Schoolhouse limbo: How low will educators go to ‘better’ grades?
Maryland’s new education chief, Carey Wright, an old-school champion of rigorous standards, is pushing back against efforts in other states to boost test scores by essentially lowering their expectations of students.
States, including Oklahoma and Wisconsin, are making it easier for students to demonstrate on annual assessments that they are proficient in math and English after a decade of declining test scores nationwide. By redesigning the assessments and lowering the so-called “cut scores” that separate achievement levels such as basic, proficient, and advanced, several states have recently posted dramatic increases in proficiency, a key indicator of school quality.
'If you don’t set high expectations, you’re never going to achieve the kinds of goals that you want to achieve. And in our business, it’s called student learning.'
Wright warns that lowering the bar on proficiency can create the public impression that schools are improving and students are learning more when, in fact, that’s not the case.
“You can make yourself look better to the public by lowering your cut scores,” Wright, the Maryland state superintendent of schools, told RealClearInvestigations in an interview. “But then you are not really measuring proficiency. My position is no, no, no. Parents and teachers need to know if their children are proficient or not.”
As most public schools continue to deal with the related crises of learning loss and chronic absenteeism years after COVID-19, Wright says now is the worst time to lower expectations of students, which can stifle the impetus to improve. In other moves to accommodate struggling students, districts and states have reduced graduation requirements and inflated grades with policies that ban failing marks. The best evidence comes from studies in Washington and North Carolina showing that grades have held steady at their pre-pandemic levels even though students are learning much less.
“With grades and assessments, the education system seems to be sleepwalking into a policy of ratcheting expectations down to better reflect what today’s students can do, rather than doubling efforts to help get students to where they need to be,” said Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which argues for high academic standards.
Wright, who took over Maryland schools this summer, is refusing to backpedal on standards in a state that plunged from the top to the bottom in U.S. performance over the last decade. The superintendent says she aims to improve Maryland’s declining proficiency rates the hard way by making academic standards more rigorous in all content areas. As students learn more in class, the theory goes, they should become more proficient on state tests.
But a strategy that asks more of teachers and students is never an easy lift in districts that often resist top-down calls for change. Without direct control over school districts run by local boards, state superintendents like Wright must depend on the ability to inspire principals and teachers to follow their lead and meet inconvenient truths head-on.
Wright has done it before. As the state superintendent in Mississippi a decade ago, she collaborated closely with districts in lifting content standards and provided support to completely revamp literacy instruction in what was the worst-performing state in the union. Student proficiency soared without lowering cut scores. Educators called it the “Mississippi Miracle.”
“If you set the bar low, that’s all you are going to get,” Wright said. “But if you set the bar high for students, and support teachers and leaders, it’s doable.”
Lowering cut scores, boosting proficiency
Each state controls its own definition of proficiency and how students can achieve the all-important marker of academic success. The state sets its own content standards that detail what students need to know in each grade, writes its own tests to determine if they are proficient, and devises its own cut scores.
The undertaking is more art than science. There is no accepted single definition of what makes a student proficient. States mostly aim for grade-level proficiency, or what the average student can do, based on their own content standards. A handful of states shoot higher, approaching a more rigorous definition of proficiency spelled out by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the Nation’s Report Card.
By moving the bar on tests and cut scores, education officials have instantly raised or lowered proficiency rates. Over the years, some states have added enough rigor to allow only a third of students to show proficiency while others have reduced it to ensure that the vast majority perform well, Marianne Perie, who has helped more than a dozen states develop assessment methods, told the New York Board of Regents last year.
Today, states are lowering the bar and lifting proficiency rates. “Oklahoma just lowered their cut scores and Wisconsin is another one that ended up with less rigorous cut scores,” Perie told RCI. “If more kids are proficient this year compared with the previous years, it indicates that cut scores are less rigorous or that kids learned a lot more over the last year.”
High standards fall in Wisconsin
Wisconsin, like most states, has experienced a big drop in proficiency. In 2017, 44% of public school students were deemed proficient in English. That percentage fell in 2018 and 2019 and then plunged in the early years of the pandemic before recovering a bit to 39% in 2023.
This year, Wisconsin rolled out its new test and cut scores. State Superintendent Jill Underly was transparent about the changes, explaining in October that the redesign was meant to fix a problem created a decade ago when Wisconsin and other states aligned their cut scores to an “extremely high” level used by NAEP, reducing Wisconsin’s proficiency rate in the years that followed. Underly wrote that Wisconsin’s new grade-level cut scores better reflect the actual proficiency of students, making results easier for families to understand.
What families saw was a dramatic boost in English proficiency to 48% this year — a nine percentage-point gain over 2023 — due to assessment changes that had nothing to do with classroom learning.
To be sure, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction didn’t tout the 2024 results. It announced that they shouldn’t be compared to prior years since testing methods changed. Still, families who don’t follow the fine print of assessments may be left with the impression that Wisconsin schools are performing much better this year.
Paul Peterson, a prominent Harvard professor of education policy who has tracked changes to state proficiency levels, says politics seems to be a driver in the lowering of testing rigor.
“Student performance is falling so I would imagine the pressure on states to rethink standards must be considerable,” Peterson said. “Officials want to show that they are spending the public's dollar well, and that students are learning.”
No notice in Oklahoma
In Oklahoma, a similar assessment revamp unfolded this summer but with a controversial twist: State leaders in Oklahoma didn’t inform school districts or families that they had lowered the bar before releasing the test results in August, according to reports in the local media.
When school districts saw the results, principals and teachers were in disbelief over the huge increase in performance. In fourth grade English, for instance, 47% of students reached proficiency — an extraordinary 23% jump compared to 2023.
Later in August, State Superintendent Ryan Walters, a conservative who has been under fire for insisting that public schools teach the Bible, admitted that the state changed its assessment regime without publicly announcing it. Republican state lawmakers issued a statement criticizing Walters for “putting a false narrative out there” about a jump in test scores. Oklahoma’s Department of Education didn’t respond to a request from RCI for comment.
“I believe in transparency and communication,” said Perie, the testing expert. “Oklahoma was the only state where it seemed like they were hiding the changes.”
New York denies lower standards
As in Wisconsin and Oklahoma, New York’s retooled content standards, assessments, and scoring also produced higher proficiency rates.
A New York education official told RCI that the goal was to determine what should be expected of today’s students and how to evaluate their proficiency in various subjects using the new content standards. New York saw a dramatic 13% increase in math proficiency and a small boost in English in 2023, the year the changes were implemented.
Officials in New York and Wisconsin are adamant that the updated assessments don’t amount to a lowering of academic standards even though proficiency rates jumped. The New York official added that while several factors impact student achievement from year to year, instruction is one of the most highly related attributes.
“It is incorrect and irresponsible to derive from this that the standards have been lowered,” the official said in an email.
Petrilli of the Fordham Institute calls such explanations from state officials doublespeak. “By definition these states are lowering standards for proficiency because it’s easier for students to meet the standard than it was before,” he said.
Wright’s ‘Mississippi Miracle’
Education experts say Wright’s tenure as the state superintendent in Mississippi offers a lesson to states struggling with low proficiency rates today: Even in the worst of times, Wright showed, states can raise their expectations of students and get results.
When Wright took over Mississippi schools in 2013, they were at the very bottom in performance nationally. A mere 21% of fourth graders were proficient in reading, according to NAEP. Educators in the South would say, “At least we are not as bad as Mississippi.”
The decade before the pandemic was a time of rising expectations in public education. With Wright in charge, Mississippi joined half of the states in raising the bar for fourth grade reading proficiency between 2013 and 2019.
The lifting of expectations was relatively easy. It’s policymaking. The tough part for state superintendents was implementing changes in schools to reach those higher goals. For the most part, the higher bars didn’t translate into higher levels of proficiency by 2017, according to research by Daniel Hamlin at the University of Oklahoma and Harvard’s Peterson.
There are only theories as to why: After the Great Recession of 2009, school funding declined. The Obama administration relaxed federal accountability measures put in place by President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind reform of 2002. The advent of smartphones became a major distraction for students.
Mississippi was a notable exception. Its fourth grade reading proficiency jumped by 11 percentage points from 2013 to 2019, rising to a top-20 performer in the United States, according to NAEP. In math, the increase was equally impressive.
Wright got results the old-fashioned way, with a tenacious focus on improving proficiency for all students, including those living in poverty, says Washington Cole, then her chief of staff and now a district superintendent in Mississippi. To get there, Wright rolled out a literacy program that was backed by decades of research and, crucially, provided teachers and administrators with extensive training in the model and sent coaches into the lowest-performing schools. “The professional development was a huge part of it,” Wright said.
Wright also toughened the district grading system that provided public accountability. When districts earned an “A” for performance, they were publicly celebrated by community members and lawmakers, adding to the incentives for other districts to improve. Over a decade, Wright’s team transformed Mississippi into an unlikely national K-12 success story.
“Dr. Wright set high expectations and her hard work and determination were very infectious with everyone. She was amazing,” Cole said. “I have no doubt that she will do the same thing in Maryland.”
Maryland tries a turnaround
Wright has her work cut out for her. After a decade of decline in Maryland, 48% of students are proficient in English and 24% in math.
In Baltimore, where almost all students are black or Latino, the numbers are tragically low. Only 6% of middle and high schoolers are proficient in math. More than 40% of Baltimore students were chronically absent last year, according to a district estimate, well above the national average. Students can’t learn if they don’t show up.
None of this seems to faze Wright, who assumed permanent leadership of Maryland’s schools in July. In returning to her native state, where she earned her doctorate in education and began her career as a teacher and administrator, Wright has wasted no time in setting a very ambitious goal.
“In the next three years we are expecting a five-percentage point increase in proficiency each year in English and math,” she said.
To achieve that goal, Wright appointed a task force of teachers, leaders, experts, and parents to quickly recommend changes to the state’s accountability system, which she discovered painted a very rosy picture for the public. It was giving high marks to three-quarters of all schools despite their low proficiency scores. Wright wants the new system to provide school leaders with clearer measurements on a range of topics, such as the pace of student growth and graduation rates, so they can target their weak areas for improvement.
“Superintendents take a lot of pride in their ratings,” Wright said. “They want to be that district that gets recognized.”
Major changes are also coming to classrooms. Wright’s new early literacy policy, which won state board approval in October, details expectations for instruction based on the science of reading and teacher training in an attempt to lift test scores that have fallen to 41st in the country.
The biggest change in policy puts an end to social promotion. Districts with parental consent will be able to hold back third graders who don’t meet literacy standards rather than promote them to fourth grade, where they will continue to struggle to read, hampering their future performance. It’s the kind of bold change that Wright wasn’t hesitant to push despite opposition from some board members and families concerned about the impact on disadvantaged students.
It worked for Wright in Mississippi, producing a very large increase in reading performance by sixth grade, according to researchers.
“Putting a stake in the ground and saying we are not just going to move kids along if they haven’t learned to read by grade 3 is very powerful and much needed for our education system,” said Joan Dabrowski, the chief academic officer of Baltimore City Public Schools. “Dr. Wright is very clearly telling the districts they need to prioritize this policy and the state will be monitoring districts so there is a lot of accountability.”
Will the policy work? Dabrowski says it depends on the support teachers and principals receive from Wright to make the difficult changes over several years. “I like everything in the policy, but there are lots of points where implementation could go well or not go well,” she said.
Illinois next to lower cut scores
In June, Illinois made clear that it plans to boost proficiency, too, by following the approach of Wisconsin. Illinois Superintendent Tony Sanders said in a report that his state has one of the toughest definitions of proficiency in the nation. He said students who are on track for college could be mislabeled as not proficient, sending a wrong message to their families.
To fix this, Illinois is planning to adjust its assessment methods by 2025, which will likely boost the state’s proficiency rates.
If Wright fails in Maryland, would she consider following Illinois and other states in easing the rigor of assessments?
She scoffed at the idea.
“When you look over the last decade of dropping test scores, now is not the time to be lowering the bar,” she said. “If you don't set high expectations, you're never going to achieve the kinds of goals that you want to achieve. And in our business, it's called student learning.”
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
How Helene gave way to ‘Hurricane Snafu’ in the Carolinas
It wasn’t as if the Tar Heel State didn’t see Hurricane Helene coming. On Sept. 25, one day before Helene stormed ashore, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper declared a state of emergency as the storm’s path showed it churning northward toward Appalachia after making landfall in Florida.
Yet, that advance declaration was not followed by any state evacuation orders, and the population largely sheltered in place as Helene hit the steep, wooded hills of Western North Carolina, squatting over the area, unleashing more than an inch of water per hour for more than a day. The unprecedented, relentless downpour, falling on ground already saturated by rain the week before, tore old pines and hardwoods out by the roots, creating arboreal torpedoes that rocketed down the steep inclines; water that turned photogenic stony creeks into whitewater torrents, lifting ancient streambed boulders and tossing them like chips on to roads and into homes and buildings. The storm left 230 people dead, nearly half of them in North Carolina, with dozens still missing as of early November.
There is no such thing as a 'perfect response,' but the one following Helene teaches important lessons.
As residents in Asheville, Chimney Creek, and other smaller communities continue to pick up from the carnage, after-action reports indicate government agencies at the federal and state levels were slow to react. Interviews with several private relief groups that sprang into action after Helene, along with statistics provided by congressional sources, indicate that Cooper’s office and the Biden administration were slow to activate military personnel and assets like helicopters that were critical in the days after the storm. In addition, budgetary moves and internal communications have also drawn questions about how the Federal Emergency Management Agency is spending its money and how it envisioned its purpose in a Biden administration suffused with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” mandates.
FEMA is also wrestling with revelations that politics had influenced some of its relief efforts. The agency fired a staffer who told crews to avoid houses in storm-damaged parts of Florida that displayed Donald Trump campaign signs. The dismissed worker said this week her orders were not an isolated incident and that FEMA avoided “politically hostile” zones in the Carolinas, too.
“There seems to have been a priority shift, period,” said Eric Eggers, the vice president of the conservative Government Accountability Institute. “It seems impossible to separate its mission creep and its ideological pursuit of an agenda when its duties are to fix that bridge or clear that road.”
As devastating and increasingly expensive natural disasters continue to be a fact of life in the United States, FEMA’s halting response, especially in the early days after Helene, when lives were in jeopardy, suggests both the capabilities and limits of state and federal responses.
Communication breakdowns
In the first days, survivors told RealClearInvestigations that the impact of governments’ slow-footed efforts was countered by the heroic efforts of private citizens and groups who rushed to provide help. As FEMA and others began to assert themselves, some conflicts arose between government representatives and volunteers, although everyone RCI spoke with agreed that such disasters inevitably spawn chaos. There is no such thing as a “perfect response,” but many people said the one following Helene teaches important lessons.
Helene didn’t slam into Western North Carolina the way hurricanes typically do but instead squatted like an angry demon over the region in which the economically vital fall tourist season was just swinging into gear.
In Avery County, a parks and recreation gymnasium had been set up as a shelter with approximately 40 beds and generators for backup power, according to Jamie Shell, the editor of the weekly Avery Journal-Times and a lifelong Tar Heel.
“On the day prior to the storm, we were in touch with the county emergency management office and county manager to get a feel for where they were in terms of initial response,” he said. “I remember a number of generated auto-calls and emails from the county to the county residents informing them of the historic and potentially devastating nature of the event, warning people to make plans to seek higher ground and evacuate as needed due to the torrential rains and damaging winds that would arrive.”
By Friday morning, Shell said people were fending off the elements as best they could.
“It was a case where most everyone who were not necessary (emergency) personnel were pretty much sheltering in place, as roads were being littered with fallen trees and high water, with the worst damage along creeks and rivers,” he said.
Power soon went out, making communication difficult for both survivors and potential rescue efforts, and creeks crested, complicating overland travel. Shell said some roads remained passable, but without power or an aerial view, it was impossible for people to find shelter if their homes were damaged or lost, and for relief efforts that didn’t have small planes or helicopters to get to wrecked spots, and even then potential landing zones were unclear.
Here, too, politics has emerged to cloud the relief picture. Shell said he relied on a Starlink hookup, the satellite company launched and owned by Elon Musk, and that county officials were also reliant on Musk’s system. Private relief agencies told RCI that Starlink provided thousands of Starlinks, which they distributed via helicopter after Helene, offering torn-up zones their only method of communication.
Between them, the United Cajun Navy and Operation Helo, two of the private groups that operated rescue and relief operations with helicopters, distributed nearly 1,000 Starlink hookups to powerless homes. Musk trumpeted the fact that Starlink’s services would be free in the remainder of 2024 for Helene and Hurricane Milton victims, although there are reports users are still being hit with hardware starter costs.
Such assistance from Starlink might have been greater, according to some congressional sources, had the Federal Communications Commission not canceled an $885.5 million deal with Starlink to expand rural broadband access. Instead, the Biden administration sunk $42 billion into a rural broadband access program that has not hooked up any customers — a failure that dogged Vice President Kamala Harris in her failed presidential campaign, as Harris was the point person on that project.
Some Republican officials in Washington have grumbled that Cooper and the Biden administration moved too slowly in terms of activating the National Guard or the huge U.S. Army assets at Fort Liberty, formerly Fort Bragg, in North Carolina. Information provided by the state to Congress and shared with RCI shows the state’s “rotor and fixed-wing aircraft” made available rose from fewer than 10 in the storm’s initial 48 hours to 20 by Sept. 30, but it stayed at that number for three full days. North Carolina Highway Patrol provided fewer than five helicopters through Oct. 9.
Congressional sources also provided information showing there were fewer than 1,000 troops available for relief efforts until Oct. 3.
‘None of us were prepared’
Private relief agencies, untangled by orders, swung into action more quickly.
“When I got there, all I heard was, ‘Where’s FEMA? Where’s FEMA?’” said Brian Trascher, a leader of the United Cajun Navy, a private disaster relief outfit that formed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. “In fact, FEMA moves fairly quickly once they know where the problem is but otherwise everything was a clusterf***. They didn’t have anything prepositioned and so for about four or five days, most of the search and rescue was done by private people.”
But Trascher offered praise to FEMA, too. He had been meeting with FEMA officials in Washington as Helene approached, part of an ongoing effort by the feds and the Cajun Navy to cooperate better in response to disasters. It is not true that FEMA was invisible in Helene’s immediate aftermath — Trascher said he ran into a top official he knows within hours of his arrival in North Carolina — and FEMA staff on the ground were committed and hard-working, he said.
That take was echoed by others deeply involved in the first few days of Helene’s response. Of the four private relief groups that discussed the situation with RCI, all agreed FEMA officials in Western North Carolina were earnest but said both the federal bureaucracy and the military response proved creaky.
The air over the Helene-ravaged landscape was wide open in the first few days, and the private helicopters were free to go wherever they could. That began to change once federal agencies came into the picture. The Federal Aviation Agency did give out some “squawk codes” to the flyers working with private groups, Trascher said, but more codes and a better-coordinated response with the FAA are needed going forward, according to Trascher and Eric Robinson, a co-founder of Operation Helo.
The private relief executives also expressed doubts that FEMA had the most experienced hands on deck. In addition, although many National Guardsmen in the area are native Tar Heels and were champing at the bit to help, they were repeatedly snarled by delays in orders, according to several people familiar with the first days of response.
“We ran it like a military op,” Robinson said of Operation Helo, a group based in North Carolina that was born in Helene’s aftermath. “But the strength of the storm, the amount of water, I don’t think anyone anticipated that.”
Robinson described whole towns annihilated, saying there were lakes “that it looked like you could walk across, there was so much debris floating.” His team distributed more than 517 Starlinks and was also assisted personally by Ivanka Trump in the week after Helene struck.
At one point, Robinson said there were people marooned on a hilltop, and his group asked the National Guard to handle the job. Though more than willing, the guardsmen had to wait more than three hours for their orders. “We just went and got them in the meantime,” he said.
Another group distributing emergency aid and Starlinks was Samaritan’s Purse, the international relief agency whose Boone headquarters left it literally at Helene’s ground zero.
“We all knew the storm was coming, and we were ready,” said Franklin Graham, the group’s president and chief executive. “But none of us were prepared for the infrastructure’s collapse.”
Like other private officials involved in relief efforts, Graham was far from biting in his criticism of FEMA and North Carolina agencies. Similarly, he acknowledged, as Trascher and Robinson did, that private groups enjoyed freedom from the red tape that customarily snarls government bureaucracies.
“I do think FEMA might be better if it wasn’t run by a political appointee,” Graham said. “It was working in our favor initially that there were no rules, and what we saw was a true example of neighbors helping neighbors.”
Budgetary woes
As of early November, FEMA said it had spent “approximately $4.3 billion on Hurricane Helene response and recovery.” Of that total, some $213 million went in direct assistance to 126,000 North Carolina households, with another $202 million “for debris removal and reimbursement of emergency protective measures for the state.”
Helene also brought new attention to FEMA’s budgeting. Even as it pushed money out to storm victims, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who oversees FEMA, and other Biden administration officials began raising alarms that the agency could run short on hurricane relief money.
But along with those calls came revelations from Homeland Security’s watchdog inspector general that the agency was sitting on $73 billion in unliquidated funds committed to previous disasters — including $8.3 billion for those declared in 2012 or earlier. The agency has also spent nearly $4 billion on COVID relief in September, the same month as Helene — including for funeral expenses, vaccination and testing sites, and personal protective equipment. That spending was paused in September to shift money to its Immediate Needs Funding, FEMA said, but it acknowledged $3.8 billion was “obligated” for the virus that peaked in 2021.
Gov. Cooper’s office also pushed back against reports it may have been tardy in calling up the National Guard or responding to hard-hit zones.
“The North Carolina National Guard was activated and on the ground before, during, and after the storm, and we believe this was the fastest and largest integration of active-duty military soldiers under Title 10 working with the National Guard in North Carolina history,” said Jordan Monaghan, a spokesman for the governor. “Immediately following the storm, staged equipment and personnel began moving into Western NC, using Asheville’s airport as a staging area where supplies were flown in, loaded onto helicopters, and flown into counties that couldn’t be reached by road. Where roads were passable, supplies were delivered by truck.”
On Sept. 30, Cooper asked Biden to “make all necessary federal resources available,” and that so-called “Title 10” request was approved by the Defense Department on Oct. 2, according to Monaghan. At that point, helicopters and other key assets took to wing.
Both FEMA and Cooper’s office stressed the unprecedented nature of Helene, and that view was echoed by Trascher, who said some of the areas the Cajun Navy serviced were “the worst I’d seen since Katrina.”
As of early November, power outages had fallen from more than 1 million to fewer than 900, while roughly 1,000 of the 1,300 closed roads have been opened, according to Cooper’s office. All told, there have been “2,024 FEMA workers and thousands of Department of Transportation workers, utility workers, law enforcement officers, and volunteers on the ground.”
‘Disaster equity’ and government failure
Yet, under the Biden administration’s “whole of government” emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion, there are indications FEMA has moved away from a broad-based relief template.
In the past two weeks, FEMA also became embroiled in the scandal surrounding the orders of the now-dismissed staffer that Hurricane Milton relief crews should bypass homes displaying Trump campaign signs. The former supervisor, Marn’i Washington, told the Black Star Group’s digital platform that her orders were not an isolated incident. Instead, they reflected long-standing agency policy that calls for avoidance of areas or homes it considers “politically hostile.”
“FEMA always preaches avoidance first and then de-escalation, so this is not isolated,” she said. “This is a colossal event of avoidance not just in the state of Florida, but you will find avoidance in the Carolinas.”
In an in-house 2023 Zoom meeting that has received renewed attention, FEMA and other federal officers focused on how disasters allegedly hit the LGBTQ community with special fury. In that meeting, FEMA Emergency Management Specialist Tyler Atkins said LGBTQ people and others who have been disadvantaged “already are struggling,” and natural disasters compound their struggles.
Maggie Jarry, a senior emergency management specialist with the Department of Health and Human Services, then chimed in, saying emergency management in the U.S. must shift from prioritizing “the greatest good for the greatest amount of people” to “disaster equity.”
“We have to look at policies and understand to what extent they have disadvantaged communities that have less assets, communities that have pre-existing vulnerabilities in accessing disaster-related recovery supports,” Jarry said.
A FEMA spokesperson told RCI that any notion the agency has lost touch with its core mission is false.
“FEMA’s mission remains clear and unchanged — to help people before, during, and after disasters,” he said. “We are fully committed to ensuring that all communities have the support they need to prepare for and recover from disasters. FEMA’s disaster response efforts and recovery programs are funded through the Disaster Relief Fund, which is a dedicated fund for disaster efforts. Disaster Relief Fund money has not been diverted to other, non-disaster related efforts.”
FEMA’s Helene response enjoyed considerably better coverage than it received during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 when media accounts blistered the agency and the Bush administration for weeks. This time around, there were many stories outlining what FEMA does and does not do, with the former primarily involving reimbursement to state and local projects for debris removal, reconstruction, and the like. It also provides cash to survivors in the immediate aftermath of declared disasters.
Many media outlets also magnified FEMA’s attempt to combat “misinformation,” and these reports frequently blamed the Trump campaign for spreading unfounded rumors. At one point, FEMA even paused relief operations in parts of North Carolina over unfounded rumors that vigilantes were “hunting” FEMA workers.
Those pro-FEMA slants lost considerable traction days after the presidential election, however, when the story broke about FEMA relief teams in Florida deliberately bypassing homes that displayed support for Trump’s campaign.
All of these threads — the Biden administration’s “Justice40” for diversity, equity, and inclusion; the spending on matters unrelated to natural disasters or tied up in endless projects going nowhere; federal contracts to help rural America canceled — add up to an unsavory “politics of disaster relief” according to the Government Accountability Institute.
Eggers and Peter Schweizer, GAI’s leader, examined the problem in a recent podcast by that name. What happened after Helene is further evidence of that problem, Eggers said.
“In some ways, it’s a triumph of the human and American spirit, but in other ways, it seems like a failure of the American government,” he said.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
Trump’s re-election will cause the largest investigation in FBI history to crash back to earth
That rumble, thud, and explosion heard in the wee hours of Nov. 6 was the sound of the largest investigation in FBI history crashing into the dustbin of history.
When Decision Desk projected that the commonwealth of Pennsylvania gave Donald J. Trump the 270 Electoral College votes he needed for victory, the Jan. 6 ship of state fell to earth like the Luftschiff Zeppelin Hindenburg in Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937.
Boom.
Perhaps at no time in the modern era has a presidential vote been watched so keenly as January 6ers watched the evening of Nov. 5. Their cries of redemption broke the early-morning calm on Nov. 6 across all 50 states.
The January 6 machine is dead. Long live the January 6 machine.
From the dingy cells of the District of Columbia jail, the unwavering tones of the national anthem rang out more assuredly than on hundreds of other nights over the past nearly four years.
Oh say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
Somewhere out in the ether, the echoes of President Gerald R. Ford hung in the air:
My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. But there is a higher Power, by whatever name we honor Him, who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice but mercy.
As the electoral map began to take shape the evening of Nov. 5, the accused and long aggrieved of Jan. 6 felt a growing sense of hope — something they never received from two years of GOP control in the U.S. House of Representatives.
That hope was brought home by the maligned, impeached, attacked, mocked, and despised man whom the American left shot in the ear because they simply could not beat him with ideas — or honest ballots.
Deux ex machina, thy name is Trump.
How bitter the sight must have been for the D.C. elites and oligarch class to behold: the despised orange man at the dais declaring Nov. 5 as “the day Americans regained control of their country.”
Donald J. Trump’s seemingly impossible ascent from the ashes of Jan. 6 will loom over American history in a way no other event or political movement ever has.
The January 6 machine is dead. Long live the January 6 machine.
While the FBI and the inaptly named U.S. Department of Justice might continue pushing the creaking wheels of “shock and awe” to ensnare a few dozen more January 6ers, the tires will be flat soon enough.
In a way, Trump owed this victory to his followers and supporters who were ground up in the shredder of selective prosecution for protesting election fraud — and getting caught up in rioting that was meant to mortally wound the career of the 45th president of the United States.
January 6 still cries out for investigation and action on a range of issues — an effort that should begin even before Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. and Kamala Devi Harris depart the White House on Jan. 20, 2025.
Pardon me, Mr. President
Many if not most of those whose lives were ruined by Jan. 6 have hoped a Trump victory would bring pardons or commutations to put an end to the political warfare waged from the left on Middle America.
Trump has frequently talked about issuing pardons for Jan. 6 defendants, but the devil in that project will be in the details. A blanket pardon or pardons restricted to nonviolent cases? What would accomplish justice and begin healing? Some of those discussions have already taken place.
A real January 6 investigation
The work product of the so-called Jan. 6 investigations has been heavy on narrative and light on truth. Congress should not shirk or duck this important duty. The full weight of Congress, amply funded, is needed to cut through the propaganda and unearth the truth. The Department of Defense played a bigger role than has been disclosed publicly. Investigators need to document which troops were at the Capitol that day and what their mission was.
How much did the myriad Jan. 6 investigations and 1,500-plus prosecutions cost the American taxpayer?
Should the Justice Department be downsized? Should investigators instead look at the roles played by Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and other Justice Department brass in designing and arming the Jan. 6 prosecution machine?
Fedsurrection, fedsurrection
There is too much smoke surrounding this issue for there not to be fire. What was the federal law enforcement presence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, and what did agents and informants do? Was there incitement or entrapment? And if there were large numbers of feds present, why did they not help quell the rioting that broke out?
Reforms need to be examined to correct how confidential human sources are used and managed in FBI investigations. A pattern suggesting routine entrapment demands some kind of check on the power of the informant.
New criminal probes
Special prosecutors should be employed or grand juries impaneled to investigate the killing of Ashli Babbitt and the senseless, horrific beating and death of Rosanne Boyland. The D.C. bubble has hidden many facts and ignored many others that contributed to these two Jan. 6 tragedies.
Torture behind bars
Congress failed to investigate and expose the banana republic torture and abuse visited upon many dozens of men and women in D.C. pretrial detention and at Bureau of Prisons facilities. These victims’ stories should be documented and shown to the American people in televised prime-time hearings.
Capitol Police transparency
Congress needs to rein in the U.S. Capitol Police, making the department more directly accountable to the American people. The agency does not believe its records should be available to the public. The Capitol Police often ignore or deny requests from media. Judicial Watch Inc. has engaged in years of litigation to obtain records.
Congress should closely examine the Capitol Police Jan. 6 timeline and what took place since that day. How many officers faced retaliation for reporting issues and problems to the USCP inspector general? Was there a shadow administration undercutting former Police Chief Steven A. Sund in the weeks leading to Jan. 6?
During the brief tenure of acting Chief Yogananda Pittman, officers were forced to sign nondisclosure agreements after Jan. 6. Some were unjustly forced out. Pittman was given a sweetheart retirement deal after she took a new job at the University of California-Berkeley.
Federal criminal code
Congress should examine how the federal criminal code was used and weaponized to take down Jan. 6 defendants. From the dubious “obstruction of Congress” felony to the minefield that is the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, Congress should consider adjustments that make it harder to persecute instead of prosecute.
Rage-mob damage
How did the mere allegation or even a hint of an allegation create conditions that destroyed families without any due process? Why was Air Force veteran Babbitt denied military honors by the Pentagon when she was not accused, much less convicted, of Jan. 6 criminal violations? Why were other veterans denied disability or other benefit payments based on charges alone? Why did couples lose their mortgage loans because one was charged with a Jan. 6 offense?
FBI procedures and power
Aside from thinning the herd of G-men at J. Edgar Hoover’s stomping grounds, the bureau might benefit from a serious review of proper and improper use of tactical power to apprehend nonviolent misdemeanor defendants. Congress or a Jan. 6 task force should examine what some defense attorneys argue is an unconstitutional projection of FBI power via SWAT raids that might usurp the sovereignty of the states.
The Brady Bunch
In hundreds of Jan. 6 criminal cases, exculpatory evidence was withheld from defendants, numerous defense attorneys have asserted. In some other cases, federal judges looked the other way while defense attorneys held up long lists of evidence they were denied. The House Committee on the Judiciary might consider a review of this topic to see why the strictures of the Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland did not prevent abuses.
A judicial review
Not a single Jan. 6 defendant was granted a change of venue, despite ample evidence that the District of Columbia voting pool is nearly 95% Democrat and deeply biased against those who were at the Capitol on Jan. 6. No Jan. 6 defendant was found not guilty by a D.C. jury.
Did District judges properly administer the law? Should defendants accused in D.C. have the option to be tried by a jury of their peers in their home federal court districts?
A study could be made of the deep judicial bias that poisoned many Jan. 6 cases, such as judges who found it impossible to check their tongues or even be mindful that their public statements could taint the jury pool.
While some social media influencers might call for retribution under the new Trump administration, it's more likely that January 6ers are simply looking for something to which they are already entitled: justice.
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Will Hurricane Helene aftermath prove to be the difference in North Carolina?
Just 21 days before the start of early voting, Hurricane Helene delivered biblical-level destruction to the hills, hollows, and mountains of North Carolina. The massive storm brought devastating floods that killed 232 people — half of them in this state — and buried entire riverside communities in rivers of mud.
Now, residents struggle for basic supplies. More than 2,500 families are homeless. Crowded shelters are well above capacity. Hundreds of road and bridge closures are disrupting transportation and the delivery of crucial aid.
One-fifth of the state’s 7.3 million registered voters reside in the disaster area. Are candidate visits and pledges of support resonating with voters?
Two days after the storm, Gov. Roy Cooper requested a major disaster declaration from the federal government in order to surge assistance to state and local agencies and provide immediate relief to suffering North Carolinians. FEMA claimed in a news release that it sent 25 trailer loads of food and 60 trailer loads of water to North Carolina. But Hendersonville resident Andrea Corn says she has not seen a state or federal worker yet.
After the storm, Corn — a 55-year-old accountant who is more accustomed to preparing tax forms for local businesses than organizing relief missions — formed an ATV group to rescue elderly victims in Henderson County. Most roads and bridges had crumbled or washed away, and many folks could be reached only by going off-road.
Andrea and her husband, a volunteer fireman, brought supplies to victims stranded in remote “hollers.” Many residents were without power for more than a month following Helene’s visit. Samaritan’s Purse, a nondenominational evangelical Christian charity, distributed solar-powered lights to light the dark nights.
Abandoned by the state
Well before the storm hit, these Western North Carolina mountain towns were imbued with a culture of self-reliance. Residents call it “WNC Strong.” But in the wake of Helene, residents needed critical help that only government can supply: large-scale search and rescue operations, power and water restoration, and infrastructure repair.
Today, many of these residents feel abandoned by state and federal government officials. One question looming over the recovery efforts is whether it will impact voting behavior in Tuesday’s elections. “They are supposed to stand up for us, and we feel forgotten,” Corn said. “We’re going to need lots of money to recover, and our government is sending it to Ukraine.”
Chuck Edwards, Republican congressman representing Western North Carolina, said state emergency officials cannot account for the whereabouts of 400 pallets of FEMA-supplied food and water meant for hurricane relief. He has requested 1,180 FEMA trailers to house thousands of displaced people.
In Buncombe County, local artist and photographer Anna Hitrova said that volunteers — not government workers — brought her necessary supplies after the storm. “The only people I’ve seen on the ground in Buncombe,” she said, “are churches and Samaritan’s Purse.”
Hitrova said she had a “black-pilled moment” when she drove through neighboring Swannanoa. She saw families camping on the lots where their homes once stood. They were without generators, phones, or anything else. “It was a shock; I was crying,” she explained. “It hit me how bad it was to be cut off from the world. The government waited to respond while people were dying.”
The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services has reported that most of the state’s deaths were in Buncombe County, home of Asheville and Swannanoa. “When I found out that FEMA had used money for housing illegal migrants and saw our government giving billions to Ukraine while families were getting $750, I was furious,” said Hitrova.
Some assistance came from unlikely sources. Billionaire Elon Musk, for instance, stepped up to help. The SpaceX CEO donated 500 Starlink internet receivers to groups across the devastated area. Musk’s donation came after the urging of local state Rep. Danny Britt and former President Donald Trump.
“Here, people had lost their homes and had nothing, but they had painted signs that read ‘God Bless Elon,’” Hitrova said. “I realized that Elon gave these people a lifeline that the government could not.”
Election Day implications
North Carolina is a key battleground state with 16 electoral votes. Trump won the state narrowly in 2016 and by an even smaller margin in 2020. The current RCP average has the former president leading by only 1.5 points. Both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have visited the storm-ravaged region while campaigning.
During her Oct. 5 visit, Harris met with Asheville’s mayor and leaders of progressive groups such as NC Counts. After attending a local FEMA briefing, the vice president praised state and federal workers for the “nobility of their work and their calling.”
Two weeks later, Trump appeared at an Asheville recovery site flanked by Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley, an area native, and numerous North Carolina politicians and local business owners.
The former president said the American people were the real heroes of the recovery efforts and that the state and local governments had let storm victims down. Trump said he had come to express a simple message to the region: “I’m with you, and the American people are with you all the way.”
One-fifth of the state’s 7.3 million registered voters reside in the disaster area. Are the visits and pledges of support resonating with voters? In Henderson, a predominantly red county, it appears so. “I was shocked to see the level of highly motivated people out here voting this year despite their difficulties,” said Henderson County GOP Chair Brett Calloway.
Andrea Corn said that access to voting was the number-one concern for Helene victims. “Some folks needed food, others had lost their home, and the first thing they were asking about was voting,” she said. “It was truly all that mattered for them.” Some residents told her they hadn't voted in two decades.
Corn recently closed her accounting office so that her employees could help staff election sites. Calloway also says people are eager to help in the election campaign. A week after the storm, a man came into the GOP office to ask about volunteering. “I’ll have to do it around my wife’s funeral,” the teary-eyed man said. “My country needs me.”
As of Friday, nearly 58% of registered voters in the county had cast their vote. Turnout this year is 19% higher than in 2020. “Many of the voters we’re seeing are on the inactive voter rolls,” says Calloway. “Only 7% of our voters are Election Day voters, so there is no danger of Election Day votes being cannibalized,” he said.
By Friday morning, 3.7 million North Carolinians had voted, surpassing the 2020 early voting total. Later, the State Board of Elections reported over 4 million votes cast in 2024, with over half of registered voters participating.
“This year, voting is a symbolic act for me,” declared Anna Hitrova. A onetime Democrat who now publicly identifies as a conservative activist, she says she has “given up” on the current government. “I am going to vote, I am going to vote for Trump, and I am going to do it on the first day of early voting in the progressive city of Asheville.”
Editor’s note:This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
Exclusive: How the Capitol Police were set up to fail on January 6
As part of Blaze Media’s three-part mini-documentary series “A Day in the Life of Harry Dunn,” we continue to update readers on how we arrived at this point in our “Truth About January 6” series. You can find part one here.
Despite denials from the U.S. Capitol Police and some congressional investigators, evidence quickly emerged after the January 6, 2021, protests and riots that Capitol Police officers were intentionally under-deployed.
Testimonies from Capitol Police officers in various Jan. 6 trials, along with radio transmissions and whistleblower statements, have provided many answers. These findings also suggest a coordinated cover-up to keep this information from the American public.
If the Capitol Police had been fully deployed that day, the breach likely would not have occurred. Ashli Babbitt and Rosanne Boyland might still be alive, and the Department of Justice’s 1,500 prosecutions — ranging from trespassing to seditious conspiracy — might never have happened. Additionally, members of the Capitol Police, D.C. Metropolitan Police, and several convicted Jan. 6 participants might not have died by suicide in the aftermath.
Although I have long suspected that trained provocateurs manipulated the events of January 6 under the watch of the Capitol Police command center, many believe that frontline, uniformed Capitol Police officers were knowingly complicit and even initiated the violence. Video evidence contradicts that claim.
Here’s a sample of the social media comments that followed my initial blog series — written before my time at Blaze Media — in which I referred to the Capitol Police as “sacrificial pawns” on January 6:
“The Capitol Police were willing participants by following those D.C. fascists’ orders. I have no sympathy for them or their families.”
“Don’t sign up to collect a paycheck defending a corrupt government.”
“They’re a disgrace to the uniform and America. How f***ing dare they.”
“You’re being played.”
These comments came from the political right, but the left wasn’t silent either. Some were quite bloodthirsty, suggesting that every Capitol Police officer should have replicated Lt. Michael Byrd’s gunshot and left us with “a thousand more Ashli Babbitts.” Many who called for defunding the police after George Floyd’s death in 2020 suddenly became strong supporters of “Back the Blue” following the events of January 6, 2021.
In my January 6 writings, I’ve often stressed that I had to reassess some of my initial assumptions as more evidence surfaced. For example, in my first article about January 6, published on January 13, 2021, I misidentified the officers in “fluorescent-sleeved jackets racing down steps toward the first upper tier above street level” as Capitol Police. They were actually members of the D.C. Metropolitan Police.
This may seem like a minor distinction — especially to the “all cops are bastards” crowd — but these details are crucial as we work to uncover and present the full truth of that day. Most importantly, who in the command chain set up or allowed these events to unfold?
When it comes to the many unanswered questions, odd circumstances, and unindicted figures, we don’t need to agree on every detail. We also don’t need to agree on each event, video, or police officer’s actions to find common ground on one key point I’ve emphasized about January 6: I saw bad people doing bad things, good people doing good things, and even otherwise good people doing really stupid things.
This observation applies to both individual protesters and police officers. There were heroes and villains on both sides of that thin blue line on January 6.
My questions about the Capitol Police’s deployment, orders, and actions on January 6 began with my first published article. From the moment my Uber driver dropped me off at the Washington Monument around 9:30 a.m. until I reached the lower west terrace of the Capitol Building at exactly 1:19 p.m., neither I nor my camera saw a single law enforcement officer.
As the crowd swelled from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, it was hard to imagine not seeing any police presence among such a massive group in the nation’s capital. Police and Secret Service officers heavily guarded the Ellipse stage, where President Trump was set to speak, but the crowd’s density kept me from entering that area. When I eventually started walking from the Washington Monument lawn toward the Capitol Building again, I still didn’t see or capture on camera a single police officer.
As I approached the Peace Monument, sirens signaled the arrival of D.C. Metro Police units. At the Reflecting Pool, I finally spotted Metro Police officers in fluorescent jackets streaming down the Capitol steps toward the lower west terrace.
I then heard the first flash-bang grenades and saw tear gas released on the lower west terrace. No barricades or police lines blocked my way — initial agitators and provocateurs had removed them about 20 to 25 minutes earlier — so I ran to the terrace and began recording the violence at exactly 1:19 p.m., just three minutes after President Trump left the Ellipse stage, more than a mile away.
For a year, I publicly asked: "Why wasn’t there a police presence on the Washington Monument lawn? Why didn’t I see any police on the mile-long walk to the Capitol?" and "Why were so few Capitol Police officers on duty at the Capitol, considering the planned rallies, marches, and legally permitted events on the Capitol lawn that day?"
I initially estimated that fewer than 200 Capitol Police officers were at the Capitol on January 6. A year later, on the anniversary of the event, I returned to D.C. to seek answers. I asked patrolling Capitol Police officers those questions, and I also wanted to know what orders they received that day. I was particularly interested in what seemed like a "stand-down" or "pull-back" order at around 2:00 p.m.
None of the officers I approached on the streets or at the Capitol would answer. At the time, I didn’t know about the nondisclosure agreements Capitol Police had signed under Yogananda Pittman during her seven-month tenure as acting chief of police.
On December 16, 2021, Forbes made a convoluted attempt to answer the question about Capitol Police deployment on January 6:
USCP documents show that at 2 p.m. on that day, only 1,214 officers were “on site” across the Capitol complex of buildings. Congressional investigators concluded, however, that USCP could only account for 417 officers and could not account for the whereabouts of the remaining 797 officers.
In late 2022, when I first met with former Capitol Police officer turned whistleblower Lt. Tarik Johnson, he confirmed that my initial estimate of “fewer than 200” Capitol Police officers at the Capitol Building during the first wave of violence on January 6 was accurate.
Johnson explained that during previous protest events, the standard operating procedure required an “all hands on deck” approach for Capitol Police. On those days, officers working the night shift were required to stay and work a double shift through the next day. But on January 6, Capitol Police command sent those officers home after their shifts, treating it like a routine day at the office.
In a follow-up phone conversation, Johnson revealed more about the deceptions Capitol Police leadership spread regarding force deployment on January 6. Addressing internal department and congressional investigations that claimed officials “could not account for the whereabouts of the remaining 797 officers,” Johnson said, "It's a bald-faced lie, and you can quote me on that."
Johnson explained that all Capitol Police officers clock in and clock out electronically at the start and end of each shift. Once clocked in, each officer is tracked throughout the tour of duty, making it impossible for their commanders not to know their whereabouts. This information should still be available in the computer logs — assuming the logs haven’t been erased.
When asked why Capitol Police leadership would cover up information about force deployment, Johnson responded, “Because they don’t want to tell you where the officers were or what they were doing. They don’t want anyone to know how many of our officers were on administrative leave that day.”
My investigations, which include interviews with Capitol Police officers and congressional investigators, revealed further embarrassment, as several officers went into hiding once the violence began, locking themselves in offices and closets.
Another key issue involves the “diversion events,” when two pipe bombs were coincidentally discovered within minutes of the first provocateurs breaching the west side Capitol barricade. The pipe bombs were found at both the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee headquarters — two of nearly 20 buildings under the Capitol Police’s security purview.
Johnson couldn’t estimate how many officers were diverted to the RNC and DNC after the bombs were discovered. However, he emphasized that the emergency response still doesn’t account for the missing whereabouts of 797 officers. He noted that exact records of how many officers were diverted, and precisely who, should be easily retrievable from Capitol Police computer records.
Set up to fail?
The first Oath Keepers trial featured the testimony of Stephen Brown, a Florida-based event planner hired by the controversial figure Ali Alexander, a Trump supporter and founder of Stop the Steal. Brown’s job was to secure permits from the Capitol Police for an event on the Capitol grounds. He was also responsible for organizing the rental of the staging and public address system and coordinating the scheduling of VIP speakers and stage security, handled by members of the Oath Keepers.
Brown testified that he had previously planned many protest events in the nation’s capital, with attendance ranging from as few as 5,000 to as many as 300,000 protesters.
Under direct examination by Oath Keeper Kelly Meggs’ defense attorney Stanley Woodward, Brown described the surprisingly small presence of Capitol officers during the delivery and setup of the staging and PA system. He noted that at previous events he’d organized on Capitol grounds, he had seen “three, four, even five times the size of police presence, including SWAT teams,” compared to what was present on January 6.
The inconvenient truth is that my camera, Stephen Brown’s testimony, and statements by Lt. Johnson and other Capitol Police officers suggest a deliberate under-deployment of officers that day — a day in which we now know, and as I have previously written:
Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, Asst. Chief Yogananda Pittman, head of protective and intelligence operations, the D.C. Metro Police, the United States Park Police, the White House, the Pentagon, the National Guard, both the Senate and House of Representative Sergeants-at-Arms, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, the FBI, and other federal agencies all knew that tens of thousands of protestors would be descending upon the Capitol grounds that day.
An unnamed Capitol Police officer, just days after the melee, told the Associated Press, “During the 4th of July concerts and the Memorial Day concerts, we don’t have people come up and say, ‘We’re going to seize the Capitol.’ But yet, you bring everybody in, you meet before. That never happened for this event.”
According to the Washington Post, only a week after the Capitol was breached, “an FBI office in Virginia issued an explicit warning that extremists were preparing to travel to Washington to commit violence and ‘war,’ according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post.”
Instead of “all hands on deck,” frontline Capitol Police officers were somewhere between one-tenth to one-fifth strength when it came time to respond to what was coming their way. Whether an operational failure or deliberate under-deployment, this set up the circumstances enabling the breach of the Capitol Building by a relatively small number of aggressive and violent rioters.
Ultimately, it remains inexplicable why only 200 to 300 violent perpetrators wielding sticks, flagpoles, clubs, and bear spray were able to overpower two fully armed law enforcement agencies, the tactical units of nearly every three-letter federal agency, and an unknown number of undercover law enforcement assets to breach what is supposed to be one of the most secure government facilities in the world.
Unless, of course, they were set up to fail. Most Capitol Police officers on duty that day believe that to be the case.
This would explain why Capitol Police union members gave then-acting Chief Yogananda Pittman a 92% “no-confidence” vote only five weeks after her curiously absent leadership from their command center on January 6.
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