Sweden’s national seismic network said Tuesday that it registered two explosions near mysterious leaks on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which have prompted concerns of sabotage.
While Nord Stream 2 hasn’t entered commercial operation — its certification was halted on the eve of the invasion — Nord Stream 1 provided a crucial pathway for Russian gas to reach Europe until earlier this month, when Russia closed the pipeline citing maintenance concerns.
The latest: “The U.S. is supporting efforts to investigate and we will continue our work to safeguard Europe’s energy security,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Tuesday night, noting that he had also spoken to his Danish counterpart Jean-Charles Ellermann-Kingombe.
The big picture: Two leaks were detected in the Nord Stream 1 pipeline and one in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. While neither pipe was operating at the time the leaks were discovered, both were filled with gas, Reuters noted.
One blast occurred early Monday and a second occurred later that day, public broadcaster SVT reported, per Reuters.
Zoom in: Nord Stream AG confirmed in a statement that “the Nord Stream 1 control center registered a pressure drop on both strings of the gas pipeline,” adding that an investigation is underway.
Sweden’s Maritime Authority issued a warning for ships to maintain a five nautical mile distance from the sites of the leaks, which were registered near the Danish island of Bornholm.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said she “cannot rule out” sabotage. The country’s maritime authority echoed Sweden’s warning, noting that ships could lose buoyancy if they’re in the vicinity of the leaks and that there remains a risk of the leaked gas igniting at the water’s surface and in the air, according to AP.
Bjorn Lund, a seismologist at Sweden’s National Seismology Centre SVT there’s “no doubt that these were explosions,” Reuters reports.
What they’re saying: Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters Tuesday the leaks were a cause for concern and acknowledged the possibility of sabotage along the pipeline. “No option can be ruled out right now,” he said, per Reuters.
“It is too early to conclude yet, but it is an extraordinary situation. There are three leaks, and therefore it is difficult to imagine that it could be accidental,” Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen said Tuesday, the Financial Times reported.
Editor’s note: This article has been corrected to note that the leaks began on Monday, not Thursday.
This story has been updated with new details on the blasts registered by Sweden’s National Seismology Centre and with comment from White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy discussed the 25th Amendment on a call with GOP leadership days after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and said the process “takes too long,” according to an audio recording obtained by two New York Times reporters and shared with CNN.
McCarthy also said during the call that he wanted to reach out to then-President-elect Joe Biden as he expressed hope for a “smooth transition,” and said he thought impeachment would further divide the nation.
The call took place on January 8, 2021, and the audio was obtained for the new book “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future,” by Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns.
At one point in the recording, McCarthy asks an aide for a readout of what House Democrats had been discussing internally. The aide responds, “I think the options that have been cited by the Democrats so far are the 25th Amendment, which is not exactly an elegant solution here.”
McCarthy interjects to say, “That takes too long too. It could go back to the House, right?”
The aide responds, “Correct. If the President were to submit a letter overruling the Cabinet and the vice president, two-thirds vote in the House and the Senate to overrule the President. So it’s kind of an armful.”
That same day, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent out a “Dear Colleague” letter to House Democrats raising the 25th Amendment as an option. The House ended up voting days later on a resolution calling on the vice president to activate the 25th Amendment, with only one Republican, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, joining all Democrats to support the measure.
CNN has reached out to McCarthy’s office to request comment on the new audio.
At the beginning of the audio, McCarthy can be heard saying, “What the President did is atrocious and totally wrong,” comments that have been previously reported on by The New York Times.
Invoking the 25th Amendment would have required then-Vice President Mike Pence and a majority of the Cabinet to vote to remove Trump from office due to his inability to “discharge the powers and duties of his office” – an unprecedented step.
The new audio release of McCarthy is the latest in a series of such releases featuring the House GOP leader that have shed light on what he said privately to other House Republicans in the aftermath of the January 6 attack. And the fact McCarthy was pressing one of his aides for details about how the 25th Amendment process would work shows there was a serious conversation at the highest levels of GOP leadership about the idea – not just idle chatter – even if it was ultimately deemed not a viable option.
Last month, audio showed that McCarthy did consider asking Trump to resign in the days after the riot, contradicting his office’s earlier denials of New York Times reporting that he had done so.
Audio also showed that in the days following the insurrection, McCarthy told Republican lawmakers on a private conference call that Trump had admitted bearing some responsibility for the deadly attack.
McCarthy has moved to tamp down the potential fallout from the audio releases both in public and in private, and he commented on speaking about the 25th Amendment. McCarthy, who initially vehemently denied the Times’ reporting before the audiotapes of those conversations were released, has argued that he was merely floating potential scenarios about Trump’s future and was not advocating for one option over the other.
“I have never asked the President to resign. I never thought he should resign,” McCarthy said in April when pressed on whether he had believed at any point that Trump should resign. “What I was asked on a phone call was about the process, the 25th Amendment, whether someone was impeached. We walked through ifs, ands and buts. It was never in the process to ask Trump to resign.”
Trump, for his part, said after the initial audiotapes were released that while he didn’t like what he had heard McCarthy saying, their relationship remains strong – in part because McCarthy worked so hard after January 6 to win his support.
In the new audio, McCarthy can also be heard discussing wanting to reach out to Biden.
“I do think the impeachment divides the nation further and continues the fight even greater. That’s why I want to reach out to Biden. I wanted the President to meet with Biden; that’s not going to happen,” McCarthy said, adding, “I want to see about us meeting with Biden, sitting down, make a smooth transition to show that, and continue to keep those statements going.”
McCarthy, who said he used to have breakfast with Biden when he was the vice president, also talked about what would be best for Biden, arguing that a smooth transition would “be beneficial to his presidency, too” and that Biden would be in a “stronger” position if he implores the country to move forward.
McCarthy can also be heard saying on the tape, “I’m trying to do it not from a basis of Republicans, of a basis of, hey, it’s not healthy for the nation. That’s a conversation I want to have with Biden himself.”
This story has been updated with additional developments Wednesday and further details.
Last Thursday evening, President Joe Biden dropped a political bombshell when he said the world is now at the highest risk of nuclear “Armageddon” than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
For the first time since that Cold War confrontation began on Oct. 16, 1962 – nearly 60 years ago to the day – there now exists “a direct threat of the use of the nuclear weapon if, in fact, things continue down the path they’ve been going,” Biden said.
Olha Havryliuk’s son and son-in-law, along with a stranger, were shot in the head in the yard of their house. The Russian soldiers smashed the Havryliuks’ fence, parked their armored vehicle in the garden, and moved into the house. They cooked in the neighbor’s garden, killing and plucking chickens and roasting them on a barbecue while the men lay dead yards away across the alley.
By the time the troops pulled out at the end of March, two brothers, Yuriy and Viktor Pavlenko, who lived at the end of the street, lay dead in a ditch by the railway line. Volodymyr Cherednychenko was found dead in a neighbor’s cellar. Another man, caught by the Russian soldiers as he ran along the train track and taken into a cellar of a house at the end of the street, was also found shot dead.
The bodies of three civilians in a garden of a house in Bucha on April 4.The property of the Shypilo family in Bucha where six people are thought to have been tortured and killed at one end of Ivana Franka Street.
The story of Bucha and its horrors has unfolded in chapters as new revelations of Russian atrocities emerge, fueling outrage among Ukrainians and across much of the world. But prosecutors and military intelligence officials were investigating early on, collecting evidence to try to identify the perpetrators responsible for the mass killings, torture and rapes in the once tranquil suburb.
Working with war crimes and forensic experts from around the world, Ukrainian investigators have reached some preliminary conclusions, focusing in particular on the 64th Brigade. They have already identified 10 soldiers from the unit and accused them of war crimes.
Ukrainian officials say that the brigade was formed after Russia struggled in a 2008 war with Georgia, and that it was awarded an honorary title by President Vladimir V. Putin last month for its performance in Ukraine.
Yet the brigade took little part in any fighting, coming in after other units had seized control of Bucha and then tasked with “holding” it. The troops established checkpoints throughout the town, parking their armored vehicles in people’s yards and taking over their homes.
“They imprisoned our people,” said Ruslan Kravchenko, the chief prosecutor for the Bucha district, describing the actions of the accused soldiers. “They tied their hands and legs and taped their eyes. They beat them with fists and feet, and with gun butts in the chest, and imitated executions.”
The name of the 64th Brigade and a list of 1,600 of its soldiers were found among computer files left behind in the Russian military headquarters in Bucha, providing investigators with an immense resource as they began their investigation. Dmytro Replianchuk at Slidtsvo.info, a Ukrainian investigative news agency, soon found the social media profiles of dozens of the names, including officers.
Three victims who survived beatings and torture have been able to identify the perpetrators from the photographs, Mr. Kravchenko said.
Ruslan Kravchenko, left, the chief prosecutor for the Bucha district, leading a search in April of a Russian base set up in a boiler room in the suburb.Items left by retreating Russian forces have been collected and cataloged by Mr. Kravchenko and his team.
One of the victims was Yuriy, 50, a factory worker, who lives near one of the most notorious Russian bases, at 144 Yablunska Street. On March 13, a unit of the 64th Brigade came to search his house. He said that he had identified the soldiers when shown photographs by prosecutors. The soldiers were rough and uncouth, he said. “You could see they were from the Taiga,” he said, referring to the Siberian forest. “They just talk to bears.”
Yuriy managed to avoid suspicion, but on March 19, the soldiers returned and detained his neighbor Oleksiy. Like several others interviewed for this article, the men asked to be identified by only their first names for their security.
An investigator identifying empty shell casings in April at a sprawling complex at 144 Yablunska Street, where eight people were executed by Russian forces in early March. The entrance of 144 Yablunska Street. The complex was the site of one of the most notorious documented mass killings in Bucha.
Oleksiy declined to be interviewed but confirmed that he had been detained twice by the Russian unit, interrogated in a basement for several hours and put through a mock execution when the soldiers fired a gun behind him. Still shaken, he said, “I just want to try to forget it all.”
Created to ‘Scare the Population’
Based in Russia’s far east, near the border with China, the 64th Brigade belongs to the Eastern Military District, long seen as the part of the Russian Army with the lowest levels of training and equipment.
The brigade has ethnic Russian commanders but consists largely of soldiers drawn from minority ethnic groups and disadvantaged communities, according to Col. Mykola Krasny, the head of public affairs of Ukrainian military intelligence.
In radio conversations that were intercepted by Ukrainian forces, some of the Russians expressed surprise that village roads in outlying areas of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, were paved with asphalt, he said.
“We see it as a deliberate policy to draft soldiers from depressed regions of Russia,” Colonel Krasny said.
Not a lot is known about the brigade, but Colonel Krasny claimed that it was notable for its lack of morality, for beatings of soldiers and for thieving. Drawn from a regiment that had served in Chechnya, the brigade was established on Jan. 1, 2009, shortly after Russia’s war in Georgia, Colonel Krasny said. The goal was clear, he added: to build up a fearsome army unit that could instill control.
A neighbor draped a blanket over a dead woman in April after the police had examined the body. She was found with a gunshot wound to the head, naked but for a fur coat, in a cellar outside a house in Bucha.An abandoned Russian post on a street in Bucha on April 3.
“The consequences of these politics was what happened in Bucha,” he said. “Having no discipline, and these aggressive habits, it looks like it was created to scare the population.”
He claimed that the Russian soldiers’ disadvantaged backgrounds, and the fact that they could act with impunity, prompted them “to do unspeakable things.”
It was not only the enemy who suffered their brutality. The Russian Army has long had a reputation for hazing its own soldiers, and on a cellphone left behind in Bucha by a member of the 64th, investigators found recent evidence of the practice: a video in which an officer is talking to a subordinate and then suddenly punches him in the side of the head while other soldiers stand around talking.
The Russian government did not respond to a request for comment on the accusations against the 64th Brigade but has repeatedly claimed that allegations of its forces having committed atrocities in Bucha and elsewhere are false.
Western analysts who have studied the Russian Army said that the behavior of troops in Bucha was not a surprise.
A classroom in Bucha ransacked by Russian soldiers. The school was used as a base by the occupying troops.A house in Bucha after being occupied by Russian troops. Ukrainian investigators have already identified 10 soldiers from the 64th Brigade and accused them of war crimes.
“It is consistent with the way they consider responding,” said Nick Reynolds, a researcher of land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, a military research organization in London. “Reprisals are part and parcel of how the Russian military does business.”
The ‘Bad Guys’ Will Come
Killings occurred in Bucha from the first days that Russian troops appeared. The first units were airborne assault troops, paratroopers and special forces who fired on cars and civilians in the streets and detained men suspected of being in the Ukrainian Army or territorial defense.
The extent of the killings, and the seeming lack of hesitation among Russian soldiers to carry them out, has led Ukrainian officials to surmise that they were acting under orders.
“They couldn’t not know,” Bucha’s prosecutor, Mr. Kravchenko, said of senior military commanders. “I think the terror was planned.”
Many of the documented killings occurred on Yablunska Street, where bodies lay for weeks, visible on satellite images. But not far away, on a corner of Ivana Franka Street, a particular form of hell played out after March 12.
Volodymyr, 65, was detained and questioned in 144 Yablunska Street. He said that on March 4 he saw eight people with hands bound being led around a corner and that he then heard the gunshots as they were executed.
Residents had already been warned that things would get worse. A pensioner, Mykola, 67, said that the Russian troops who first came to the neighborhood had advised him to leave while he could. “‘After us, such bad guys will come,’” the commander told him, he recalled. “I think they had radio contact and they knew who was coming, and they had their own opinion of them.”
Mykola left Bucha before the 64th Brigade arrived.
The spring flowers are pushing up everywhere in Bucha, fruit trees are in blossom, and city workers have swept the streets and filled in some of the bomb craters. But at the end of Ivana Franka Street, amid smashed cars and destroyed homes, there is an eerie desolation.
“From this house to the end, no one is left alive,” said Ms. Havryliuk, 65. “Eleven people were killed here. Only we stayed alive.”
Her son and son-in-law had stayed behind to look after the house and the dogs, and were killed on March 12 or 13, when the 64th Brigade first arrived, she said. The death certificates said that they had been shot in the head.
Olha Havryliuk, left, stands in front of her home with her daughter, Iryna. Olha’s son, Roman Havryliuk, and Iryna’s husband, Serhiy Duhliy, were both found shot dead, along with a stranger, in the yard.The garden of the Havryliuks’ neighbors. Russian troops would use the space to cook on a barbecue, killing and plucking chickens and roasting them while dead bodies lay just yards away across the alley.
What happened over the next two weeks is hard to fathom. The few residents who stayed were confined to their homes and only occasionally dared to go out to fetch water from a well. Some of them saw people being detained by the Russians.
Nadezhda Cherednychenko, 50, pleaded with the soldiers to let her son go. He was being held in the yard of a house and his arm had been injured when she last saw him. She found him dead in the cellar of the same house three weeks later, after the Russians withdrew.
“They should be punished,” she said of his captors. “They brought so much pain to people. Mothers without children, fathers, children without parents. It’s something you cannot forgive.”
Neighbors who lived next door to the Havryliuks just disappeared. Volodymyr and Tetiana Shypilo, a teacher, and their son Andriy, 39, lived in one part of the house, and Oleh Yarmolenko, 47, lived alone in the other side. “They were all our relatives,” Ms. Havryliuk said.
Nadezhda Cherednychenko, 50, with a photograph of Volodymyr, her 27-year-old son.The cellar where Volodymyr Cherednychenko, who was detained for three weeks by Russian troops, was found shot through the ear.
Down a side alley lived Lidiya Sydorenko, 62, and her husband Serhiy, 65. Their daughter, Tetiana Naumova, said that she spoke to them by telephone midmorning on March 22.
“Mother was crying the whole time,” Ms. Naumova said. “She was usually an optimist, but I think she had a bad feeling.”
Minutes later, Russian soldiers came in and demanded to search their garage. They told a neighbor to leave, shooting at the ground by her feet.
“By lunchtime they had killed them,” Ms. Naumova said.
She returned to the house with her husband, Vitaliy, and her son Anton last month after the Russian troops withdrew from Kyiv. Her parents were nowhere to be found, but they found ominous traces — her father’s hat with bullet holes in it, three pools of blood and a piece of her mother’s scalp and hair.
There was also no sign of the Shypilos or of Mr. Yarmolenko, except trails of blood where bodies had been dragged along the floor of their house.
Eventually, French forensic investigators solved the mystery.
They examined six charred bodies found in an empty lot up the street and confirmed that they were the missing civilians: the Sydorenkos, the three Shypilos and Mr. Yarmolenko. Several bore bullet wounds but three of them had had limbs severed, including Ms. Naumova’s mother, the investigators told the families.
Her father had multiple gunshot wounds to the head and chest, her mother had had an arm and a leg cut off, she said.
“They tortured them,” Ms. Havryliuk said, “and burned them to cover their tracks.”
Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting from Bucha, Ukraine.
Tetiana Naumova and her husband, Vitaliy, with photographs of her parents, Lidiya and Serhiy Sydorenko.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday was asked to block the Biden administration’s student loan debt relief program, which is set to take effect this weekend.
The request by the Brown County Taxpayers Association in Wisconsin was directed to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who is responsible for handling emergency application requests from the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the group’s request.
A federal judge in Wisconsin earlier this month dismissed the taxpayers association’s lawsuit challenging the program, ruling that the group did not have legal standing to block the plan.
The group then filed an appeal of that ruling to the 7th Circuit appeals court.
Wednesday’s request to Barrett asks that the plan by President Joe Biden to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for millions of borrowers be suspended pending the outcome of the pending appeal.
The U.S. Department of Education opened its application for student loan forgiveness in a beta test on Friday.
The application officially launched on Monday. The Biden administration could start processing borrowers’ requests for student loan forgiveness as soon as this Sunday.
Legal challenges against student loan forgiveness
The legal challenges that have been brought against the president’s plan continue to mount.
Six Republican-led states — Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina — are trying to block Biden’s plan, arguing that the president doesn’t have the power to issue nationwide debt relief without Congress. They’re also claiming that the policy would harm private companies that service some federal student loans by reducing their business.
The main obstacle for those hoping to foil the president’s action is finding a plaintiff who can prove they’ve been harmed by the policy. “Such injury is needed to establish what courts call ‘standing,'” said Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor.
Tribe said he isn’t convinced that any of the current lawsuits filed have successfully done that.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
The Texas shooting, which left 19 schoolchildren and two teachers dead and more than a dozen wounded, has put a national spotlight on Daniel Defense, a family-owned business in Georgia that has emerged as a trailblazer in an aggressive, boundary-pushing style of weapons marketing and sales.
Some of its advertisements invoke popular video games like “Call of Duty” and feature “Star Wars” characters and Santa Claus, messages that are likely to appeal to teenagers. The company was an early adopter of a direct-to-consumer business model that aimed to make buying military gear as simple as ordering from Amazon, enticing customers with “adventure now, pay later” installment plans that make expensive weaponry more affordable.
And the company’s founder and chief executive, Marty Daniel, has fashioned himself as a provocateur who ridicules gun control proposals and uses publicity stunts to drum up sales.
Daniel Defense is at the forefront of an industry that has grown increasingly aggressive in recent years as it tries to expand beyond its aging, mostly white customer base and resists the calls for stronger regulation that seem to intensify after every mass shooting.
“Daniel Defense is basically the poster child of this egregious, aggressive marketing,” said Ryan Busse, a former executive at the gun company Kimber who is now an industry critic. “Marty Daniel burst in the door, a lot louder and more brazen than other gun makers, much like Donald Trump did on the political scene.”
He added, “Through this company, you are telling the story of how the gun industry has become increasingly radicalized.”
Daniel Defense’s strategy seems to have been effective. Its sales have soared, in part because of its successful targeting of young customers like Salvador Ramos, the gunman in Texas. Mr. Ramos, whom the authorities killed on Tuesday, was a “Call of Duty” video game enthusiast and appears to have bought his assault rifle directly from Daniel Defense, less than a week after turning 18.
Mr. Daniel did not respond to emails or calls. Steve Reed, a Daniel Defense spokesman, said in a statement that the company was “deeply saddened” by the Texas shooting.
Mr. Daniel, 59, is a practiced storyteller who adopts a folksy tone to market his company and its guns. He often casts himself as something of a goofball, a screw-up who flunked out of Georgia Southern University — not once, but twice — before finally graduating and starting a company that made garage doors.
Marty Daniel, the founder and chief executive of Daniel Defense.Credit…Savannah Morning News
He has said that his gun company was born out of his poor golf game. Instead of puttering around the course, Mr. Daniel started using an AR-15 — the type of gun he would later go on to make — for target practice. “Every shot he fired filled him with a satisfaction he’d never before experienced,” the company’s website says.
At the time, Mr. Daniel had trouble finding a way to mount a scope onto his rifle. He began designing and selling his own accessory that allowed gun owners to add lights, a range finder and lasers onto the rifle.
He got his break in 2002 at a gun show in Orlando, Fla., where he was approached by a representative of the U.S. Special Forces. He ultimately won a $20 million contract to produce the accessories for combat rifles. More deals followed. In 2008, he won a contract with the British military, according to Daniel Defense’s website.
By 2009, the company had expanded to making guns for consumers. Its military ties were the basis of its marketing, which often featured heavily armed fighters. “Use what they use,” one ad says. Another shows a military-style scope aimed at passing cars on what looks like a regular city street. Others include references — using hashtags and catchphrases — to the “Call of Duty” video game.
Before the 2000s, most gun makers did not market military-style assault weapons to civilians. At the largest industry trade shows, tactical military gear and guns were cordoned off, away from the general public. That started to change around 2004, industry experts say, with the expiration of the federal assault weapon ban.
“Companies like Daniel Defense glorify violence and war in their marketing to consumers,” said Nick Suplina, a senior vice president at Everytown for Gun Safety, a group that supports gun control.
In 2012, the Sandy Hook shooting led to an industrywide surge in gun sales, as firearm enthusiasts stocked up, fearing a government crackdown. In an interview with Forbes, Mr. Daniel said the shooting “drove a lot of sales.” (Forbes reported that Daniel Defense had sales of $73 million in 2016.)
After the shooting, Daniel Defense offered employees extra overtime to meet skyrocketing demand, according to Christopher Powell, who worked for the company at the time. “They kept people focused on the task at hand,” he said.
But in the late 2010s, some colleagues started to worry that Mr. Daniel had become distracted by the glamour of marketing the brand and rubbing shoulders with celebrities and politicians, according to a former Daniel Defense manager. They voiced concerns that some of the marketing materials were inappropriate for a company that manufactures deadly weapons, said the manager and a former executive, who didn’t want their names used because they feared legal or professional repercussions.
Some ads featured children carrying and firing guns. In another, posted on Instagram two days after Christmas last year, a man dressed as Santa Claus and wearing a military helmet is smoking a cigar and holding a Daniel Defense rifle. “After a long weekend, Santa is enjoying MK18 Monday,” the caption states, referring to the gun’s model.
The industry’s aggressive marketing has landed some companies in trouble. Earlier this year, the gun maker Remington reached a $73 million settlement with families of children killed at the Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Conn. The families had claimed that Remington improperly marketed its assault rifles, including with its weapons appearing in “Call of Duty,” which the killer at Sandy Hook had frequently played.
A year after Sandy Hook, with the Super Bowl approaching, Daniel Defense deployed a new marketing stunt.
The National Football League had a policy prohibiting ads for weapons on its telecasts. But Daniel Defense tried to buy a 60-second spot that depicted a soldier returning home to his family, with ominous music in the background. “I am responsible for their protection,” the ad’s narrator intones. “And no one has the right to tell me how to defend them.”
Given the N.F.L.’s ban on gun ads, it was no surprise that the ad was rejected. (Daniel Defense claimed that the ad complied with the policy because the company sells products besides guns.) But Mr. Daniel turned the rejection into a rallying cry, and the conservative media lapped it up. Appearing on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends,” he urged viewers to “call the N.F.L. and say, ‘C’mon, man, run my ad.’”
“That is Marty Daniel at work,” Mr. Powell said. “He’s not one of those typical C.E.O.s that you see.”
Mr. Daniel and his wife, Cindy, have worked hand-in-hand with the National Rifle Association to raise money for the group, sell weapons to its members and beat back calls for gun control.
In recent years, Mr. Daniel and Ms. Daniel, the company’s chief operating officer, became outspoken supporters of Donald J. Trump, contributing $300,000 to a group aligned with Mr. Trump. Mr. Daniel joined the “Second Amendment Coalition,” a group of gun industry heavyweights who advised Mr. Trump on gun policy.
Mr. Daniel told Breitbart News in 2017 that Mr. Trump’s election saved “our Second Amendment rights.” He and his wife have also donated to other Republican candidates and groups, including in their home state of Georgia. So far in the 2022 election cycle, they’ve given more than $70,000 to Republicans.
Food vendors, vending machines and tables occupy the area where Daniel Defense was to have its booth at the National Rifle Association convention in Houston this weekend.Credit…Michael Wyke/AP
Before the Uvalde massacre, Daniel Defense’s guns were used in at least one other mass shooting. Four of its semiautomatic rifles were found in the hotel room of the gunman who killed 59 people at a Las Vegas music festival in 2017, one of the deadliest shootings in American history.
Mr. Daniel has been an especially vocal critic of gun control. After the shooting at Parkland High School in 2018, he briefly expressed support for legislation, backed by the N.R.A., to bolster the federal background-check system. But he soon reversed his position, citing “overwhelming feedback.” He declared that “all firearms laws that limit the rights of law-abiding citizens are unconstitutional.”
“You don’t see the same kind of boldness from the chief executives of Smith & Wesson or the old-guard gun companies,” said Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the nonprofit Violence Policy Center. “Daniel is more at the edges.”
Daniel Defense is only a fraction of the size of those rivals. It manufactured nearly 53,000 guns in 2020, the most recent year for which government data is available, giving it a less than 1 percent share of the market.
But experts say it has led the way in building a direct-to-consumer sales business, as gun manufacturers try to match the success of other industries in capitalizing on e-commerce.
In the past, gun companies would sell their products to stores, which then sold the weapons to customers. Now, industry experts say, the manufacturers are increasingly trying to sell guns and accessories online, targeting consumers with slick ad campaigns. (Guns sold online have to be picked up at a licensed firearms dealer, who conducts a background check.)
Daniel Defense also offers a buy-now-pay-later financing option that allows qualified buyers to spread the price — some of its guns retail for more than $1,800 — over a number of payments. The approval takes seconds, the company’s website says.
“They’ve been a brand leader,” said Timothy Lytton, a law professor at Georgia State who studies the gun industry. “They’ve been exceptionally successful at selling the idea that civilians who’d like to own a firearm for self-protection need a high-capacity, semiautomatic weapon.”
Gun sales surged during the pandemic, including at Daniel Defense. The company also received help via a $3.1 million loan from the federal Paycheck Protection Program, which was intended for small businesses at risk of laying off employees.
The week before the Texas shooting, Daniel Defense posted a photograph on Facebook and Twitter, showing a little boy sitting cross-legged, an assault rifle balanced across his lap. “Train up a child in the way he should go,” the caption reads, echoing a biblical proverb. “When he is old, he will not depart from it.”
The ad was posted on May 16. It was Mr. Ramos’s 18th birthday.
A day later, he bought his first gun, a Smith & Wesson assault-style rifle, from a store in Uvalde, according to State Senator Roland Gutierrez of Texas who cited law enforcement officials. The store has been identified as Oasis Outback. Three days later, he bought the Daniel Defense rifle for $1,870 plus tax, according to a photo of the receipt that Mr. Ramos reportedly posted on the social media platform Yubo.
Amid a national outcry after the shooting, Daniel Defense retreated from its usual provocative online presence. The company restricted access to its Twitter feed. It canceled plans to have a booth at this weekend’s N.R.A. convention in Houston.
And on Thursday, it removed the $15,000 guns-and-ammo sweepstakes from its home page.
Tara Siegel Bernard and Serge F. Kovaleski contributed reporting and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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