#january 6 committee

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

The January 6th riots were obviously a national embarrassment. The January 6th theatre we’ve witnessed since is a global, historical, unadulterated farce.

Yesterday’s partisan committee hearing on January 6th was nothing short of a national embarrassment. No doubt the January 6th riots were, too. Had pipsqueak Pence done his job, the country would look far different today. But two wrongs don’t make a right. How Democrats continue to abuse their power for the partisan persecution of their political opponents will remain a stain on America’s body politick for generations to come.

The most humiliating moments – especially for the audiences watching from around the world – saw all four “stars” of the “show” crying for the television cameras.

Crying over havoc.

Harry Dunn, Adam Kinzinger, Aquilino Gonell, and Adam Schiff all boo-hooed on international television, signaling nothing but weakness to America’s adversaries. But why should they care? These men are more concerned about climate change activist shaman than they are about the Chinese Communist Party. More on that, later. Schiff, recall, was once the latest in a string of purported titans who were set to “take down Trump,” in the failed impeachment proceedings. Yesterday, he reverted to his natural state of sobbing little manlet, keen to play up his “human” side for the cameras. A crock, if ever there was one. ‘The Worst Attack EVER!’

The narrative has suggested that January 6th was “the worst attack” on the United States since, like, ever. The moderate position appears to be that it was the worst attack since my people (the British) burned the White House down. And yet, anyone with even a cursory knowledge of American history would righty guffaw at such claims. Hell, anyone with a functioning memory should be able to see through the pantomimish postulation. Consider 1954, when four armed Puerto Ricans took positions in the gallery overlooking the chamber of the House of Representatives and opened fire. They wounded five Members of Congress: two Republicans and three Democrats. It was a pretty heinous attack. Of course Jimmy Carter commuted the terrorists’ life sentences later on.

Or how about in 1971, when a left-wing protester planted an actual bomb that actually exploded outside the Senate.

“The Congressional reaction was generally restrained,” the New York Times reported at the time. No such luck this time.

Or consider 1983, when a massive blast tore through the Capitol building, luckily killing no one, but leading to the modern identification requirements needed to enter the building. In a way, this attack killed the openness of America’s legislature, which had been almost totally open to the public prior. The culprits – Laura Whitehorn, Marilyn Buck, and Linda Evans – were all radical Marxists.

Whitehorn served 14 years and is now a lauded figure on the left. Buck served 25 years before being released to die from cancer a month later. Evans served 11 years, got parole, and then had her sentence commuted by Bill Clinton.

You could also take the 1915 bombing, carried out by Harvard University professor Frank Holt aka Eric Muenter. Or perhaps more contemporaneously, the storming of the Senate by hundreds of left-wing activists intent on stopping the confirmation of a Supreme Court judge.

Over 60 Secret Service personnel were assaulted and injured when far-left activists descended on Trump’s White House in 2020, frustrated at the then-President’s seeming cruise to re-election. Shortly after, Democrats would abandon plans to “storm” or “besiege” the White House and fixated their efforts on changing election laws around the country, as The National Pulse originally reported. Of course, there are a number of similar incidents, none of which attracted the condemnation nor the committee hearings as January 6th.

(Hat-tip to Yossi Gestetner on Twitter for assembling this list of incidents).

Friends in High Places.

Much like some of the Marxist revolutionaries who found comfort in the arms of Carter and Clinton, some of yesterday’s characters have friends in high places, too.

Police officer Harry Dunn, who spent a not insignificant amount of time in yesterday’s hearing ragging on America and “racism,” appears to be represented by long-time Democrat lelgal creep Mark Zaid.

Zaid, if you recall the name, is the guy who very much enjoys frequenting Disney Land alone, as a grown man. His YouTube contained videos such as “Top 10 prettiest disney channel stars” and “Selena Gomez from child to women.”

(Zaid’s creepy YouTube page.)

Zaid – who once declared that a “coup” against President Trump was underway – is one of the most critical lawyers in Democratic Party circles. But he’s nowhere near as important as Dunn’s other mates: Nancy Pelosi and Jamie Raskin.

Raskin was another of the Democrats’ failed impeachment managers, against Trump. Pelosi, we all know, is drunk Satan.

Crooks and Dunn.

It boggles the mind how lawmakers and police officers can cry about feeling threatened during a committee meeting, but then make their partisan preferences so abundantly clear. No Republican on Capitol Hill could possibly feel safe again, after yesterday’s display. Not least because Dunn appears to be an ardent support of a Marxist movement, linked to the Chinese Communist Party. Black Lives Mao-tter.

Dunn’s Twitter page is adorned with BLM propaganda.  He doesn’t even try to hide it.

The same group that terrorized Washington, D.C. including the Capitol Hill neighborhoods Dunn is supposed to concern himself with is one of Dunn’s faves.

After they burned St. John’s Church, besieged the White House, lay waste to businesses across the Capitol, and injured and killed dozens across the country, Dunn endorsed BLM. Who’s the real danger to America?

(Dunn and daughter pose at ‘BLM Plaza’.)

But Dunn’s links to the group aren’t just concerning given their recent, domestic terrorist activities. BLM is a front organization for radical communists inspired by and working with the Chinese Communist Party. In other words, hostile foreign actors now have guns on the ground on Capitol Hill. Refresh your memory, if you need to, about the hardline Marxist authoritarian goals of the group: from praising mass murderer Mao to launching blatantly genocidal attacks on Israel. Forget just Republicans feeling unsafe around Dunn. Jewish Members of Congress and staffers on the Hill should probably watch out, given his subscribed ideology and thought leaders. Critical race theory proponents have also been on Chinese Communist-sponsored trips, as reported by The National Pulse.

Crying-on-Crying-on-Crying.

Naturally, in response to my live online commentary about the farcical nature of yesterday’s events, left-Twitter went mental. Again. Especially Luke O’Brien – himself a Chinese Communist-linked researcher who attempted to intimidate me by giving away where I like to drink in Washington, D.C., which is hardly a secret but O’Brien was obviously dog-whistling to his violent followers. In other words, their response to the children crying on television yesterday was to cry at me some more on Twitter. Truly a meta-pathetic American altercation. I hesitate to say it since this country has been so kind to me, but folks, the whole world is now laughing at you. From your Women’s Soccer Team celebrating a 3-0 loss, to your athletes winning awards for dropping out of the Olympics, to your elections being an evident farce, to your lawmakers and elected officials crying on television. This isn’t the America anyone from abroad falls in love with. This is a national and international embarrassment. And it’s only just the beginning. Full Fraud Farce.

We know the full fraud farce is coming into full effect. As I posted to GETTR at the unreasonable hour of airport-o-clock this morning, “One of the most deeply concerning parts of the political establishment’s stupidity-arrogance complex is how easily fooled they’re going to be when nefarious actors and foreign agents plant fake, malicious “evidence” about political adversaries writ large. The state will rush to deny their own citizens the most fundamental rights. Trump/Russia was a very basic test case and US institutions totally failed.” Not only are Democrats willing to take the knee – even when they’re draped in the cloth of literal slavers – they’re willing to use the apparatus of state to aggressively and violently persecute the opponents of foreign, Communist, hostile powers.

China doesn’t need to start a war with the United States. They’ve started a war within the United States.

In search for intellectually unachievable omnipotence, Democrats are more than willing to fight it for them.

The January 6th riots were obviously a national embarrassment. The January 6th theatre we’ve witnessed since is a global, historical, unadulterated farce.

[alwaysbewoke]

🤞🏿🤞🏿🤞🏿

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 19, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 20, 2024

In Florida, Kansas, Ohio, Illinois, and Arizona, Republican voters chose their presidential candidate today. The results highlight the weaknesses former president Trump is bringing to the 2024 presidential contest.

Trump, who is the only person still in the Republican race, won all five of today’s Republican races. But the results showed that his support is soft. Results are still coming in, but as I write this, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who has suspended her campaign, received between 13% and 20% of the vote, Florida governor Ron DeSantis—who has also suspended his campaign—picked up votes, and “none of the names shown” got more than 5% in Kansas. 

Even in Ohio, where Trump’s preferred Senate candidate won, Trump received less than 80% of the Republican vote. After NBC News conducted an exit poll in Ohio, MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin reported that of Ohio Republican primary voters—who are typically the most committed party members—11% said they would vote for Biden in November and another 8% said they wouldn’t vote for either Trump or Biden.

Trump has money problems, too. This morning, Brian Schwartz of CNBC reported that while Trump has pushed Haley voters away, Biden’s team has courted both voters and Haley donors to help Biden defeat Trump. Schwartz said that at least a half dozen former Haley fundraisers have decided to help Biden. 

Aside from the Haley supporters who are moving to Biden, Trump’s campaign faces a money crunch. As Schwartz reported yesterday, small donors have slowed down their financial support for Trump considerably, possibly because of fatigue after 9 years of Trump’s supercharged fundraising pitches. Big donors have also been holding back funds out of concern that they will not go toward electing Republicans, but rather will be used to pay Trump’s legal fees.

On March 14, Trump’s people organized a new joint fundraising committee, called the Trump 47 Committee. It is designed to split the money it gets between state Republican parties, the Republican National Committee, and Trump’s Save America Political Action Committee (PAC). As Schwartz notes, Save America spent $24 million on Trump’s legal bills in the last six months of 2023.

While running for president is pricey, so is breaking the law. The former president continues to rail against the law that he must deposit either money or a bond to cover the court-ordered $454 million he owes in penalties, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, and interest, after he and the Trump Organization were found liable for fraud. “I would be forced to mortgage or sell Great Assets, perhaps at Fire Sale prices, and if and when I win the Appeal, they would be gone. Does that make sense? WITCH HUNT. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!” Trump posted on his social media channel. 

Lisa Mascaro, Mary Clare Jalonick, and Jill Colvin of the Associated Press wrote today that Trump is putting the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol at the heart of his presidential campaign, rewriting the five deaths and the destruction to claim that the rioters were “unbelievable patriots” whom he will pardon as soon as he takes office again. His new hires at the Republican National Committee to replace staff he fired are strengthening the idea that Biden stole the 2020 election. 

He’s being helped by loyalists in Congress who are trying to rewrite the history of that day to claim that Trump and the rioters have been persecuted by the Department of Justice. They are attacking the testimony of witnesses like Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, about what she saw that day, although she testified under oath and they are not similarly bound to tell the truth. Trump has said former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, a Republican who served as vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” 

But while Trump’s supporters are willing to sing along to a recording of incarcerated participants in the riots singing their version of the national anthem—the song lyrics are credited to “Donald J. Trump and J6 Prison Choir”—the fact that more than 1,200 people have been charged for their actions that day and many of them have been sentenced to prison seems likely to dampen enthusiasm for trying something like that again. 

Today, former Trump advisor Peter Navarro also had to report to prison, in his case a federal prison in Miami, for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the January 6th committee for documents and testimony. Last September, a jury found Navarro guilty of contempt of Congress, rejecting his insistence that he didn’t have to answer to Congress because Trump had invoked executive privilege over their conversations about overturning the 2020 presidential election. 

Navarro vowed to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court, but a federal appeals court agreed with the verdict, and yesterday, for the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts rejected Navarro’s plea to stay his sentence. “I am pissed—that’s what I am feeling right now,” Navarro told reporters just before he reported to prison for his four-month sentence. 

Trump is also facing renewed scrutiny on his past behavior. With the election interference case in Manhattan heating up, Trump sought to block his former fixer Michael Cohen, adult film actress Stormy Daniels, and former model Karen McDougal from testifying. All of them say Trump paid to keep voters from hearing negative stories about him before the 2016 election. Judge Juan Merchan denied those motions.

And there was a surprise announcement today. Tomorrow, the House Oversight Committee will hold another hearing in the Republicans’ ongoing attempt to impeach President Joe Biden. Today the Democrats on the committee announced they have invited Lev Parnas as their witness. The Ukrainian-born Parnas was an associate of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and was deeply involved in the effort to create dirt to smear Biden before the 2020 election. 

In 2022, Parnas was convicted of wire fraud, false statements, and breaking campaign finance laws by funneling money illegally to Trump and other Republican lawmakers. Since he broke with Giuliani, he has been eager to explain what happened and how. He will likely bring up stories that Trump would prefer that voters forget.

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, told reporters: “Lev Parnas can debunk the bogus claims at the heart of the impeachment probe and, in the process, explain how the GOP ended up in this degraded and embarrassing place.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[poetry-protest-pornography]

Listen, I am not super optimistic about consequences, but like, fuck yes:

[porterdavis]

You go, Jan 6 Committee!

Kicking ass and taking names. Much better than I anticipated.

I was afraid we'd get Muellered, but Liz Cheney is bringing it.

Anyone who watched that and still tries to be ambivalent is instead being willfully ignorant.

(Yes, I'm looking at you my dear sister!)

[cyarskaren52]

AND SHE GOT EXACTLY WHAT SHE DESERVED!!!

[aunti-christ-ine]

Listen  to  Rick. 

[msfangirlgonewild]

HA! I can’t wait and watch what happens…

[nodynasty4us]

From the January 19, 2023 item:

A 122-page memo circulated among Committee members delved into the roots of the violence and presented plenty of evidence that the failure of the social media companies to address online extremism was a big part of the problem. There was almost nothing in the final report about what they found due to a fear of angering the big, powerful companies.

...

The Committee's Purple Team spent a year going through tens of thousands of documents from multiple companies and interviewed numerous executives and employees from Facebook down to Gab and Discord. Yet its findings didn't make it into the final report, even though its memo showed how 15 social media sites played a big role in the events of Jan. 6. The Purple Team also showed how many platforms bent their own rules to avoid penalizing conservatives out of fear of reprisals. This is just the opposite of what conservatives say, that social media platforms is biased against them. In reality, the platforms allowed conservatives to repeatedly violate the rules without any punishment.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

I kind of resent the January 6 hearings because I know with 100% certainty in my heart of hearts that NOTHING is going to come of them. There isn't going to be some dramatic third act climax where all the bad guys get their comeuppance and democracy is saved, roll credits! That's not going to happen. What IS going to happen is some small fish will get thrown under the bus and then turn against the big fish (too little, too late), and some medium fish will throw themselves under the bus to take one for the team and protect the big fish (never rat on your friends, the pay's too good), but none of the big fish will see a single fucking consequence for anything. There will be no arrests, no trials, no jail time, no slinking away into shame and obscurity. They will get off scot free and continue doing what they've done, but now with a tacit seal of approval, and things will continue to go downhill as the worst human beings take back the reins of government and punish everyone who tried to stand in their way. When Republicans want someone taken out, they just fucking take them out.

I think we all know this to be true. The hearings are largely for show because no amount of damning evidence hurts anyone anymore. Well, at least not in the long term; Democrats are quick to pop champagne because Madison Cawthorne lost his re-election bid, but they must know he's not really gone for good. He'll be back in 2024, either taking back his house seat, or gunning for senate or governor, and he's likely to win because he's more popular outside his district than in it. There's no infrastructure in place to punish all the bad guys and keep them out of politics forever, so the worst "fringe" nutjobs of today will be the mainstream leaders of tomorrow (the Republican party is all fringe at this point; it's survival of the craziest, a race to the bottom, they want to see who can act the most cruel and depraved of them all).

The January 6 conspirators are gonna get away with it, and they gonna retaliate tenfold. The hearings are important, but they feel meaningless because we KNOW the system is broken. Even if the DOJ came down hard on any of them, prosecution could be derailed by a transition of power in 2025, or a single juror sympathetic to their plot could decide to ignore all evidence and hang the trial on purpose to get them off. It's so easy for right-wingers to pack juries and courts in their favor, but left-wingers just never do that. It's only ever a kangaroo court when the conservatives are in charge, "you're guilty because we say so, and no amount of evidence to the contrary can change that."

[the-pithy-aaaaah]

I have downloaded all of the transcripts the January 6 Committee has released so far so I have MONTHS of reading material

[dchan87]

Still not sure why the Jan 6 hearings don’t trend on Tumblr more often. You’d think politics tumblr would be all over them, and the rest of the site would be treating it like a soap opera…

[porterdavis]

Too convenient by half

In an incredible coincidence, Mr. Stepien cannot appear before the J6 Committee due to a 'family emergency'.

He is unable to locate his cojones.