Rep. Zoe Lofgren and Enrique Tarrio, the former national chief of the Proud Boys.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP, left; Stephanie Keith/Getty Images, right.

• Rep. Zoe Lofgren interrupted the Proud Boys’ Enrique Tarrio’s Capitol-riot deposition.
• The California Democrat asked Tarrio why he once called her a slur for women on Telegram.
• The exchange is just one of many bizarre moments in Tarrio’s newly released deposition transcript.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren had just one question for Enrique Tarrio, according to the transcript from the ex-Proud Boys leader’s deposition before the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021.

Why, the California Democrat wanted to know, did you call me a “C-word” on your Telegram channel?

Their brief exchange — Tarrio would claim ignorance of the slur, and Lofgren would hop right back out of the virtual deposition — is just one of several bizarre moments from a newly released transcript of Tarrio’s lengthy grilling in spring before the House committee.

Tarrio is on trial at the US District Court in Washington, DC, defending himself against seditious-conspiracy charges in connection with the attack. Opening statements and the start of testimony are expected in the first week of January.

The 231-page transcript released Wednesday night gives a hint of Tarrio’s coming defense.

It shows him portraying the Proud Boys — defined as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and an extremist group by the FBI — as something of a haphazard, decentralized Rotary Club.

Members — Tarrio said he couldn’t tell the committee how many there were, even roughly — rose to the highest ranks through “good works,” he testified, such as “a bicycle and toy drive for Christmas.” 

“The Proud Boys didn’t do an insurrection. That’s not what they do. They drink,” Tarrio’s lawyer Dan Hull said at one point during the deposition, calling them “a satirical kind of goofy group of people.”

“It’s like, ‘Don’t believe your lying eyes,'” Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Insider after reviewing the transcript Thursday.

“It’s like, ‘You couldn’t have really seen us do what we did on January 6 because we are a good organization, just a bunch of guys who like to get together and drink beer,'” Lewis said. 

Federal prosecutors have a different view of the Proud Boys, saying the five defendants and 200-plus members who showed up that day were the brutalizing spear tip to the attack.

Tarrio’s codefendant Dominic “Spaz” Pezzola, a Proud Boys lieutenant from Rochester, New York, is accused of being first to breach the Capitol, breaking a window with a riot shield forcibly stolen from a Capitol Police officer.

Pezzola bragged afterward that he would have killed then-Vice President Mike Pence if given the chance, the feds allege.

With 160 known chapters across the country, the extremist hate group remains active, Emily Kaufman, a researcher with the Anti-Defamation League, told Insider. 

They were active during the summer’s Pride Month and have been agitators over the winter holidays at LGBTQ events, particularly the Drag Queen Story Hours hosted at schools and libraries, she said.

“We would have expected that they would be decimated by these arrests,” Kaufman said of the more than 40 Proud Boys charged in the Capitol attack. “Instead, they have found this niche.”

Lofgren, a vocal member of the January 6 committee, shows up about one-quarter of the way into Tarrio’s deposition, on Page 51 of the transcript.

“I see that Ms. Lofgren has come onto video,” a committee lawyer whose name is redacted is recorded as saying. “Ms. Lofgren, do you have a question?”

“Well, I did have a brief question,” the congresswoman responded.

“Mr. Tarrio,” she told him. “I have received a copy of a post from you, and it’s ‘Enrique’s House of Propaganda’ from your — ‘Tarrio’s Telegram.'”

The House of Propaganda channel has since been taken down, Lewis of George Washington University said.

“And it’s a picture of me holding a piece of paper at a microphone in the Judiciary Committee, and the caption from you is, ‘This — I’m going to spell it out, c-u-n-t — is blind in one eye.'”

“I’m wondering,” she said, “what you meant by that?” 

Tarrio responded, “I wish I could reference the post, Ms. — how do you pronounce your name? I’m sorry.”

“Lofgren,” the congresswoman responded.

“Lofgren,” Tarrio repeated. “I wish I could — I wish I had that in front of me where I could see it.” 

He then promised to “take a look at it” and get back to the committee.

Then he said he didn’t know whether he wrote the post. 

“There’s multiple people that run Telegram channels, specifically mine, too,” he said.

“Alright,” Lofgren said. “I yield back.”

She apparently clicked out of the video deposition at that point. But several pages later, the committee lawyer circled back.

“So you did call Ms. Lofgren” that slur? the lawyer asked.

“No,” Tarrio answered. “I don’t even remember typing that.” 

“So somebody using your account called Ms. Lofgren” the slur? the committee lawyer asked.

“Like, I — I mean, I stated this previously. That account’s administered by a lot of people.” 

At this point, Tarrio’s lawyer cut in. 

“What’s the significance of being called that word?” he asked.

“That’s a word that’s been around since 1300s in London. It’s not a particularly nice word for a lot of people, but —” 

Here Tarrio, his client, cut him off, apparently highly interested: “You know the history of that word?” 

“I do,” the lawyer told his client, “unfortunately.”

There followed a brief back and forth in which both Tarrio and his lawyer complained about the lack of “context” in Lofgren’s inquiry into the word’s use by — someone.

“Does the context matter?” the committee lawyer asked.

“I just don’t understand why that’s just such a big deal,” Tarrio’s lawyer said, dismissing Telegram as “just kind of a really nasty Irish bar scene.”

In other testimony, Tarrio told the committee there was nothing nefarious about then-President Donald Trump responding, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” when asked during the September 2020 presidential debate what he wished to tell white-supremacist groups.

Trump, Tarrio suggested, was encouraging the Proud Boys to prepare for the election through nonviolent actions, “Like, ‘Let’s go rally!'”

Tarrio told committee members: “I took it to be, like, ‘Hey, the election’s coming up. Stand by.’

“I also believe that he meant, like, ‘Stand by me as the president,’ Like, I’ve never, like, failed.”

Lewis countered that members of the extremist group saw “stand back and stand by” as “a call to arms.” One Proud Boy member testified before the committee that membership “tripled” as a result of Trump’s remark.

“They didn’t see this as, ‘Oh, hey, we got a shout out on TV. We should make sure to go vote,'” Lewis told Insider.

The transcript captures Tarrio alternating between pleading the Fifth, which he did more than a dozen times, and offering detailed tangential observations.

These included that he’s, “Not a big Obama fan, because of socialized health care,” and that Trump was “a great president” who “said it how he felt” and “didn’t give us more wars.”

“I don’t think that January 6th should’ve happened,” Tarrio said.

“I wish I can take — I wish I could get in a time machine and stand in front of the police line and speak to those people in front of that line, and say, ‘Don’t do it.’

“I wish I can do that,” Tarrio, who said he still considered himself a Proud Boy, told the committee. “I can’t.”

Federal prosecutors tell a different story. They have quoted Tarrio as saying, “Make no mistake. We did this,” on an encrypted chat channel moments after Pezzola is accused of breaking that first Capitol window at 2:24 p.m. on January 6. 

“Do it again,” the feds say Tarrio chatted two hours later when his lieutenants asked him what to do next.

Tarrio’s February 4 deposition came just three days after he was sprung from a Washington, DC, jail for burning a historic church’s Black Lives Matter banner. It was just one month before his March arrest in connection with the Capitol attack.

The Proud Boys seditious-conspiracy trial follows the November seditious-conspiracy conviction of the Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and is expected to last about six weeks.

Over 1 million homes and businesses were without power in the eastern half of the United States and Texas on Saturday as winter storms battered much of the country, according to data from PowerOutage.us.

U.S. utilities were working to restore power after the storms moved on from their service territories but some were still dealing with high winds.

The greatest numbers of outages were in the southeast, with 277,442 customers without power in North Carolina, followed by Maine, South Carolina, Tennessee, and New York.

During the Christmas weekend, storms are expected to bring blizzard conditions to the Great Lakes region, heavy rains followed by a flash freeze on the East Coast and wind gusts of 60 miles per hour (100 kph) and bitter cold as far south as the U.S.-Mexico border.

Here are the major outages by state:

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Ukrainians will create their own miracle this Christmas by showing they remain unbowed despite Russian attacks that have plunged millions into darkness, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a defiant message on Saturday.

Speaking 10 months to the day since Russian launched a war that has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions more, Zelenskiy said that while freedom came at a high price, slavery would cost even more.

“We endured at the beginning of the war – we withstood attacks, threats, nuclear blackmail, terror, missile strikes. We will endure this winter because we know what we are fighting for,” he said.

Relentless Russian missile and drone attacks since October have caused massive damage to the power-generating system, regularly leaving major cities without water and heat.

Zelenskiy made his remarks in a video address to Ukrainians who celebrate Christmas in December. Most Ukrainians are Orthodox Christians and mark the occasion in early January.

“Even in complete darkness, we will find each other to hug each other tightly. And if there is no heat, we will embrace each other for a long time to warm one another,” he said.

“We will smile and be happy, as always. There is one difference – we will not wait for a miracle, since we are creating it ourselves.”

The clip, which lasted just under nine minutes, was filmed outside at night with just a few white lights and a Christmas tree in the background.

Zelenskiy noted Ukrainian troops were fighting battles in the eastern Donbas region while others were in exile both home and abroad, having fled the Russians.

“We have been fighting them for more than 300 days and eight years. Will we allow them to achieve what they want?” he said, referring to Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea.

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An arctic blast gripped much of the United States on Saturday leaving nearly 2 million without power, at least 14 dead from weather-related car crashes and thousands stranded due to flight cancellations.

As plummeting temperatures were expected to bring the coldest Christmas Eve on record, energy systems across the country were strained by rising demand for heat and storm-related damage to transmission lines.

Some 1.8 million U.S. homes and businesses were left without power as of early Saturday morning, according to tracking site Poweroutage.us.

Many electric companies were asking customers to conserve energy by not running large appliances and turning off unneeded lights.

The disruptions also upended daily routines and holiday plans for millions of Americans during one of the busiest travel periods of the year.

Nearly 2,000 U.S. flights were canceled on Saturday, with total delays tallying 4,000, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware. More than 5,000 flights were cancelled on Friday, the flight tracking said.

The American Automobile Association had estimated that 112.7 million people planned to venture 50 miles (80 km) or more from home between Friday and Jan. 2. But stormy weather heading into the weekend likely ended up keeping many of them at home.

Fatal car accidents around the country left at least 14 dead from weather-related accidents, according to media reports.

Two motorists were killed, and numerous others injured, in a 50-vehicle pileup that shut down the Ohio Turnpike in both directions during a blizzard near Toledo, forcing an evacuation of stranded motorists by bus to keep them from freezing in their cars, officials said.

Three of the deaths were reported in Kentucky, where Gov. Andy Beshear, on Saturday, warned residents to “Stay home, stay safe, stay alive.”

“I know it’s really hard because it’s Christmas Eve. But we’re having dozens and dozens of accidents,” he said in an online briefing. “It’s simply not safe.”

Blizzard conditions remained on Saturday for Buffalo, New York and its surrounding county on the edge of Lake Erie in western New York where between 4-to-6 feet of snow will fall by Sunday, the National Weather Service said.

The city imposed a driving ban on Friday, which remained in effect on Saturday, and all three Buffalo-area border crossing bridges were closed to inbound traffic from Canada due to the weather.

Temperatures are forecast to top out on Saturday at just 7 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 13 Celsius) in Pittsburgh, surpassing its previous all-time coldest Christmas Eve high of 13 F, set in 1983, the (NWS) said.

Cities in Georgia and South Carolina – Athens and Charleston – were likewise expected to record their coldest daytime Christmas Eve high temperatures, while Washington, D.C., was forecast to experience its chilliest Dec. 24 since 1989.

The flurry of yuletide temperature records were predicted as a U.S. deep freeze sharpened by perilous wind chills continued to envelope much of the eastern two-thirds of the nation.

“The cold snap will persist through Christmas,” said meteorologist Ashton Robinson Cook, at the NWS Weather Prediction Center.

Minneapolis was the coldest spot in America on Saturday at minus 6 degrees Fahrenheit, and on Christmas morning, the coldest spot will be Fargo, North Dakota at minus 20, he said.

It will start to moderate west-to-east across America, with the high plains and Central U.S. getting back to normal by Tuesday, but it won’t warm up on the East Coast until Thursday of Friday, he said.

“For now it’s staying cold,” he said.

The severe weather prompted authorities across the country to open warming centers in libraries and police stations while scrambling to expand temporary shelter for the homeless. The challenge was compounded by the influx of migrants crossing the U.S. southern border by the thousands in recent weeks.

The National Weather Service said its map of existing or impending meteorological hazards “depicts one of the greatest extents of winter weather warnings and advisories ever.”

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KYIV (Reuters) -A Russian strike on Ukraine’s recently recaptured city of Kherson killed at least 10 people, wounded 58 and left bloodied corpses on the road, authorities said, in what Kyiv condemned as wanton killing for pleasure.

A pro-Moscow official responded by saying Ukrainian forces had launched the attack in a bid to blame the Russian military.

Fresh from a trip to the United States seeking weapons to resist the 10-month-old Russian invasion, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy published photos showing streets strewn with burning cars, smashed windows and bodies.

“Social networks will most likely mark these photos as ‘sensitive content’. But this is not sensitive content – it is the real life of Ukraine and Ukrainians,” he wrote.

“These are not military facilities. … It is terror, it is killing for the sake of intimidation and pleasure.”

Russia controls most but not all of Kherson region. Local Governor Yaroslav Yanushevych, appointed by Kyiv, told national television the death toll had risen to 10, Interfax Ukraine news agency said.

Vladimir Saldo, the region’s Russian-installed governor, said Kyiv had ordered troops to shell the city.

“This is a disgusting provocation with the obvious aim of blaming the Russian armed forces,” he wrote on Telegram.

Yuriy Sobolevskyi, deputy chair of the regional council, said a missile landed next to a supermarket by the city’s Freedom Square.

“There were civilians there, each of whom lived their own life, went about their own business,” he said, noting a girl selling phone Sim cards, others unloading items from a truck, and passersby.

Reuters was unable to independently verify the reports from Kherson.

Ukraine retook the city, the only regional capital Russia had since its Feb. 24 invasion, in November. Since then, Kyiv says Russian forces have heavily shelled the city from across the vast Dnipro river.

‘KILL WITH IMPUNITY’

Ukrainian presidential aide Kyrylo Tymoshenko said the attack came from a Grad multiple rocket launcher.

Another aide, Mykhailo Podolyak, criticized those calling for Kyiv to seek peace talks with Russia, referencing Moscow’s relentless pounding of Ukraine’s power grid since October that has left millions without heat or water.

“I’ll remind those who propose to take into account (Russian) ‘peace’ initiatives: Right now Russia is ‘negotiating,’ killing Kherson residents, wiping out Bakhmut, destroying Kyiv/Odesa grids, torturing civilians in Melitopol,” Podolyak wrote.

“Russia wants to kill with impunity. Shall we allow it?”

Yanushevych had earlier shared a message from the city’s blood bank calling for urgent donations.

Kyiv was still recovering from Monday’s wave of missile strikes, which knocked out half the city’s power supply into the next day, according to Ukraine’s prime minister.

A major Russian shipyard that specialises in building non-nuclear submarines said its general director had died suddenly on Saturday after 11 years in the job, but gave no details.

Admiralty Shipyards, based in the western port of St Petersburg, announced the death of Alexander Buzakov in a statement. He had been in the job since August 2012.

His main achievement, it said, had been preserving and strengthening the shipyard’s order books for modern non-nuclear submarines, surface ships and deep water vehicles.

Tass news agency said the shipyard is building improved Kilo-class diesel-powered submarines capable of launching Kalibr cruise missiles.

In April, Moscow said it had used a diesel submarine in the Black Sea to strike Ukrainian military targets with Kalibrs.

The shipyard said Buzakov graduated in 1980 and had more than 40 years of experience, indicating he had been in his mid-sixties when he died. St Petersburg is the home city of President Vladimir Putin.

Two Chinese cities reported daily Covid cases that far surpassed the official national tally, in another illustration of the unreliability of data in a country grappling with infections after abruptly ending Covid Zero.

The city of Dongguan in the southern province of Guangdong has 250,000 to 300,000 people being infected on a daily basis, the city’s health commission said on its WeChat account Friday, citing model-based estimates and expert assessments. The manufacturing hub had a population of about 10.5 million as of 2021.

Qingdao city in the eastern province of Shandong is seeing 490,000 to 530,000 daily cases based on data projections, according to a local newspaper report on Friday, citing the head of the city’s health commission. Covid cases have yet to peak in the city of some 10.3 million residents, the official said.

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These local estimates show a huge discrepancy with the official tally of only 4,103 cases reported for China for Dec. 23. It also underscores the inaccuracy of government data, and points to the enormous challenge facing the country after its rapid relaxation of Covid rules.

In a further sign of the scale of the outbreak, minutes from an internal meeting of the top health authority Wednesday showed that nearly 37 million people in the nation may have been infected with Covid on a single day. Health officials on the island province of Hainan said Friday that infections are “increasing exponentially” and a further surge of cases is expected into New Year’s Day and the Lunar New Year holiday in January. They didn’t give specific numbers.

Hospitals in major cities including Beijing and Shanghai have been overwhelmed, while crematoriums are struggling to cope. In Dongguan, the health commission said as of Dec. 22, there were 2,528 health care staff still working despite having fever or testing positive for Covid.

While Qingdao’s estimate is not a precise count and possibly off by tens of thousands, such a practice of “seeking truth from facts should be applauded,” setting an example for other cities, according to the former editor of the nationalistic Global Times newspaper Hu Xijin.

Some local governments are still using the old methods of calculation, “which does not reflect reality and seriously deviates from people’s observations, leading to an erosion of trust toward official releases and harm government credibility,” he wrote on his official WeChat account Saturday.

KYIV, Ukraine — Russian shells pummeled the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson on Saturday, killing at least 10 people and injuring 55 in the city that Moscow’s troops were forced to abandon last month.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, just back from his quick trip to Washington, posted photos of the wreckage on his social media accounts. He noted the destruction came as Ukrainians were beginning Christmas celebrations that for many Orthodox Christians will culminate in the traditional celebration Jan. 7.

“This is not sensitive content — it’s the real life of Kherson,” Zelensky tweeted. The images showed cars on fire, bodies on the street and building windows blown out.

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Yaroslav Yanushevych, the governor of the Kherson region, said in televised remarks that the number of people killed in the latest shelling of the city has risen from seven to 10.

He added that 55 people were wounded, 18 of them in grave condition. Yanushevych said scores of others, including a 6-year-old girl, were wounded by Russian shelling a day earlier.

Saturday marks 10 months since the start of the Russian invasion.

Ukraine has faced a blistering onslaught of Russian artillery fire, missiles, shelling and drone attacks since early October, much of it targeting the energy infrastructure in a bid to cut electricity and heating services as the freezing winter advances. The shelling has been especially intense in Kherson since Russian forces withdrew and Ukraine’s army reclaimed the city in November.

Earlier Saturday, the Donetsk regional governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said two people were killed and five wounded in shelling there over the past day. The deaths were in Kurakhove, a town of about 20,000 30 kilometers (18 miles) west of Russian-controlled Donetsk city.

About 60 shells hit three communities during the night in the area of Nikopol, said the Dnipropetrovsk regional governor, Valentyn Reznichenko.

Stepne, a settlement on the outskirts of Zaporizhzhia, was also hit by shelling but there were no details on casualties, according to the governor, Oleksander Starukh,

Zelensky has returned to Kyiv following his trip to Washington, in which he secured another $1.8 billion military aid package.

On Friday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the war would end at the negotiating table once the “special military operation“ achieves Russia’s goals. He said no reported Ukrainian peace plan can succeed without taking into account “the realities of today that can’t be ignored” — a reference to Moscow’s demand that Ukraine recognize Russia’s sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula, which it annexed in 2014, as well as other territorial gains.

Congress passed an extensive $1.7 trillion spending bill this week—narrowly avoiding a government shutdown—that will fund the government through next fall and deliver an additional $45 billion to the war effort in Ukraine if President Biden gives the bill his seal of approval.

Most Republicans voted against the legislation in the House, but nine broke ranks to deliver Democrats just enough votes to pass the bill on Friday after the Senate passed it with bipartisan approval 68-29 on Thursday.

The bill allocates over $850 billion for military spending and almost $773 billion for domestic programs, like education, healthcare and affordable housing. Senate Democrats had to negotiate a higher defense budget to win the GOP vote while rushing to push the legislation before they lose control of the Senate next term.

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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was proud of how extensive the appropriations bill was and said it was one of the most significant measures passed by Congress in a long time.

“After a lot of hard work and compromise, the Senate is funding the government with an aggressive investment in American families, workers, and national defense,” Schumer said in the Senate on Thursday.

Congress approved an extension to the federal funding deadline for one extra week to get the bill ready for Biden, who is expected to approve it.

What’s in the bill?

Following President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Washington D.C. this week, the bill pledges further support to Ukraine with a multi-billion dollar spending package for military assistance, such as weapons and training, as well as economic, humanitarian and infrastructure funding. The bill also grants $38 billion to disaster relief, which could help communities recovering from hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and wildfires or fund FEMA initiatives.

As the last must-pass bill from this session of Congress, lawmakers speckled in dozens of random initiatives and earmarks. The bill proposes banning TikTok on government devices, strengthening anti-discrimination policies for pregnant employees, more support for veterans, enhancing retirement plans and more than $500 million in additional funding for the Environmental Protection Agency.

The bill also includes an overhaul of the 1887 Electoral Count Act, making it harder to overturn the results of a presidential election, in response to former President Trump’s attempt to stay in power after his reelection loss in 2020. Additionally, it incorporates funding for U.S. attorneys to prosecute those involved in the January 6 Capitol Riots and additional funding for capitol police.

The bill failed to improve the child tax credit, which many Democrats have been vying for to reduce child poverty, but it did include funding increases for food assistance in schools, child mental health programs and Pell grant awards. The bill also changes Medicaid income qualifications, which could result in 19 million people losing their benefits, but possibly qualifying for other health programs that the bill expands.