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President Joe Biden met with Democratic governors Friday afternoon to discuss ways their states are protecting abortion access and continuing to push abortion as an election issue in November.

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Capitol Police arrested 181 pro-abortion demonstrators in Washington, D.C. on Thursday as they waged a sit-in to protest the Supreme Court’s recent overturn of Roe v. Wade.

During the protest by Center for Popular Democracy Action, Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Working Families Party – joined by prominent figures like Rep. Judy Chu (D-California) – demonstrators blocked a street near the Supreme Court, demanding that lawmakers take action to protect abortion seekers across the country.

Capitol Police began arresting people around noon on Thursday after surrounding them as the protesters marched to the Supreme Court building, calling for mass civil disobedience and vowing not to back down until abortion rights were restored. Chu, one of the original sponsors of the Democrats’ bill to codify Roe, was among the people arrested, as well as the progressive pastor and activist Rev. William Barber II.

Police said that the reason for the arrests was that the protesters were blocking an intersection, though videos posted on social media show that police closely surrounded protesters as they marched, before the arrests began. Meanwhile, uprisings waged by hundreds of thousands of people over the past week have been met with police violence, including the use of tear gas, which is an abortifacient.

Journalist Chuck Modi documented on Twitter that police were kettling protesters, an anti-protest tactic often used by police to trap protesters in which they surround protesters and confine them to a certain area like an alleyway or a bridge.

Outside SCOTUS Now. Protesters sit-in and block street, and police immediately surround & kettle them, unlike you know when…. #RoeVWade pic.twitter.com/AfjcRBzpZQ

— ChuckModi (@ChuckModi1) June 30, 2022

Modi noted that Capitol Police officers treated the abortion protesters with far more hostility than they did the January 6 attackers – an armed mob with a stated intent of killing political figures and staging a coup backed by the then-president of the United States. D.C. police said that they only arrested about a dozen people out of a mob of thousands of far right militants on the day of the January 6 attack.

Progressive advocates noted that the difference in the police response, while infuriating, was no surprise. “It’s not a coincidence that violent fascists were treated with kid gloves and folks protesting non-violently for abortion are arrested,” said anti-capitalist activist Joshua Potash. “Cops view one group as their friends and the other as an enemy.”

Barber, who said he was held in police custody for over three hours, condemned the police for the arrests. “There is something deeply immoral when you would be willing to use your power, not to provide people living wages, not to provide people voting rights, but to take away a woman’s power over her body,” he said. (Trans men and nonbinary people are also affected by the Roe overturn, and the trans community has seen a wave of attacks on their bodily autonomy even outside of the abortion ruling.)

Abortion advocates have been calling on lawmakers to take immediate action to protect abortion rights and prevent what researchers say will be a sharp uptick in death rates of pregnant people. President Joe Biden called for creating a carveout in the Senate filibuster in order to pass Democrats’ abortion bill, but the pledge means little in the face of recalcitrant conservative Democrats Senators Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona) and Joe Manchin (West Virginia), who were quick to shoot down Biden’s call.

Progressives say that, even if it were possible, creating a filibuster carveout would be wholly insufficient to meet the demands of this moment as the Supreme Court guts Americans’ rights at a rapid clip. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) have called for far right Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe to be investigated and potentially impeached, while other lawmakers have called for expanding the Supreme Court to combat Republican court packing.

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It was testimony that, for a moment, stopped the world in its tracks.

So, once the president had gotten into the vehicle with [Secret Service agent] Bobby [Engel], he thought that they were going up to the Capitol. And when Bobby had relayed to him we’re not, we don’t have the assets to do it, it’s not secure, we’re going back to the West Wing, the president had a very strong, a very angry response to that.

[White House chief of operations] Tony [Ornato] described him as being irate. The president said something to the effect of I’m the f’ing president, take me up to the Capitol now, to which Bobby responded, sir, we have to go back to the West Wing. The president reached up towards the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel. Mr. Engel grabbed his arm, said, sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel.

We’re going back to the West Wing. We’re not going to the Capitol. Mr. Trump then used his free hand to lunge towards Bobby Engel. And Mr. — when Mr. Ornato had recounted this story to me, he had motioned towards his clavicles.

With this, former White House Aide Cassidy Hutchinson did something few had managed in the six years since Donald Trump rode a golden escalator, and the presidency, down to the depths: She made a great many jaded people actually stop and recoil in horror.

For awhile now, that hadn’t seemed possible; “this is not normal” had become all too normal, and a callus had formed over the sensibilities of most. There’s only so much folks can take before the circuits start to melt, and that was certainly the plan with this White House, as was made plain by former White House adviser Steve Bannon’s operating dictum: “Flood the zone with shit.”

Hutchinson cut through that like a hot knife through, well, shit. She asserted that Trump tried to commandeer the limo and then choke a Secret Service agent because he wanted to physically join the armed insurrectionists sacking the Capitol — and just like that, at long last, a line was finally crossed. While other aspects of her testimony were more legally damaging — Trump tried to wave armed protesters through security when he knew they were armed and Capitol-bound stands out above all — this vignette was the unavoidable boulder in the road.

Of course, it could not be allowed to stand. Trump immediately blazed forth with a frightened-sounding aria of his greatest hits: This woman who is a woman knows nothing and did nothing and was never anywhere and I never met her witch hunt Democrats MAGA give me money! The heavy lifting to debunk the humongous problem presented by Hutchinson’s testimony has fallen to the two men who were in the car with Trump when he allegedly flipped out: Tony Ornato and Bobby Engel.

Within hours of Hutchinson’s testimony, it was announced that Ornato and Engel disputed her version of events and were willing to testify on this point. This was the equivalent of stopping the hole in the Titanic’s hull with a roll of paper towels, but the flooding belowdecks did briefly subside. If her testimony proved questionable on this matter, it casts a bleak light on her entire testimony.

Ornato, and by connection Engel appear to be so deep in the bag for Trump, they may as well be golf balls.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Tony Ornato was once Trump’s senior Secret Service agent, and has been a huge Trump fan from the beginning. Trump likes Ornato so much that he elevated Ornato to an official White House position: White House chief of operations. Ornato’s main portfolio included stage-managing all of Trump’s rallies, campaign events, photo-ops and so forth.

Engel is Trump’s current senior Secret Service agent, and works hand in glove with Ornato to arrange and manage Trump’s public appearances. Given the enormous attention Trump pays to how much attention he’s getting, it is not too far a cry to say Ornato and Engel held two of the most important gigs in the White House, with Ornato enjoying the superior spot between the two… and according to multiple reports, both men have become practiced at altering reality to serve Trump’s needs and desires.

“Tony Ornato has said a lot of things didn’t happen,” Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig told MSNBC. “He has tried to say to the press and to me indirectly that the clearing of Lafayette Square was not done for President Trump’s photo op. Well, that’s not true. He was at the center of that…. The Secret Service often tries to deny things that are unflattering and then when the rubber hits the road, we learn there is a little bit more to it.”

Indeed. It is also worth noting that neither Ornato nor Engel were under oath when they denied the incident, while Hutchinson was sworn before a committee on Capitol Hill when she related her version of events.

Until those men offer sworn testimony refuting hers, Hutchinson’s words will likely carry the day. Ornato, and by connection, Engel, appear to be so deep in the bag for Trump, they may as well be golf balls. Hutchinson, by comparison, has everything to lose by getting crosswise with Trump and labeled a liar.

My money is on Cassidy Hutchinson, until somebody damned reliable tells me otherwise.

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