A January 6 rioter decided to lead a hate march Tuesday in Dearborn, Michigan, a city with a sizable Muslim and Arab American populace, and got punched in the face.

Jake Lang, who was pardoned by Donald Trump while facing 11 charges related to his actions at the Capitol in 2021, decided to hold his own march in the city while Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Anthony Hudson led a march of his supporters. Lang had a clear agenda in mind, holding a banner that read “Americans Against Islamification,” taunting counterprotesters with bacon, and threatening to burn the Quran.

One counterprotester decided that Lang needed to be taught a lesson, and, while pretending to march next to him, suddenly turned and punched a smiling Lang in the face. Lang tried to shrug it off, telling a throng of cameras, “I was punched harder by Capitol police officer ladies,” while the puncher ran away across a busy street.

A person punches Jake Lang and takes off running here in Dearborn pic.twitter.com/TqOrTfAPmp

Lang, who is running as a Republican for Marco Rubio’s vacated Senate seat in Florida, was accused of assaulting law enforcement with a deadly weapon and engaging in physical violence on restricted grounds at the Capitol over four years ago. He also tried to form his own paramilitary militia in 2021, and in his remarks on Tuesday, even expressed concern about a growing non-white American population.

Dearborn has been targeted by anti-Muslim and anti-Arab protesters before. The latest protests came after Hudson claimed that Dearborn was under sharia law, only to walk back his claims after visiting the city and meeting Muslims last week. The stated goal of his march was to promote unity, but it seems to have attracted people like Lang, a bigot with a history of violence. Unfortunately for Lang, his actions led to a violent punch in the face.

Senate Republicans are still planning to take advantage of a provision of the shutdown-ending bill that would allow them to rake in cash from the federal government.

At the close of the 44-day federal hiatus, the caucus quietly slipped in a self-serving resolution that granted senators the ability to pursue financial compensation from the Justice Department—up to $500,000 each—if they had their phone records seized by former special counsel Jack Smith as he investigated Donald Trump’s 2020 election conspiracy.

Despite passing the measure, the House adamantly opposed the detail: House Speaker Mike Johnson has signaled his support for an effort to repeal it altogether. As of last week, it wasn’t clear whether anyone in the Senate actually planned to pursue the new retribution pathway, save for Senator Lindsey Graham—but the upper chamber’s initial resistance appears to have ebbed in recent days.

“The House is going to do what they’re going to do with it. It didn’t apply to them,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told CNN Tuesday. “There’s a statute that obviously was violated, and what this does is enables people who are harmed, in this case, United States senators, to have a private right of action against the weaponization by the Justice Department.”

When asked whether he believed Senate Republicans would actually line their pockets with U.S. taxpayer funds, Thune said he wasn’t convinced “anybody was talking about taking the money.”

“But I think the penalty is in place to ensure that in the future … there is a remedy in place,” Thune told the network.

Eight known Senate Republicans had their phone records subpoenaed as part of Smith’s inquiry: Senators Marsha Blackburn, Lindsey Graham, Bill Hagerty, Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson, Cynthia Lummis, Dan Sullivan, and Tommy Tuberville. Of that lot, five indicated late last week that they have no intentions to utilize the controversial provision.

“This fight is not about the money; it is about holding the left accountable for the worst weaponization of government in our nation’s history,” Blackburn told CBS News, signaling her support to change the language of the resolution. “If leftist politicians can go after President Trump and sitting members of Congress, they will not hesitate to go after American citizens.”

Smith’s team from the case has clarified that it was not spying on senators and, in fact, was well within its rights to request the phone records. Two of the team members issued a letter in October stating that they had requested phone toll records, which only show incoming and outgoing phone numbers, as well as call duration—not the contents of the calls.

Former Treasury Secretary and Jeffrey Epstein confidant Larry Summers has resigned from the board of Sam Altman’s OpenAI company amid renewed scrutiny caused by the release of his countless emails to the disgraced sex offender.

“I am grateful for the opportunity to have served, excited about the potential of the company, and look forward to following their progress,” Summers said in a statement. He was also cut from his temporary guest columnist position at The New York Times. Meanwhile, Harvard announced Tuesday that it has begun an investigation into Summers, who said he will still teach at the university.

Summers and Epstein were contacting each other back and forth frequently like high schoolers in 2018 and 2019, when both men were in their sixties.

“We talked on phone. Then ‘I can’t talk later’. Dint think I can talk tomorrow’. I said what are you up to. She said ‘I’m busy’. I said awfully coy u are,” Summers wrote to Epstein, seeking advice on the young female “mentee” he was trying to seduce at the time (he was married then, and still is). “And then I said. ‘Did u really rearrange the weekend we were going to be together because guy number 3 was coming.’ She said no his schedule changed after we changed our plans.”

“Shes smart. making you pay for past errors. ignore the daddy im going to go out with the motorcycle guy, you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh,” Epstein wrote back, just months before his death in prison.

Summers has addressed these new revelations in a “statement of regret.”

“Some of you will have seen my statement of regret expressing my shame with respect to what I did in communication with Mr. Epstein,” Summers........

© New Republic