"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth."

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Roger Parloff @rparloff 45m
DOJ submits new, air-brushed sentencing memo for Taylor Taranto, scrubbing references to his role in Jan. 6 Capitol Siege and Trump's social media post that led him to go to Obama's neighborhood with weapons. Here's the first scrubbing

May 20, 2025:

___Taranto was arrested in Obama’s neighborhood on the same day in June 2023 that Trump posted on social media what he claimed was the former president’s address. Investigators said they found two guns, roughly 500 rounds of ammunition and a machete in Taranto’s van.

Taranto was livestreaming video on YouTube in which he said he was looking for “entrance points” to underground tunnels and wanted to get a “good angle on a shot,” according to prosecutors. He reposted Trump’s message about Obama’s home address and wrote: “We got these losers surrounded! See you in hell, Podesta’s and Obama’s.” He was referring to John Podesta, who chaired Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Democratic presidential campaign.

Taranto wasn’t charged with threatening Obama or Podesta. But the judge convicted him of making a hoax bomb threat directed at the Gaithersburg, Maryland-based National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

the judge concluded that a reasonable, objective observer might have believed Taranto’s statements on the video. While some viewers may have thought his words were of a “madcap nature,” others could have interpreted them as coming from “an unbalanced narrator willing to follow through on outlandish claims,” Nichols said.

https://apnews.com/article/capitol-riot-obama-threat-taylor-taranto-trump-6d027e3aa037f1ceceb1c6b6fc3e536e

Anna Bower @AnnaBower
“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”(― George Orwell, 1984)

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