Austin, Biden accused of delaying action on the Chinese spy balloon

Republican senators on Thursday criticized Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and President Joe Biden for waiting five days to provide "direction" to the military on whether to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon last month.

During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of U.S. Northern Command, told lawmakers that he scrambled armed fighter jets to intercept the balloon when it was detected on radar over Alaskan airspace on Jan. 28. But at the time, only Biden or Austin — who was on official travel in the Philippines — had the authority to shoot it down, because the military did not assess the inflatable to have "hostile intent."

Although VanHerck immediately asked his team to develop options to counter the balloon, his first discussion with Austin on the matter wasn't until Feb. 1, five days later, the general said. During that time, the inflatable had floated into Canadian airspace, then reentered U.S. airspace over northern Idaho on Jan. 31.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) ripped Biden and Austin, accusing them of delaying action.

“So on the fifth day, it is apparent that you took the right steps,” Wicker told VanHerck. “But it's also clear that you received no direction from the president of the United States or the secretary of Defense until the fifth day of this crisis, by which point the balloon had traversed Alaska and Canada and then reentered the United States.”

But Defense Department spokesperson Sabrina Singh disputed the assertion, noting that Austin had been communicating with Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley and VanHerck to develop options earlier than the discussion on Feb. 1. The Feb. 1 call was scheduled by the secretary's team because Austin wanted to review those options, Singh said.

The comments on Thursday shed new light on the Biden administration’s handling of the incursion, from the balloon’s detection near a remote island chain off Alaska until it was shot down by an Air Force F-22 on Feb. 4. They reveal that the military was prepared to shoot down the balloon as soon as it was detected on radar as it flew over a remote island chain off Alaska, but did not have the legal authority to do so until days later.

A senior Defense Department official noted that VanHerck did not initially recommend shooting down the balloon, and that it was the general’s preference to observe it instead. Austin pushed the commander to consider “kinetic options,” said the person, who was granted anonymity in order to describe internal deliberations.

Critics have accused the administration of mishandling the incident, specifically faulting the decision to not eliminate the balloon as soon as it was spotted and instead wait until it was over water a week later. Lawmakers, especially Wicker, have also pressed the Pentagon to answer specific follow-up questions about the decision process and about previous balloon incursions over the past few years that have only recently come to light.

“So all that was needed on January 28 was to pull the proverbial trigger?” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked during the hearing.

“Yes,” VanHerck responded. “Had they had hostile intent or hostile act, I had the authority and I would have made that decision. So you're exactly correct. [At] that point, it was not my decision to make to pull the trigger.” In the case of a direct threat to the homeland, VanHerck has the legal authority to take the shot, he explained. Without that determination, that authority resides with the Pentagon chief or the president.

"If the administration's policymakers thought they had legal justification to shoot it down off the coast of Carolina, surely they have legal justification to shoot off the coast of Alaska," Cotton followed up. VanHerck responded: "My assessment is the legal basis would have been the same for either place."

VanHerck also used his appearance on Capitol Hill to fill in other details from the initial timeline. A senior Defense Department official told reporters in early February that the president asked for military options when he was notified on Jan. 31. VanHerck on Thursday said he did not present options to Austin until 7 a.m. on Feb. 1.

That same day, Feb. 1, Biden told the military to take out the balloon, which was flying over Montana after leaving Canadian airspace. The military scrambled F-22 fighter jets at the time in case the decision was made to shoot it down. But top generals ultimately advised the president to wait until the craft was over water because of the risk to people on the ground from falling debris.

VanHerck said that if he had been asked to provide options to Austin or the president earlier, while the balloon was still over Alaska, he would have been prepared to do so, he said.

VanHerck said the intelligence community first made him aware of the balloon on Friday, Jan. 27. He spoke with Milley that evening about his plan to send aircraft to intercept and assess the craft the next day.

The military’s North American Aerospace Defense Command detected the balloon on radar the next day, Jan. 28, VanHerck said. That same day, the general sent two F-35 and two F-16 fighter jets — all of them armed — to intercept the balloon, he said in response to questioning by Cotton.

Also on the 28th, VanHerck officially notified his chain of command, sending classified emails to Milley and Austin’s military assistant, he said. He did not have any direct communications with Austin at the time, and does not know when Biden was notified.

At the time, the military assessed that the balloon did not present a threat, VanHerck said, explaining that “hostile intent would be maneuvering to an offensive advantage on platform and airplane or shooting missiles or weapons would be a hostile act.”

The next day, on Jan. 29, VanHerck advised Austin and Milley "that he was looking at options to engage the balloon should that be directed or if the balloon became a threat to safety of flight," according to Singh. After the balloon re-entered U.S. airspace on Jan. 31, the president, through national security adviser Jake Sullivan, directed the military to "refine and present options to shoot down the balloon," she said.

The hearing comes almost two months after the Chinese surveillance balloon first emerged over the U.S. Since then, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have pressed Biden officials for more details on what led the administration to shoot down the inflatable, what it’s learned from its debris and what more it plans to do to track aerial objects floating in American airspace.

Both Republicans and Democrats have said they are still waiting for answers to their questions despite several rounds of briefings — some of them classified — with the administration.

The questions being raised on Capitol Hill are not solely focused on the surveillance balloon — they are also about the existence of hundreds of unidentified aerial phenomena, which are flying objects that have not been classified as balloons or other surveillance tools.

An office inside the Pentagon known as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office is conducting a review of those objects, some of which may be owned by foreign governments. Lawmakers want to know whether the U.S. has the capability to not only track those objects but to analyze them in near real-time.

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Ron DeSantis’ foreign policy: Go big and stay home

Is Ron DeSantis a traditional or MAGA-style Republican on foreign policy? The answer, increasingly, is “yes.”

He’s dropped hints about how he sees the world in books, speeches, interviews and written statements. China is the main threat facing the United States. Prioritizing Ukraine’s defense against Russia distracts from domestic problems. And Washington elites are often disastrous on foreign policy, preaching a globalism that ignores the will of the voter.

But in stating these views, DeSantis uses language ripped from both Republican tradition and the Donald Trump hymnal. It has confused observers who wonder how the former lawmaker and current Florida governor would conduct U.S. foreign policy from the Oval Office.

DeSantis’ team didn’t return requests for comment about his worldview. But Christina Pushaw, a DeSantis ally, noted that as the leader of Florida, the world’s 13th largest economy, “he meets with world leaders and policy experts all the time. He consumes a lot of information and is very much hands-on in terms of policy.”

Those around DeSantis say the former Navy lawyer who deployed to Guantanamo Bay and Iraq is still soaking in information, reading as much as he can on national security issues. DeSantis doesn’t yet have a coterie of formal foreign policy advisers, but that’s expected to come after he officially declares his candidacy for president.

What can be gleaned so far is this: DeSantis promotes U.S. strength in the world, but with limits on when to engage and with a prioritization to fixing problems at home. The result is this: Go big and stay home.

In foreign-policy-speak, he’s not a “Wilsonian” seeking to remake the world in America’s image, but he’s not fully a populist “Jacksonian,” either. And by walking that middle line, he could gain the advantage in 2024 over other Republican candidates who fit more firmly into one category or the other.

As a House Foreign Affairs Committee member from 2017 to 2019, DeSantis took vintage Republican positions that made defense hawks and traditionalists rejoice. He supported sending lethal aid to Ukraine and labeled himself part of the “Reagan school that’s tough on Russia.” He voted to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. He praised Trump’s diplomatic outreach to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. He told then-Fox Business host Lou Dobbs that Barack Obama’s push for an Iran nuclear deal persuaded Sunni Arabs to join the Islamic State.

But in the House, he occasionally flicked at a belief that America should refrain from delving into global matters of war and peace until a clear plan was in place to secure U.S. interests. His thoughts are with service members, not the elites who want to send them into battle.

“I constantly hear people say Americans are war weary, and I disagree with that. I think Americans are willing to do what it takes to defend our people and our nation,” he said during a 2014 floor debate about how the U.S. could defeat the Islamic State. “They are weary of missions launched without a coherent strategy and are sick of seeing engagements that produce inconclusive results rather than clear-cut victory.”

DeSantis argued against arming Syrian rebels fighting President Bashar Assad for that reason. “They cannot be counted on to vindicate our interests,” he said in that address, adding “there are no shortcuts when it comes to our national defense.”

Plenty in the Republican old-guard argue DeSantis is playing politics. Whether he firmly holds these views or is angling for votes, his approach could be a winning one in 2024. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that Americans don’t vote on foreign policy, but with the war in Ukraine unlikely to end soon and the increasing threats from China, this could be one cycle where the electorate is thinking more about the world.

The average Republican voter wants a leader who focuses on the physical defense of the United States and extracts the nation from unnecessary or counterproductive foreign entanglements. They are less interested in solving others’ issues or values promotion. DeSantis’ statements and positions broaden his appeal within the party and segments of the trans-partisan anti-war movement.

DeSantis has often cited the work of Angelo Codevilla, a conservative, Jacksonian-minded scholar who argued that the U.S. government was dangerously run by an unelected liberal ruling class that spurned popular sentiment. These officials hampered America’s policies at home and abroad, Codevilla argued, and his disdain for bureaucrats remains alive and well with DeSantis.

“The United States has been increasingly captive to an arrogant, stale, and failed ruling class,” DeSantis wrote in his book, “The Courage to be Free.” The elites, he continued, helped China rise by giving the country “most favored nation” trade status; “supported military adventurism around the world without clear objectives or prospect for victory” and “weaponized the national security apparatus by manufacturing the Russian collusion conspiracy theory.”

It sounds like Trump’s “deep state” complaint. But where Trump says that bureaucracy thwarts his designs — though he would often listen to them — DeSantis says this ruling class ignores what everyday Americans want. The Florida governor effectively vows not to listen to the professionals who have championed the Iraq war, opened trade with China and launched ill-fated democracy promotion projects.

When DeSantis’ skepticism of D.C. elites aligns with Trump, there’s an air of “We told you so.”

The governor told conservative host Glenn Beck last week about a trip he took to Tel Aviv as Trump considered moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. DeSantis said he asked State Department and CIA officials there what would happen if the then-president went through with it. “World War III, World War III, World War III,” he heard back.

Deadly violence did erupt after Trump moved the mission, but the apocalyptic predictions didn’t come true. DeSantis subsequently expressed deep skepticism at the experts running U.S. foreign policy. “They’re just entrenched and they have groupthink,” he told Beck.

DeSantis has made support for Israel central to his foreign policy, traveling there four times as a member of Congress and governor. He moved to stop companies from boycotting Israel and suggested working on a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians isn’t worth the effort.

DeSantis further criticized opponents of Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in that interview. Without ending U.S. involvement in the pact, he said, the Abraham Accords — the normalization agreements between Israel and Arab-majority states — would never have happened.

But the governor, by virtue of the state he leads, has sounded like a pre-Trump Republican on Latin American politics. He’s a critic of the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes, boosting dissidents’ calls for weakening their autocratic left-wing governments. Last July, he accused President Joe Biden of failing “to assist the Cuban people in their fight for freedom.”

DeSantis did, however, send Venezuelan asylum seekers from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard last year, an effort aligned with Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott to place the burdens of immigration on Democratic states that critics derided as a political stunt.

The foreign policy position that has received the most attention is how the governor thinks about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At first glance, it seems like he’s siding with Trump, but he comes at it differently, aligning himself with Kyiv’s plight while mindful of the toll U.S. commitment to the conflict could take at home and on global security.

DeSantis wrote in his statement to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that “without question, peace should be the objective.” It was an argument that the danger was delving deeper into the “territorial dispute” between Ukraine and Russia. Sending F-16 fighter jets and long-range missiles, “would risk explicitly drawing the United States into the conflict and drawing us closer to a hot war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. That risk is unacceptable.”

But DeSantis expanded on his answer in an interview a week later with Piers Morgan in which he struck more traditional Republican notes: Ukraine has “the right to that territory … If I could snap my fingers, I’d give it back to Ukraine 100 percent.” Putin, he continued, “is a war criminal” and “he should be held accountable.”

Just last year, DeSantis boasted about helping to get funding while in Congress for “a lot of weapons for Ukraine to be able to defend themselves.”

But DeSantis’ thinking has certainly been shifting in a more populist direction.

“It’s been a slow reorientation of foreign policy on the right,” said David Reaboi, a fellow at the Claremont Institute who has spoken informally with DeSantis about national security issues. “We ended up walking away from what should be our basic concern: the immediate security and needs of the American people.”

Likely future opponents are hammering the argument that it’s all for show. “President Trump is right when he says Governor DeSantis is copying him — first in his style, then on entitlement reform, and now on Ukraine,” Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador who has officially entered the presidential race, said following DeSantis’ Ukraine statement.

Allies note DeSantis is focused on the same issues as other leading Republicans: curbing China’s aggression in the military, economic and technological arenas, securing the U.S.-Mexico border and ending the scourge of fentanyl.

Where he distinguishes himself from some other 2024 hopefuls is he’d rather restrict the nation’s resources to tackling those challenges — because they most immediately reflect the needs of everyday Americans — instead of policing the world or opening the political space in other nations for small-d democrats to flourish.

As DeSantis put it in his book: “Does the survival of American liberty depend on whether liberty succeeds in Djibouti?”

Gary Fineout contributed to this report.

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Judge sentences Jan. 6 defendant who breached Pelosi’s office to 36 months in prison

A Jan. 6 defendant who surged with the mob into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and helped strategize ways for the mob to overcome police resistance was sentenced Thursday to 36 months in prison, ending one of the earliest and most unusual sagas to stem from the Capitol attack.

Attorneys for Riley Williams — a devotee of white nationalist Nick Fuentes who is 5 feet, 4 inches tall and was 22 at the time of the attack — repeatedly urged U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson to treat her like an immature child who couldn’t be responsible for her actions. But Jackson sharply rejected that effort, noting that Williams repeatedly and intentionally took steps to breach police lines and marshaled the mob to resist even further.

“She was not just a little waif blowing in the wind,” Jackson said, comparing Williams’ role in the mob to a “coxswain on a crew team.”

Jackson’s sentence was the close of one of the earliest sagas to emerge after the Jan. 6 attack. Williams was one of the first felony defendants charged, and she was suspected at the time of stealing Nancy Pelosi’s laptop, in part because she told friends that she did.

A jury convicted Williams in December of civil disorder and resisting police but deadlocked on a charge that Williams obstructed Congress and abetted the theft of Pelosi’s laptop. Williams is on tape entering Pelosi’s conference room while other rioters took the laptop, and she encouraged them to steal it, but Williams’ lawyers contended that it was unclear if the other rioters heard her comment.

Jackson spent much of her sentencing colloquy dismantling the defense’s claim that Williams was too young or too small to be responsible for the grave offenses the government charged. The defense team leaned on Williams’ youthful demeanor and the fact that she seemed briefly confused about which building was being stormed — calling it the White House as she approached. But Jackson said any momentary confusion Williams expressed was clarified by her repeated acknowledgment of why she was there.

It was not, Jackson emphasized, “because her dizzy little head was confused about which building in Washington was which.”

Fuentes, she noted, was born the same year as Williams. People can sign up for the military at 18, she added, noting that Williams was old enough on Jan. 6 to have completed a tour of duty. John Lewis was 21 when he became a freedom fighter, Jackson added.

“She was old enough to be one of the police officers she resisted,” Jackson said.

Jackson also took on the defense’s repeated assertions about Williams’ diminutive stature, noting that figures like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Liz Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had all achieved prominence despite their size.

“Riley June Williams was old enough and tall enough to be held accountable for her actions,” Jackson said.

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Republicans’ best hope for Wisconsin Senate is a Trump critic

A public break with former President Donald Trump has been career suicide for many an ambitious GOP lawmaker in recent years. It might just be a boon for Rep. Mike Gallagher.

Top party officials in D.C. and back home in Wisconsin maintain the fourth-term congressman and new head of the China Select Committee represents their best shot at flipping the battleground’s Senate seat in 2024.

There is just one thing they have to do first: convince him to run.

The 39-year-old former Marine is widely viewed as a rising star in the GOP thanks to his vocal stance on China policy and prolific fundraising. Beyond that, key Republicans say his criticism of Trump might just bolster his credibility with the very voters they’ve lost in recent cycles. His nomination would be a strong indication the party is shifting gears and learning the lessons from 2022.

Gallagher has been evasive about his plans. But people close to him say he’s not inclined to challenge Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a formidable campaigner and fundraiser in her own right. And they also recognize that Gallagher’s break with Trump over Jan. 6, and recent insistence that the former president “lost [his] support,” will be tricky to navigate, particularly in a potentially messy primary, given Trump’s immense sway over the party in recent years.

Should Gallagher pass on the contest, it could not only hurt Republicans’ chances of claiming the Senate in 2024, it would further underscore the hurdles the party faces in finding a winning electoral formula in a post-Trump world.

In their bid to oust Baldwin, senior Wisconsin Republicans are eager to find a candidate who can bring back the independent and moderate Republican voters in key suburbs who broke with the former president in 2020 and several of his top picks in 2022.

There are some signs that the former president’s grip on the GOP is beginning to slip. He has failed to scare away other presidential primary candidates and recent polling shows he’d face stiff competition from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, among other potential contenders. In Wisconsin, where Ted Cruz beat Trump in the 2016 GOP primary, DeSantis led Trump in a hypothetical 2024 matchup with Biden, according to a Marquette Law Poll from late January. But Trump’s standing in national primary polls has improved since then. And an impending indictment in a hush-money case has compelled many in the party to rally around the former president once more.

One Wisconsin Republican close to Gallagher, who was granted anonymity to talk about their private conversations with him, brushed off the notion that his public break with Trump would hurt him significantly in a future GOP primary. The person noted that the congressman didn’t vote to impeach Trump or approve an independent commission to investigate the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Instead, the person said Gallagher’s relatively lean legislative record on Wisconsin issues is his biggest vulnerability.

“He hasn't been all that focused on what's been going on at home,” said the Republican, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations. “If there’s an Achilles’ heel, it’s there, not Trump.”

Gallagher’s profile in the party has risen rapidly since he was first elected to Congress in 2016, the same year Trump took the White House — especially in his role as a leading voice on China policy. He burnished his hard-nosed stance as Trump took aim at China’s unfair trading practices and other malign activities, though the economic fallout from the ensuing trade war fell on U.S. agriculture, a top industry in Gallagher’s home state. Asked if he supported Trump’s recent campaign proposal that would levy more tariffs on Chinese goods, something that has raised alarm among some other farm state Republicans, the new head of the House China Select Committee said he wasn’t aware of the former president’s proposal to overhaul U.S. trade with China.

Despite his tensions with Trump, many Republicans are now openly suggesting Gallagher may be the party’s best chance to oust Baldwin, the battle-tested incumbent Democrat, who has already amassed a huge war chest.

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who is leading Senate Republicans’ effort to flip the chamber and has suggested he will help tap more mainstream candidates this cycle, did not hide his enthusiasm about the prospect of the congressman joining the race.

“Mike Gallagher would be a great candidate,” Daines said. “He's the kind of candidate that with his distinguished service and then time in Congress, could win both the primary and general election.”

“If Mike got in, everybody would know that's the total package,” said Brian Schimming, the state’s Republican party chair.

Trump’s specter looms, however. Republicans in Wisconsin expect the former president to campaign there around the time of the state GOP convention in June, if not earlier. And Republicans hold their national convention in Milwaukee in July 2024.

For now, Gallagher insists that he is focused on his high-profile new post as the House GOP’s preeminent China hawk, and not any potential future campaign.

Wisconsin Republicans close to the congressman describe him as “whip smart,” but also “incredibly risk averse” and “extremely deliberative,” sometimes to a point where he’s slow to make decisions. They expect him, however, to likely leave the House after his current or following term in Congress, given his push early in his congressional career to limit House members to six terms in office.

Those Republicans say Gallagher, who beat his last Democratic challenger by 30 points in one of the few semi-swing regions left in the state, is more interested in a 2028 bid to replace Ron Johnson, should the state’s current GOP senator retire as expected, or a possible 2026 gubernatorial run, rather than facing Baldwin, whose own retail politics and fundraising skills make her an intimidating foe.

Should a Republican other than Trump win the White House in 2024, Gallagher, a one-time foreign policy aide to former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's presidential campaign, may be inclined to pursue a role in the administration, according to a Wisconsin GOP lawmaker and another Republican who was granted anonymity to speak openly about their private conversations with Gallagher. A role like national security adviser, Navy secretary or secretary of State would allow him to better deploy his expertise on China and foreign policy.

“The opportunities for Mike become pretty wide,” said one of the Republicans.

As the Wisconsin GOP field waits on Gallagher to make his 2024 plans known, Baldwin has been making moves of her own. She’s preparing to formally launch her campaign shortly after Wisconsin’s closely-watched state supreme court race April 4, according to two people familiar with the plans who were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. Long able to shake the national Democratic brand, Baldwin has consistently outperformed fellow Democrats in the state, including in Gallagher’s home district in the northeast, which spans the city of Green Bay, nearby suburbs and vast stretches of dairy farms, small towns and tribal lands.

Despite Baldwin’s past campaign success, senior Wisconsin Democrats believe her upcoming reelection race will be much closer, and won or lost on the margins like most statewide contests in recent years. Baldwin’s longtime aide Scott Spector is poised for a senior role in her reelect effort according to the two people with knowledge of the campaign plans.

Other possible GOP challengers who may jump in should Gallagher choose not to run include former state Sen. Roger Roth, who won the state’s Republican primary for lieutenant governor last August, according to people familiar with the plans.

Current Reps. Bryan Steil and Tom Tiffany, who has recently been traveling more within the state, have also been floated as possible candidates, especially if redistricting squeezes some members out of their seats. (Since the news of Trump’s possible indictment, Steil and other House GOP members have rushed to defend the former president through letters and on Twitter. Gallagher’s office has meanwhile avoided the subject, tweeting about student loans and local school sports state champions.) Trump’s former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus was heavily involved in the midterms, sparking questions as to whether he was laying the groundwork for a run of his own.

David Clarke, a Trump acolyte and former Milwaukee Sheriff; former GOP Rep. Sean Duffy; former Senate and gubernatorial candidate Kevin Nicholson; and Eric Hovde, a wealthy Republican businessman who waged an unsuccessful Senate bid in 2012 are other names that have come up in conversations with GOP officials.

But another Wisconsin Republican acknowledged that many of those candidates “have already used up a lot of their political capital” in prior races. “It’s not a very deep bench.”

Gallagher now appears to be keeping everything in play.

Asked earlier this month on Capitol Hill if he had any interest in challenging Baldwin next year, Gallagher said, “My sole focus is on the select committee on the CCP not thinking about 2024.”

He took a few steps and added: “And providing the best constituent services for northeast Wisconsin.”

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Cut off by Europe, Putin pins hopes on powering China instead

Russia is racing to find new customers for its energy exports.

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Proud Boys attorneys: Informant had contact with defense team, defendants

Attorneys for five Proud Boys on trial on charges of seditious conspiracy said on Wednesday that the Justice Department had informed them that a witness one of them had been prepared to call as part of the defense this week has been a government informant since 2021.

“During this period of time, the [informant] has been in contact via telephone, text messaging and other electronic means, with one or more of the counsel for the defense and at least one defendant,” said Carmen Hernandez, an attorney for one of the five Proud Boys, Zachary Rehl, in a motion seeking more details of prosecutors’ use of informants in the case.

According to Hernandez, who filed the motion on behalf of all five defendants — including Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys’ former national chairman — the informant also attended “prayer meetings” with at least one of the defendants’ families and, at one point, discussed the composition of the defense team.

It’s the latest wrench in a trial that has stretched into its fourth month, the most significant to emerge from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Prosecutors have charged Tarrio, Rehl and three others — Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs and Dominic Pezzola — with igniting the attack, methodically working to breach multiple police lines and ultimately entering the building itself to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election as president.

U.S. District Court Judge Tim Kelly has asked for the government to respond to the defense’s filing by 9 a.m. Thursday.

Defense attorneys have repeatedly raised questions about the presence of informants within the Proud Boys and how they might have been deployed by the FBI to track the group ahead of Jan. 6. Jurors in the trial have been shown evidence that there were some informants — also called confidential human sources, or CHSs — within the group, both in text message chains and on the ground on Jan. 6.

The use of such sources is commonplace for the FBI, but there are risks when they remain involved in potential criminal activity alongside targets of an investigation.

In the three-page filing, Hernandez expressed frustration that the Justice Department had not shared more details with the defense team about the informants used in the investigation.

The information about the newly disclosed confidential source, she noted, came a day before one of the defendants was prepared to call this witness to the stand.

Prosecutors have bristled at claims of impropriety, noting that they have made nearly 10 confidential sources available to testify as part of the defense case who could discuss their contacts with the bureau. But the Justice Department is resisting efforts by the Proud Boys defense team to demand testimony from FBI agents who handled those informants and were in touch with them in the days and weeks leading to Jan. 6.

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Treasury guidance on electric vehicle tax credit due next week

The Biden administration will release the eagerly awaited proposed guidance for the domestic sourcing requirements for electric vehicles to qualify for the Inflation Reduction Act's clean energy incentives next week, a Treasury official said on Wednesday.

The IRA passed by Democrats last year included those incentives in the nearly $370 billion in climate change measures, but the legislation limited them to EVs made using domestically produced mineral and batteries, angering European nations that complained the rules violated trade agreements by denying them the full tax credit.

But those domestic content measures were critical to winning the support of centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who made it a priority for the law to develop a U.S. EV supply chain and end the industry's dependence on Chinese suppliers.

Treasury Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy Lily Batchelder said the department will work with the private sector to ensure a "smooth transition" on which vehicles qualify for the incentives and for what amount.

"The adoption of clean vehicles is central to reducing emissions in transportation while protecting Americans from the kinds of spikes in gas prices that we saw at the outset of Putin's brutalization of Ukraine," Batchelder said. "However, we can't trade dependence on foreign oil for dependence on foreign batteries and our forthcoming guidance will strengthen our supply chain."

The Treasury Department released a white paper late last year signaling the U.S. could use expanded definitions for free trade agreements for imports of critical minerals during the tax credit rulemaking process.

Manchin has repeatedly expressed outrage over the delay in guidelines for the law’s EV tax credits and has accused the administration of trying to undermine congressional intent.

On Wednesday, Batchelder said China’s control over critical minerals processing globally underscores the need to strengthen U.S. supply chains “along with like-minded partners." She pointed to recent, initial talks between President Joe Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

Treasury’s actions “will advance economic security and stability by ensuring that the United States and allies and partners are not reliant on China for critical minerals in the decades to come,” she added.

The department did not provide any specific details on the proposed rule for EVs beyond that it will be released next week.

The Inflation Reduction Act included provisions aimed at lowering the cost for electric vehicles, while also increasing domestic manufacturing across clean energy technologies and components. Since the law's enactment, companies have announced tens of billions of dollars in EV and battery manufacturing facilities.

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