Background Briefing: April 19, 2021

On By gram

 

How to Screen Out Racist Cops Who Join Anti-Government Militias

We begin with boasts on “60 Minutes” from the leader of the Arizona chapter of the Oath Keepers, the biggest of the nationwide militia among the far-right groups who stormed the Capitol, that many active duty military and police are in their ranks and that they get “training” from serving police officers. Joining us is Vida Johnson, a criminal defense attorney and professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center who works in the Criminal Defense and Prisoner Advocacy Clinic and Criminal Justice Clinic and authored a paper in 2019 that included a list of more than a hundred police departments in forty-nine states that have faced scandals over racist threats, emails or public social media posts by officers since 2009. We examine the need for Federal standards in the recruitment of police officers to exclude racist sympathizer of white supremacists groups like the Oath Keepers and the case of a police officer in Arkansas who admitted on his application form that he had attended a KKK rally as a young man who later went on the shoot dead an unarmed black boy.

 

With a Leader of the Oath Keepers Cooperating With Investigators, We Should Learn More About Who Planned the Assault on the Capitol

Then we look further into the Oath Keepers and their role in storming the Capitol on January 6 now that one of the leaders of that assault has flipped and is now cooperating with FBI investigations into the riot and the rioters. Brian Levin, a criminologist, civil rights attorney, professor of criminal justice and Director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University San Bernardino, joins us to discuss the split within the Oath Keeper between the far-right insurrectionists and the ultra far-right domestic terrorists.

 

Paralysis at the U.N. Caused by China and Russia Allows the Slaughter of Ethiopian Civilians to Continue

Then finally after having interviewed a sympathizer of the government of Ethiopia, we are joined by Ambassador Fesseha Tessema, a Tigrayan career diplomat who previously served as Ethiopia’s Ambassador to the United Nations as well as Ambassador to Israel. He joins us to discuss the paralysis at the U.N. where China and Russia have been blocking efforts to stop the slaughter of civilians and get humanitarian aid into a country that appears to be breaking apart.