scott perry 2

TRIFECTA 9 26

rename 2 12 23

no merri

see trump coup smith report

===

10 22 zombie epa 2 bak

===

LCV 3/5%

http://scorecard.lcv.org/moc/scott-perry}:

===

not in MTG b/c TP earlier group w/ more clout?

-=-=

CA-22, currently held by Republican Rep. David Valadao. Your contribution today will go directly to Randy Villegas.

: CA-48, currently held by Republican Rep. Darrell Issa. Your contribution today will go directly to Marni von Wilpert.

district: WI-03 currently held by Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden. Your contribution today will go directly to WI-03 Democratic nominee Rebecca Cooke

IA-01

R - Incumbent: Mariannette Miller-Meeks

D - Challenger: Christina Bohannan

Democrat Christina Bohannan came within 799 votes of flipping this seat in 2024, making this one of the most tantalizingly close rematches in the country. With the Iowa economy battered by tariffs, this is one of the party's best shots at a flip.

critical district: PA-10 currently held by Republican Rep. Scott Perry. Your contribution today will go directly to Janelle Stelson.

Mary Peltola's campaign for U.S. Senate. Sherrod

yahoo Order Date: September 23, 2026

Order Number: AB413164169

---

-=-=

WGAL

Perry attack ad targets Stelson with allegation her campaign calls fabricated

20 hours ago**Scott Perry's** campaign released an attack ad accusing Janelle Stelson of exposing herself naked to neighbors, but Stelson's campaign says the allegations are false and fabricated.

-=-=

RWW

Rep. Scott Perry Blames The Media For Not Explaining That Iran Is 'The Actual Aggressor' In The War 9 26

---

1 25 politico

special counsel Jack Smith’s just-released report provides fresh insights into his bid to hold Donald Trump responsible for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Smith insisted he amassed enough evidence to win a conviction if the case had made it to trial, and he laid out a comprehensive compendium of the facts he might have presented to a jury. At the same time, his report struck a defensive tone, as he sought to explain why the case never made it that far.

The public report is also incomplete. Its second volume, which pertains to Smith’s investigation of the classified documents found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate after he left office in 2021, remains secret.

Attorney General Merrick Garland does not intend to publicly release that portion of the report, though he wants to share it with select lawmakers. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has blocked any dissemination of it outside the Justice Department. And once Trump is inaugurated next week and assumes control of the department, it will be easy for him to forestall any formal release of Smith’s final assessment of the documents case.

Trump slams 'nut job' Jack Smith after judge temporarily blocks report

Still, the 137-page write-up on the election case is a final accounting of how Trump sought to derail the transfer of power four years ago, how investigators built and litigated an unprecedented conspiracy prosecution against a former president, and how that prosecution fizzled when Trump won back the White House.

Here are POLITICO’s top takeaways from the historic document.

Smith comes to Garland’s defense

A common sentiment on the left is that Garland was too deferential to Trump after Joe Biden took office and failed to unleash the full might of the department on the former president for nearly two years. The delay, critics say, made it much more difficult for Smith — once he was appointed in November 2022 — to bring Trump to trial before the 2024 election.

But Smith’s report emphasized that the Justice Department was aggressively investigating leads related to Trump long before the special counsel’s tenure began. Litigation tactics by Trump and his allies, Smith argued, were the key factors that slowed the process to a crawl.

For example, Twitter, newly purchased by Elon Musk, delayed Smith’s effort to access Trump’s account data for weeks despite a court order that ultimately resulted in the company being held in contempt and fined $350,000.

It took Smith more than a year to obtain text messages between Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark. And the department spent months fighting to access communications of John Eastman, a lawyer who helped devise Trump’s last-ditch efforts to remain in power.

The most protracted battles of all stemmed from Trump’s “broad invocation of executive privilege to try to prevent witnesses from providing evidence,” Smith wrote. It took months of secretive legal proceedings to secure testimony from Trump White House aides such as Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino and Pat Cipollone. Former Vice President Mike Pence also resisted testifying until a court ordered him to reveal some — but not all — details about his interactions with Trump. Smith noted that judges broadly rejected Trump’s privilege claims, with one holding that he was engaged in an “obvious” effort to delay the investigation.

Smith also drew attention to what may have been his biggest foil: the Supreme Court. He pointed out that the justices rebuffed his effort to put Trump’s presidential immunity claims on a similar timetable to the one the court adopted five decades earlier in litigation over Watergate and President Richard Nixon’s tapes.

And Smith argued that the Supreme Court’s resolution of Trump’s immunity assertion essentially guaranteed another round of litigation that would have been all but certain to return to the justices if Trump had not won the election and the prosecution had continued.

Smith’s path not taken: An insurrection charge

Much of Smith’s report amounts to a justification of the special counsel’s “charging decisions” — his reasons for bringing four felony counts against the former president. Smith also explained publicly for the first time his decision not to charge Trump with one of the gravest potential crimes in DOJ’s arsenal: inciting insurrection.

The bottom line, Smith said, was legal uncertainty about the federal insurrection statute. The law had not been used in 100 years. It may not have applied to a situation in which a sitting president sought to illegally retain power rather than an outside force seeking to depose a lawful administration. And, in a notable concession to Trump, Smith acknowledged the evidence didn’t show that Trump intended to cause “the full scope” of violence that occurred on Jan. 6, 2021.

“The evidence established that the violence was foreseeable to Mr. Trump, that he caused it, that it was beneficial to his plan to interfere with the certification, and that when it occurred, he made a conscious choice not to stop it and instead to leverage it for more delay,” Smith concluded. But federal investigators, he said, “did not develop direct evidence — such as an explicit admission or communication with co-conspirators — of Mr. Trump’s subjective intent to cause the full scope of the violence.”

A few tantalizing tidbits of evidence

Much of the evidence that Smith recounted has already appeared in prior court filings or was unearthed by the congressional investigation into Jan. 6. But there were a few striking new details in Smith’s report:

A Signal exchange between Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Trump DOJ official Jeff Clark in which Clark indicated a classified review of potential voter fraud evidence found “nothing helpful to P” — shorthand for President Trump.

Details of interviews with Trump’s fake electors in which some described concerns about being duped into a plan intended to “overthrow the government.”

An analysis that found Trump was watching Fox News on Jan. 6 when the broadcast aired an interview with a supporter marching to the Capitol who berated Pence for refusing Trump’s pressure to overturn the election. Moments later, Smith noted, Trump tweeted an attack on Pence, fueling the anger of the mob just as Pence was being evacuated to safety.

Will the public get to see the primary documents?

Smith’s report described the trove of evidence he assembled in narrative form. But the fate of the trove itself could be even more significant than his ultimate conclusions.

The House Jan. 6 select committee similarly mounted a two-year investigation and produced a voluminous final report. But it was the committee’s enormous cache of witness transcripts and primary source documents — drawn from Trump’s files in the National Archives, emails obtained through subpoenas and evidence produced during court battles — that has proved more enduring.

Smith reached into areas the select committee could not, getting grand jury testimony from Pence, Meadows and other top aides, including some returning to the White House next week. Those transcripts remain sealed, but there are several legal efforts underway to bring them into public view.

The Justice Department is due to respond to two of those efforts this week, a potential window into whether prosecutors may deem the public interest in the underlying materials of greater value than their continued secrecy, particularly now that the criminal case has been dropped.

===

an 10 24

Wednesday report published by The Atlantic, staff writer Russell Berman pinpoints "the narrative" that currently makes Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) "the most vulnerable Trump loyalist in the House."

Berman writes:

Perry, a former chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus who was first elected in 2012, had reportedly done plenty to aid former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The FBI seized Perry’s cellphone in 2022, which led to the revelation of text messages showing his extensive attempts to install an attorney general who would help keep Trump in office. Perry’s preferred candidate was Jeffrey Clark, a now-indicted Department of Justice official whose main qualification was spreading claims of election fraud.*

I started by noting that Perry was the one who’d introduced Trump and Clark. He cut me off.*

'An introduction?' he said, incredulously. 'Is that illegal now?' Perry accused me of repeating 'a narrative that has been promoted by the left' that the mainstream media have refused to verify. 'Somebody said, Can you introduce me? I said sure,' he explained, saying it was no different than if he had introduced me to one of his aides standing nearby. 'So no, I’m not embarrassed.'

This "narrative," Berman argues, puts the swing state lawmaker in the "most vulnerable" position.

"For a lot of normie, older Republicans, all that January 6 stuff was really a line of demarcation," Republican strategist Christopher Nicholas — a resident of Perry's district — told The Atlantic.

"Until this year, Perry had demonstrated even more political resilience than Trump; he outran him in 2020, winning his district while Trump narrowly lost Pennsylvania," Berman writes.

"That might not be the case in November. Both of their races are toss-ups," The Atlantic reporter continues. And with the Democrats vying for Perry's opponent — former news anchor Janelle Stelson — to defeat the MAGA congressman, Berman emphasizes "bigger underdog might be Perry."

The Atlantic's full report is available at this link (subscription required).

===

rnc no support? an 10 24

Why this GOP congressman 'just might' lose his seat: report - Alternet.org

===

mma

Scott Perry and right-wing host enthusiastically praised Project 2025

Prompted by host Chris Stigall, Perry pushed Project 2025 as a solution for conservatives to bring “some accountability” to government

Written by Eric Hananoki

Published 10/03/24

During an interview in July, Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) and right-wing podcaster Chris Stigall enthusiastically praised and defended Project 2025. After Stigall says he's “thrilled” that Project 2025 is “thinking beyond today,” Perry replied that he was “exactly right,” and touted the Heritage Foundation initiative, saying, “These people on the left ... they're scared to death that there's actually a plan.”

Project 2025 is the deeply unpopular, radical right-wing blueprint organized by The Heritage Foundation that is intended to provide policy and personnel recommendations to the next Republican presidential administration.

It has become an albatross for Trump, who has claimed that he knows “nothing” about the project despite his numerous connections to it.

But the project did get a strong defense during the July 13 edition of The Chris Stigall Podcast, where Perry and the show’s conservative host praised Project 2025.

Video

CitationFrom the July 13, 2024, edition of The Chris Stigall Podcast

Stigall began the discussion about Project 2025 by defending it, saying: “I don't think this is a huge scandal. I don't think there's anything secret or subversive about it. I totally understand what it is. The Heritage Foundation has the idea, we want to stock the halls of government, which are vast and full of left-wing progressives. We would like to actually bring conservatives from around the country in to stockpile and staff all of these many bureaucracies. I think it's nothing more complicated than that. Have I got it about right, Scott?”

Perry agreed, saying, in part: “Yeah, you've got it completely right. It's a coalition of different organizations that are generally like-minded but not completely that are trying to be prepared for a future Trump presidency.”

The two continued, with Stigall stating that he’s “thrilled” about Project 2025. Perry then said that liberals are attacking it because “there actually could be some accountability” in government and it’s a plan to “get rid of their agenda and stop their agenda.”

CHRIS STIGALL (HOST): I'm thrilled that conservatives for once are thinking beyond today. They're looking down the road because the left always does.

SCOTT PERRY (CONGRESSMAN): Yeah, that’s exactly right. And at this point, because of what happened the last time when President Trump came in, not knowing all the people in Washington and thinking that actually people in Washington would accept his agenda and know that there were career government employees. But there was a new sheriff in town and now we're going to do something different. And then he found out that's not how it works.

These people on the left are scared to death that there actually could be some accountability and that they're not going to be able to just sit in there and promote their leftist agenda and say, “Oh, Mr. President, we don't work for you. We're just going to wait you out for four years and we're going to continue to march towards communism.” They're scared to death that there's actually a plan and that the right [inaudible]paring to remove them from the halls of power and get rid of their agenda and stop their agenda. You know, they just saw that President Trump is an anomaly and they want to march towards socialism and Marxism and they don't want anybody to get in the way of that. And anything that looks like it could get in the way of that must be confronted and must be defeated. And so that's where this falls into that category.

Perry also has connections to The Heritage Foundation. He appeared on the of Kevin Roberts’ podcast and said he was “honored” and “thrilled” to be on the show. Roberts is the president of The Heritage Foundation and the architect of Project 2025.

And in January of this year, Perry co-wrote an op-ed with Victoria Coates criticizing a retracted plan by the National Park Service to remove a statue of William Penn in Pennsylvania. Coates is a Heritage Foundation vice president who is listed as a Project 2025 contributor.

Perry’s has deep connections with right-wing media, including with a 9/11 conspiracy theorist

Perry is a repeat guest on various right-wing media networks, including on Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News. He also has repeatedly appeared on the show of Ken Matthews and said during one appearance: “I love Ken Matthews. He's awesome. He's one of the only people in the media with courage to really talk about the important things.”

Matthews is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who devoted a show to pushing 9/11 conspiracy theories with a leading 9/11 conspiracy theorist. He also said, “I question the crash at Flight 77 into the Pentagon. I have so many questions about the Pentagon. Everything about it. The building, the damage, the burn. I always question burns and explosives and things like that. But no video of the aircraft.” (In fact, there was video of the aircraft.)

Matthews also said: “I lost respect for science over 9/11. That’s when I really lost respect for scientists, excuse me. I don’t — I respect science, but the scientists? What 9/11 proved, what COVID proved, scientists are just as buyable as everybody else.”

Perry has also shared an antisemitic meme and a post from a social media account that has promoted pro-Nazi material, shared white nationalist propaganda, and attacked people for being Jewish.

---

an 6 24

Buttigieg dismantles MAGA lawmaker’s 'factually incorrect' claims at EV hearing

transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pennsylvania) have a history of clashing on environmental policies and electric vehicles, and the two of them butted heads once again during a congressional hearing on Thursday morning, June 6.

When Perry grilled Buttigieg, he responded to the far-right MAGA congressman's claims about the Biden Administration's "dictatorial" policies on electric vehicles — and gave him a thorough fact-check.

The Democratic transportation secretary told Perry, "Given time is limited, I will confine myself to addressing the factually incorrect portions of what you have said — beginning with the assertion that EV sales are going down. They are, in fact, going up."

When Perry claimed that those EV sales are "government sales," Buttigieg responded that he was referring to "private sales too."

"More private citizens buy EVs than government purchases," Buttigieg told Perry.

The Biden transportation secretary went on to tell Perry, "Let me address the second factual mistake in these remarks, which is that EV costs are getting higher. They are, in fact, getting lower, and according to J.D. Power, have now reached parity or are slightly lower than gas-powered cars."

Buttigieg also address EV sales for 2024's first quarter, adding, "The third incorrect assertion you made is that sales dropped in Q1; they did not drop in Q1 compared to the previous year."

*Watch the full video below or at this link.

---

GOP rep who had phone seized by FBI as part of J6 investigation now has oversight over it

w ronny jaCKSON

---

AN 1 24

In a Sunday, January 7 editorial, The Philadelphia Inquirer urges voters to consider ousting three longtime lawmakers this year over their Donald Trump-influenced lack of "integrity."

The newspaper's editorial board calls out the "disgraced" actions of US Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), and Pennsylvania's own — US Representative Scott Perry (R), as well as State Senator Doug Mastriano (R-Franklin), noting "all three" public officials "are up for reelection this year."

"Unfortunately, Mastriano, Perry, and Menendez know nothing about integrity," the board emphasizes, and "voters should keep that in mind."

Despite the fact Menendez was "charged with taking bribes in return for using his power to benefit foreign governments" in September — and just last week — indicted again on charges alleging he abused "his office to help a New Jersey developer obtain millions of dollars in investment from a fund with ties to the government of Qatar" — the senator says he's "not going anywhere."

The board writes:

*Perry defied a subpoena from colleagues in the House that investigated events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. The final House reportmentions Perry 22 times and referred him to the Ethics Committee.

*Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.) said Perry sought a pardon from Trump during his final days in office, which Perry denied. FBI agents seized Perry’s telephone, though the congressman said he was not a target of any federal investigation

"Mastriano spread false information about vote totals in Pennsylvania, though like Perry, Mastriano did not challenge the votes regarding his state Senate race. Mastriano used campaign funds to bus protesters to Washington and marched to the Capitol with insurrectionists," the editors note, adding there's "nothing more egregious than a public official participating in a plot to overturn a presidential election."

"None of them have any business serving in a government the authorities say they worked to subvert. Yet, despite allegations that they abused their office, each man continues to pocket their six-figure, taxpayer-funded salaries," the editors emphasizes. "There was a time when disgraced elected officials would at least resign for the sake of the institution and the public they served. But instead, taxpayers are stuck for now."

---

an 12 23

just weeks after the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals unsealed documents revealing U.S. Congressman Scott Perry's (R-PA) conversations in his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, a federal judge on Tuesday gave the Department of Justice permission to access almost "1,700 records recovered" from the Pennsylvania lawmaker's cell phone, The Washington Post reports.

Politico reported a few of Perry's interactions, including:

{A Dec. 12, 2020, text exchange with Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel discussing efforts to challenge Joe Biden’s victory in the election.}:

{A series of exchanges between Perry and a former DOJ colleague, Robert Gasaway, between Dec. 30, 2020, and Jan. 5, 2021, in which Perry embraced a plan to have then-Vice President Mike Pence 'admit testimony' prior to the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021. Perry agreed to 'sell[] the idea' with a call to Trump, Pence and Trump adviser John Eastman, but Perry later alerted Gasaway that Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, 'will not allow access.'}:

The "most revealing" interaction, Politico noted, was a conversation the GOP leader had with ex-U.S. Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark — and Donald Trump Georgia co-defendant — in which Perry told Clark that Trump was upset with Clark for using the Justice Department to defend Pence against a lawsuit brought by another House member, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas)."

Per the Post, on Tuesday, "Chief U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg of Washington, D.C., gave investigators access to 1,659 records and withheld 396 others after a federal appeals court directed him to individually review 2,055 communications from Perry's phone to decide which were protected by the Constitution’s 'speech or debate' clause, which grants members of Congress immunity from criminal investigation when acting in their official capacities."

According to the report, "Tuesday's order will determine which messages investigators with special counsel Jack Smith can actually use as potential evidence in any case, pending an expected renewed appeal by Perry, part of legal fight that has tied up the records for more than a year."

---

12 23 an

. Scott Perry (R-10th District) is among nearly 200 people including former Vice President Mike Pence whose names appear on a list of potential witnesses produced by prosecutors in the Georgia election interference case against former President Donald Trump, according to a report.

Citing sources who had reviewed the list and people who confirmed they had been told they may be called to testify, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the document also lists Trump administration officials, including former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr and former advisor Steve Bannon.

A 98-page indictment obtained by Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis in August charges Trump and 18 others with racketeering in connection with an alleged effort to change election results in Georgia, where Trump narrowly lost to President Joe Biden in 2020.

Perry, whose district covers part of central Pennsylvania, has not been charged in either of the election interference cases against Trump. A call to Perry’s Washington, D.C., office on Friday was not returned.

The witness list also includes Cassidy Hutchinson, a one-time top aide to Trump’s former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and several Georgia officials including Gov. Brian Kemp, Attorney General Chris Carr, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, the Journal-Constitution reported.

While not every person on the list is likely to be called to testify, the newspaper said the scope of the list shows the breadth and depth of the evidence prosecutors plan to present in their effort to prove Trump — and his now 15 co-defendants — guilty.

Prosecutors reached plea agreements with four people charged in the indictment including Trump campaign lawyers Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro and Jenna Ellis.

The select House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol invited Perry to testify and later subpoenaed Perry, citing his effort to help Trump install Jeff Clark, a former Justice Department official who was receptive to Trump’s election fraud claims, as acting attorney general.

Perry refused to testify, but the committee found in its final report that Perry had tried to help Trump overturn the results of the election.

A hearing in June 2022 centered on Perry’s role in efforts to pressure the Justice Department to support unsubstantiated claims of election fraud. The committee noted that Perry had called Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in January 2021 to urge him to speak with Clark and that he brought Clark to the White House to meet Trump in December, after a meeting in which Perry and other Republicans discussed how to overturn the election.

Perry is also fighting to keep Special Counsel Jack Smith, whose investigation led to Trump’s indictment in a Washington, D.C. federal court, from obtaining access to messages on his personal cell phone, which the FBI seized in August 2022.

A document unsealed in the case earlier this month details Perry’s discussions of efforts to challenge the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania and Georgia. It notes that the data extracted from Perry’s phone includes information about a draft letter Clark drafted to be sent to officials in Georgia and other states that the Justice Department was investigating serious allegations of election fraud that might impact the outcome of the election.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and Twitter.

---

an 8 23 no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/trump-fake-elector-prosecutions-congress/

Trump fake elector prosecutions could soon ensnare members of Congress

Matt Laslo

August 04, 2023

WASHINGTON – The justice system is closing in on former President Donald Trump, and soon, some expect that dragnet will ensnare elected members of Congress.

Before lawmakers left town for a month-long recess, Raw Story caught up with two Republicans the U.S. House January 6 select committee named as central to the scheme to get then-Vice President Mike Pence to certify slates of fake electors after Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.

The two lawmakers were dismissive and said no prosecutors, either local or federal, had contacted them in their quest to hold fake electors and their enablers accountable.

“Not me. I've gotten nothing,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) –who allegedly tried to pass Wisconsin fake electors to Pence — told Raw Story at the Capitol. “There’s nothing to come after me for.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI)

Johnson also dismissed the fake elector case in Michigan as “absurd.”

Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) – chairman of the House Freedom Caucus – also brushed aside concerns and said he hasn’t been contacted.

“No,” Perry – who the January 6 select committee flagged to the House Ethics Committee for refusing to sit for an interview – told Raw Story while walking to the Capitol. “I don’t have any concerns.”

Others aren’t so sure. During the Jan. 6 select committee proceedings, formerRep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) accused Perry of asking Trump for a pardon after the failed insurrection.

ALSO READ: Mark Meadows ‘flipped hard’ on Trump: ex-January 6 committee adviser

“Look at the congressmen and their text messages, they obviously were in some coordinating function. The issue is, does it rise to the level of indictment?” former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA) – who served as an adviser to the Jan. 6 committee –told Raw Story this week. “But as this testimony comes out, I think they're going to get on one of those things called a Pucker Factor 10. I think they're going to be biting buttonholes in their underwear when the actual evidence comes out.”

Perry and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows exchanged at least 62 text messagesbetween the 2020 election and President Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021. In one exchange, Perry informed Meadows they’d begun the “cyber portion” of their efforts to overturn the election results in Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona.

Hot pursuit of fake electors

In July, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel dropped felony charges on 16 Republicans she alleges were at the center of her state’s fake elector scheme. Last week, the Associated Press reported the FBI and Justice Department questioned Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe earlier this year.

The scheming around fake electors is also central to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump. He dubs the “criminal scheme” to send slates of fake electors to Congress the “Wisconsin Memo.”

“The plan began in early December,” the indictment reads, “and ultimately, the conspirators and the Defendant’s Campaign took the Wisconsin Memo and expanded it to any state that the Defendant claimed was “contested” — even New Mexico which the Defendant had lost by more than ten percent of the popular vote.”

The indictment then quotes a Dec. 6 email from former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that accompanied the Wisconsin Memo.

“We just need to have someone coordinating the electors for states,” Meadows is quoted on page 23 of the indictment as sending campaign staff.

Then, on Dec. 27 – just over a week away from the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. – the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, told Trump, according to the indictment, “that the Justice Department could not and would not change the outcome of the election.”

“Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump is quoted as replying.

The evidence speaks for itself, Riggleman tells Raw Story.

“To quote Hunter Thompson: facts are a million-pound s— hammer. And fact-based insights based on data is a 2-million-pound s— hammer,” Riggleman said.

All eyes are now watching to see if other state attorneys general follow Michigan’s lead and seek prosecutions for those involved in the fake elector plot, including Republicans on Capitol Hill.

“I give credit to the attorney general because people are not above the law, and they broke the law,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) recently told Raw Story. “These are people that lied about the most important thing, which is our democracy.”

From Your Site Articles

Ginni Thomas 'may have crossed the line' into criminality with fake electors plot: former federal prosecutor ›

Special counsel gives two fake Trump electors immunity to compel testimony ›

Michigan AG indicts 16 people in Trump fake electors plot: report ›

Sewers to swamps

It seems improbable now that Perry, whose record of wide-swinging claims goes back well before 2020, could have climbed the party ranks so quickly.

Perry once recklessly suggested, on live air, that ISIS was responsible for the 2018 mass shooting in Las Vegas. On another occasion, he accused then-CNN host Chris Cuomo of fabricating the extent of devastation in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in 2017.

In a 2017 town hall meeting, Perry reportedly once blamed pollution on the almighty. While defending proposed budget cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, Perry criticized the agency's Chesapeake Bay cleanup plans, claiming only certain polluters were targeted while other culprits were unfairly ignored.

"If you are spiritual and you believe in God, one of the violators was God because the forests were providing a certain amount of nitrates and phosphates to the Chesapeake Bay," he said.

That claim, unsurprisingly, was debunked by experts who note that water-side trees provide pollution runoff protection. But his divine deflection may have been less surprising to his constituents.

Perry was running his family's business, Hydrotech Mechanical Services, in 2002 when the company was caught dumping sewage sludge onto the banks of Stony Run Creek in south-central Pennsylvania. The state charged Perry with altering chemical-monitoring documents and he narrowly avoided a felony conviction. Instead, his company paid a $5,000 fine and Perry completed the state's Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition in what he called a "last-minute, at-the-courtroom deal that was never supposed to happen, but it did."

It wouldn't be the last time Perry would face accusations of hiding evidence.

Fireside chats

In the months after Trump's 2020 electoral defeat, former chief of staff Mark Meadows kept his office fireplace well-kindled. The fire was lit first thing in the morning by staff, his former aide testified, then heaped with logs throughout the day. And every so often, Meadows would walk over to his fireplace, remove its covering, and throw a few documents into the fire.

Meadows had been the chair of the House Freedom Caucus until 2019, a post Perry now holds, and the two men knew each other well. Perry had begun having meetings with Meadows that December, the aide said, arriving with physical papers and PowerPoint presentations to discuss former Vice President Mike Pence's role in certifying the 2020 election results — and what Perry "believed could happen on Jan. 6."

Eventually, Perry brought a few others to meet with Meadows, the aide said. With the fireplace lit and a room full of warm bodies, Meadows left his office door propped open. The aide saw Perry and the others inside, and sawMeadows again burning documents.

Perry's spokesman has denied he was ever part of these discussions, citing a Jan. 6 tweet from the congressman condemning the violence at the Capitol. But just hours after the attack, Perry joined other Republicans on the House floor in a failed attempt to prevent his own state's electoral votes from being counted. Perry would then spend months parroting Trump's baseless claims of election theft, arguing that Pennsylvania's 7 million votes should be thrown out.

Ultimately, the same aide who saw Perry leave Meadows' office amid the presumed or apparent destruction of documents would testify that Perry was among several members of Congress who had asked for her help in securing a preemptive presidential pardon. Perry has denied this, although not under oath.

Perry's Democratic hall pass

Eventually, members of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 events developed a clearer picture of Perry's role in Trump's failed bid to overturn the 2020 election results.

In a trove of texts leaked in December 2022, Perry and Meadows' 2020 exchanges surfaced, illuminating an array of schemes and outlandish notions aimed at reversing Trump's defeat. Perry sent YouTube conspiracy-theory videos about election-meddling Italian satellites, asking Meadows why the Italian government couldn't help the group's cause. Perry suggested seizing voting machines with a "cyber forensic team" after the election, and putting them under lock and key.

Perry went on to urge Meadows to get Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen replaced with a Trump-friendly figure in the DOJ, Jeffrey Clark. After Trump ordered Rosen to declare the election corrupt, Rosen refused. Trump responded by threatening to replace Rosen with Clark, who'd concocted a plan to help overturn the election results, but the then-president backed down from after a fiery meeting where several DOJ officials and Trump's own White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, threatened to quit in response. Those exchanges are now part of the reason the DOJ wants access to Perry's cell phone contents.

But back in July of 2022, House Oversight Committee members knew significantly less about Perry's role.They subpoenaed Perry, who responded by denying the legitimacy of the committee he now sits on, and refused to testify.

The committee's chair at the time, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., had the authority to file contempt charges against Perry. But as CNN's Manu Raju reported, Raskin seemed to have "little appetite to refer House Republicans who defy subpoenas to DOJ on contempt charges -- saying it could lead to 'wild goose chases.'

"I don't know that Congress can take a member of Congress to court under the speech or debate clause," Raskin said, referring to Perry's defense that his cell phone conversations were immune from collection. "But our point here is not to come up with, you know, a dozen new dazzling theories to end up in a lot of wild goose chases all over the land."

"Our point is to bring back a report to the American people to Congress about what happened to us," Raskin told Raju.

Rather than facing contempt charges, Perry was referred to the House Ethics Committee, along with other members who refused to obey subpoena orders. But with a Republican majority in the House and Kevin McCarthy holding the speaker's gavel, both the Ethics Committee and the House ethics review office have become partisan chokepoints.

These days, Raskin sees Trump's indictment as imminent.

"We think there will be charges probably on some things we didn't even have, because we don't have all of the prosecutorial resources that the Department of Justice has, and so we think they probably collected a lot more evidence than we got," he told MSNBC on Friday.

Even if Raskin's prediction is correct, Perry's role in Trump's Jan. 6 plans may remain under a shroud of congressional secrecy. The party whose subpoenas he once dodged now, for its own reasons, has Perry's back in his tug-of-war with the DOJ.

On Feb. 23, the DOJ will get its chance to ask an appeals court in Washington for access to Perry's phone contents. House Democratic leaders will once again fight to keep Perry's evidence from coming out at all.

20 hard rt held mccarthy hostage

United States Congressman Scott Perry (R-Pennsylvania) claimed on Sunday's edition of This Week that there is nothing remiss about him serving on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's (R-California) proposed committee to investigate the Justice Department's probes of the January 6th, 2021 Capitol insurrection, despite the fact that he was a central player in former President Donald Trump's corrupt scheme to remain in power after he lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.

According to the now-disbanded House Select Committee that amassed evidence of a vast conspiracy behind the January 6th Capitol attack, Perry was the brains behind a plot to replace then-Attorney General Bill Barr with Jeffrey Clark, who was the acting assistant attorney general for the civil division at DOJ during the Trump presidency. The plan was to fire Barr and install Clark in exchange for his cooperation in the ploy to have fraudulent electors from key swing states – such as Pennsylvania – award the Electoral College votes that Biden won to Trump. This ruse was based on Trump's false insistence that widespread voter fraud cost him the election. There is no evidence that this was the case, yet it remained the foundation of Trump's efforts to overturn the election and thwart the peaceful transfer of power.

In August 2022, the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized Perry's cell phone. White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the Select Committee that Perry purportedly sought a presidential pardon from Trump, although he denied having done so.

Regardless, however, these facts prompted ABC News moderator George Stephanopoulos to grill Perry on the ethics of his participating in congressional investigations of the agencies with which he is entangled.

"The speaker has also reportedly said that he's going to appoint a church-style committee to investigate the investigations. Since you’re part of the investigation by the Justice Department, will you – will you pledge not to serve on that committee?" Stephanopoulos asked the GOP lawmaker.

Perry objected to the question itself:

Well, why should I be limited – why should anybody be limited just because someone has made an accusation? Everybody in America is innocent until proven otherwise. And I would say this, the American people are really, really tired of the persecution and the instruments of federal power being used against them. We're talking aboutparents that go to school board meetings for the schools that they pay for with their taxes and having the temerity to question the curriculum, and then they're put on, you know, the red-flagged, or they’re flagged by the Department of Justice and the FBI for attending a meeting. That's not what America is supposed to be about. That sounds like some tin horn third-world dictatorship. Sure, we're going to investigate and we need to. We need to make sure that these agencies aren't running amuck and aren’t out of control which clearly they are.

Stephanopoulos pressed Perry a second time:

Doesn't that pose a conflict to you since you’re also part of the investigation?

Again, Perry deflected:

So, should everybody in Congress that disagrees with somebody be barred from doing the oversight and investigative powers that Congress has? That's our charge. And again, that's appropriate for every single member regardless of what accusations are made. I get accused of all kinds of things every single day, as does every member that serves in the public eye. But that doesn't stop you from doing your job. It is our duty and it is my duty.

Watch below or at this link.

an 12 22

no lnx docs

'They will ruin my life': January 6th panel publishes additional testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson

Brandi Buchman and Daily KosStaff December 22, 2022

On Thursday, the Jan. 6 committee published two transcripts from its extensive interviews with Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump White House aide who offered some of the most damning and explosive testimony to emerge from the 18-month probe of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

When she appeared publicly before the committee this summer, Hutchinson recounted how former President Donald Trump waved off warnings from his security detail about armed people in the crowd and urged that they be allowed to pass through metal detectors unmolested. She revealed learning about how Trump had lunged at the neck of his own Secret Service agent when his request to be ferried to the Capitol after the speech at the Ellipse was denied. She recalled the secrecy of her boss, former chief of staff Mark Meadows, who allegedly burned paperwork after a meeting with Rep. Scott Perry, an outspoken advocate of Trump’s Big Lie.

Hutchinson’s testimony was an embarrassment of riches for the committee, filling in blank spots left open by less-than-cooperative Trump White House officials. But the transcripts released Thursday also illuminate the huge pressure she came under by testifying.

Hutchinson told the committee that she recalled telling her mother plainly: “I’m f*cked.”

Cassidy Hutchinson Sept 14 by Daily Kos

She was “f*cked,” she said, because she was effectively trapped.

She didn’t have the ability to shell out huge sums of cash to attorneys who could represent her when she went before the committee so was stuck with Stefan Passantino, a Trump White House lawyer whose fees were being paid by the former president’s Save America political action committee.

“I am completely indebted to these people,” she told her mother, the transcript shows. “And they will ruin my life Mom, if I do anything they don’t want me to do.”

[Cassidy Hutchinson Sept 15 by Daily Kos

She went to her estranged father, a Trump supporter, and asked him for help.

“I drove up to New Jersey, and I went to his house one night and begged him. It’s probably the one thing I regret in all of this, I wish I didn’t stoop to that level because it was a no— but I begged him to help me. I said I would pay him back, like, ‘name your interest rate,’” she said. “Like I just need help. And I remember saying to him, ‘you have no idea what they’re going to do to me if I have to get an attorney with Trump world,’ because he’s a very big Trump supporter, as is his own right, and I don’t—it’s not being critical, it’s just a fact. And he just didn’t get it. And I didn’t expect him to. But I just left there feeling defeated.”

Passantino, she told the committee, urged her to skimp on details when answering the investigator’s questions. He advised her to mislead the committee, she said, though she stressed that he did not instruct her to lie explicitly.

“I want to make this clear to you,” Hutchinson said. “Stefan never told me to lie. He specifically told me, ‘I don’t want you to perjure yourself but ‘I don’t recall’ isn’t perjury.”

She remembered him adding: “They don’t know what you can and can’t recall.”

He also suggested that she avoid meeting with the committee altogether when she had an appointment in June. She should consider drawing a contempt of Congress charge instead of testifying, he allegedly advised. It would be an unpleasant risk but a smaller one.

Hutchinson said Passantino told her, “running to the right is better for you.”

Passantino represented Hutchinson during three of her depositions before she hired a different attorney. The transcripts published on Thursday are dated Sept. 14 and Sept. 15, both dates when Passantino was not representing her. For these meetings, Hutchinson was represented by attorney Jody Hunt.

The committee has not yet published its final report in full or the complete record of its witness transcripts. Her earlier interviews under Passantino’s representation are expected to be included in that group.

When news first broke Wednesday about Passantino’s alleged advice to Hutchinson, he denied any wrongdoing in statements to reporters. Hutchinson, he said, was truthful and cooperative and he never instructed her to mislead the committee. His biography, meanwhile, has been pulled off the webpage of the law firm where he serves as partner.

During her initial interviews with the committee prior to September, Hutchinson said Trump aides would reach out to her. Jason Miller and Justin Clark extended potential job offers to her after she met with the select committee for the first time. The next time she was scheduled to testify, she said Ben Williamson, an aide to her former boss Mark Meadows called her on the eve of her appearance.

‘Mark wants me to let you know that he knows you’re loyal,” Williamson said in a voicemail, Hutchinson recalled. “He knows you’ll do the right thing tomorrow and that you’re going to protect him and the boss.”

The “boss” was watching, Passantino would later hint to her.

an 12 22

after the 2020 presidential election, Rep. Scott Perry was among Pennsylvania’s most vocal promoters of the Big Lie. Perry falsely claimed that widespread voter fraud occurred in the Keystone State — a claim that has been repeatedly debunked — and pushed for its electoral votes to be taken away from the Democrat who legitimately won the state: now-President Joe Biden.

Then, after the January 6, 2021 insurrection, Perry (who chairs the far-right House Freedom Caucus) asked outgoing then-President Donald Trump for a preemptive pardon, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is continuing to investigate the January 6, 2021 insurrection and the events that led up to it. After the 2022 midterms, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel, Jack Smith, to head the investigation. And the DOJ, CNN reports, is trying to “gain access” to text messages that Perry sent during that late 2020/early 2021 lame duck period as part of that probe.

CNN’s Katelyn Polantz, in an article published on December 14, explains, “The investigative work, now overseen by Special Counsel Jack Smith, is significant given that Perry texted then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about advice from a ‘cyber forensic team’ he was in touch with after the 2020 election. Perry believed election security was compromised, contributing to Donald Trump’s loss of the presidency, and wanted to preserve voting machines after the election. That led the Pennsylvania lawmaker to be in touch with powerful Trump backers, including (former White House Chief of Staff Mark) Meadows, Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark and others who pushed false claims of election fraud.”

In a text sent to Meadows on November 10, 2020, Perry, according to Polantz, wrote, “Plz tell every state senior that they need to 1. Preserve the specific voting machines (scanners)…. Please ensure widest dissemination and action.”

Polantz reports, “Perry’s communications with Meadows suggest the congressman was keen to disseminate the same types of direction to others. He then asked Meadows for contacts in Wisconsin and Arizona, andMeadows later referred him to another Republican member of Congress, Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy…. CNN first reported in the spring on the Meadows texts, after obtaining 2319 text messages that Meadows had sent and received between Election Day 2020 and the 2021 inauguration. The texts were among those selectively provided by Meadows to the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection.”

In August 2022, DOJ investigators “seized” Perry’s cell phone “as part of” its January 6 investigation.

“Perry sued the Justice Department days after the search, then quickly asked the court to put the public-facing lawsuit on hold,” Polantz notes. “The Justice Department approached Perry’s phone seizure and other phone seizures from Trump allies in two parts, according to sources familiar with the investigation and public filings. DOJ would image the phone through an initial warrant and then seek a second warrant through confidential court proceedings to access the data…. Perry, according to his lawsuit, tried to hold off federal investigators from accessing his phone data by claiming some of it was personal or protected by the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, which protects the work of members of Congress.”

https://www.alternet.org/meadows-2658957827/

an raw 12 22

The massive trove of text messages turned over by Mark Meadows to the House select committee show Republican elected officials were willing to violate the U.S. Constitution on "bizarre" and obviously phony evidence.

Talking Points Memo reporter Hunter Walker obtained the messages, which show the former White House chief of staff communicating with GOP officials at all levels of government about far-fetched conspiracy theories to justify overturning Donald Trump's election loss, and he told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that their lack of sophistication was genuinely shocking.

"We're touching on something that is really a central thing here," Walker said. "I covered the Trump White House, and a big question is how many people are in on the joke and how many people are true believers. I first, you know, became familiar with the text log when i was working on my book, The Breach, which is about the Jan. 6 investigation. I co-wrote it with [former GOP lawmaker] Denver Riggleman. He knows a lot of these people, and he was shocked when he opened the text log. He led the [select committee's] phone team, it was like looking into the mouth of madness, and even with that introduction, I had a similar reaction."

"Adults in government, not only engaging in frighteningly undemocratic language, but their base intelligence is called into question," Walker continued. "You're talking about the wild Italian theory, people were taking it seriously. We see another instance where someone has a bizarre theory from a Romanian YouTube video that any of us would know not to tweet, based on stuff from 2005 that they somehow thought carried over to 2022.The information literacy of our members of Congress is called into question here, and that's part of why we thought it was more important to present more of the totality of the these texts you have seen anywhere before, and our text team made sure you can see them in a phone as they were received, because the typos, the wild links, all of this is really important."

"One last point, and this is something that shouldn't be lost in this discussion," he added. "We see the pressure, we see it in real time in these texts on people like Doug Ducey, that was on people like Brad Raffensperger, that was on people like the Arizona attorney general. Scott Perry, the same guy sending this Italian theory, is talking about lobbying to have Trump pressure the Italian government and Pennsylvania legislatures, and you know, I think one of the things we see is if these people had given into the pressure, all of this plotting just might have worked."

Watch belowor at the link

why wd he comply? now?

https://www.alternet.org/meadows-2658957827/

Former President Donald Trump and allies’ attempted coup and the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol Building was egged on by a number of Republicans. Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, in December 2021, even recommended that Trump declare martial law in order to remain in the White House. And Flynn isn’t the only Trump supporter who had martial law in mind. According to the January 6 select committee, Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina had the same idea.

In an article published by Rolling Stone on December 13, journalist Charisma Madarang reports that in late 2020 and early 2021, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was in touch with “34 members of Congress” via text messaging about Trump’s efforts to remain in power. Meadows, according to Madarang, was forced to “hand over 2319 text messages to the House select committee.” And in one of them, dated January 17, 2021, Norman recommended martial law.

January 17, 2021 was 11 days after the January 6 insurrection and only three days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration. In that text message to Meadows, Norman wrote, “Mark, in seeing what’s happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of no return in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!”

Norman referred to martial law as “Marshall law” in his texts, and so did Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

“By January 17,” Madarang writes, “Greene told Meadows that several Republicans in Congress wanted Trump to declare martial law. She, too, appeared to think giving power to the military was named after a person named Marshall.”

Greene, in a text, told Meadows, “In our private chat with only Members, several are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call for Marshall law. I don’t know on those things. I just wanted you to tell him. They stole this election. We all know. They will destroy our country next. Please tell him to declassify as much as possible so we can go after Biden and anyone else!”

drops phone lawsuit quietly

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/rick-perry/

PHONE SEIZED 8 22

refused to testify jan 6

One day after the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, federal agents have executed a search warrant on a GOP member of Congress at the center of the Jan. 6 investigations.

"This morning, while traveling with my family, 3 FBI agents visited me and seized my cell phone," Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) exclusively told Fox News.

"They made no attempt to contact my lawyer, who would have made arrangements for them to have my phone if that was their wish," he claimed, even though prosecutors usually prefer that subpoena route unless they fear the evidence could be destroyed or not turned over.

"I’m outraged — though not surprised — that the FBI under the direction of Merrick Garland’s DOJ, would seize the phone of a sitting member of Congress," Perry complained.

While Trump's search warrant was reportedly about alleged mishandling of classified information and public documents, Perry's search may be related to Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

When Perry was subpoenaed by the House select committee in December, Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) wrote that they were searching for information on the effort to install former Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark as acting Attorney General.

“We have received evidence from multiple witnesses that you had an important role in the efforts to install Mr. Clark as acting Attorney General," Thompson wrote. "Acting Attorney General Rosen and acting Deputy Attorney General Donoghue have provided evidence regarding these issues, and we have received evidence that others who worked with Mr. Clark were aware of these plans. We are also aware that you had multiple text and other communications with President Trump’s former Chief of Staff regarding Mr. Clark—and we also have evidence indicating that in that time frame you sent communications to the former Chief of Staff using the encrypted Signal app.Mr. Clark has informed us that he plans to invoke his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination in anticipation of a deposition to be conducted by the Committee.When Mr. Clark decided to invoke his 5th Amendment rights, he understood that we planned to pose questions addressing his interactions with you, among a host of other topics."

“In addition, we have information indicating that you communicated at various relevant times with the White House and others involved in other relevant topics, including regarding allegations that the Dominion voting machines had been corrupted," Thompson added.

raw story

Some of the most radical Republicans in Congress freaked out after GOP Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania had his cell phone seized by FBI agents executing a search warrant.

"This morning, while traveling with my family, 3 FBI agents visited me and seized my cell phone," Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) exclusively told Fox News. "They made no attempt to contact my lawyer, who would have made arrangements for them to have my phone if that was their wish."

"I’m outraged — though not surprised — that the FBI under the direction of Merrick Garland’s DOJ, would seize the phone of a sitting member of Congress," Perry added.

Perry, the chairman of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, has been subpoenaed by the House Select Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

And some far-right Republicans leaped to his defense, even though a federal judge found there was probable cause his cell phone contains evidence of a federal crime.

"The FBI has gone rogue and is doing the dirty work of a communist regime," tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). "Who is giving these orders?"

"They've declared war!" Rep. Ronnie Jackson argued in all-caps. "Now they’re seizing the phone of a sitting member of Congress. The regime grows more tyrannical every day. If we don’t win and win big in November, our country as we know it will cease to exist!"

"The Biden regime is out of control," argued Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY).

"This is America, and these Gestapo tactics are not welcome," said Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO). "There will be a reckoning."

"We will not be intimidated," Boebert added. "We will not back down to Biden’s thugs. Game on."

GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy said, "Garland has lost the trust of the American people and will answer for his abusive tactics."

Meanwhile, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) tweeted "defund the FBI" after two years of Republicans claiming Democrats are running on a "defund the police" message.

"Our country is becoming unrecognizable," Gosar said. "The FBI, and the Regime they take marching orders from, are the enemy of the American People."

"They must be stopped," Gosar demanded.

perry head of freedom caucus, used to headed by Mulvaney OMB klukowski

perry denied, then proved? 3 more denied?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/23/5-takeaways-jan-6-hearing-trumps-doj-plot/

wapo

June 23, 2022

In the Jan. 6 committee hearing on June 23, witnesses described how President Donald Trump pressured the Justice Department to investigate election fraud. (Video: JM Rieger/The Washington Post, Photo: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

The Jan. 6 committee on Thursday held its fifth major hearing, this one focused on President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign on the Justice Department to help him overturn the election.

The plot was spearheaded within the department by an official named Jeffrey Clark, whose home federal agents searched Wednesday in a significant development that reflects the increasing legal jeopardy faced by Trump’s allies and perhaps Trump himself. Trump at one point considered installing Clark as acting attorney general to further the plot — which prompted mass resignation threats....

The Jan. 6 committee on Thursday held its fifth major hearing, this one focused on President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign on the Justice Department to help him overturn the election.

Timeline: Trump's pressure on the Justice Department to overturn the election

Below, some takeaways from the hearing.

The pardon picture, filled out

In a video presented on June 23, Trump White House officials said that at least five House Republicans asked President Donald Trump for pardons. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

The committee has repeatedly previewed evidence that certain key players in Trump’s plot soughtpardons. Last week, one of them was revealed to be Trump lawyer John Eastman, who asked to be put on “the pardon list.” The implication from that email was that there was indeed a list that seemingly might have other names.

The committee built out its own list Thursday, adding several House Republicans to it. Here are the names and the evidence:

Reps. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) — In a Jan. 11 email from Brooks, he said he and Gaetz were suggesting pardons for everyone who objected to the election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. White House lawyer Eric Herschmann also said he believed that Gaetz had requested a pardon. White House aide John McEntee said Gaetz told him he asked for one from White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Meadows, also testified to the effort by Brooks and Gaetz, saying that Gaetz had been seeking a pardon “since early December” and that he reached out to her personally.

Days after the Capitol attack and the final attempt to overturn the election, Members of Congress requested pardons.

Five days after the attack on the Capitol, Representative Mo Brooks requested pardons for himself, Representative Gaetz, and others. pic.twitter.com/f0xLm5SKtT

— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) June 23, 2022

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) — Hutchinson testified that he requested a pardon.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) — Hutchinson testified that he requested a pardon.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — Hutchinson said that she had heard that Greene had asked the White House counsel’s office for a pardon from deputy counsel Pat Philbin but that Greene hadn’t asked her personally.

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) — Hutchinson testified that he requested a pardon.

Perry has flatly denied seeking a pardon, calling it “a shameless, soulless lie,” but Hutchinson said he talked to her directly about it.

Hutchinson also said that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), whom House Republicans tried to put on the committee before Democrats objected, talked with the White House about congressional pardons but that she was unaware of him asking for one.

What John Eastman and ‘the pardon list’ means

Asking for a pardon doesn’t equal admitting guilt,[but in applying you must tell what you did? negates exec priv] and Eastman in particular argued that his request was meant as a precaution. But given how far-fetched this plot was and how often those involved were told their plot was illegal, that fact that people were trying to cover their backsides on the way out is important.

And crucially, some of these requests came even before the plot failed on Jan. 6.

USE OF SIGNAL CHAT SIGNIF?

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/22/gop-lawmakers-deeply-involved-in-trump-plans-to-overturn-election-new-evidence-suggests-00027340

ref

no lnx

insurrection fallout

GOP lawmakers were deeply involved in Trump plans to overturn election, new evidence suggests

Deposition excerpts filed by the Jan 6. select committee underscore the expansive cast of elected Republicans who had enlisted themselves in Trump’s effort to cling to power.

Rep. Jim Jordan and Rep. Matt Gaetz speak to reporters.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) speak to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., in 2021. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

By Kyle Cheney and Nicholas Wu

04/22/2022 11:36 PM EDT

Updated:04/23/2022

Republican members of Congress were heavily involved in calls and meetings with former President Donald Trump and his top aides as they devised a strategy to overturn the election in December 2020, according to new evidence filed in federal court late Friday.

Deposition excerpts filed by the Jan 6. select committee — part of an effort to force former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to appear for an interview — suggest that some of Trump’s top allies in Congress were frequently present in meetings where a handful of strategies to prevent then-President-elect Joe Biden from taking office were discussed, including efforts to replace the leadership of the Justice Department with figures who would sow doubts about the legitimacy of the election.

Lawmakers who attended meetings, in person or by phone, included Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and numerous members of the House Freedom Caucus, according to Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Meadows who provided key testimony about the conversations and meetings Meadows had in December 2020.

The new evidence underscores the expansive cast of elected Republicans who had ultimately enlisted themselves in Trump’s last-ditch effort to cling to power. Members traded theories about ways to push then-Vice President Mike Pence to single-handedly stop Biden’s election, they parried with the White House Counsel’s Office on the boundaries of the law regarding presidential electors and they met directly with Pence’s staff to encourage him to take direct action on Jan. 6, when Congress convened to count electoral votes.

“They felt that he had the authority to — pardon me if my phrasing isn’t correct on this, but — send votes back to the States or the electors back to the States,” Hutchinson recalled.

The disclosure came as part of a Friday evening court filing by the select panel asking a federal court to throw out Meadows’ lawsuit against the committee. In the filing, the select committee revealed that Meadows turned over 2,319 text messages during a brief period of cooperation but withheld more than 1,000, citing various privileges.

“[H]e was not acting as anything like a typical White House Chief of Staff advising the President on official matters of government policy,” House General Counsel Doug Letter wrote. “Mr. Meadows was playing a campaign role, attempting to facilitate a strategy that would have reversed the certified results of the 2020 election.”

The committee indicated that Meadows told Jordan in a text message that he supported efforts to convince Pence to send the election back to the states.

“I have pushed for this. Not sure it is going to happen,” Meadows texted Jordan early in the morning on Jan. 6.

Some of the GOP lawmakers were present in December meetings, Hutchinson recalled, when members of the White House Counsel’s Office raised significant legal doubts about a plan for pro-Trump activists to submit “alternate” electors in states won by Joe Biden.

Others attended a Dec. 21 meeting where Rudy Giuliani, then the president’s personal lawyer, and some associates advocated a plan for Pence to unilaterally refuse to count Biden’s electors and instead send the election back to various GOP-controlled state legislatures to replace Biden’s electors with Trump’s.

The panel also released text messages between Perry and Meadows about replacing Justice Department leadership before Jan. 6 with officials thought to be more sympathetic to Trump’s claims of voter fraud.

“Mark, just checking in as time continues to count down. 11 days to 1/6 and 25 days to inauguration,”Perry texted the then-White House chief of staff on Dec. 26, 2020, asking him to get in touch with Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark. “We gotta get going!”

“I got it. I think I understand. Let me work on the deputy position,” Meadows responded.

Perry rejected a request from the select panel to testify.

The panel also revealed that it interviewed Steven Engel, the former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Engel indicated that Clark proposed on Jan. 3, 2021, having DOJ issue a legal advisory opinion regarding “the Vice President with respect to his authority when it comes to opening the votes as the President of the Senate on January 6th.”

“And I shot down that idea,” Engel recalled. “But I said — I said: ‘That’s an absurd idea. The — you know, the Vice President is acting as the President of the Senate. It is not the role of the Department of Justice to provide legislative officials with legal advice on the scope of their duties.” And — you know, and — not to mention it was 3 days from the date. OLC doesn’t tend to provide the legal opinions, you know, in those cases, you know, in that short timeframe.”

[MOST READ

Kate Bedingfield is leaving the White House

Liz Cheney Wins the GOP’s Manhood Contest

The Southwest is bone dry. Now, a key water source is at risk.

Judge holds Cushman & Wakefield in contempt, orders fines in Trump probe

Shadow 2024 race: Newsom vs. DeSantis]

The committee also homed in on Meadows’ role as an unofficial campaign adviser, noting that he routinely straddled the line between his official White House work and his effort to keep Trump in office. Hundreds of documents Meadows claimed were privileged included contacts he had with Trump campaign lawyers, the committee said, citing a privilege log from Meadows himself.

The committee chronicled Meadows’ frenetic activity in the final weeks before Jan. 6, with his actions including:

— Helping the campaign craft and distribute talking points about election fraud, in concert with allies like attorney Cleta Mitchell and campaign adviser Jason Miller. “This is what I prepared and sent to Sen Braun last night to help prepare him for ABC appearance this am,” Mitchell wrote on Jan. 6 to Meadows, who forwarded the email to Miller. “Can the WH press office get and start using??”

— Communicating with Raffensperger and his deputy Jason Fuchs around efforts to get Georgia officials to overturn the results in the state.

— Texting often with Perry about plans to install Clark at the Justice Department in order to use DOJ’s power to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election. In one exchange,Perry indicated he had sent separate messages to Meadows via Signal,and the two discussed a potential deputy for Clark.

— Meeting in his office with retired Army Col. Phil Waldron, who was pushing for Trump to invoke national security procedures as part of a plan to seize control of voting machines. Waldron referenced the meeting in an email sent to Meadows’ Gmail account.

— Conducting an array of calls on Jan. 6 from a secure “control car” that was part of Trump’s motorcade.

“I know that he was on several calls during the rally. And I went over to meet with him at one point, and he had just waved me away, which is out of the ordinary,” Hutchinson testified.

The committee also indicated it has come to believe Trump did not attempt to contact any federal law enforcement agency amid the riot, pointing to testimony from former Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, former Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen and his deputy Richard Donoghue, who indicated he never connected with Trump that day.

“I never spoke to the President that day,” Donoghue told the panel. “He was not on any calls that I was on.”

The panel concluded: “It is also now clear that Mr. Trump never telephoned his Secretary of Defense that day to order deployment of National Guard, and never contacted any federal law enforcement agency to order security assistance to the Capitol Police.”

Filed under: Joe Biden, Joe Biden 2020, Mike Pence, Donald Trump,

POLITICO

INTRO'S JBC TO TRUMP

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/14/inside-explosive-oval-office-confrontation-three-days-before-jan-6/

wapo no lnx

New details emerge of Oval Office confrontation three days before Jan. 6

Jeffrey Clark, a mid-level Justice Department official, wanted Trump to name him attorney general in a plan aimed at potentially overturning the election

Image without a caption

By Michael Kranish

June 14, 2022 a

[Jeffrey Clark, assistant attorney general for the environment and natural resources division, speaks during a news conference, flanked by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler, left, and Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, right, in September 2020. (Susan Walsh/Pool/AP)]

Three days before Congress was slated to certify the 2020 presidential election, a little-known Justice Department official named Jeffrey Clark rushed to meet President Donald Trump in the Oval Office to discuss a last-ditch attempt to reverse the results.

Clark, an environmental lawyer by trade, had outlined a plan in a letter he wanted to send to the leaders of key states Joe Biden won. It said that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” about the vote and that the states should consider sending “a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump” for Congress to approve.

In fact, Clark’s bosses had warned there was not evidence to overturn the election and had rejected his letter days earlier. Now they learned Clark was about to meet with Trump. Acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen tracked down his deputy, Richard Donoghue, who had been walking on the Mall in muddy jeans and an Army T-shirt. There was no time to change. They raced to the Oval Office.

As Rosen and Donoghue listened, Clark told Trump that he would send the letter if the president named him attorney general.

“History is calling,” Clark told the president, according to a deposition from Donoghue excerpted in a recent court filing. “This is our opportunity. We can get this done.”

Donoghue urged Trump not to put Clark in charge, calling him “not competent” and warning of “mass resignations” by Justice Department officials if he became the nation’s top law enforcement official, according to Donoghue’s account.

“What happens if, within 48 hours, we have hundreds of resignations from your Justice Department because of your actions?” Donoghue said he asked Trump. “What does that say about your leadership?”

Clark’s letter and his Oval Office meeting set off one of the tensest chapters during Trump’s effort to overturn the election, which culminated three days later with rioters storming the U.S. Capitol. His plan could have decapitated the Justice Department leadership and could have overturned the election.

Clark’s actions have been the focus of a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation and an ongoing probe by the Justice Department’s inspector general, and now are expected to be closely examined during June hearings by the House committee investigating the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021.

The House Jan. 6 investigation committee has conducted over 800 interviews with insurrectionists and Trump aides. Here’s what’s next. (Video: Blair Guild/The Washington Post)

After the New York Times reported in January 2021 about Clark’s actions, he said he engaged in a “candid discussion of options and pros and cons with the president,” denied that he had a plan to oust Rosen, and criticized others in the meeting for talking publicly and “distorting” the discussion.

Now, however, key witnesses have provided Congress with a fuller account of Clark’s actions, including new details about the confrontation that took place in the Jan. 3 Oval Office meeting, which lasted nearly three hours.

A reconstruction of the events by The Washington Post, based on the court filings, depositions, Senate and House reports, previously undisclosed emails, and interviews with knowledgeable government officials, shows how close the country came to crisis three days before the insurrection.

The evidence, which fills in crucial details about Clark’s efforts, includes an email showing he was sent a draft of a letter outlining a plan to try to overturn the election by a just-arrived Justice Department official who had once written a book claiming President Barack Obama planned to “subvert the Constitution.”

But larger mysteries could still be solved at an upcoming Jan. 6 committee hearing slated to examine Clark’s actions, including the crucial question of whether Clark and his allies were acting on their own initiative — or whether they were one piece of a larger, well-planned effort to keep Trump in power. That question gets to the heart of the committee’s professed mission: proving there was a “coordinated, multi-step effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.”

Clark, 55, and his lawyer, Harry MacDougald, declined to comment.

The House committee unanimously voted to hold Clark in contempt of Congress after he declined in December to answer most questions on grounds that his interactions with Trump were privileged. But Clark later appeared before the committee and asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, CNN reported; his testimony from that appearance has not been released.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who participated in the Judiciary Committee’s investigation, said investigators should key in on whether Clark was working on behalf of others not yet identified.

“It certainly could be a symptom of a much larger and more coherent plan than has currently been disclosed,” Whitehouse said. Clark “does not appear to have elections expertise or experience, which raises the question, did he really sit down at his computer and type it out or does somebody produce it for him?”

Clark, who attended Harvard and got his law degree from Georgetown, built a career focused on environmental law at the Washington law firm of Kirkland & Ellis and served in the George W. Bush administration’s Justice Department.

Clark arrived at Trump’s Justice Department in 2018 to head an office that enforces environmental laws and regulations, and then in September 2020 became acting head of the department’s civil division.

When Attorney General William P. Barr resigned as of Dec. 23 after declaring that the Justice Department had not found evidence of mass fraud in Trump’s election loss, Rosen became the acting attorney general. Trump, though, complained to Rosen that the Justice Department still wasn’t adequately investigating his claims of massive fraud.(A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.)

Clark would soon emerge as someone interested in pursuing Trump’s claims. He found a key ally in Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), one of the earliest proponents of Trump’s voter fraud claims. Perry later told radio station WITF that he had worked with Clark on “various legislative matters” over the previous four years. When Perry called Donoghue in late December to complain that the Justice Department hadn’t sufficiently investigated the election, he mentioned Clark as someone “who could really get in there and do something about this,” according to the Senate Judiciary Committee majority report.

Shortly before Christmas, Clark and Perry met, according to the Senate report. Perry told WITF that “when President Trump asked if I would make an introduction, I obliged.” A Perry spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Clark then met with Trump in the Oval Office, according to the Senate report. When Rosen found out Clark had talked privately with Trump, he was livid, telling Clark in a Dec. 26 phone call that, “You didn’t tell me about it in advance. You didn’t get authorization. You didn’t tell me about it after the fact. This can’t happen,” according to Rosen’s interview with the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Clark was “somewhat apologetic” and promised he wouldn’t do it again without permission, according to Rosen. But Clark had already made an impression on the president. The next day, Trump told Rosen in a phone call that “people are very mad with the Justice Department” not investigating voter fraud and referred to having met with Clark.

Rosen told Trump that the Justice Department could not “flip a switch and change the election,” according to notes of the conversation cited by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“I don’t expect you to do that,” Trump responded, according to the notes. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”[PERRY? CRUZ?] The president urged Rosen to “just have a press conference.”

Rosen refused. “We don’t see that,” he told Trump. “We’re not going to have a press conference.”

A top Clark associate, meanwhile, prepared to send him a draft of the letter to state legislatures.

Kenneth Klukowskihad arrived at the Justice Department just two weeks before the Oval Office meeting to become legal counsel to the civil division overseen by Clark.

He had long been an outspoken figure on the right, working as senior legal analyst for the conservative Breitbart website and co-writing a 2010 book about President Barack Obama titled “The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency.” Before joining Clark’s team, he’d served as special counsel to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, according to his Facebook page.

At 4:20 p.m. on Dec. 28, 2020, he sent an email that has been a central mystery in the Clark episode. The email to Clark, obtained by The Post, has the subject line, “email to you,” and an attachment titled “Draft Letter JBC 12 28 20.docx.” The email text simply said “Attached.” The attached letter, which has been previously released, was titled“Pre-Decisional & Deliberative/Attorney-Client or Legal Work Product – Georgia Proof of Concept.”

The House committee has sought to determine if Klukowski wrote the letter and whether he did so alone.Klukowski is cooperating with the committee, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a closed-door session.

In an April court filing, a committee lawyer said there is evidence suggesting the letter “may have been drafted by Ken Klukowski.” Whitehouse said he wants to know if someone produced the letter for Klukowski. Klukowski and his lawyer, Edward Greim,declined to comment.

Twenty minutes after Klukowski sent the document, Clark sent Rosen and Donoghue an email with the subject line “Two Urgent Action Items.” One was an attachment of the letter that Klukowski had just sent to him. At the bottom of the letter was a place for it to be signed by Rosen, Donoghue and Clark.

“I set it up for signature by the three of us,” Clark wrote. “I think we should get it out as soon as possible.”

The second item was Clark’s request for an intelligence briefing about an allegation that the Chinese were controlling U.S.-based voting machines via internet-connected smart thermostats, a theory that the Justice Department had dismissed as not credible.

Donoghue said in his deposition that he found Clark’s proposed letter to state leaders and request for the intelligence briefing to be “very strange” and “completely inconsistent with the department’s role ...[and] with what our investigations to date, had revealed.”

“There’s no chance I would sign this letter or anything remotely like this,” Donoghue emailed Clark on the afternoon of Dec. 28, 2020. He stressed that the Justice Department investigations into possible fraud were so small that they “would simply not impact the outcome of the election.” Donoghue told Clark that asking the states to reconsider their certified election results “would be a grave step for the Department to take and could have tremendous constitutional, political, and social ramifications for the country.”

Rosen summoned Clark to a meeting along with Donoghue. Clark explained that he been looking at allegations on his own and had concerns about the reliability of the election, according to Donoghue’s deposition. “He mentioned this smart thermostat thing,” Donoghue said, surmising that Clark had read information in lawsuits and “various theories that seemed to be derived from the Internet.”

Donoghue told Clark in the meeting that the proposed letter was “wildly inappropriate and irresponsible … nothing less than the department meddling in the outcome of a presidential election,” Donoghue told the Senate committee.

Rosen was stunned. He had known Clark for years and once had worked with him at Kirkland & Ellis. Rosen told the Senate committee that he wondered “what’s going on with Jeff Clark. That this is inconsistent with how I perceived him in the past.” At several points, Clark asked that the word “acting” be removed from his title as head of the civil division, which Rosen said he declined.

With the meeting concluded, Rosen and Donoghue thought Clark’s effort was over. Clark told them, “I think they are good ideas. You don’t like them. Okay. Then, I guess we won’t do it,” according to Rosen’s Senate committee interview.

But Clark’s effort to woo Trump with his ideas was just beginning.

Several days later, Rosen learned that Clark had once again met with Trump — and once again without informing him in advance, Rosen told the Senate committee. Clark told Rosen that Trump wanted him to consider becoming attorney general. Rosen was livid. “He says he won’t do it again. He did it again,” Rosen recalled. But Rosen said he did not have the authority to fire Clark, as he would have liked to do, because Clark was a presidential appointee.

Shortly after the clash between Clark and the senior Justice Department officials, Clark told Rosen that if he reversed his position and signed the letter to the Georgia legislature, then Rosen could remain attorney general,Rosen told the Senate committee. Rosen refused. Donoghue told Clark that “you went behind your boss’s back, and you’re proposing things that are outside your domain and you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rosen told the Senate committee.

The following day, Jan. 3, 2021, Clark told Rosen that he had just talked with Trump and that “the president had decided to offer him the position, and he had decided to take it. So that I would be replaced that Sunday, and the department would chart a different path,” Rosen told the Senate committee.

“I don’t get to be fired by someone who works for me,” Rosen said he told Clark. Rosen then called and asked to meet with Trump.

Donoghue, meanwhile, had begun taking things off his office wall and packing boxes, presuming he would resign if it was true Clark was about to be named attorney general,Donoghue told the Senate committee.

A meeting in the Oval Office was quickly arranged with Clark, Rosen, and other Justice Department and White House lawyers. Rosen found Trump sitting behind the Resolute Desk, while other White House and Justice Department officials took their seats. Donoghue, still in his muddy jeans and T-shirt, remained outside. The Post had just broken the news that Trump had a day earlier pressured Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to find enough votes to win the state. Raffensperger had told Trump his allegations of fraud that could overturn the election were baseless.

While Donoghue was watching television coverage about The Post’s report, a White House official emerged and said, “The president wants you in this meeting.”

Around the time Donoghue entered, Clark was telling Trump that if he became attorney general he would “conduct real investigations that would, in his view, uncover widespread fraud,” Donoghue said in his House deposition. Clark vowed to send the letter he drafted to Georgia and other states and said that “this was a last opportunity to sort of set things straight with this defective election, and that he could do it, and he had the intelligence and the will and the desire to pursue these matters in the way that the president thought most appropriate.”

Everyone else in the room told Trump they opposed Clark, Donoghue said.

Trump repeatedly went after Rosen and Donoghue, saying they hadn’t pursued voter fraud allegations.

“You two,” Trump said, pointing to the two top Justice Department officials. “You two haven’t done anything. You two don’t care. You haven’t taken appropriate actions. Everyone tells me I should fire you.”

Trump continually circled back to the idea of replacing Rosen with Clark.

“What do I have to lose?” the president asked, according to Donoghue.

“Mr. President, you have a great deal to lose,” Donoghue said he responded. “Is this really how you want your administration to end? You’re going to hurt the country, you’re going to hurt the department, you’re going to hurt yourself, with people grasping at straws on these desperate theories about election fraud, and is this really in anyone’s best interest?”

Donoghue warned Trump that putting Clark in charge would be likely to lead to mass resignations at the Justice Department.

“Well, suppose I do this,” Trump said to Donoghue. “Suppose I replace [Rosen] with [Clark], what would you do?”

“Sir, I would resign immediately,” Donoghue said he responded. “There’s no way I’m serving under this guy [Clark].”

Trump then turned to Steve Engel, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, whom Trump reportedly had considered for a seat on the Supreme Court.

“Steve, you wouldn’t resign, would you?” Trump asked.

“Absolutely I would, Mr. President. You’d leave me no choice,” Engel responded, according to Donoghue’s account. Engel declined to comment.

“And we’re not the only ones,” Donoghue said he told Trump. “You should understand that your entire department leadership will resign. Every [assistant attorney general] will resign. ... Mr. President, these aren’t bureaucratic leftovers from another administration. You picked them. This is your leadership team. You sent every one of them to the Senate; you got them confirmed. What is that going to say about you, when we all walk out at the same time?”

Donoghue then told Trump that Clark had no qualification to be attorney general: “He’s never been a criminal attorney. He’s never conducted a criminal investigation in his life. He’s never been in front of a grand jury, much less a trial jury.”

Clark objected.

“Well, I’ve done a lot of very complicated appeals and civil litigation, environmental litigation, and things like that,” Clark said, according to Donoghue’s deposition.

“That’s right,” Donoghue said he responded. “You’re an environmental lawyer. How about you go back to your office, and we’ll call you when there’s an oil spill.”

Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, told Trump that Clark’s proposed letter was “a murder-suicide pact,”according to Donoghue’s deposition. “It’s going to damage everyone who touches it. And we should have nothing to do with that letter. I don’t ever want to see that letter again.” Cipollone declined to comment.

Trump made his decision and turned to Clark.

“I appreciate your willingness to do it,” Trump said, according to Donoghue. “I appreciate you being willing to suffer the abuse. But the reality is, you’re not going to get anything done. These guys are going to quit. Everyone else is going to resign. It’s going to be a disaster. The bureaucracy will eat you alive.And no matter how much you want to get things done in the next few weeks, you won’t be able to get it done, and it’s not going to be worth the breakage.”

Clark had yet another idea. He asked whether Engel could provide a formal opinion about what authority Vice President Mike Pence had “when it comes to opening the votes” of the electoral college result on Jan. 6, according to an excerpt of Engel’s deposition in a recent court filing.

“That’s an absurd idea,” Engel said he responded, asserting it wasn’t the job of the Justice Department and noting only three days remained before Pence would perform his role. Trump interjected that he didn’t want anyone attending the meeting to talk to Pence about what to do on Jan. 6.

“Nobody should be talking to the vice president here,” Trump said, according to Engel. Instead, Trump would soon do that himself in an attempt to convince the vice president not to certify Biden’s election.

As the Justice Department officials filed out of the White House that night, one grave threat to American democracy had passed.

Three days later, after the president falsely said at a rally that “we won this election, and we won it by a landslide,” a pro-Trump mob broke into the Capitol.

1/6 hearing bombshell

Reacting to a revelation from Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) that several Republican Party lawmakers reportedly went hat in hand to Donald Trump and asked for pardons related to attempts to throw out the results of the 2020 presidential election, former Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) predicted they could be in big trouble.

In the midst of the first publicly televised Jan. 6 House committee hearing on the Capitol insurrection, the Wyoming Republican suggested that Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) was one of those lawmakers, telling the national TV audience, "Rep. Scott Perry … has refused to testify here. As you will see, Representative Perry contacted the White House in the weeks after Jan. 6 to seek a presidential pardon. Multiple other Republican congressmen also sought presidential pardons for their roles in attempting to overturn the 2020 election”

Asked about the accusation by CNN host Jim Sciutto, the former Republican lawmaker went off on a rant about some of his former associates.

"Another significant revelation from the Vice-Chair Liz Cheney yesterday is that several GOP lawmakers sought pardons from then-president Trump after January 6th, presuming, it seems, they had criminal exposure here," host Sciutto asked as CNN identified the four lawmakers as Perry along with Reps. Andy Biggs, Paul Gosar of Arizona, and Mo Brooks of Alabama. "What is your reaction? You're a former sitting Republican member of Congress, to hear that some of your former colleagues were looking for a pardon, felt they needed a pardon."

"It is clear to me they have a guilty mind, they think they may have done things that were illegal and potentially criminal and that's why they sought a preemptive pardon. That's simply astounding to me, one of the member's district was adjacent to mine, Scott Perry, and we all know he had made many outreaches to Jeffrey Clark at the DOJ and it is clear to me, again, that I just can't fathom that a member of Congress would ever seek a pardon, just -- it is really quite a stunning action."

"It really speaks to the idea of criminality that -- those are the only people who seek pardons and the fact that they -- that the actions that they took before or during the events of that day, they know that they -- they did something wrong," he continued. "So wrong that they sought a pardon. I can't imagine any -- most of my colleagues would ever have thought for a second to seek a pardon for anything. So it is clear to me that they know they're on the wrong side of this, and that's why they're trying not to participate in these hearings because they're exposed."

Watch below:

bs said sedit vote based on states [rights] not approv pandemic vote by mail

mma 6 22

during the first public hearing of the House January 6 select committee, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) revealed that Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) refused to testify regarding his role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election results. She also revealed that Perry sought a pardon from then-President Donald Trump over his efforts to keep the president in power.

[twt]

during the live hearing, Perry instead appeared on the right-wing misinformation network One American News to bash the committee’s work.

Perry described the committee hearing as “a three-ring circus” and “reality TV” that is only meant “to distract from what is actually happening to the country and what people are most concerned about.”

Perry then placed blame for the insurrection on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), saying Republicans need to get to the bottom of “what the speaker’s culpability is or was” for the events of January 6.

house investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection just took an unexpected turn: report

Meaghan Ellis

December 21, 2021

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) has become a key focal point for the House Select Committee's investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, according to The Washington Post'...

The chairman of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus is demanding **U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn** (R-NC) back up his incendiary charges that several members of Congress invited him to alleged orgies where they would do “key bumps” of cocaine.

Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) (photo), who has been asked by the January 6 Committee to testify but has refused, told Politico’s Olivia Beavers, “I think it is important, if you’re going to say something like that, to name some names.”

Tuesday Beavers also reported that House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had wanted to speak with Cawthorn about the allegations – not to start any type of investigation, but because some Republicans said they were “upset” Cawthorn made the claim.

Perry and McCarthy are not the only ones angered about Cawthorn’s charges.

“You should have to name names if you are going to go make those kinds of brush stroke accusations and impugn the character of people in this institution or … anybody else in this town,” an unnamed House Republican, told Beavers.

Last week Cawthorn told the “Warrior Poet Society” podcast that, Beavers writes, “he received invitations along the lines of “‘hey, we’re going to have kind of a sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come’.”

“What did you just ask me to come to?” Cawthorn said. “And then you realize they are asking you to come to an orgy.”

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/mark-meadows/

i forgot ziegler:

an 6 22 raw story

Navarro, President Trump’s former trade advisor was indicted for contempt of Congress on Friday due to his refusal to cooperate with the January 6th Committee, which has signaled interest in his communications with the president.

Less attention has been paid to Garrett Ziegler, a Navarro aide and zealous Trump loyalist who both supported his boss’ efforts and coordinated with a network of outside operatives who were promoting an onslaught of false claims about election fraud and legally dubious schemes to preserve Trump’s hold on power.

Ziegler received an email from the senior investigative counsel for the committee, which is scheduled to begin public hearings on June 9, requesting a meeting to discuss information he might have that is relevant to the congressional investigation.

Among his extensive efforts from his office at the White House, Ziegler facilitated a now-infamous late-night meeting on Dec. 18, 2020 in which attorney Sidney Powell, retired Lt. General Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne tried to persuade President Trump to order the National Guard to seize voting machines and re-running elections in six battleground states he lost to Joe Biden.

Ziegler used his White House Worker and Visitor Entry System, or WAVES pass to let Powell, Flynn and Byrne into the White House, allowing them to hold an impromptu meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, as he later recounted in aninterview with fellow election denier David Clements. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone were caught by surprise by the meeting, which reportedly descended into a shouting match. Ziegler’s efforts bypassed protocol for White House meetings, and he said when it was discovered that he had let the plotters into the White House, his visitor’s privileges were revoked.

In Navarro’s book In Trump Time, he wrote that “to support the challenge effort, he allowed “several members of my staff to help out in the battleground states on their own time.” Navarro’s book describes “the young and always earnest” Ziegler venturing to an Indian reservation in Nevada to investigate alleged vote-buying shortly after the election. The work eventually culminated in the three-part Navarro Report, which asserted without evidence that the election had been stolen from Trump.

Around the time of the election, a man named Mark Cook took a photograph of cardboard boxes stacked on metal shelves that were labeled “Dominion Voting” and “Made in China.”

“My good friend Mark Cook took this picture,” Ziegler, who is now 26, wrote on his Telegram channel in June 2021. “We infiltrated the election equipment storage facility in Sacramento County, CA, and documented all of the violations of law.”

Cook’s photograph would later be used on the final page of a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” put together by Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel with a background in psychological warfare that was shown to members of Congress on Jan. 4 and 5, 2021. The presentation recommended that Vice President Mike Pence set aside the electoral votes from the six battleground states carried by Biden, and also called on President Trump to order the National Guard to seize voting machines and re-count the ballots.

For his part, Cook remains active in the election denial movement. Last month, he and Clements, a former New Mexico State University professor, addressed a Republican-controlled board of commissioners in Surry County, NC. Introduced by Clements as “our hardware and IT cybersecurity expert,” Cook told commissioners: “If our Pentagon can’t secure a network, Department of Defense can’t secure a network, our Department of Homeland Security can’t secure a network, are we really so foolish as to think the only system that is completely impervious to any cyber-hack is our voting system?”

Cook’s 25-minute presentation omitted a simple fact — voting tabulation machines are not networked, and preliminary counts are transferred on a mobile drive to a computer to be uploaded from local election offices for election-night reporting.

Both Ziegler and Cook were trusted associates in the network of operatives and conspiracy theorists that worked under the competing legal teams headed by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and by Powell, alongside Flynn and Byrne.

In a private Telegram text to another election denier that has been reviewed by Raw Story, Waldron said, “Mark and Garrett have worked with us since 14 Nov 20.” He added that Ziegler and Cook “both passed rigorous background checks” after suspicions arose that CIA and British intelligence assets were attempting to infiltrate the network plotting to overturn the election.

“I have no idea what Waldron was alluding to,” Ziegler told Raw Story in an email. “None. I had an active [top secret/sensitive compartmented information] clearance at the time. I think he was just spinning a tale for others.”

Waldron declined to comment for this story.

Michael Trimarco, a Giuliani associate who rented a bloc of rooms at the Westin Arlington Gateway hotel in November 2020,also alluded to a dual role on Ziegler’s part in an interview with the far-right podcaster Ann Vandersteel earlier this year.

“I know some of the people that were his direct reports, because he wasn’t officially reporting directly to Peter,” Trimarco told Vandersteel. “So, I know some of these other people. And politically that didn’t make people around in Peter’s world very happy with Garrett in the inter-office kinda…. But from what I saw, he was well connected with Peter… and I know he furnished a lot of information for the report.”

While enmeshed with the outside election denial network, Ziegler also provided the external teams with a direct conduit to the White House and President Trump, to the extent that Trimarco said information about election irregularities would often reach Trump before even Giuliani knew about it.

“Ironically, a lot of the stuff that got back to Rudy didn’t end up coming through me,” Trimarco said. “Because once that connection was made, Garrett would give it to Peter, and Peter would give it to the president. And then it would circle back to Rudy.”

In his interview with Clements, Ziegler dated work on the three-part Navarro Report to Nov. 15 — one day after Waldron said he had started working with Ziegler. Ziegler said he and four other aides assisted Navarro with the reports.

“We prepared — Peter gave direction,” Ziegler told Clements. “He’s a fantastic, logical thinker, which is very hard — easier said than done. He laid it out, what his vision was. And our job was to get the first draft.”

Much of the information in the reports was funneled up from the outside team, Trimarco said.

“Peter put out a three-volume report together, and a lot of the information — not all of it — came from this group of analysts that work working out of the Westin that did not go toTomotley,” Trimarco said, referencing attorney Lin Wood’s estate in South Carolina, where Powell and Flynn established a working headquarters away from DC.

One day after Powell, Flynn and Byrne’s Dec. 18 visit to the White House to promote their plan to have the National Guard seize voting machines and re-run the election, Trump tweeted out a link to the Navarro Report, with an invitation to his supporters to attend a “wild rally” in DC on Jan. 6, 2021.

Similar to his former boss, since leaving the White House Ziegler has continued to deride a coterie of officials he considers weak and insufficiently loyal to the president. In interviews and Telegram messages, Ziegler has particularly singled out Meadows for savage criticism.

In Telegram message in late January 2021, Ziegler wrote that he feared Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg would take control of the country and impose a dystopian “technocracy.”

“And I can assure you, from my standpoint in the WH, I did everything I could to prevent this,” Ziegler said. “I broke rules, protocol, etc. If I had a decade more of life under my belt, I would have had the formal power to get rid of Meadows, Cipollone, etc.”

Ziegler’s Telegram messages suggest he viewed Meadows as an obstacle to efforts to overturn the election. In one message, in February 2021, Ziegler faulted Meadows for citing an audit in Georgia as evidence of due diligence, writing that the chief of staff was “so fckn dumb (or compromised)” that he didn’t question whether an auditing company could be corrupted by “mob-like cartels.”

Like Navarro, who was indicted for contempt of Congress on Friday, Meadows is fighting a subpoena from the January 6th Committee. Last December, the House voted to hold Meadows in contempt, referring his case to the Justice Department for prosecution.

Meadows played a critical role in shepherding an array of schemes entertained by Trump in his quest to hold onto power. That included hosting meetings with the president and members of the House Freedom Caucus to discuss a plan — much like Navarro’s “Green Bay Sweep” — to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to remand the electoral votes back to the battleground states and delay certifying the election for Biden, according to testimony to the January 6th Committee by White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. Meadows also hosted a meeting in which Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who is now the chair of the Freedom Caucus, expressed support for the idea of sending Trump supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6, while others in the meeting remained silent, the New York Times has reported. Hutchinson also reportedly testified to the committee that she saw Meadows burn documents in his office fireplace after a meeting with Perry.

Ziegler has positioned himself to the right of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, of which Meadows was a chair before he left Congress to serve as Trump’s chief of staff.

“He’s a Freedom Caucus guy,” Ziegler complained to Clements during his July 2021 interviewed. “And what this means is — I call them ‘permanent hearing holders.’ So, Benghazi, Killary…. Nobody ever gets indicted with these jokers. Mark Meadows comes from that ilk…. So, how does this relate to the president’s chief of staff? He just wasn’t effective. He would get steamrolled by people.”

Much of Ziegler’s rhetoric on Telegram is laced with racist vitriol that uses African nations as a stand-in for national decline, while Christian chauvinism as force for national rebirth.

“If we elect people like Mark Meadows — good, jolly, your brother next door — we’re gonna end up like Zimbabwe,” Ziegler said. “If I could do one thing — which is stop electing nice guys. We need Christian zealots, frankly.”

Ziegler expressed a similar sentiment in a March 2021 Telegram message, in which he wrote, “We could have a Third Great Awakening in the country, both religious and political. And the coup we just went through could be the flint that ignites it. Hopefully its ends will be a repentance to the Christ and a Republic that gets rid of this corrupt and satanic Oligarchy.”

Beyond the Dec. 18, 2020 meeting he arranged at the White House, Ziegler said he tried to help Powell get to the president on different occasion.

“I walked Sidney over to the residence one to try to get the president a binder full of evidence,” Ziegler said on a podcast in February 2021. “And we got blocked again there, too.”

Ziegler recalled that he would tell anyone who would listen to him in the White House: “Let’s just go look at the ballots. We don’t have to do it. Have the National Guard in Georgia do it.”

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/first-act-of-newly-elected-head-of-house-gops-most-extreme-group-is-announcement-hes-just-tested-positive-for/

badash ncrm

Members of the Freedom Caucus, the most extreme group of House Republicans, just elected a new leader, U.S. Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania. His first act was to announce he has just tested positive for COVID-19.

Perry is a far right wing extremist who has repeatedly spread falsehoods about election fraud – and compared Democrats to Nazis.

He was first elected to Congress in 2006, ran unopposed or with no Republican challenger several times, thanks in part to what was later found to be an unconstitutional gerrymandered district.

Rep. Perry, "an outspoken Pennsylvania Republican, played a significant role in the crisis that played out at the top of the Justice Department," in December of 2020, The New York Times reported, "when Mr. Trump considered firing the acting attorney general and backed down only after top department officials threatened to resign en masse."

Perry introduced Trump to DOJ attorney Jeffrey Clark, the acting chief of the civil division, who "was sympathetic to Mr. Trump's view that the election had been stolen."

Mr. Perry introduced the president to Mr. Clark, whose openness to conspiracy theories about election fraud presented Mr. Trump with a welcome change from the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, who stood by the results of the election and had repeatedly resisted the president's efforts to undo them.

Congressman Perry was also one of just 18 members of the House to vote against a resolution condemning the dangerous anti-Democratic conspiracy theory QAnon, "a collective delusion that alleges President Donald Trump is fighting a Satan-worshipping cabal of elites who abuse children," Buzzfeed reported last year, noting the vote came just "three days after its followers targeted Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski with death threats."

In June Rep. Perry compared Democrats to Nazis, as The Jerusalem Post reported, when he said: "It wasn't a government in Germany that took the people's rights away immediately. It was fascism. Fascism took it away, because the government put the heavy hand on the companies and the companies did the government's work. Well look around, ladies and gentlemen." [what?]

"The Left are always coming… We have to be stronger and louder than them… They are destroying our economy. They are destroying our energy sector. They are going to do this if we let them, and we can not let them… Go fight them."

no lnx twt

'Deeply dangerous': MSNBC host reveals the history behind the GOP embrace of a deadly conspiracy theory

Mehdi Hasan // Hasan

Alex Henderson October 01, 2021

Fox News' Tucker Carlson generated considerable controversy when, on his April 8 show, he promoted the Great Replacement Theory — a racist conspiracy theory that has become prominent in white supremacist and white nationalist ideology. And almost half a year later, Carlson is still claiming that President Joe Biden and other Democrats are trying to "replace" white voters with immigrants from developing countries. MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan called Carlson out on his show this week, warning that he is promoting a claim that "gets people killed."

The progressive firebrand described the Great Replacement as a "conspiracy theory so vile, so extreme, so dangerous" that it was, in the past, avoided by mainstream conservatives and kept "on the furthest fringes of the far right."

Hasan told viewers, "What is the Great Replacement? It's a story, or a theory if you will, about liberal elites secretly changing our demographics, helping Black and Brown immigrants to invade America and replace white people. It's a white supremacist story about so-called white genocide. Scary, right? Bonkers, too. And yet, this year, Fox's Tucker Carlson came along and thought, 'Hmmm, let's bring this idea into the light to a prime-time cable audience."

The MSNBC host went on to say that the Great Replacement Theory has become a "rallying cry for the neo-Nazi far right," noting that it originated in France with white nationalist author Renaud Camus and his book "Le Grand Remplacement." And Hasan noted that a series of terrorist attacks have been carried out by White supremacists who embrace and promote that theory.

"The Great Replacement Theory gets people killed," Hasan warned. "And yet, you now haveTucker Carlson— the most influential right-wing cable news host in America — defending it, promoting it, mainstreaming it. And elected Republicans are now following in his footsteps…. Members of the GOP are now openly trafficking in neo-Nazi rhetoric."

Hasan showed clips of Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania,Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rep. Brian Babin of Texas promoting the Great Replacement Theory, arguing that "members of the GOP are now openly trafficking in neo-Nazi rhetoric" rather than simply using racist "dog whistles" like Republicans of the past. And he noted thatRep. Matt Gaetz of Floridahas vigorously defended Carlson by explicitly promoting the Great Replacement Theory by name.

"This is how white supremacy is normalized in America today: the marriage between Rupert Murdoch's Fox and Donald Trump's GOP," Hasan warned. "And they make us numb to this stuff…. This is a deeply dangerous moment for America."

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/scott-perry/

New York Times on Saturday singled out Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) as a member of Congress who "played a significant role" in former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election — and now, lawmakers in Perry's state are calling for the congressman's resignation.

According to the Times, while Perry was hardly a main character in the president's unsuccessful attempt to usurp President Joe Biden's electoral victory, he played an integral role in Trump's plan to fire acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. Trump was hoping to replace Rosen, "who stood by the results of the election and had repeatedly resisted the president's efforts to undo them."

Perry introduced Trump to Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department official who "was sympathetic to Mr. Trump's view that the election had been stolen," the Times reports.

Per the Times:

"As the date for Congress to affirm Mr. Biden's victory neared, Mr. Perry and Mr. Clark discussed a plan to have the Justice Department send a letter to Georgia state lawmakers informing them of an investigation into voter fraud that could invalidate the state's Electoral College results."

According to the Times, the former president "backed down" on his plan to fire Rosen and install Clark "only after top department officials threatened to resign en masse."

As the York Daily Record reports, Perry also "led a House floor objection to Pennsylvania's election results" when Congress met to certify the Electoral College votes. That meeting was interrupted by a mob of angry Trump supporters after the president held a rally and promised to "fight like hell" for the presidency.

Following the publication of the report, officials in Pennsylvania on Saturday called for Perry's resignation. One such official was Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta (D-PA), who offered this succinct message for his Republican colleague...

===

https://www.ecowatch.com/house-republicans-climate-2460740442.html

46 House Republicans Side With Science

A couple things happened late last week that feel worth mentioning, to kick off this week on a hopeful note.

First, in a bit of legislative wonkery, the House of Representatives voted against an amendment that would have prevented the Department of Defense from studying how climate impacts threaten national security.

To express that in a way that doesn't double up on negatives, let's unpack it. The National Defense Authorization Act is the annual bill to fund the Department of Defense. This is considered a "must-pass" bill so everyone tries to slip in amendments, hoping that the bill's size and scope means they pass without notice.

One of these amendments, proposed by Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa), would have cut funding for a DoD study of how climate change will impact national security over the next 20 years. The military is already dealing with climate change, so it's prudent that they are able to study what sorts of impacts are coming down the line.

Perry argued that there are plenty of other agencies looking at climate change, so the military shouldn't. But in a relatively impressive display of intelligence, 46 Republicans joined Democrats to vote down Perry's amendment, preserving the funding for the DoD study.

That 46 Republicans were willing to side with science is impressive, and in part a function of the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus. This group has come under some scrutiny (perhaps rightfully so) for their general inaction and specifically failing to criticize Trump's Paris pull-out.

But now, by voting down Perry's amendment, they've done something—that's good news! In their defense, the fear of getting "Bob Inglis'd" (where a Republican takes a reasonable position on climate change then gets primaried from the right by a Koch-supported candidate), is understandable.

Bob Inglis brings us to the other flicker of light in these dark times. Buzzfeed's Zahra Hirji reported on Friday that Rep. Lamar Smith took a quiet trip to the Arctic to tour science facilities in the melting North. Yes, the same Lamar Smith who spent a year harassing climate scientist Tom Karl went to learn from climate scientists about their work. Oddly, he refused to talk about it with Buzzfeed afterward, canceling a call two minutes before it was supposed to start.

Considering that it was a trip to Antarctica that inspired Inglis's conversion to climate reality, one can hope that seeing the ice melting for himself will have a similar effect on Smith.

Either way, the Defense vote shows that the House may be moving in the right direction, if admittedly at a glacial pace. Whether or not it continues, we'll just have to wait and Larsen C.

:{==

2014531Undermining Clean Air ProtectionsAir

2014528Attack on Sound ScienceToxics/Public Right to Know, Other

2014525Attack on Scientific IntegrityToxics/Public Right to Know, Other

2014519Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline (KXL)Climate Change, Dirty Energy

2014515Big Polluter GiveawayDirty Energy, Climate Change, Lands/Forests

2014489Assault on the Clean Water RuleWater

2014470Pesticides PollutionToxics/Public Right to Know

2014463Attack on the Endangered Species Act (ESA)Wildlife

2014461Using Best Available ScienceOther

2014402Assault on Clean Energy and Clean WaterClean Energy, Water

2014397Impacts of Climate ChangeClimate Change

2014394Attack on Clean waterWater

2014393Light Bulb Efficiency StandardsClean Energy

2014389Social Cost of CarbonClimate Change

:{2014376Clean Energy FundingClean Energy only good vote

2014368Big Oil GiveawayDirty Energy, Drilling, Lands/Forests

2014364Offshore Drilling SubsidiesDirty Energy, Drilling

2014361National Ocean PolicyOceans

2014359Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) ExportsDirty Energy

2014354Gutting Pipeline ReviewDirty Energy

2014334Military Investments in Advanced BiofuelsTransportation

2014267Blocking Climate Action in Trade AgreementsClimate Change

2014177Big Oil BudgetDirty Energy

2014147Preventing New ParksLands/Forests

2014141Toxic Mining WasteWater

2014113Attacking Public Input & Environmental ReviewOther

2014106Carbon PollutionClimate Change

2014103Climate Change ScienceClimate Change

201491Undermining Flood Insurance ReformClimate Change, Other

:{201478Assault on Public ProtectionsAir, Other

Leadership PAC (1):

First Capital PAC

Career Fundraising

2011 - 2016 Total Receipts:	$1,463,731
2011 - 2016 Total Spent:	$1,181,655
Debts:	$0
Last Report:	Thursday, December 31, 2015

Top 5 Contributors, 2011 - 2016

Contributor	Total	Indivs	PACs
Every Republican is Crucial PAC	$20,000	$0	$20,000
National Auto Dealers Assn	$20,000	$0	$20,000
American Bankers Assn	$15,250	$250	$15,000
Exelon Corp	$14,000	$0	$14,000
National Assn of Realtors	$14,000	$0	$14,000

...view more data

Top 5 Industries, 2011 - 2016

Industry	Total	Indivs	PACs
Leadership PACs	$80,500	$0	$80,500
Oil & Gas	$61,100	$11,100	$50,000
Retired	$56,671	$56,671	$0
Electric Utilities	$46,500	$0	$46,500
Real Estate	$42,869	$27,869	$15,000

...view more data

Source of Funds

Individual Contributions	$688,176	(47%)
PAC Contributions	$755,707	(52%)
Candidate self-financing	$15,000	(1%)
Other	$4,848	(0%)

:{NOTE:

Every Republican is Crucial PAC	$20,000	$0	$20,000
National Auto Dealers Assn	$20,000	$0	$20,000
American Bankers Assn	$15,250	$250	$15,000
Exelon Corp	$14,000	$0	$14,000
National Assn of Realtors	$14,000	$0	$14,000
Comcast Corp	$13,500	$0	$13,500
Majority Cmte PAC	$12,500	$0	$12,500
Koch Industries	$12,000	$0	$12,000
Penn Waste	$12,000	$12,000	$0
Kinsley Construction	$11,500	$11,500	$0
Shipley Energy	$10,600	$10,600	$0
BNSF Railway	$10,500	$0	$10,500
Exxon Mobil	$10,500	$0	$10,500
Norfolk Southern	$10,250	$250	$10,000
Susquehanna International Group	$10,200	$10,200	$0
Freedom Project	$10,000	$0	$10,000
Keystone Alliance	$10,000	$0	$10,000
Eagle Forum	$9,500	$0	$9,500
Honeywell International	$9,498	$0	$9,498
Rutters Farm Stores	$9,450	$9,450	:{ }:

Last week, Rep. Scott Perry (R-Penn.) introduced the Energy Sovereignty Act. The text is unusually short for a piece of congressional legislation: a mere 97 words. And the intent is unusually clear: “To repeal section 115 of the Clean Air Act.”

Section 115 is a never-before-used portion of the Clean Air Act that grants the U.S. EPA broad powers to regulate pollutants that affect another country if that other country is also acting to curb such pollution. Since 195 nations reached an agreement in Paris in December to limit climate pollution, some climate policy wonks and legal scholars say Section 115 can now be deployed, giving the EPA a powerful new tool it can use to rein in greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. Naturally, that has Republicans like Perry worried.

Up until now, EPA has only had traditional “command and control” means of regulating pollution at its disposal in fighting climate change. It identifies a source of emissions, such as cars or power plants, and it sets standards for reducing emissions from that sector. There are various legal constraints on how EPA sets those standards, such as technological feasibility. With the Clean Power Plan, EPA tried to get a little more creative and flexible, setting emissions targets for each state’s energy sector that could be met through several possible “building blocks,” and that opened the plan up to additional legal challenges. Now it risks being overturned by the Supreme Court if Justice Antonin Scalia is replaced by another conservative....

elected 2012

Scott Gordon Perry (born May 27, 1962) is the U.S Representative for Pennsylvania's 4th congressional district, serving since 2013. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives for the 92nd legislative district (2007–2013). Perry is also a Brigadier General in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard.

Early life and education

Perry began his working career at age 13 picking fruit in Mechanicsburg^[citation ^needed]. In 1980, he graduated from Northern High School and the Cumberland-Perry Vo-Tech School.^[3] In 1991, he graduated from Pennsylvania State University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration Management. In July 2012, he earned a Masters degree in strategic planning from the US Army War College.^[4]^

Military service

Army National Guard

Perry began his military career in 1980 when he enlisted in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard. He attended basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, graduating Advanced Individual Training at Fort Belvoir, Virginia as a technical drafting specialist. He graduated as the President of Class 24 of Pennsylvania’s Officer Candidate School and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Field Artillery.^[citation ^needed]^

He served as an Aerial Observer in HHB 28th Infantry Division Artillery (DIVARTY). He was assigned to the 1-108th Field Artillery as a Fire Support Team Leader before transferring to Company A, 28th Aviation General Support, as a section leader. He served as a scout platoon leader in Troop C (Air) 1/104 Cavalry; Commander of Detachment 1, HHT 1/104 Cavalry; Commander, Troop C (Air) 1/104 Cavalry; A2C2 officer – 28 Aviation Brigade; Assistant S3 Air, 28ID(M); S2, 28th AVN BDE; Executive Officer, 1/104 Cavalry; Executive Officer, Task Force Saber, Multi-National Division (North), Bosnia; Safety Officer, SAAO, PA Joint Forces HQ.^[citation ^needed].

War in Iraq

In February 2008, he assumed command of the 2-104th General Support Aviation Battalion, in which he managed the unit's mobilization to and preparation at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, for its eventual deployment and combat mission as Task Force Diablo in Operation Iraqi Freedom. The Task Force was credited with flying 1,400 missions, accruing over 13,000 combat flight hours, transporting over 3 million pounds of cargo and 43,000 soldiers and passengers (including civilian). As TF Commander, Perry flew 44 missions, accruing nearly 200 combat flight hours. Perry currently serves as Commander of the HQ 166th Regional Training Institute, Pennsylvania National Guard.^[5]^

Awards/Decorations...

==}:

scott perry 2

Smith comes to Garland’s defense

Smith’s path not taken: An insurrection charge

A few tantalizing tidbits of evidence

Will the public get to see the primary documents?

GOP rep who had phone seized by FBI as part of J6 investigation now has oversight over it

Sewers to swamps

Fireside chats

Perry's Democratic hall pass

house investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection just took an unexpected turn: report

46 House Republicans Side With Science

Leadership PAC (1):

Career Fundraising

Top 5 Contributors, 2011 - 2016

Top 5 Industries, 2011 - 2016

Source of Funds

Contents

Early life and education

Military service

Army National Guard

War in Iraq

Awards/Decorations...