  Josh Hawley Says He Doesn’t Know If He Saluted Any Rioters, So We Checked On Jan. 6, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) walked outside the U.S. Capitol, turned to a crowd of protesters and infamously saluted them with a raised fist before going inside to try to throw out November’s election results.
About an hour later, some of those protesters broke through police barricades and stormed up the steps of the Capitol, where the mob smashed on the door until they gained entry to the building and a melee with law enforcement awaited.
Hawley insisted last week that he was saluting peaceful protesters and has maintained that he did nothing to encourage the violence that day.
“I don’t know which of those protesters, if any of them, those demonstrators, participated in the criminal riot,” Hawley said Tuesday during a live event with The Washington Post, calling it a “slur” to say they were all rioters.
But it’s ridiculous for Hawley to suggest he waved to a peaceful crowd and that he couldn’t possibly know if any of those people were part of the insurrection after he went inside. Photos and videos from that day show that many people on the east side of the Capitol were eager participants in the day’s events. HuffPost, working with members of the Sedition Hunters community and the group Capitol Terrorists Exposers, endeavored to help Hawley resolve the question of whether he’d saluted rioters on Jan. 6. The conclusion? He did.
Senate Republicans issued a slew of cataclysmic warnings on Tuesday as they tried to sink voting reform, claiming the Democrats’ top-priority package would dismantle faith in democracy and suppress millions of votes ― all as their own party pushes voting limitations nationwide. It’s an absurd comparison: Jim Crow laws were aimed at making it near-impossible for Black Americans to vote; Democrats’ bill (the For the People Act) would make voting easier, streamline registration processes and prevent partisan gerrymandering, among other reforms. An Arizona state senator who initially backed the controversial recount of November votes in Maricopa County now says he regrets his support of the “ridiculous” operation. State Sen. Paul Boyer has joined a growing army of Arizonans appalled by the Republican-dominated state Senate’s recount operation that targets only races won by Democrats in the county that includes Phoenix. The private company hired by the Senate, Cyber Ninjas, has no experience with ballots or elections, and is owned and operated by right-wing conspiracy theorist Doug Logan, who subscribes to the “big lie” that the presidential election was rigged against former Republican President Donald Trump.
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