In other news, the Senate Commerce Committee has advanced the confirmation of Pete Buttigieg by a comfortable margin of 21 to 3 to be the next secretary of transportation. Buttigieg will be the first openly gay cabinet secretary ever confirmed by the Senate.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve says it will continue the stimulus measures that Trump and the GOP tried to stop in the year-end government funding bill passed last month.
Finally, Reuters exclusively reported this morning that the leader of the Proud Boys is a snitch.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys extremist group, has a past as an informer for federal and local law enforcement, repeatedly working undercover for investigators after he was arrested in 2012, according to a former prosecutor and a transcript of a 2014 federal court proceeding obtained by Reuters.
In the Miami hearing, a federal prosecutor, a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent and Tarrio’s own lawyer described his undercover work and said he had helped authorities prosecute more than a dozen people in various cases involving drugs, gambling and human smuggling. [...]
Law-enforcement officials and the court transcript contradict Tarrio’s denial. In a statement to Reuters, the former federal prosecutor in Tarrio’s case, Vanessa Singh Johannes, confirmed that “he cooperated with local and federal law enforcement, to aid in the prosecution of those running other, separate criminal enterprises, ranging from running marijuana grow houses in Miami to operating pharmaceutical fraud schemes.”
A lot of people's immediate reaction to this report was to call him a "snitch" which is obvious and accurate, but my immediate takeaway was that this could be why law enforcement has always treated the Proud Boys with kid gloves while beating liberal protesters.
Did they have some kind of arrangement? I'd like to know more.
In interviews with Reuters, however, he said that before rallies in various cities, he would let police departments know of the Proud Boys’ plans. It is unclear if this was actually the case. He said he stopped this coordination after December 12 because the D.C. police had cracked down on the group.
If it ever appeared that police departments and white supremacists were working together, it's possible they literally were.