sheltered at an undisclosed location during the Capitol siege by a violent mob loyal to President Donald Trump.

The Capitol's attending physician notified all lawmakers Sunday of the virus exposure and urged them to be tested. The infected individual was not named.

Dr. Brian Moynihan wrote that “many members of the House community were in protective isolation in the large room — some for several hours” on Wednesday. He said “individuals may have been exposed to another occupant with coronavirus infection.”

Dozens of lawmakers were whisked to the secure location after pro-Trump insurrectionists stormed the Capitol that day, breaking through barricades to roam the halls and offices and ransacking the building.

Some members of Congress huddled for hours in the large room, while others were there for a shorter period.

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Trump-supporting Christian leaders and their Sunday messages

Support for President Donald Trump has been consistently strong among evangelicals, with some professing that he has been the best friend Christians have had in the White House.

On the first Sunday since a mob of his supporters seeking to overturn President-elect Joe Biden's election stormed the U.S. Capitol and five people including a police officer died, the messages from the pulpits of Christian leaders who've backed Trump were as disparate as the opinions of the nation's citizenry.

They ranged from recitations of debunked conspiracy theories of who was responsible, to calls for healing and following Jesus Christ rather than any individual person, to sermons that made no mention of Wednesday's chaos and what it means for the future.

Here is a look at what some were preaching to their flocks:

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Cops: Chicago shooter who killed 3 posted social media rants

CHICAGO (AP) — A man who police say killed three people and wounded four others during a series of shootings in and around Chicago posted nonsensical and expletive-laced videos in the days and hours leading up to the attacks.

Investigators on Sunday were trying to determine a motive for the Saturday afternoon attacks in which police say 32-year-old Jason Nightengale apparently chose his victims at random. Police killed Nightengale in a shootout just north of the city about four hours after authorities say he shot his first victim in the head in a South Side parking garage.

Those killed included a 30-year-old University of Chicago student from China named Yiran Fan, Anthony Faukner, 20, and Aisha Nevell, 46, a security guard. Wounded were a 77-year-old woman, 81-year-old woman and a 15-year-old girl, according to Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown. Another woman was shot in the neck in Evanston, police in the suburb said.

Authorities didn't release many details about Nightengale, a Chicago man whose LinkedIn page listed work over the years as a janitor, security guard and forklift operator. But a series of disturbing videos posted to Facebook over two years under Nightengale's middle name, Oliver, offered clues as to his state of mind.

In one posted Thursday, Nightengale held a gun to the camera and muttered unintelligible statements as he appeared to be driving. A police official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation confirmed it was Nightengale in the video.

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Johnson under fire as UK again faces onslaught of COVID-19

LONDON (AP) — The crisis facing Britain this winter is depressingly familiar: Stay-at-home orders and empty streets. Hospitals overflowing. A daily toll of many hundreds of coronavirus deaths.

The U.K. is the epicenter of Europe’s COVID-19 outbreak once more, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government is facing questions, and anger, as people demand to know how the country has ended up here — again.

Many countries are enduring new waves of the virus, but Britain’s is among the worst, and it comes after a horrendous 2020. More than 3 million people in the U.K. have tested positive for the coronavirus and 81,000 have died — 30,000 in just the last 30 days. The economy has shrunk by 8%, more than 800,000 jobs have been lost and hundreds of thousands more furloughed workers are in limbo.

Even with the new lockdown, London Mayor Sadiq Khan said Friday that the situation in the capital was “critical,” with one in every 30 people infected. “The stark reality is that we will run out of beds for patients in the next couple of weeks unless the spread of the virus slows down drastically,″ he said.

Medical staff are also at breaking point.