#select committee to investigate the january 6th attack on the united states capitol

[tomorrowusa]

Unintentionally, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) seems to have inspired a fitness trend. 

The Missouri Democratic Party is sponsoring 5k runs inspired by Speedy Josh Hawley.

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley's infamous chicken run has inspired the Missouri Democratic Party to plan a race outside the political sphere. The Jan. 6 Committee showed a video last night of Josh Hawley running away from the Jan. 6 rioters just hours after he raised his fist to them in solidarity. In response to mass calls for a Hawley-inspired run, The Missouri Democratic Party will host a "Hawlin' Hawley" 5k. The organization announced the move on Twitter.

It’s actually a virtual 5k run so that runners outside Missouri can take part.

More details are at @MoDemParty on Twitter.

If running is not your thing, there is Hawley merch available at the Missouri Democrats merch store.

There’s the brand new “Show Me Running” t-shirt.

For something more classic, there’s Josh’s fist pump – but in an orange jump suit.

We’ll let The St. Louis Post-Dispatch have the last word of this post.

Editorial: Hawley's sprint was more than just funny. It encapsulated his core cowardice.       

Laughable as the video is, it’s important to remember the deadly serious context surrounding this sidesplitting comeuppance for a politician who so richly deserves it. Lives were lost that day, the seat of government was breached for the first time in more than two centuries, American democracy was destabilized in what may yet prove to be permanent ways — and Missouri’s junior senator was instrumental in all of it.

When then-President Donald Trump refused to accept his clear defeat in the November 2020 election, every congressional Republican had a choice to make: Endorse Trump’s scheme to undermine public confidence in the results by falsely claiming that mass voter fraud had cost him reelection, or put party aside and stand up for democracy. Hawley, like far too many of his fellow Republicans, chose the former.

[ ... ]

Hawley — and, initially, only Hawley — announced he would object. With that, the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 went from being a pro-forma rubber stamp of a settled election to a showdown over Trump’s big lie that would make the Capitol a target for the mob.

As Trump’s insurrection simmered that day outside the Capitol prior to the attack, Hawley raised his fist in solidarity with the crowd.

[ ... ]

That’s not a leader, it’s a follower — one who follows the worst elements of his party, even after an attack that endangers him, his congressional colleagues and democracy itself. And that’s a legacy from which Hawley can never run.

[westeroswisdom]

Yep, Game of Thrones was brought up at Tuesday’s hearing of the House of Representatives committee investigating Donald Trump’s attempted coup on January 6th last year.

[T]he far-right media ecosystem, boosted by social media and right-wing YouTube bloggers, dutifully spread Trump’s message. The committee played a clip Tuesday of various pro-Trump personalities hyping the rally to millions of followers using increasingly violent rhetoric:    

At one point in the clip, pro-Trump YouTuber “Salty Cracker” ― who currently has 776,000 subscribers ― told his followers: “You better understand something, son. Red wave, bitch! There’s gonna be a red wedding going down Jan. 6.”

“Mother fucker, you better look outside,” he continued. “You better look out Jan. 6, kick that fucking door open and look down the street. There’s going to be a million-plus geeked-up, armed Americans.”

“Red Wedding” is a clear reference to an extremely violent “Game of Thrones” scene of the same name, in which attendees at what was intended to be a celebratory feast are instead betrayed, trapped inside a venue and murdered.

Coincidentally, that wasn’t the only “Game of Thrones”-inspired call for violence in the leadup to Jan. 6: In his address to the crowd that morning, Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, urged attendees to embrace “trial by combat” before marching on the Capitol.

George R.R. Martin is probably not terribly happy about MAGA zombies making references to his work. In 2017 he compared Donald Trump to Joffrey Baratheon. If anything, GRRM’s views about the Former Guy have only gotten increasingly negative. Perhaps as he’s working on The Winds of Winter he may use slightly disguised names of January 6th bad guys for bad guys in TWoW. 😉

[trumpbites]

For Trump, the Legal Shoes Finally Drop - The New York Times

For Trump, the Legal Shoes Finally Drop – The New York Times

Criminal Referrals: In its final public session, the Jan. 6 House committee accused Mr. Trump of inciting insurrection and other federal crimes as it referred him to the Justice Department for potential prosecution. Cassidy Hutchinson: The former White House aide told the panel in September that a lawyer aligned with Mr. Trump had attempted to influence her testimony. A Diminished Trump: The…

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 5, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 6, 2024

President Joe Biden launched his reelection campaign today with a speech at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. He spoke after a visit to nearby Valley Forge, where General George Washington quartered his troops from December 1777 to June 1778 during the Revolutionary War in which the former colonies sought to establish their independence from Great Britain.

Biden began the speech by outlining what the soldiers in the Continental Army quartered at Valley Forge had fought for. “America made a vow,” Biden said. “Never again would we bow down to a king.”

A “ragtag army made up of ordinary people” fought for what Washington called “a sacred cause,” he said: “Freedom, liberty, democracy. American democracy.” Valley Forge, he said, “tells the story of the pain and the suffering and the true patriotism it took to make America.”

Three years ago, he said, when insurrectionists tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power on January 6, 2021, “we nearly…lost it all.”

“Today, we’re here to answer the most important of questions,” Biden said. “Is democracy still America’s sacred cause?... This is not rhetorical, academic or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time.”

“And it’s what the 2024 election is all about.”

Biden described Trump’s attack on American democracy and warned that “Donald Trump’s campaign is about him, not America, not you.” Biden remembered the “smashing windows, shattering doors, attacking the police” of January 6. He recalled the rioters erecting a gallows while the crowd chanted, “Hang Mike Pence,” hunting for then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and injuring more than 140 police officers. 

Like the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Biden emphasized that while the whole world was watching the attack in horror and disbelief, and even as staff, family members, and Republican leaders pleaded with Trump to do something, the former president watched events unfold on the television in a little room off the Oval Office and “did nothing.”

Biden repeated the condemnation of former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) when he called that refusal to act “among the worst derelictions of duty by a president in American history.”

The president went on to explain how Trump continued to lie that he had won the 2020 presidential election despite losing recounts and 60 court cases. For those lies, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani was ordered last month to pay $148 million to election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss for defamation, and the Fox News Corporation agreed to pay $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems for lying that their machines had switched votes from Trump to Biden.

Then, when he had exhausted all his legal options, Trump urged his supporters to assault the Capitol. Since then, more than 1,200 people have been charged with crimes related to the events of that day; nearly 900 of them have pleaded guilty or been convicted. 

Trump has called those insurrectionists “patriots” and has promised to pardon them if he is returned to office. But normalizing violence as part of our political system destroys the reasonable debate and peaceful transition of power that is at the heart of democracy. Biden identified this danger, warning: “Political violence is never, ever acceptable in the United States political system—never, never, never. It has no place in a democracy. None. You can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American.” 

Biden noted that Trump has promised to continue to assault democracy, threatening “a full-scale campaign of ‘revenge’ and ‘retribution’...for some years to come.” Trump has said he “would be a dictator on day one,” called for the “termination of all the rules, regulation, and articles, even those found in the U.S. Constitution,” and echoed the language used in Nazi Germany by calling those who oppose him “vermin” and talking about the blood of Americans being poisoned by immigrants. 

“There’s no confusion about who Trump is and what he intends to do,” Biden said. 

Immediately after January 6, 2021, “even Republican members of Congress and Fox News commentators publicly and privately condemned the attack,” he said. “But now…those same people have changed their tune…. [P]olitics, fear, money, all have intervened. And now these MAGA voices who know the truth about Trump on January 6th have abandoned the truth and abandoned democracy.”

“They made their choice,” Biden said. “Now the rest of us—Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans—we have to make our choice. I know mine. And I believe I know America’s. We will defend the truth, not give in to the Big Lie. We’ll embrace the Constitution and the Declaration, not abandon it. We’ll honor the sacred cause of democracy, not walk away from it.”

“Today, I make this sacred pledge to you,” he said. “The defense, protection, and preservation of American democracy will remain, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency.” 

“America, as we begin this election year, we must be clear,” Biden said. “Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot.” “The alternative to democracy is dictatorship—the rule of one, not the rule of ‘We the People.’”  

“Together, we can keep proving that America is still a country that believes in decency, dignity, honesty, honor, truth,” he said. “We still believe that no one, not even the President, is above the law…. [T]he vast majority of us still believe that everyone deserves a fair shot at making it. We’re still a nation that gives hate no safe harbor…. We still believe in ‘We the People,’ and that includes all of us, not some of us.” 

In “that cold winter of 1777,” Biden said, referring back to the soldiers at Valley Forge, “George Washington and his American troops…waged a battle on behalf of a revolutionary idea that everyday people—like where I come from and the vast majority of you—…that everyday people can govern themselves without a king or a dictator.”

Americans “take charge of our destiny,” Biden said. “We get our job done with…the help of the people we find in America, who find their place in the changing world and dream and build a future that not only they but all people deserve a shot at.” 

“This is the first national election since [the] January 6th insurrection placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy,” Biden said. “We all know who Donald Trump is. The question we have to answer is: Who are we? That’s what’s at stake. Who are we?” 

And then he answered his own question, concluding with his characteristic faith in the American people. “After all we’ve been through in our history, from independence to Civil War to two world wars to a pandemic to insurrection,” he said, “I refuse to believe that, in 2024, we Americans will choose to walk away from what’s made us the greatest nation in the history of the world: freedom, liberty.”

“Democracy,” he said, “is still a sacred cause.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[vote-democrat-president-congress]

Smith recounts these facts to establish Trump’s motive and intent on January 6

December 5, 2023 (Tuesday)

A new filing today by Special Counsel Jack Smith in the case United States of America v. Donald J. Trump for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election shows Smith’s office establishing that Trump has a longstanding pattern of refusing to accept election results he dislikes.

As early as 2012, the filing notes, Trump baselessly alleged that voting machines had switched votes intended for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. In the 2016 campaign he “claimed repeatedly, with no basis, that there was widespread voter fraud,” and publicly refused to commit to accepting the results of that election. This pattern continued in 2020, but in that election he took active steps to seize power.

The filing introduced information that Trump, an agent, and an unindicted co-conspirator tried to start a riot at the TCF Center in Detroit as vote counting showed Biden taking the lead. As Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo points out, this scheme sounds much like the Brooks Brothers Riot of 2000 that stopped vote counting in Miami-Dade County in Florida. Roger Stone was a participant in the Brooks Brothers Riot; in 2020 he was working to keep Trump in office.

Smith’s team shows how this pattern continued to play out in the 2020 election, with Trump urging supporters like the Proud Boys to back him, falsely asserting that the election had been stolen, and attacking former supporters who denied that the election had been stolen. The pattern has continued until the present, with Trump calling those who were found guilty of offenses related to the attack on the U.S. Capitol “hostages” and claiming they were “treated horribly.”

Smith recounts these facts to establish Trump’s motive and intent on January 6, but his identification of a longstanding pattern indicates it would be a grave mistake to think Trump has any intention of campaigning fairly or accepting any result in 2024 other than his return to the White House.

New House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who has endorsed Trump for president and was a key organizer of the congressional effort to keep Trump in office, has promised to release all the surveillance footage from the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Trump supporters insist that the full tapes will reveal that the attack was not as bad as the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol showed. Johnson said that the tapes must be shared publicly for “transparency.”

Today, Johnson supported Trump’s message about January 6 when he said that he was making sure the faces of rioters are blurred in the surveillance footage. "We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don't want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ [Department of Justice] and to have other, you know, concerns and problems," he said. Johnson’s spokesperson quickly walked back the comment, saying Johnson meant to say that faces were blurred to prevent “all forms of retaliation against private citizens from any non-governmental actors.”

Also today, Kash Patel, who served on Trump’s national security team and is widely expected to return in a second Trump administration, expanded the authoritarian threats Trump people have been making to include the media. On former Trump ally Steve Bannon’s podcast, Patel promised that the Trump team would fill government positions from top to bottom with loyalists and would use the Department of Justice to go after those perceived to be Trump’s enemies.

“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Patel said. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections—we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

Yesterday, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who is promoting her new book, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning, called out Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) for his continuing hold on military appointments that kept more than 450 routine promotions from taking effect over the past ten months. Tuberville claimed his refusal to permit the nominees’ confirmations was an attempt to change Pentagon policy of permitting leave for service members in states that ban abortion to obtain abortion care elsewhere. But on NPR yesterday, Cheney wondered: “Why is Tommy Tuberville doing that? Is he holding those positions open so that Donald Trump can fill them?”

Today, under great pressure from members of his own party who worried the Democrats would change the rules to weaken the power of the Senate minority, Tuberville released his hold on most of the nominees. The Senate promptly confirmed 425 of them.

Still, Tuberville retained holds on 11 officers of the most senior rank. According to congressional reporter for Punchbowl News Andrew Desiderio, the positions left vacant are commander of Pacific Air Forces, commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, Air Component Command for the United States Indo-Pacific Command, commander for Air Combat Command, the head of the Navy’s Nuclear Propulsion Program, the head of Northern Command (which defends the United States and coordinates defenses with Canada, Mexico, and the Bahamas), the head of the U.S. Cyber Command, vice chief of staff of the Army, vice chief of staff of the Air Force, vice chief of Space Operations, and vice chief of Naval Operations.

Last night, Cheney explained to political commentator and television host Rachel Maddow exactly what a second Trump presidency would look like, Cheney said: "He would take those people who are the most radical, the most dangerous, who had the proposals that were the most dangerous, and he will put them in positions of supreme power. That's a risk that we simply cannot take."

Mark Joyella of Forbes took note of Maddow’s introduction last night, in which the host stressed the importance of protecting democracy. She began by emphasizing how much she and Cheney disagreed about everything in politics, so much so that it was as if they were on different planets at war with each other.

Maddow made that point, she said, because “in civic terms, in sort of American citizenship terms, I think it's really important how much we disagree. It's important how far apart we are in every policy issue imaginable. It is important that Liz Cheney is infinity and I am negative infinity on the ideological number line. It's important because that tells you how serious and big something has to be to put us, to put me and Liz Cheney, together on the same side of something in American life.”

The Rachel Maddow Show was the most watched news show on cable television last night, with 3.15 million viewers. The Fox News Channel’s show Hannity, hosted by personality Sean Hannity, had just under 2 million viewers.

It seems clear Americans are waking up to Trump’s threats to stack the government with loyalists, weaponize the Justice Department and military, deport 10 million people, and prosecute those he perceives to be his enemies in politics and the media. Interviewing Trump tonight, Hannity tried to downplay Trump’s statements about his authoritarian plans for a second term by getting him to commit to staying within the normal bounds of a president should he be elected in 2024. The first time he was asked, Trump sidestepped the question. So Hannity asked again. “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” he asked.

“Except for day one,” Trump responded.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson 

[follow-up-news]

Former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro was sentenced to four months in prison Thursday for criminal contempt of Congress, with federal prosecutors saying he “thumbed his nose” at the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Navarro was convicted in September on two counts for refusing to testify and provide documents to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, which issued its report and dissolved in late 2022 after Republicans won control of the House. The charge carried a mandatory minimum sentence of a month in prison. Federal prosecutors had sought six months for Navarro, saying he, “like the rioters at the Capitol, put politics, not country, first, and stonewalled Congress’s investigation.” Navarro, prosecutors said, “chose allegiance to former President Donald Trump over the rule of law.” U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta handed down the sentence Thursday and also ordered Navarro to pay a fine of $9,500.

[yourreddancer]

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

July 15, 2022 (Friday)

A late news dump tonight: the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has subpoenaed from the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) the text messages between agents on January 5 and January 6, 2021, that it learned Wednesday had been deleted. 

Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) told Secret Service director James Murray, who recently announced his upcoming resignation, that the committee wants all the texts by July 19, 2022.

Politico legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney noted that this is the first time the committee has subpoenaed an agency in the executive branch, at least publicly.That joins other legal news today. 

Trump confidant Steve Bannon tried again today to get his trial for contempt of Congress dismissed, arguing that because the court has refused to let him subpoena members of Congress, he cannot have a fair trial. That trial is due to start Monday.

Fani Willis, the Fulton County, Georgia, prosecutor, today told the chair of the Georgia Republican Party, David Shafer, as well as two state senators, that they could be indicted for their participation in the attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.

And the Department of Justice requested that the first defendant from the January 6 insurrection to be convicted at trial, Guy Reffitt, be sentenced to 15 years in prison. This is an upward adjustment of sentencing guidelines because the department is asking the judge to consider Reffitt’s actions as terrorism, since the offense for which he was convicted “was calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct.” 

Reffitt was a leader of the Texas Three Percenters militia gang, which calls for “rebellion” against the federal government. He came to Washington, D.C., for January 6. He attacked U.S. Capitol Police officers and encouraged others to do so before entering the Capitol armed with a handgun, where he targeted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). 

A camera on his helmet recorded Reffitt’s words that day. “I’m taking the Capitol with everybody f*cking else,” Reffitt told the people around him. “We’re all going to drag them m*therf*ckers out kicking and screaming. I don’t give a sh*t. I just want to see Pelosi’s head hit every f*cking stair on the way out. (Inaudible) F*ck yeah. And Mitch McConnell too. F*ck ‘em all. They f*cked us too many g*dd*mn years for too f*cking long. It’s time to take our country back. I think everybody’s on the same d*mn wavelength. And I think we have the numbers to make it happen…. [W]e’ve got a f*cking president. We don’t need much more. We just get rid of them m*therf*ckers and start over.”

Afterward, he boasted, “We took the Capital [sic] of the United States of America and we will do it again.” Back in Texas, Reffitt deleted a thread of messages between him and another planner—the FBI was able to recover it—and threatened to hurt his teenaged children if they reported him. Reffitt has a history of domestic violence, including threatening his wife with a gun.

  The hefty sentence request for Reffitt is likely to convince others implicated in the insurrection to cooperate.The timing of today’s legal news highlights that the prosecution of those who tried to destroy our government is imperative to uphold the rule of law.

On this date in 1870, Congress voted to readmit Georgia to the United States after the Civil War. So far as the people living through that era thought, this ended Reconstruction, which they conceived of as the reconstruction of the U.S. government. And that was it. 

While there were military tribunals for those who had committed war crimes– most of them concerning the treatment of prisoners of war—there was never a legal reckoning for even the leaders of those who had tried to destroy the nation, although their efforts had led to the deaths of 620,000 soldiers and sailors and cost the country more than $5 billion. 

In an attempt to be magnanimous, U.S. officials gave former Confederates no reason to abandon their loyalty to their failed nation. They clung to it through Lost Cause mythology, convincing themselves that theirs was the true version of America despite their defeat, and that their cause was noble. Georgia’s return to the Union depended on the state’s ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing Black men the right to vote, but within a year of Georgia’s readmission, white southerners were already undermining Black voting. Within a decade, they had regained control of their states and were pushing their Black neighbors into second-class citizenship.

Without any cost for adherence to the Lost Cause, there was no reason for Confederate symbols to disappear. They have continued to play an astonishingly large role in our society, and not just in the South. They have inspired those eager to dismantle the government ever since the Civil War. They have made a spectacular comeback since the 1980s until finally, on January 6, 2021, the Confederate battle flag flew in the U.S. Capitol.

This time, though, there is a chance to change the story. Prosecutions have January 6 participants like Reffitt trying to hide their actions, and jail time will almost certainly dampen the enthusiasm of those who were happy to be part of an insurrection until they discovered there was a legal cost. While U.S. leaders after the Civil War thought their best hope of building a nation based on racial equality was to avoid prosecutions, scholars who study the restoration of democracy after an authoritarian crisis are very clear: central to any such restoration is enforcing the rule of law.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection is dropping its subpoena of the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the software vendor Salesforce for information related to fundraising emails the party sent ahead of the attack, multiple media outlets reported.

The Washington Post first reported on Friday that counsel for the RNC and Salesforce were notified this week that the Committee is withdrawing the subpoena, deeming the information not necessary anymore at this stage of the investigation.

“Given the current stage of its investigation, the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol has determined that it no longer has a need to pursue the specific information requested in the February 23, 2022 subpoena that it issued to Salesforce,” Douglas Letter, the House general counsel, wrote in an email to the RNC and Salesforce, according to the Post.

Salesforce owns the platform that the RNC uses to fundraise.

The House Committee subpoenaed Salesforce for information related to RNC fundraising efforts in February, saying the committee and the Trump campaign solicited donations with unfounded claims that the 2020 presidential election was tainted by massive voter fraud. A Jan. 6 Committee spokesperson said in March that the Committee wanted to investigate the impact of false messages in the weeks leading up to the Capitol attack and where donations were directed.

The RNC filed a lawsuit to quash the subpoena in March, saying that it violated the First Amendment and Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and did not “advance a legislative purpose.” A federal judge rejected the lawsuit in May, saying that it did not violate the RNC’s constitutional rights and that the Select Committee’s interest in obtaining the information outweighed any burden placed on the RNC.

But an appeals court temporarily blocked the Committee from obtaining the records later that month while the RNC challenged the subpoena.

The decision comes as the Select Committee is expected to resume its public hearings on the insurrection later this month following a break.

The Select Committee and RNC did not immediately return requests from The Hill for comment. A spokesperson for Salesforce declined to comment.

[mariacallous]

The first thing that struck me in reading the executive summary of the Jan. 6 select committee’s final report last month was footnote number 50. The text it supports in the main document is the following bald statement: “As the Committee’s hearings demonstrated, President Trump made a series of statements to White House staff and others during this time period indicating his understanding that he had lost” the 2020 election.

But wait a minute, I thought as I read this. I don’t recall from the hearings Trump’s making statements indicating that he acknowledged privately that he had lost. He had seemed to me, rather, quite delusionally confident of the fraud he was alleging. Willful blindness, definitely, but actual knowledge that he had lost? I didn’t remember that. 

Yet there, in footnote 50, were four different references to transcripts that the committee claimed supported the sentence:

See, e.g., Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Transcribed Interview of General Mark A. Milley (Nov. 17, 2021), p. 121; Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Transcribed Interview of Alyssa Farah Griffin, (April 15, 2022), p. 62; Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Continued Interview of Cassidy Hutchinson, (Sep. 14, 2022), p. 113; Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Transcribed Interview of Kellyanne Conway, (November 28, 2022), pp. 79-84.

One of them, with Kellyanne Conway, was even recent—having taken place after the hearings this summer. 

I couldn’t look up the transcripts at the time because neither the full report nor the underlying material was available publicly yet. But in the weeks since, the committee has released both. 

The release of the full report reveals that this remarkable claim exists only in the executive summary. The committee does not allege in the report itself that Trump acknowledged his loss in repeated conversations to staff. The underlying material, meanwhile, allows us to check up on this arresting statement allegedly made by President Trump. 

So did he really admit privately he had lost? The answer, as I’ll explain, is yes-ish. But the evidence isn’t all that strong, which explains why the committee did not focus on this in its hearings or in the body of the report itself. Only one of the transcripts cited clearly supports the claim. Two sort of do, but it’s a matter of interpretation. And one—at least in my view—really does not. 

It is a very rare thing for a government body to show its work to the extent the Jan. 6 committee has done in its final report. 

The select committee did not just release a narrative report. It also released a huge trove of material that underlies that report. That trove includes hundreds of deposition and interview transcripts and also untold numbers of documents. The notes also navigate the reader through a giant public record, consisting of court filings, newspaper articles, public statements, and, yes, a great many tweets. It’s hundreds of thousands of pages all told.

Normally, notes in an investigative report point to interviews the reader can’t access. They point to grand jury transcripts, internal memoranda of interviews, or other materials the reader cannot simply click on and search.

But the committee here has given not just its interpretation of events and not just the raw material from which it drew its judgments, but also thousands of connections between the two. Those connections are the report’s endnotes.  

It’s a powerful model for future investigative bodies, one that allows anyone to check up on the committee’s interpretation of its evidence and one that offers pointers to journalists as to where to find the good stuff in the pile of material the committee has released. 

Reading the notes carefully reveals a number of different themes. 

[tomorrowusa]

Acyn on Twitter.

That’s historian Michael Beschloss on MSNBC.

On the 4th of July there are often re-enactments of events from American history such as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address or Washington crossing the Delaware River.

In the future will Americans be depicting Donald Trump throwing his food or trying to strangle a Service Service agent who wouldn’t drive him to an insurrection?

ICYMI...

Donald Trump is unbalanced and delusional. It would be dangerous to have him as a deputy sanitation commissioner in a small town – never mind the President of the United States with control over the US nuclear arsenal.

Nevertheless, most Republicans continue to make excuses for him and kowtow to his every whim.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 15, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

DEC 15, 2023

CNN reporters today pulled together evidence from a number of sources to explain how “a binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency.” The missing collection of documents was ten inches thick and contained 2,700 pages of information from U.S. intelligence and that of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies about Russian efforts to help Trump win the 2016 presidential election. 

The binder went missing in the last days of the Trump presidency and has not been recovered. Its disappearance has raised “alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed.”

Reporters Jeremy Herb, Katie Bo Lillis, Natasha Bertrand, Evan Perez, and Zachary Cohen have pieced together the story of how in his last days in office, Trump tried to declassify most of the information in the binder in order to distribute copies to Republican members of Congress and right-wing media outlets. According to an affidavit by reporter John Solomon, who was shown a copy of the binder, the plan was to begin releasing information from it on the morning of January 20, 2021, so that it would hit the news after President Joe Biden had been sworn in. 

But late on January 19, while Solomon was copying the documents, White House lawyers recalled the copies to black out, or redact, sensitive information, worrying that while most of the facts in the binder were apparently already public, the methods of collection and persons involved were not. At some point in that process, an unredacted copy of the binder disappeared. 

A former aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson, told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol last year that she thought Meadows took the unredacted binder with him. 

Today, in statements that seemed very carefully worded, Meadows’s lawyer, George Terwilliger, told CNN: “Mr. Meadows was keenly aware of and adhered to requirements for the proper handling of classified material, any such material that he handled or was in his possession has been treated accordingly and any suggestion that he is responsible for any missing binder or other classified information is flat wrong.” Terwilliger told the New York Times: “Mark never took any copy of that binder home at any time.” 

The missing binder was not among the material the Federal Bureau of Investigation recovered from Mar-a-Lago last year, and intelligence officials briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee about the missing information (the CNN story does not say that the House Intelligence Committee has been briefed). In April 2021, Trump allegedly offered to let the author of a book about him see the binder, saying “I would let you look at them if you wanted…. It’s a treasure trove…it would be sort of a cool book for you to look at.” 

The story of yet more missing classified information highlights that Judge Aileen Cannon, who was confirmed to her position after Trump lost the 2020 election, has permitted Trump to slow down United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, Waltine Nauta, and Carlos De Oliveira, the pending criminal case in which he and two aides are accused of mishandling classified documents under the Espionage Act as well as making false statements and engaging in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Perhaps even more strongly, at a time when House Republicans have declined to fund Ukraine’s war against Russia’s 2022 invasion, the story serves as a reminder of the role Russia played in Trump’s 2016 election and how, during Trump’s time in office, he continued to cultivate a relationship with Russia’s authoritarian president Vladimir Putin and to turn his back on America’s traditional democratic allies, including those in NATO. (At one point, he told National Security Advisor John Bolton, “I don’t give a sh*t about NATO.”) 

Indeed, Trump has suggested he would take the U.S. out of NATO if he returns to office, breaking the coalition that held first the Soviet Union and then Russia at bay since World War II. Such a betrayal would weaken all of the security alliances of the United States, according to Eastern European specialist Anne Applebaum, exposing the U.S. as an unreliable ally. As democracies ceased to work together, they would have to work with authoritarian governments, and after American political influence declined, so would the economic influence that has protected our economy. Authoritarian leaders like Putin would be the winners.

News about the missing binder also highlights just how hard Trump worked to convince his loyalists that that connection was a hoax. Although all U.S. intelligence services and the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee assessed that, in fact, Russia did intervene in the election to get Trump into the White House, many Trump loyalists continue to believe Trump’s lie that such interference did not happen. 

Trump’s determination to convince his followers that “Russia, Russia, Russia” was a hoax was in part an attempt to get out from under the legal implications of working with a foreign country to win an election but also, perhaps more profoundly, an attempt to make his followers believe his lies over reality. If he could make them believe him, rather than the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community and the Senate, they would be his to command.

Russia, Russia, Russia was an important precursor to the Big Lie that Trump, rather than Joe Biden, won the 2020 presidential election. The Big Lie has failed at every test of evidence, and yet Trump loyalists still say they believe it. 

Today, former Trump ally Rudy Giuliani continued to defend the idea that the 2020 election had been stolen, even after a jury of eight Americans said he must pay the eye-popping sum of $148,169,000 to Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman for defaming them by saying they had participated in election fraud—he made that up—and for emotional distress. Freeman and Moss had asked for $24 million each.

Of that verdict, $75,000,000 was for punitive damages, illustrating that spreading Trump’s lies so that they hurt individuals comes at a whopper of a cost. Giuliani had refused to cooperate in the case, although he admitted to the truth of the underlying facts, and he had continued to attack Moss and Freeman to reporters during the trial. 

Trump’s election lies that hurt companies are also costly, as the Fox News Corporation found when it settled with Dominion Voting Systems for $787 million over the media company’s lies about the 2020 election. 

Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) tried to address Trump’s attack on our democracy when this week they inserted into the National Defense Authorization Act a provision saying that no president can withdraw from NATO without approval from the Senate or from Congress as a whole. 

“NATO has held strong in response to Putin’s war in Ukraine and rising challenges around the world,” Kaine said. He added that the legislation “to prevent any U.S. President from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO reaffirms U.S. support for this crucial alliance that is foundational for our national security. It also sends a strong message to authoritarians around the world that the free world remains united.” 

Rubio added, “The Senate should maintain oversight on whether or not our nation withdraws from NATO. We must ensure we are protecting our national interests and protecting the security of our democratic allies.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[bloodfirewhiskeyink]

They need to send the whole group to prison

[reading-writing-revolution]

The January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol was the product of a months-long effort, led by former-President Donald Trump and enabled by members of Congress, state representatives, and political allies, to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election. Since that deadly attack, the House of Representatives’ Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attacks on the United States Capitol has engaged in a deliberate and largely quiet effort to investigate the facts, circumstances, and causes that led to the attack. As the Committee prepares to hold its first public hearings beginning on June 9, CREW is proud to be one of the leading voices for accountability. Below we provide answers to some of the common questions about the Committee’s work, authority, and quest for accountability.