klukowski bb
SEE EASTMAN
SEE KEN BLACKWELL
enumerated powers BS
j6 ch 4 no anno
When no State legislature appointed its own set of electors before December 14th, the Trump Campaign arranged for electors to meet in contested States anyway and cast fake electoral college votes.201 This letter, with the Department of Justice seal at the top, was just one more way that President Trump and those close to him could pressure State officials to send competing electoral college votes to Congress for consideration during the joint session, despite former Vice President Biden’s certified victory in each of the contested States.
Despite the similarities between the requests in Clark’s proposed letter and the requests that President Trump and his team made to State officials for nearly 2 months, the extent to which Clark directly coordinated his actions with the Trump Campaign and its outside advisors is unclear. Clark asserted his Fifth Amendment rights and various other privileges to avoid answering the Select Committee’s questions about these and other topics.202
When Giuliani was asked during his Select Committee deposition whether he remembered discussing DOJ issuing a letter like Clark’s, Giuliani refused to answer because it implicated attorney-client privilege with President Trump, but when asked if he recalled ever recommending that Clark be given election-related responsibilities at DOJ, Giuliani said, “I do recall saying to people that somebody should be put in charge of the Justice Department who isn’t frightened of what’s going to be done to their reputation, because the Justice Department was filled with people like that.” 203 And the investigation has also revealed that Clark and John Eastman were in communication throughout this period.204
One person who had worked with Eastman and others in his circle was a lawyer installed to work with Clark at the Department of Justice in mid-December—the final weeks of the Trump administration—namedKen Klukowsk:{i.205 Klukowski was a Trump administration political appointee serving as a senior counsel under Clark in DOJ’s Civil Division.206 After serving as a lawyer in the Office and Management and Budget (OMB) for more than a year and volunteering as a lawyer for the Trump Campaign after election day, Klukowski only joined the Department when the administration’s personnel staff “expedite[d]” his appointment because the White House’s Presidential Personnel Office “want[ed] him in soon.” 207
On the morning of December 28th, Clark asked Klukowski to draft the Georgia letter for him.208 Clark dictated the substantive key points of the letter to Klukowski and told him exactly what to include.209 After several meetings with Clark throughout the day to update him on progress, Klukowski turned in his assignment and gave the letter to Clark, which Clark sent along to Acting Attorney General Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Donoghue, as described above.210}:
Donoghue quickly responded to Clark’s email, stating “there is no chance that I would sign this letter or anything remotely like this.” 211 The plan set forth by Clark was “not even within the realm of possibility.” 212 Donoghue warned that if they sent Clark’s letter, it “would be a grave step for the Department to take and it could have tremendous Constitutional, political and social ramifications for the country.” 213 Contrary to President Trump’s and Clark’s wild claims about the election, Donoghue stressed that DOJ’s ongoing investigations related to matters of such a “small scale that they simply would not impact the outcome of the Presidential Election.” 214 Clark’s assertion to the contrary was baseless.
ginni j6
8 BYMR.-
9 Q I was asking about Department of Justice officials.
10 Do you have -- did you have any communications with anyone who was then at
11 the Department of Justice in the post-election timeframe regarding concerns or questions
12 you had regarding the 2020 election?
13 A No, I did not.
Do you know Jeffrey Clark?
No.
Do you know Ken Klukowski?
I do.
:{How do you know Mr. Klukowski?
He's in a lot of my meetings. He's in CAP meetings. He's in Groundswell
20 sometimes. And I like him.}:
21 Q Did you have any conversations with Mr. Klukowski in the post-election
22 timeframe regarding the 2020 election?
Not that I remember, not that I can recall. No.
How about Members of Congress? Did you have any conversations with
25 Members of Congress in the post-election timeframe regarding concerns you had about
j6 depo DL
4 SELECT COMMITTEE TO INVESTIGATE THE
5 JANUARY 6TH ATTACK ON THE U.S. CAPITOL,
6 U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,
7 WASHINGTON, D.C.
DEPOSITION OF: KEN KLUKOWSKI
Friday, June 10, 2022
file:///C:/Users/patmc/Downloads/GPO-J6-TRANSCRIPT-CTRL0000916054.pdf
1 perjury that the testimony you're about to give in this deposition shall be the truth, the
2 whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
3
4
5
The Witness. I do.
The Reporter. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. And then, if at any time you need any breaks or
6 would like to consult with your counsel, please just let us know, we're happy to do so.
7 And just as a reminder, this is being recorded through the Webex platform and
5
8 also this camera. So if you do need to consult, we'll figure out a way to do that, because
9 this doesn't stop recording.
10 All right. At this point, I understand that either you, Mr. Greim, or you,
11 Mr. Brothers, would like to make preliminary remarks.
12 Mr. Brothers. Yes. We'd just like to note for the record before we begin the
13 resumed deposition, at the beginning of this deposition some months ago, Mr. Klukowski
14 raised numerous objections. :{:{I}::{ }::{will}::{ }::{not}::{ }::{recite}::{ }::{them}::{ }::{for}::{ }::{the}::{ }::{record again,}::{ }::{but}::{ }::{the}:
15 objections include, but aren't limited to, matters dealing with the composition of the
16 committee, the authorization of the committee to issue a subpoena for Mr. Klukowski's
17 deposition testimony based on the composition issues, whether the subpoena is
18 supported by a legislative purpose and a pertinent committee function.
19 There were also numerous objections raised in Mr. Klukowski's document
20 production. And we preserve all of those objections and are not waiving any of them by
21 appearing to resume the deposition today.}: And we also continue to preserve all
22 constitutional and common law privilege
...
So this is going to be a more targeted deposition than last time.
7 There's a few issues we wanted to bring you back to discuss.
8 The first I'll start with is going back toMr. Jeffrey Bossert Clark. And we
9 understand that you began working for him on December 15th at the Department of
10 Justice.
A That is my recollection.
12 Q Okay. Do you know whether Mr. Clark ever communicated with Rudy
13 Giuliani?
14 AI do not recall ever being told one way or the other on that. So I have no
15 recollection of anything responsive to that.
16 Q Did he ever tell you anything that suggested he was in touch with
17 Mr. Giuliani or anybody from his legal team?
Not that I recall.
Did Mr. Clark ever tell you about communications or meetings he had with [powell]...
Kerik, Katherine Friess, or Cleta Mitchell, any of those?
What were those names again?
Yeah, sure. Bernie Kerik?
Not that I recall.
Katherine Friess or Friess?
Not that I recall.
:{Cleta Mitchell?
Not that I recall.}:
Q Okay. Did Mr. Clark ever tell you he had meetings or communications with
10 anybody associated with the President's campaign? Or what was left over from the
11 campaign at that December through January period?
12 A Could you clarify? It's -- that's -- that's --you say anyone affiliated with the
13 campaign?
14 Q That's correct. Who was representing the President in his personal
15 capacity or on behalf of the campaign in the period from December 15th up and through
16 January the 20th. Do you remember Mr. Clark saying that he had been in touch with
17 anybody like that?
18 A I do not recall any conversation in which he mentioned a name that I either
19 knew or that he represented to me was someone representing the campaign.
20 Q Did he say -- did Mr. Clark say to you that he had been in touch with
21 representatives from the President's campaign or his individual counsel -- the President's
22 individual counsel?
23 AI do not recall any conversation that was characterized in words similar to
24 what you just said.
25 Q Okay. Other than the President or White House staff, do you remember...
[cleta?]
So can you repeat the question we're on now?
Yes, of course. :{So my question now is, did Mr. Clark ever tell you that he
3 spoke with John Eastman in the post-election periods? And when I say spoke,
4 electronically, in person, over the phone, or otherwise.
5 A Not that I recall.}:
6 Q When we last met, we did discuss with you your interactions with John
7 Eastman. I will say that you withheld, as your counsel has represented last time, and
8 this time again, and throughout the period,that you withheld a number of documents on
9 attorney-client, First Amendment privilege claims.
10 Did you, Mr. Klukowski, review those claims before asserting them to the
committee?
12 Mr. Greim. I'm going to -- I'm going to object here. I mean, I think it's
inappropriate to ask a witness about, you know, his interaction with counsel and the
14 preparation that went into positions that we take.
15 - Okay. And to be clear, I'm not going to ask about any
16 communications with counsel that he had.
1:{7 I just want to make sure, Mr. Klukowski, did you review your documents and
18 ultimately decide and agree with the decisions to produce or withhold certain documents
19 on objection grounds?}:
20 Mr. Greim. You know, I think I -- I understand the -- I understand the question,
21 but I don't think it's appropriate to try to tease out -- I mean, I think the relevance would
22 be to show that there was a difference between the witness and counsel, and I just don't
23 think that's an appropriate question here.
24 I mean, I think we will just stipulate that the positions that we took are the
25 positions we too...
[lots on 1st amend/atty client priv?]
13
1 represent to you, as part of ongoing litigation, and it was produced over certain
2 attorney-client work product and other objections.
3 The first thing I'll ask you is -- one person on this isChuck DeVore. Do you know
4 who Chuck DeVore is?
Not to my recollection.
So the day after the election, on November 4th -- it's at the bottom of this
7 email -- John Eastman wrote to Chuck DeVore, saying, I'm on a plane to Philly, can't call,
8 but can do email.
9 And then :{Chuck DeVore responds, November 4th at 7:25 p.m., says, If Biden ends
up 270 to 268, consider this. Of the 270 electors, 171 are in States that allow faithless
electors. I believe that's 55 in California where there is a penalty, but you can do it
anyway. Decent odds he loses one, especially if he starts deteriorating in the coming
weeks under the stress.}:
14 Mr. Eastman then responds one email further up the chain on November 4th, at
15 7:12 p.m., saying, So throws it to the House. How likely one of our Rep delegations goes
16 south on us. Lots of never Trumpers there.
17 Mr. DeVore then, moving up one, responds November 4th at 6:13 p.m., saying,
18 We may be up to 27. Iowa went from 3 to 1 Dem and might go 3 to 1 Rep.
19 Republican, I'm assuming.
20 :{And then Mr. Eastman, at the very top of this email chain, on Friday, November
6th, says to Mr. DeVore, I'm in a conference but can do email. Already been in touch
with Ken Klukowski on the legislative override for violations of existing State law option.}:
23 John.
24 Do you recall Mr. Eastman reaching out to you in this period, so before November
25 6th and after the election, about what he calls the State legislature override?
...
15
1 for President?
2 A I was -- I can't speak to Dr. Eastman's state of mind. For my part, I was
3 representing the President's campaign.
4 Q But you're suggesting here that you're on the same legal team, is that right,
5 with Dr. Eastman at this period between November 4th and November 6th?
6 A What I'm saying is that any communications I would've had on that subject
7 matter during that window would have been of a nature that, as a practicing attorney, I
8 have with other attorneys numerous times in terms of I'm working on a matter and want
9 to consult with another attorney who may or may not formally join the campaign, but it is
10 a consultation in contemplation of potential representation of anticipated litigation.
11 Q Okay. So your objection is noted. I will go back to one thing that
12 Mr. Greim raised, which was, do you remember talking to Mr. Eastman about this
13 legislative override that's referenced in the email that I'm showing you as exhibit No. 24,
14 between November 4th and November 6th?
15 AI do recall conversations about identifying potential legal issues that could be
16 raised in litigation as part of a post-election challenge.
17 Q Okay. :{And that's somewhat different than this legislative override which
18 would be about electors and the legislative -- based on the context of this email -- a State
19 legislature's authority to choose electors.}: So do you remember discussing that, the
20 legislative override that involves a legislature, a State legislature choosing its own
21 electors, with Dr. Eastman in this period between November 4th and November 6th?
22 A In some of -- I was working on the campaign in Pennsylvania. To the best
23 of my recollection, in the public filings that were made in that Pennsylvania litigation, it
24 included a discussion of the Electors Clause.
25 Q Do you dispute --
....[i do not recall many times]
Q
Yes. Yes. Thank you.
Sure.
I'm there. Yes, I'm there.
All right. So in the prayer for relief, B, it says, Declare that any electoral
college votes cast by such electors appointed in the defendant States -- Pennsylvania,
George, Michigan, and Wisconsin -- are in violation of the Electors Clause and cannot be
counted.
26
8 So my question is, had you discussed the idea of filing suit to, quote, declare that
9 any electoral college votes, end quote, in States that Trump might lose, before the
10 election? Did you have that discussion before the election?
11 A Not that I recall.
12 Q This relief, particularly in D, which is at the bottom of page 17, If any of the
13 defendant States have already appointed electors to the electoral college using the 2020
14 election results, direct that such States' legislatures, pursuant to statute in the
15 Constitution, have the authority to appoint a new set of electors in a manner that does
16 not violate the Electors Clause or to appoint no electors at all.
17:{ That is somewhat similar to the letter that you drafted for Mr. Clark on December
18 the 28th and that we covered in your last deposition. Did you discuss the December
19 28th letter that you drafted with John Eastman?
20 A Not that I recall}:, nor would I say that the two are similar.
21 You're referring there, if I am correct in understanding, that you're referring to a
22 letter for Jeff Clark that was after December 14th?
23 Q Correct, yeah.:{ So in our last meeting, we discussed the December 28th
letter that you drafted for Mr. Jeffrey Clark while at the Department of Justiceas a proof
of concept letter to the State of Georgia, asking them to look into election-related issues.}:...
2 [11:28 a.m.]
3 BY
4 Q I will say this. The letter is at exhibit No. 2 in your binder we went over at
5 length. On page 3, it does say that :{"we," meaning the Department of Justice, "share
6 with you," in this letter, meaning the State of Georgia, "our view that the Georgia General
7 Assembly has implied authority under the Constitution of the United States to call itself
8 into special session for the limited purpose of considering issues pertaining to the
9 appointment of Presidential electors."}:
Which paragraph?
That's page 3, the bottom paragraph.
Yes. That paragraph does not say they still had the authority to appoint
new electors. It's saying they have the authority to convene to discuss the appointment
of electors. That would include electors that were already appointed and could not be
changed.
16 Q Okay. If we go to page 5, this letter that you drafted says, middle
17 paragraph, "The Georgia General Assembly accordingly must have inherent authority
18 granted by the U.S. Constitution to come into session to appoint electors regardless of
19 any purported limit imposed by the State constitution or State statute requiring the
20 Governor's approval."
21 Do you agree that I just read that correctly?
22 A Yes. And that's consistent with what I said, because I'm referring to there's
23 no mention there to the Federal Constitution or the Federal Constitution empowering
24 Congress to set a date beyond which electors cannot be appointed. That's only a
25 reference to State statutes and State constitutions....
[much wrangling on priv and scope of j6 authority] [much i do not recall]
42
1 Q Okay. I'll go to exhibit No. 31. This is a December 28th email, again,
2 produced to us in litigation over -- that included claims of various privileges and work
3 product assertions.
4 This is from a person named :{Edward Corrigan and Connie Hair, copying both you
5 and Mr. Eastman, from Ken Blackwell. }:This subject is, "VP briefing on January 6th, 2021,
6 meeting."
7 First, I'll ask you, who is Ed Corrigan?
8 A :{Ed Corrigan is, to the best of my knowledge, a private citizen who works here
9 in Washington, D.C}:.
11 Corrigan?
Do you have any kind of friendly or professional relationship with Mr.
I would say that we are friends.
Did you work on issues related to the November 2020 election together?
I do not recall working with Mr. Corrigan on the election.
And Connie Hair, we went over last time, is Mr. Gohmert's chief of staff, at
least at the time. Is that correct? That's what you understood?
Yes. Correct. That was and is my understanding.
John Eastman, we've been talking about him.
And who's Mr. Blackwell?
AMr. Blackwell is a friend of mine and a former elected official and former
21 presidentially appointed official, previous administrations.
22 Q In this email Mr. Blackwell says, "As I stated last week, I believe the Vice
23 President and his staff would benefit greatly from a briefing by John and Ken."
24 Did you have a conversation in the week before this email with any of these
25 participants about briefing the Vice President?
1 AI do not recall having a conversation with any of these individuals about
2 briefing the Vice President.
3 Q Do you remember Mr. Blackwell saying anything about the Vice President's
4 role on January the 6th at any point after December 15th?
I do not recall conversations with Ambassador Blackwell on that topic.
And conversations, to be clear, would include any communications,
7 meetings, text messages, phone calls. You don't remember any of ...
In whatever communication is being referenced in that first clause where it
2 says, "As stated last week," I have no recollection of anything happening. I mean, this is
3 December 28. So I have no recollection of anything in whatever that window would be,
4 December whatever to whatever. What that's referencing there, I have no recollection
5 about what that would be.
6 Q Did you ever speak to John Eastman about him potentially briefing the Vice
7 President or after briefing the Vice President what he discussed?
8 A I do not -- I'll answer those as separate questions. I do not recall anything
9 pertaining to the former,nor do I recallhim ever telling me that he briefed the Vice
10 President.
11 Q Mr. :{Blackwell said in the next line, "As I also mentioned, make sure we don't
12 overexpose Ken given his new position}:." At that point, you had only a week or two
13 before joining the Department of Justice.
14 Do you know what Ken Blackwell's concerns were with you and your new
15 position?
16 A I do not know. It is -- I do not know. I don't know what he is referring
17 there. I had made known in my friend circles, which would include Ambassador
18 Blackwell, that I was looking forward to joining the Department and that once I was there
19 I would be in a fundamentally different role. :{I saw myself as a straight G-man and just
20 seeking to get some respectable DOJ litigation credentials under my belt before I went on
21 to the private market in January 20 looking for a job.}:
22:{ So I had told everyone that I thought I was moving on from campaign-related
23 activity, because I was going to keep my head down and focus on my government job.}:
24 I don't recall specific conversations, but I said them to so many people so many
25 times that I would be confident that the ambassador was in at least one of those
...
47
1 Q Did Ms. Hair -- I guess -- let me start over.
2 Did you ever talk to Ms. Hair about sensitivities about your situation with the
3 Department of Justice and being able to do things like briefing the Vice President?
A Well, those are two separate questions. Let's break those out.
5 I have no recollection of anything pertaining to the Vice President. I referenced
6 in my earlier conversation that I wasn't sure what I spoke with her about on the phone
7 record that we saw on December 28. And I told you that while I couldn't recall the exact
8 conversation, that I would be -- that to the best of my recollection the substance was that
now that I know there is litigation here with the United States as an adverse party, that I
should not be communicating about this.
11 And so I don't recall if that was a, "You can't be calling me on this. I can't be
12 answering your questions. Don't email me things. Make sure I'm not copied on things.
13 I can't have any part of this." I don't know what was conveyed in that phone call.
14 But I do know that was the fact of the matter, is that I'm now seeing that I had
15 just -- I was seeing something indicating to me that I was in an adverse position and so I
16 just shouldn't be having communications on this.
17I do not recall what I conveyed or how I conveyed it.
So this email is on the same date as the email you received from Ms. Hair --
Yes.
-- about Gohmert v. Pence?
Yes.
Was there any connection between what's being suggested in this email and
Ms. Hair sending the Gohmert v. Pence lawsuit to you?
Not that I know of. Not to my knowledge.
Were you surprised by this? I mean, somebody's suggesting to you that
...
50
1 23, talking about Ms. Hair, you said, "When we do see each other it's, 'Hi, how's it going.'
2 And it's genuine. But we are not, like, in regular communication or work together on
3 things."
Yes.
So my question for you in light of that is that on December 28th we know of
6 at least these two emails that included Ms. Hair about the election in particular. So
were you working on issues related to the election with Ms. Hair?
Not that I recall.
:{Do these emails, seeing them, this, and the fact that you got the Gohmert v.
Pence lawsuit from her the same day and you discussed at length your communications
with her on the 28th, refresh your recollection as to what you were doing with Mrs. Hair
around that time?
13 A No. I do not believe I was doing -- to the best of my recollection, I had not
14 seen Mrs. Hair during any of my time at DOJ. I'm not sure how long it had been even
15 prior to that since I had seen her.}:
16 Q And you said you weren't in regular communication. So were both of these
17 kind of news to you, out of the blue, all of a sudden Ms. Hair pops up twice in one day?
A To the best of my recollection, yes.
Now, obviously, that's not -- those are not two isolated things. Someone
20 mentioned my name to her. So, I mean, it's -- there's content from the communication
21 we just looked at indicating that there were other conversations going on, conversations
22 that I have no recollection being a part of.
Q:{ When you spoke to Ms. Hair on the 28th, did she raise this idea about
24 somebody briefing the Vice President, potentially you?
25 A Not that I recall...}:.
[hair et all xmas and cocktail hours.
Let's go back on the record. It's 12:34, and we're resuming the
14 deposition of Mr. Ken Klukowski.
15 BY
16 Q Just a few follow-ups.
17 Are you familiar with a person named Ken Chezbro (ph) or Cheesebro (ph),
18 depending on how you pronounce it?
A How is it spelled?
Q C-h-e-s-e-b-r-o.
A I have no recollection of ever seeing or hearing that name.
Q Okay. Do you know an individual named Mark Martin?
A :{Mark Martin?
Q Correct. Former North Carolina Supreme Court judge.}:
A I have no recollection of a person by that name..
55
How about James Troupis, T-r-o-u-p-i-s?
I do not recall ever meetinga person by that name.
Q Okay. Not necessarily meeting, but talked with them, communicated with
4 them?
5 A :{No. I am unaware of any communication I had with someone of that name,
by that name}:.
7 Q And just I'll represent to you that Mr. Chesebro is somebody who also was a
8 lawyer doing work with the campaign in the post-election period. I believe he was
9 based out of, at least for part of the time, Boston, Massachusetts.
10 Does that refresh your recollection?
No. It -- no.
Okay. Do you know who Ginni Thomas is?
Yes.
Who do you know her to be?
Ginni Thomas is a prominent figure in the conservative movement and the
16 wife of Justice Clarence Thomas.
17 Q Did you have any communications with her after the election,
18 November 3rd, 2020, up and through January 20th, 2021?
19 A I do not recall any substantive communication. We end up at a lot of the
20 same Christmas parties and whatnot. So I do not recall any conversations with her, but I
could easily have seen her during that time and exchanged pleasantries at some sort of
social event like a Christmas party. I have no recollection.
Fair enough. And we're not so interested in those pleasantries.
Right. Absolutely. I just want to make clear I'm being very forthright with
25 you in my answer....
56
1 Q Yes. I appreciate that. So just for clarity in the record, do you recall ever
2 having any conversations about the 2020 election with Ms. Thomas after the election?
I do not recall such a conversation.
:{Do you remember any conversations you had with Ms. Thomas about the
joint session of Congress?
I do not recall any such conversation.}:
Earlier, before we broke, I asked you about any briefings that you're aware
8 of for the Vice President or the President. And just to be clear, did you ever discuss or
communicate with any White House staff about the joint session of Congress?
...
rww 11 22
after right-wing predictions of a “red wave” or “red tsunami” were defeated by voters, some right-wing leaders are predictably calling for new restrictions on early voting and mail-in ballots, both of which have increased access to the ballot and expanded as safe ways for people to vote during the COVID-19 pandemic.
:{
}:
Among those calling for limiting early and mail-in voting is the Family Research Council’s Ken Blackwell, a notorious voter suppresser during his tenure as Ohio secretary of state, who in 2020 participated in former President Donald Trump’s scheme to get Vice President Mike Pence to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power after Trump’s loss.
An article published Tuesday by FRC’s “news” outlet, The Washington Stand, said Blackwell called it “crazy” to depend on vote by mail and said he would end early voting if he could. In a conversation with FRC’s Tony Perkins two days after the election, Blackwell declared himself “a 21st Century Luddite” and said he wanted to ditch voting machines for paper ballots and restrict voting to Election Day itself.
Blackwell and Perkins agreed that voting by mail and longer election periods create greater ballot security challenges and more opportunities for human error. “The Democrats want that type of a process,” Perkins claimed. Blackwell agreed, saying, “What they figure is that if you have enough confusion, if you have tight margins, you get vote counts in what I call the area of litigation.” In reality, election experts and studies have shown that vote by mail is safe and reliable.
While making insinuations about Democratic motives, Perkins and Blackwell said that there were fewer reports of “shenanigans” this year, thanks in part, they said, to having additional observers at the polls.
Perkins said the two political parties have worldviews that are 180 degrees apart, claiming that “Our freedoms, our abilities to raise our families, to teach our children to love the Lord and to know him and to live that faith out in the broader society is at risk in every election.” Blackwell agreed, adding, “We know that the difference between our constitutional republic is that God is at the center, is central to it, and all of the totalitarian states that I have ever visited, they tried to run God and faith out of the public square, crush the family, and make people more dependent, not free citizens but subjects.”
Speaking about the midterm elections, Blackwell said that it may not have been a red tsunami, but there were major victories for right-wing candidates. “We cannot let the devil steal our joy,” he said. Perkins responded by quoting or paraphrasing Pastor Gary Hamrick: “Hey, we sawRoeoverturned, and we didn’t expect some kind of backlash from the devil?”
“I think the reason people are opposed to very practical procedures such as a photo ID is because they want to cheat the system,” Perkins said. “They want to be able to manipulate it.”
“They want confusion,” Blackwell added, “They don’t want clarity.”
To be fair, Perkins and Blackwell know something about cheating the system and creating confusion. Both energetically embraced and promoted Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. In December 2020, they signed a letter falsely claiming, “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.” The letter called on state legislatures in six battleground states won by Biden to appoint pro-Trump electors anyway. At the end of that month, both Perkins and Blackwell signed another letterurging Senate Republicans to contest electors from five states.
As mentioned earlier, Blackwell was also involved in the scheme to pressure Pence to overturn the election. On Dec. 28, 2020, Blackwell sent an email to several right-wing insiders urging that Pence and his staff get a briefing from “John and Ken”—that is, John Eastman and Ken Klukowski. Eastman, a lawyer who pushed illegal schemes to keep Trump in power, has had a long professional association with Klukowski, a former director of FRC’s Center for Religious Liberty who after Trump’s loss was parachuted into the Justice Department office of Jeffrey Clark, who was plotting to drag the DOJ into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.
Two days before the Capitol insurrection, Blackwell tweeted a video message using the “Stop the Steal” hashtag and urging activists to demand that members of Congress address “election irregularities and illegalities” on Jan. 6. “This is not a time for sideline sitters or backbenchers,” he said. “You must do what you can with what you have where you are. Our republic demands it.”
Under Perkins’ leadership, FRC last year launched the Center for Biblical Worldview, which it said would help activists “see the spiritual warbehind the political war.” Pollster and Center for Biblical Worldview senior fellow George Barna told religious right activists at FRC’s “Pray Vote Stand” summit last yearthat it is their duty to try to indoctrinate other people’s children into a “biblical worldview.”
Tags: Ken Blackwell Kenneth Blackwell Tony Perkins Capitol Insurrection Donald Trump Election 2020 Election 2022 Stop the Steal voter suppression Voting Rights Family Research Council
===
https://www.msnbc.com/congress/jan-6-hearings/live-blog/live-updates-analysis-day-5-rcna34785
99d ago /
Day 5 offers new evidence — and new mysteries
:{
Lisa Rubin
}:
As at prior hearings, the House select committee offered new evidence today, including evidence of GOP congressmembers’ consciousness of guilt. (You don’t ask for a pardonunless you think there’s a decent chance you broke the law — and could be prosecuted.)
But some of the new evidence was just as puzzling as it was tantalizing. Consider two examples.
First, the committee asserted today that lawyer Ken Klukowski, who served in the Justice Department for a hot minute, collaborated with John Eastman and Jeffrey Bossert Clark on aspects of Trump’s scheme. But how did Klukowski come to DOJ, where, as Liz Cheney noted, he was specifically assigned to Clark, in the first place?
one clue comes from the Dec. 28, 2021 email the committee showed today, in which GOP activist and Family Research Council fellow Ken Blackwell advocated that Eastman and Klukowski brief Pence and his team. That email was sent to two people: Rep. Louis Gohmert’s chief of staff, Connie Hair, and Ed Corrigan, the president and CEO of the Conservative Partnership Institute, or CPI. If CPI sounds familiar to you, it should. It’s where Mark Meadowsis now a “Senior Partner,” and it was the beneficiary of a $1 million donation from Trump in the weeks after the select committee was created.
What sway, if any, Corrigan and Hair had over Pence and his staff is unknown. But it bears noting that Corrigan had prior experience filling administration jobs for Trump; as his CPI bio reads, he led “the personnel selection process for all domestic policy departments” for Trump’s 2016 transition.
Second, the committee noted, in describing the run up to the Jan. 3, 2021 Oval Office meeting, that Jeff Clark was already being referred to asthe acting attorney general on White House call logs late that afternoon. The absence of call logs for Jan. 6 itself has already been thoroughly explored, but is it possible that such logs for other, significant days reveal more than we would have expected? Looks like we’ll have to wait at least until hearings resume next month to find out.
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The key role played by Ken Klukowski
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In November of last year, the House select committee issued a subpoena to Kenneth Klukowski, a lawyer and former aide to Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark. And in its press release, the committee was fairly transparent as to why: Klukowski “was:{**involved in drafting a letter**:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:that urged legislatures in certain states to delay certification of the election.” He also helped Clark prepare for the now-infamous Jan. 3, 2021 meeting. That, of course, was the meeting at which all assembled but Clark said they would resign if Trump fired Rosen and made Clark acting attorney general.
But who is Klukowski?
For starters, he’s a guy with a long history in the conservative legal and political worlds, including with Team Trump. In November 2016, Politico reported thatKlukowski, who was then senior counsel at director of strategy at the First Liberty Institute, joined the Trump transition team as an advisor on “protecting constitutional rights.”By 2018, while still at First Liberty, he argued, in an op-ed for the Washington Examiner in support of an Oregon couple that refused to bake a same-sex wedding cake. Unsurprisingly, Klukowski, a former Family Research Council director, was named as a member ofthe “Christian legal army” in The Nation’s reporting on those lawyers’ growing influence in state attorneys generals’ offices and federal courts.
Klukowski’s relationships with key Trump world figures are also substantial. A former senior legal editor at Breitbart, he hasknown former Trump advisor Steve Bannon for years. (Here’sthem talking together on Breitbart.) And connections between Klukowski and Trump attorney John Eastman date back to at least 2012.”He even appeared with another Trump campaign lawyer, Sidney Powell, on talk radio in 2018.
Yet Klukowski did not join the Trump administration until late August 2019, when he joined OMB as a special counsel underthen-general counsel Mark Paoletta, who later became embroiled in the withholding of aid to Ukraine underlying Trump’s first impeachment. (Today, Paoletta and Klukowski havereunited in private practice at Schaerr Jaffe, a boutique law firm well stocked with conservative legal stars.) And he didn’t leave the White House for the Justice Department until mid-December 2020, which begs the question: Why would anyone, much less someone with a plum White House gig, take a job expected to last little more than a month?
As expected, the committee has some answers.
First, Klukowski “parachuted into the Department... with only 36 days left until [the] inauguration” and then “drafted th[e] Georgia letter with Mr. Clark” just days before the Oval Office showdown between Clark and his DOJ bosses.
Second, Klukowski worked with his old friend Eastman, includingafterhe joined DOJ, to quietly aid Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. Ken Blackwell, a GOP activist and former Ohio Secretary of State, suggested Pence and his staff would benefit from a briefing from Eastman and Klukowski. Still, Blackwell cautioned they not “overexpose Ken given his new position.” Klukowski’s value, apparently, was as both a willing soldier for Trump, and an under-the-radar insider.
As Cheney summed up, the evidence shows “Klukowski was simultaneously working with Jeffrey Clark to draft the proposed letter to Georgia officials to overturn their certified election and working with Dr. Eastman to help pressure the Vice President to overturn the election.” And that determination, coupled with reporting that federal law enforcement seized electronic devices from Clark’s home yesterday, is not a good development for Klukowski.
https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/new-two-men-very-close-to-ginni-thomasone
In early September of 2020, during the same several-week period that Ginni Thomas friend and Donald Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell was successfully recruiting Ginni Thomas friend and former Clarence Thomas law clerk John Eastman to also become a Trump lawyer, Eastman was the head of the far-right Claremont Institute Center …...
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July 17
Proof, Investigative Commentary:Two Men Very Close to Ginni Thomas—One of Them One Step Removed From Trump’s Coup Plot—Come seth abramson graphicUnder New Scrutiny, Seth Abramson, left, July 16-17, 2022. New evidence strongly suggests that it’s more imperative than ever that the House January 6 Committee get sworn testimony from the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—and do so quickly.
Introduction: In early September of 2020, during the same several-week period that Ginni Thomas friend and Donald Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell was successfully recruiting Ginni Thomas friend and former Clarence Thomas law clerk John Eastman to also become a Trump lawyer, Eastman was the head of the far-right Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence.
Around this time—September 9—a member of Trump’s National Security Council, Michael Anton, authored a truly stunning article entitled “The Coming Coup?” The document is profoundly unsettling in retrospect, given Anton’s high position within Trumpworld’s intelligence apparatus.
In “The Coming Coup?”, Anton imagined the following scenario:
Violence around the time of the 2020 election propagated by left-wing groups; requiring the invocation of the Insurrection Act by then-President Trump....
Note that this very same sequence of events could equally be triggered if Trump and his political team were to stage a televised act of violence and chaos and then blame it on left-wing agitators in a premeditated way—which, in the event, is exactly what Trump used the Rudy Giuliani-Steve Bannon-John Eastman “war room” at the Willard Hotel in Washington to do during Insurrection Week.
Despite no evidence whatsoever that either Black Lives Matter activists or participants in the loose antifa movement had been present at the United States Capitol on that dark day, Trumpist partisans insisted that they had been—and immediately after the Capitol was cleared began pushing Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act on these (fraudulent) grounds.
[B]y September of 2020 it was Trump’s longtime friend, attorney, confidant, and fixer Michael Cohen who had told Congress and all America under oath that he knew for a fact that Donald Trump was not going to concede the 2020 presidential election no matter what happened in it.
Just days ago, a Mother Jones investigative report confirmed Cohen’s revelation with secretly recorded pre-election audio of Bannon—of Trump’s Insurrection Week Willard Hotel war room, which he shared with the Claremont Institute’s Eastman—confirming that in fact it was Trump who’d all along planned to execute the plot Anton wrote of for Eastman’s Claremont Institute back in September, just after Eastman came aboard Trump’s legal team at Ginni Thomas friend Cleta Mitchell’s invitation.
So Michael Cohen was right. And if you’re of the camp that believes—on significant evidence—that every accusation by Trumpworld is fact a confession, you can see in the coup plot outlined above by Trump adviser Anton precisely the sequence of events that would quite nearly be carried out by Bannon, Giulian, Eastman, Sidney Powell, Michael Lindell, Patrick Byrne, and Michael Flynn.
Within 90 days of Anton’s essay, Eastman would be working on making the seditious vision of Trump’s intel guru (which the Claremont Institute had eagerly published) a reality—though for Donald Trump, of course, rather than Joe Biden. Indeed, once Ginni Thomas friend Eastman joined Trump presidential adviser Ginni Thomas and the aforementioned Ginni Thomas friend and presidential adviser Cleta Mitchell as a Trump adviser, he appears to mostly have focused on executing Anton’s hypothetical.
Seth Abramson, shown above and at right, is founder of Proof and is a former criminal defense attorney and criminal investigator who teaches digital journalism, seth abramson resized4 proof of collusionlegal advocacy, and cultural theory at the University of New Hampshire. A regular political and legal analyst on CNN and the BBC during the Trump presidency, he is a best-selling author who has published eight books and edited five anthologies.
https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/mike-flynn/
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Inside the secret campaign to distance a former Trump NSA official from Michael Flynn's security team
Jordan Green and Raw Story July 28, 2022
In late 2020, Lt. General Michael Flynn sent a security team to the home of Staci Burk, an Arizona law student. The team leader asked Burk to prepare an affidavit with information about ballots on planes that could be used to support lawsuits filed by attorney Sidney Powell to overturn the 2020 election.
Members of the security team, part of a group called 1st Amendment Praetorian, took Burk’s cell phone against her will. She later learned that it turned up in Washington, DC a couple of days before Trump supporters overran the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Burk herself was not in DC in December 2020 and January 2021. She said in a court filing in February 2021 that she learned on Jan. 11 that her phone was at the Willard Hotel, which has been described as a “command center” of the effort to overturn the 2020 election.
The 1st Amendment Praetorian security team’s seven-week residency at Burk’s home upended her life. Burk fled her home, incurred financial debt, reassessed her beliefs about the election and struggled to repair her reputation as various conspiracy theorists in the election denial world assailed her credibility.
Burk’s ordeal with 1st Amendment Praetorian — better known by its initials 1AP — pulled her into the orbit of a dizzying array of pro-Trump actors, including Arizona politicians, conspiracy theorists and associates of Flynn and Powell.
In January 2022, almost one year after her cell phone was confiscated, a lawyer who served in the Trump White House Office of Presidential Personnel named Andrew Kloster reached out to Burk with an unusual request. He wanted a written statement from her disassociating a former National Security Agency official and Flynn associate from 1AP.
The request came just as the investigation of the House Select Committee to investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol was causing increasing unease among allies of the former president.
Kloster told Burk he was representing Trump NSA official Jim Penroseas a “sort of a favor” during the phone call earlier this year, which Raw Story is reporting for the first time. Kloster also indicated he was familiar with the former president’s interest in the widening congressional probe.
Described in his Federalist Society bio as “a longtime fixture of the conservative movement” who had worked at the Heritage Foundation, Kloster joined the Trump White House Office of Presidential Personnel in 2020. After Trump left office, Kloster served as chief of staff for a special counsel appointed by Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to investigate the outcome of the 2020 election in Wisconsin.
“I was in the Trump White House, and I know many people; I talk with them continually about what’s going on,” Kloster said. “And I’ve been involved with some of these other January 6th matters. And it’s really — I think at the highest level, [Penrose is] not involved with anything untoward. But there’s always concern when you’ve got these giant Democratic sort of fishing expeditions that he just wants to button things up so that he can — if anyone does come to him, he can say, ‘Look, I had nothing to do with this. I had nothing to do with that.’
“So, it’s one of those things, like, a lot of people are concerned — Jim is concerned,” Kloster continued. “And it’s more like what can he do affirmatively before anything — before anybody does anything to kind of help him protect himself. And so, I think your issue is one of those loose ends that he just wanted to button up — not because he has any — you know, things could just continue and nothing could ever happen, and he could not get that from you and things could still be totally fine. Or, he might need it at some point.”
Emails to the January 6th Committee for this story seeking clarification on whether Penrose is under scrutiny went unreturned.
According to a professional biography, Jim Penrose retired from the NSA as a senior-level defense intelligence analyst in 2014. Lin Wood, the defamation lawyer who collaborated with Powell to file election challenge lawsuits, has confirmed that Penrose joined Powell and Flynn at his South Carolina estate in November 2020 to work on the election, along with Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence captain, and Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas who would later lead the partisan review of the Arizona election.
Raw Story initially contacted Staci Burk in August 2021. She has continually expressed reluctance about going on the record due to her concern about ongoing threats from associates of Michael Flynn, including 1AP member Michael Kenny. She says she is releasing the recording now because she feels the public has a right to know about matters important to democracy.
Robert Patrick Lewis, the 1AP cofounder, received a subpoena from the January 6th Committee in November 2021, requesting that he appear for a deposition and turn over documents. Lewis’ lawyer, Leslie McAdoo Gordon, has since indicated that Philip Luelsdorff, the other cofounder, and the organization itself have also been subpoenaed. Lewis appeared before the committee in April and invoked the Fifth Amendment, on his lawyer’s advice.
Citing a ruling by a federal judge in California that gave credence to an assertion made by the committee that President Trump participated in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the election, McAdoo Gordon said in a letter to the committee that the committee’s position puts pressure on the US Department of Justice to pursue charges.
“Thus, the committee’s theory creates a genuine risk of criminal exposure for anyone who may have, in the opinion of motivated prosecutors, assisted former President Trump or his supporters in any way as they contested the election results between November 2020 and January 6, 2021,” McAdoo Gordon wrote.
In an addendum provided to the committee in July, McAdooGordon confirmed that Joshua James, who has pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy, was “a member of 1AP for a very short time in 2020.” James was charged as part of a conspiracy with other members of the Oath Keepers militia. McAdoo Gordon told the committee that James left 1AP after being advised he could not simultaneously be in the Oath Keepers and 1AP. She added that James was not a member of 1AP in January 2021 and has had no association with the group since that time.
Kloster told Burk that Penrose told him he had previously approached 1AP with a similar request seeking a statement absolving him of responsibility, without success.
“It’s timely because of all this general January 6th stuff,” Kloster told Burk. “And he’s not involved with any of that. But it’s just like, they certainly are at one level or another. And they’re probably flailing about. I mean, part of the reason — you’re like, ‘Oh, maybe they would collude to give him that’ — no, they don’t want to give him that because what they’d rather do is have anything to pin on anybody to save their own butts. But, according to him, they had talked and approached them several times to get some letter like this from them. And that is his interpretation of them kind of stiff-arming him is that they want to have him in their back pocket, along with whatever else they have, just to save their own butts on X, Y and Z.”
Burk did not accede to Kloster’s request because she told him that would be a lie, and she said he did not contact her again.
‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’
Based on his conversations with Jim Penrose, Andrew Kloster told Burk he understood his client’s relationship with 1st Amendment Praetorian to be minimal.
“It seems like he thinks that his relationship was that they were there in the mix and that he would talk with people because they reported to other people,” Kloster said. “He comes in as a contractor with a very limited relationship on his technical stuff. He sticks to that lane, but of course, everyone’s talking with everyone, and so he will talk to people. But he was not in the chain of command. He had no idea about X, Y and Z with your phone or whatever.”
As previously reported by ProPublica, Penrose told Burk during a phone call in late December 2020 that he had spent $75,000 to pay former FBI agents to look into two separate allegations about potentially illegal ballots delivered by plane in Phoenix and Seattle.
“Let me be crystal clear: I’m investigating this on behalf of Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, right, the people that are going to take this right up to the president and the Supreme Court and work on these cases,” Penrose told Burk during that call.
The call, which Burk recorded, took place on Christmas day after she and a 1AP member named Brandon Pittman had returned from a local shooting range. According to an incident report by the Florence Police Department, Richard “Chi” Chichester, a former correctional officer from Massachusetts who was also a member of the 1AP security team, reported that two black SUVs had followed Burk home from the shooting range. The incident also prompted a phone call to Penrose.
The recording reveals that Penrose, who expressed concern about Burk independently investigating the two ballots-on-planes leads, set parameters and conditioned the 1AP security team’s continued presence at her home on her compliance.
“Here’s the deal: If we’re going to protect you, we need to have some kind of understanding about what the parameters are and the way you’re going to engage publicly and how you’re going to expose yourself to threats publicly,” Penrose said. “Because it’s all of us, right? We’re all in this together.”
Penrose added that anything Burk did — from picking up the phone to inviting someone into her home — was “impacting the guys in the room with you, and anybody who’s going to be assigned to your protective detail.”
Burk told Raw Story she turned over her recording of the phone call to the January 6th Committee in October 2021.
Raw Story reviewed more than 20 recordings — which Burk has not publicly shared — that provide a picture of how her cell phone was stolen and how it wound up at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, just before Jan. 6.
In recorded statements, Pittman and Chichester — the two 1AP members assigned as Burk’s protective detail at the time — have both admitted that her phone was stolen, while giving conflicting accounts of how it took place. In one of the recordings, Pittman told Burk that he learned that Chichester had her phone in Washington, DC.
Joe Flynn, Michael Flynn’s brother, corroborated the account in a phone call with Burk.When the matter was brought to his attention, Flynn indicated he turned to a man named Geoffrey Flohr for an explanation.
Flohr, whose nickname was “Yoda,” was a former Michigan State Police officer and former polygrapher with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Pittman described him as the “team leader,” and Chichester called him “the guy in charge.”
“Yoda told me that Chi took it out of your hands,” Flynn told Burk. “Or something like that. And when I heard that, I said, ‘What are these people doing taking somebody’s property without their permission?’”
In his phone call to Burk in January, Andrew Kloster said that Jim Penrose acknowledged he was engaged with 1AP “as a general matter, about security.” If Penrose expressed the view that Burk’s phone was needed, Kloster suggested, the 1AP members took it to a level that his client never intended.
“I mean, it’s almost like the Thomas Becket [quote], ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” Kloster told Burk. “And then they take it as an order to murder the bishop—same thing. Like, ‘We’ve got to worry about our phones. And here’s a phone.’ And then they take that as, ‘Well, let’s go steal the phone.’ That is the darkest interpretation that you can reasonably draw.”
“They decided to do that, yes,” Kloster continued. “And again, I don’t know. But they decided to do that. And then claim that it was an order to, like, cover their butts. Which shouldn’t cover their butts…. But it just makes it look worse for all involved… when really they’re just overzealous nutcases.”
The precise reason why Burk’s phone was stolen and who, if anyone, ordered it remains unclear. Regardless, responsibility for the misdeed ultimately fell to Flohr, who also served in Michael Flynn’s personal security detail for his speech in front of the Supreme Court during the Jericho March on Dec. 12, 2020.
Chichester told Burk he encountered Flohr at the Willard hotel after Burk’s phone surfaced in DC.
“He just tapped me on the shoulder, didn’t say a f***ing thing, okay?” Chichester recounted. “And I was just watching him as he came past, all right? I was angry. I probably showed a little bit of anger in my face or something because I was pissed off at him because of the whole clusterf***…. Because of the whole thing — the stealing — the phone being stolen. The way he did things, it was just all f***ed up, and he was the guy in charge.”
James Curtis, a Marine Corps veteran who replaced Chichester on the 1AP protective detail at Burk’s house, also blamed Flohr.
“Seeing Yoda plan the theft of the phone — that by itself is problematic,” Curtis said. “But the timeline that sets this in motion and moves this off of you being a team player and to a target is knowing that on day one, they came asking for your phone.”
In a call with Burk, Flohr told her he was told “to be quiet” about the phone debacle “because this had the potential of blowing up all over the place. You literally hold — I’m telling you right now — you literally hold 1A Praetorian in your hand. That’s how it’s viewed. But I wanted the f***ing truth.”
Flohr said he reported the matter to Matthew Wallach, a prominent 1AP member.
“We want to do the f***ing right thing,” Flohr said. “And it’s all on my shoulders. So, listen up. It’s all on my shoulder. I went and told him forty-five seconds after f***ing numb nuts there right next to you told me what it was. I went and drilled it right into the people that run this place. And I said, ‘We got to fix this. We gotta f***ing fix this.’ And they said, ‘Well, we’re gonna take it under advisement, get through the DC op, and then address it.’”
Flohr ended his involvement with 1AP shortly after Jan. 6, 2021. After the phone debacle, Pittman told Burk that Flohr’s departure was directly linked to the handling of her security detail.
“Because of the issues that we had with you, and the way that they were handled was a bunch of bulls***, and Yoda was the guy that was like, ‘This is a bunch of bulls***,’” Pittman told Burk. “And so, Yoda, like, shields me from a lot of flak, because I tell Yoda, and Yoda tells the bosses. The bosses hit back at Yoda, and then Yoda hits back at me, you know?”
As previously reported by Raw Story, Flohr was on the grounds at the US Capitol, along with a second 1AP member named Alan Kielan.
Leslie McAdoo Gordon, 1AP’s lawyer, said in a statement provided to the January 6th Committee in early July that she learned following Robert Patrick Lewis’s deposition that “two members of 1AP went with or followed the portion of the crowd from the Ellipse that went to the Capitol grounds.” McAdoo Gordon minimized Flohr and Kielan’s connection to the organization, writing, “They had already completed their work with 1AP at that time.” She added that the two men went to the Capitol “without the knowledge or approval of 1AP or Mr. Lewis.”
Flohr could not be reached for comment for this story.
After Burk’s phone was stolen, James Curtis accurately predicted that she would become the target of a campaign to discredit her. He also entertained the possibility that Penrose bore some responsibility for the theft.
“I don’t know Penrose, but if he’s self-serving enough to take your phone, he’s also self-serving enough to help fabricate tales about you that aren’t true,” Curtis said. “But right now, your actions are being defined probably — I’m making some assumptions here — your actions are being defined by whoever it was that wanted your phone. And so, your actions are not going to be defined in a way complimentary to you or the truth you understand, right? They’re going to be defined in ways that benefit whoever took your phone — presumably Penrose, right?”
When Kloster called Burk nearly a year later, she told him that's almost exactly what ended up happening.
“He pushes this out there: ‘She’s crazy, she’s this, she’s that,’" Burk said of Penrose. "And tries to discredit and do all of this stuff, which leads all of those minions who thought they were saving the country and all of that to then chase me out of town and dox and harass and threaten."
Penrose could not be reached for this story.
Reached by Raw Story by phone, Joe Flynn said he doesn’t know why Burk’s phone was stolen, but indicated he was surprised to hear Penrose’s name come up in connection with the episode.
“It was inconsequential,” Flynn said during a brief interview. “It doesn’t mean much to anybody.”
Joe Flynn has acknowledged his role in assigning the 1AP security team to Burk’s home.
“At the time we were working with 1st — 1A Praetorians,” Flynn said in an interview for the QAnon-aligned Patriot Voice channel on Telegram in January. “We were working with them for a very short period of time, just after the election when we were participating in the rallies in Washington. And their team provided General Flynn, myself, Sidney, Patrick [Byrne] and a few others security…. By the way, they provided that security free of charge.At the time, we didn’t have any money, so that was a benefit not having to pay that money. As I understand it, we sent a team out to watch over her out in Phoenix.”
Joe Flynn told Raw Story that his brother “didn’t have anything to do” with the decision to assign a security team to Burk, but Flohr gave a different account to Burk.
“It started with Joe,” he told Burk. “I got a call from him. He goes, ‘And we need ya in the Southwest.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ He says, ‘Hold on.’ And then Mike comes on the phone. He says, ‘Yoda, this is Mike Flynn. I need you to get to the Southwest for a whistleblower that we have down there. How long is it going to take you to get there?’ I said, ‘I haven’t been out to Arizona before.’ I said, ‘It’s going to take me a day and a half.’ He says, ‘Get going.’ And so, I did, because I had to pack my car. Two and a half hours later, I was on the road.”
Before 1AP’s arrival, a man named John Shattuck, who is linked to Michael Flynn through the Gold Institute for International Strategy, arranged for a local firm in Arizona called Mayhem Security Solutions to provide security for Burk.
Joe Flynn later explained to Burk that Mayhem was replaced because their fee was too expensive.
“We couldn’t afford it,” Flynn told Burk. “We weren’t going to be able to pay them. They wanted us to pay them thirty thousand dollars. We don’t have that kind of money. So, we said, ‘Okay, we got this other group who can do it for free.’”
‘If there’s going to be a second Trump term…’
Burk, who has since concluded there is no evidence of widespread election fraud, looked into two separate allegations about potentially illegal ballots on planes shortly after the Nov. 3, 2020 election. She said that Geoffrey Flohr, the team leader for the 1st Amendment Praetorian security detail at her house asked her to prepare an affidavit for Powell. Burk said assertions about extensive fraud by Powell and Michael Flynn helped convince her there must be something to the allegations of ballots on planes, which Powell herself mentioned in a speech at a Dec. 2, 2020 rally in Alpharetta, Ga.
“I listened to General Flynn and Sidney Powell say they had reliable evidence there were bad actors rigging the election and their team validated there was a great deal of corroborating evidence it was true and that I was in grave danger of being killed and needed a security team,” Burk said in a statement to Raw Story.
“Those were obviously lies,” Burk continued. “I believed the lies because, at the time, I thought, why else would they be taking the South Korean plane story so seriously when it was their associates who were on the ground with the plane taking video.I now see in their psyop I was a pawn, and it was much easier to raise money if they terrorized the witnesses and then said they needed money to protect the witnesses. I was just a pawn in their elaborate money-making venture,” Burk added.
Burk claims that in late December 2020, she had not been aware of a Dec. 18 meeting that took place at the White House in which Flynn, Powell and Byrne urged President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and order the National Guard to seize voting machines.
“It was my understanding Trump had a plan, and I trusted that,” Burk said. “As things came to light, I now see everything their associates did with me between November 2020 and May 2021 was all gaslighting, cover up and narrative control with an ends-justifying-the-means mentality and little care or concern for how their actions terrified my family and disrupted our lives.”
Joe Flynn said in a text to Raw Story that his brother was not interested in responding.
“This is a story about nonsense and nothing,” he said, “and anyone who reads Raw Story needs to get a mental exam.”
Sydney Powell could not be reached for this story.
Despite describing Penrose as a “contractor” during the period he engaged with 1AP, Kloster also suggested to Burk that his client’s relationship with Michael Flynn was insignificant.
“He knew General Flynn,” Kloster said. “He knew who he was. They had some communication. There was no hand in glove. He didn’t report to him, or vice-versa.”
Kloster also dismissed the notion that Penrose was working on behalf of President Trump, telling Burk: “I’m a little bit closer to some of that stuff. I kind of know — yeah, that’s a little bit, uh, that’s on the order of puffing up, for sure, yeah.”
Kloster did not return messages for this story. But in a post on Telegram in early July, he announced a new project to protect the professional reputations of so-called “America First” public servants.
“We’re just getting started, but if you’re looking to assist in giving our conservative public servants the tools they need to survive attack, pls look at this new org run by our former WH staff,” Kloster wrote.
The website for Personnel Policy Operations describes the new nonprofit’s foundational precept as a belief that conservative public servants targeted for “persecution” by “the radical left, corporate media, tech companies, leftwing NGOs and other activists” need support in order to succeed, while warning that without a robust safety net, “others will be deterred from entering public service in the first place, or from taking real action for their country.”
Kloster recently spoke up in defense of Kenneth Klukowski, a former senior counsel to Trump Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark. Kuklowski reportedly helped Clark draft a letter to state officials in Georgia in late December 2020 requesting that they delay certifying their votes to allow time for federal prosecutors to investigate election fraud allegations.
“The January 6th investigation is all about attacking mid-level and senior staff like Ken, to ensure that we don’t have a farm team in 2024, no matter who the president is,” Kloster told The Federalist last month. “This isn’t about the truth, but about making it impossible for conservatives to successfully enter and leave government.”
In a recent Axios report, Kloster was named as part of a group of “former Trump administration and transition officials working on personnel, legal or policy projects for a potential 2025 government.”
Jack Posobiec, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a political operative who is “known primarily for creating and amplifying viral disinformation campaigns,” praised Kloster’s Personnel Policy Operation while filling in as a host on the “War Room” show for former White House strategist Steve Bannon on July 1. (Bannon was convicted of contempt of Congress on July 22 for refusing to cooperate with the January 6th Committee.)
“We’ve got the precinct project that’s going on here from the War Room,” Posobiec told Kloster. “That’s precinct by precinct across the country. We’ve got the dismantling of the administrative state. That’s the other project. But what you just said, I think, is one of the most important lessons, shall we say, from the first Trump term, which is that personnel is policy.
“If there is going to be a second Trump term — and that’s basically been kind of the theme of this show today — that this key office, the PPO and the staffers across the government, right, getting into the administrative state and wrestling down with Leviathan.”
It was through another Trump administration official that Kloster became acquainted with Jim Penrose, he told Staci Burk earlier this year.
“So, I got connected with Jim through a friend of mine who was in the administration, who’s very, very good,” Kloster said. “I had reached out to him thinking it was not quite a pro bono, but sort of a favor, because I don’t actually represent people too often. Then, I spoke to Jim, and I thought, ‘My gosh, he’s done a lot, he’s good, and a lot of people are vouching for him.’ And then, so I’m now representing him.”
trump coup came to DOJ late via OMB mikm? , many doj resignations?
OMB mulvaney freedom caucus
incubator clerk, gmu scalia, FRC , liberty 1st (CNP ginni)
On :{Aug. 22, 2018:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, Neomi Rao, then the administrator of OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, was scheduled to have a “Groundswell Mtg.” It is not confirmed whether this is Ginni Thomas’ Groundswell. Early in her career, Rao served as a law clerk for Justice Thomas on the Supreme Court, and in 2019, she was appointed by Trump to serve as federal judge in Washington, D.C.
Paoletta OMB lawyer repped Cassidy Hutchinson, who tired to shut her up; she fired him and got another lawyer, testified jan 6 #5
Public records obtained by American Oversight show the degree of access Thomas and her coalition had in the Trump administration. A calendar entry from :{March 5, 2020:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, shows Russ Vought, then the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, was scheduled to have “Breakfast with Ginni Thomas.”
In November 2016, Ken Klukowski, First Liberty's senior counsel and director of strategic affairs was appointed to head the issue area of "Protecting Americans' Constitutional Rights" in the Donald Trump presidential transition team.[50] Klukowski, later Senior Counsel to Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, was one of several Trump campaign officials subpoenaed in the Jan. 6 Select Committee investigation.[51]
Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, who served as Deputy General Counsel to First Liberty Institute, and Jeff Mateer, who previously served as general counsel, were nominated in 2017 by President Trump for District Court positions. Mateer subsequently withdrew after a May 2015 speech where he referred to transgender children as "Satan’s plan" became public.[52][53] The Senate confirmed Kacsmaryk on June 19, 2019.[54][55]
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-family-research-councils-insurrection-connections/
theFamily Research Council, a major player in the religious-right political movement, was deeply involved in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election—a fact made all the more apparent by revelations during the June 23 public hearing of the House select committee investigating the conspiracy that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
We had already known that FRC publicly supported Trump’s schemes to unlawfully stay in power. FRC President Tony Perkins and other leaders connected with the secretive Council for National Policy had signed a letter in mid-December 2020falsely claiming, “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.” That letter called on state legislatures in six battleground states won by Joe Biden to “appoint clean slates of electors to the Electoral College to support President Trump.” It urged the House and Senate to reject pro-Biden electors from those states.
FRC Executive Vice President Jerry Boykin also signed that letter, as did Kenneth Blackwell, FRC’s senior fellow for human rights and constitutional governance. Blackwell, a notorious voter suppresser who abused the power of his office when he was Ohio’s secretary of state, was all-in on Trump’s election lies from the earliest days of the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement. Just days after the election, Blackwell used wildly false and inflammatory language in support of Trump’s claims, denouncing Pennsylvania’s governor, who defended his state’s election results from false claims of voter fraud, and “his legion of darkness.”
Blackwelland Perkins signed a second open letter at the end of December 2020 urging Senate Republicans to contest the votes from five battleground states.
Two days before the insurrection at the Capitol, Blackwell tweeted a video message using the “Stop the Steal” hashtag. “This is not a time for sideline sitters or backbenchers,” he said. “You must do what you can with what you have where you are. Our republic demands it.”
It turns out that Blackwell was busy behind the scenes, too.
At the Jan. 6 committee’s June 23 hearing, Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney revealed the contents of a Dec.28, 2020, email from Blackwell that read in part, “As I stated last week, I believe the VP and his staff would benefit greatly from a briefing by John and Ken.”
“John” would be John Eastman, the far right-wing lawyer who doggedly pushed illegal schemes to keep Trump in power based on false claims of election fraud and bogus theories about the vice president’s power to single-handedly decide who would become the next president. “Ken” referred to Ken Klukowski,a religious-right lawyer and pundit, longtime associate of Blackwell, and former director of FRC’s Center for Religious Liberty.
Blackwell’s email was sent to Ed Corrigan, a former Heritage Foundation vice president who served as part of the leadership team of Trump’s transition and now heads up the Conservative Partnership Institute,which promotes voter suppression in the name of “election integrity.**”**It also went to Rep. Louis Gohmert’s chief of staff Connie Hair,whose promotion of Big Lie conspiracies about the election was quoted by Ginny Thomas in her post-election emails to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows. Completing the circle, Meadows is now a “senior partner” at the Conservative Partnership Institute, which received $1 million from Trump’s PACshortly after the Jan. 6 committee was created.
Klukowski had joined the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget in the fall of 2019. After the 2020 election, Klukowski was parachuted into the Justice Department office of Jeffrey Clark, who was scheming to drag the DOJ into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election in key battleground states. Blackwell clearly seemed to recognize the bad optics of Klukowski’s involvement, urging in his email, “As I also mentioned, make sure we don’t overexpose Ken given his new position.”
Clark has unwillingly played a starring role in the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation, which has painstakingly exposed his effort to get Trump to name him acting attorney general. Clark and others had originally planned to send a letter to Georgia legislators—a letter that Klukowski helped Clark write—falsely claiming that the DOJ had identified major election problems in the state and encouraging them to convene a special session to consider naming a pro-Trump Electoral College slate. When Clark’s DOJ superiors blocked his scheme, Trump seriously considered making Clark acting attorney general so he could carry it out, abandoning the plan only after other top Justice Department officials threatened a massive leadership resignation that would swamp news of the letter and define Trump’s legacy.
As Rep. Cheney concluded, “This email suggests that Mr. Klukowski was simultaneously working with Jeffrey Clark to draft the proposed letter to Georgia officials to overturn their certified election and working with Dr. Eastman to help pressure the vice president to overturn the election.”
In other words, while a battle raged between principled White House and Justice Department officials who were committed to upholding the election results and facilitating a peaceful transfer of power and the defeated president and his power-at-all-costs supporters, current and former FRC leaders were in the trenches with Trump and the would-be election overthrowers.
Their collusion on Trump’s attempt to overturn the election is far from the first Blackwell-Klukowski collaboration. They co-authored numerous partisan diatribes in the form of op-eds and books, including “Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency” and “Resurgent: How Constitutional Conservatism Can Save America.” In 2016, Klukowksi guest-hosted FRC’s “Washington Watch” radio program and had Blackwell on as a guest.
At FRC’s October 2021 Pray Vote Stand conference—the rechristened activist gathering known for years as the Values Voter Summit—Blackwell slammed federal voting rights legislation and backed new voting restrictions being put in place by Republican state legislators.
The revelations of the Family Research Council’s all-out effort to help Trump stay in power despite his rejection by voters makes it even more appalling to learn from ProPublica that FRC has successfully petitioned the IRS to change its official classification to that of an association of churches, a tactic that Right Wing Watch has reported has been used by other religious-right groups like Focus on the Family and Liberty Counsel to evade public scrutiny and accountability.
Tags: Connie Hair Ed Corrigan Jeffrey Clark Jerry Boykin Ken Blackwell Ken Klukowski Kenneth Blackwell Mark Meadows Tony Perkins Capitol Insurrection House select committee on Jan. 6 Conservative Partnership Institute Council for National Policy Family Research Council
==
day 5 thurs 6/23 DOJ
https://www.thedailybeast.com/jan-6-committee-exposes-how-donald-trump-misused-the-doj-to-concoct-election-fraud
no lnx
CAPITOL RIOTS
Jan. 6 Committee Exposes Trump’s Chaotic Abuse of the DOJ to Try to Stay in Power
‘JUST SAY IT WAS CORRUPT’
The Jan. 6 Committee is laying out how Trump pressured the DOJ to say there was election corruption when there wasn't.
Jose Pagliery
Political Investigations Reporter
Updated Jun. 23, 2022
In the most damning evidence yet that former President Donald Trump knew he lost the 2020 election but was still willing to abuse his office to remain in power, a former top Department of Justice official testified Thursday that Trump told the DOJ to "just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and Republican congressmen.”
Thursday’s groundbreaking congressional testimony came from former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, one of a handful of ex-DOJ officials who stood up to Trump in his final days in office and refused to have the department misused this way.
Donoghue’s handwritten notes of his interactions with the former president were presented at the Jan. 6 Committee’s fifth public hearing on Thursday, where legislators on the panel announced that several fellow members of Congress eventually sought presidential pardons for their role in Trump’s wide-ranging plan to stay in office.
The committee also revealed that pardons were sought by some of the most vocal Republicans who promulgated election conspiracy theories, played different roles to interrupt the transfer of power, and publicly called for Trump to remain in power—even if by force: Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), and Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA).
Many of those asking for a pardon were present at a meeting on Dec. 21, 2020 in which members of Congress discussed overturning the election. Others like Gaetz—who asked for a blanket pardon “from the beginning of time up until today, for any and all things,” according to videotaped testimony by Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann—and Brooks, who requested a pardon for anyone who voted to decertify the election, sought larger immunity.
Cassidy Hutchinson, once an aide to Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, recalled hearing from fellow staff that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) also requested a pardon.
“The only reason I know to ask for a pardon is because you think you've committed a crime,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), a member of the committee. “They knew that every bit of what they did was a lie and it was wrong.”
None of the legislators who allegedly sought pardons from Trump responded to questions from The Daily Beast emailed after the hearing.
The hearing kicked off just hours after news broke that federal agents had raided the Virginia home of the former DOJ official at the center of this plot: Jeffrey Clark, a Trump loyalist who has already come under scrutiny for abusing his high-ranking position there in the final weeks of the administration. This relatively unknown government lawyer devised a plan to use the DOJ to cast doubt on election results in states where Trump lost to now-President Joe Biden by making vague references to a federal investigation and intimidating state-level officials. His home was searched by federal law enforcement on Wednesday.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia has awkwardly confirmed the raid in vague terms, noting there "was law enforcement activity in the Lorton, Virginia area yesterday” without commenting on “the nature of that activity or any particular individuals."
At Thursday’s hearing, former DOJ leaders also recounted what may be one of the most decisive moments of the Trump presidency: a Sunday afternoon meeting on Jan. 3, 2021 when Trump nearly fired acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen—only to hear that several regional U.S. attorneys from districts across the country had threatened to quit in solidarity if the president would weaponize the DOJ this way. When Trump suggested putting Clark in charge, Donoghue told him something that seemed to stick: "Mr. Clark will be left leading a graveyard."
[Jan. 6 Panel Delays Hearing Schedule Due to New Evidence
KEEP IT COMING]
The committee on Thursday also revealed text messages between Trump’s White House chief of staff and a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who lobbied to have Clark ascend through the DOJ ranks as part of the plan to hijack the department.
In those texts, Perry expressed the urgency in getting Clark a high enough spot where he could make a difference.
“Mark, just checking in as time continues to count down. 11 days to 1/6 and 25 days to inauguration. We gotta get going!” the congressman wrote on Dec. 26, 2020. “Mark, you should call Jeff [Clark]. I just got off the phone with him and he explained to me why the principal deputy won’t work especially with the FBI. They will view it as not having the authority to enforce what needs to be done.”
“I got it. I think I understand. Let me work on the deputy position,” Meadows responded that evening. The congressman and White House official then began to communicate via Signal, an encrypted chatting app with disappearing messages.
The committee on Thursday also presented new evidence touching on the unhinged legal strategy put together by law professor John Eastman to keep Trump in command by interrupting the official certification of 2020 electoral college ballots on Jan. 6, 2021 at the Capitol building—the very event insurrectionists were trying to derail.
That plan, which involved having key states replace Biden electors by submitting alternate slates of fake electors loyal to Trump, apparently also involved an attorney freshly appointed to the DOJ and assigned to specifically work under Clark as a senior counsel: Kenneth A. Klukowski.
That attorney’s role in the plot, which partly relied on a sustained campaign to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence into misusing his duty as the person counting the ballots aloud, was detailed in an email written by J. Kenneth Blackwell—an activist who has worked at the conservative group Groundswell alongside Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife, Ginni.
In it, Blackwell wrote, “As stated last week, I believe the VP and his staff would benefit greatly from a briefing by John [Eastman] and Ken [Klukowski]. As I also mentioned, make sure we don’t overexpose Ken given his new position.”
At the outset of the hearing, Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said Trump “wanted the Justice Department to legitimize his lies, to basically call the election corrupt… it was a brazen attempt to use the Justice Department to advance the president’s personal agenda.”
The committee’s three witnesses Thursday were all part of DOJ leadership during the tumultuous end of the Trump administration who had abrasive interactions with the White House when they took a firm stand and refused to do the president’s bidding: then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen, former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, and Steven Engel, who led the DOJ’s in-house policymaking office.
“They were willing to sacrifice their careers for the good of our country,” Kinzinger said.
All are expected to explain in further detail how Clark tried to use the chaos of Trump’s refusal to concede to Biden to make himself attorney general—and turn what should remain a non-political law enforcement agency into Trump’s personal tool.
Much of what the nation previously knew about the ordeal came from a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation last year that culminated in a 394-page report titled, “Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election.”
[‘Pence Deserves It’: Jan. 6 Panel Reveals Dark Trump Desire
PRIMETIME HISTORY
Jose Pagliery]
Internal emails acquired by congressional investigators showed that Clark, then the head of the DOJ’s civil division, sought his boss’ approval for a draft letter he wrote to Georgia state officials claiming the Justice Department was “investigating various irregularities” and asking the governor and legislature there to “convene in special session” and hear testimony about made up election fraud claims.
Co-chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) noted that Clark’s draft letter sounded all too similar to the legal theories of law professor John Eastman and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani because it was a key part of their ploy to keep Trump in power.
Clark already testified under oath before the committee back in February, although he repeatedly refused to answer questions, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. 105/125x]
On Thursday, the committee played a portion of a videotaped deposition of former Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, one of several attorneys who was present at a decisive meeting at the Oval Office on Jan. 3, 2021. Herschmann expressed bewilderment at Clark’s proposed plan to use the DOJ this way—and his ploy to make himself the nation’s AG.
“I thought Jeff's proposal was nuts,” Herschmann testified, recalling that he said, “The best I can tell, the only thing you know about environmental and elections challenges is that the both start with 'E.’”
[Republican on Jan. 6 Panel Sees ‘Violence in the Future’
‘WAKE UP, AMERICA’]
Donoghue, then the acting AG, previously told the committee in a recorded interview that Trump White House lawyer Pat Cipollone called Clark’s letter “a murder-suicide pact” that would “damage anybody who touches it.”
Several lawyers there remembered how Clark tried to argue that his short stint overseeing environmental cases at the DOJ somehow qualified him to be top lawyer in the country. Donoghue told the committee that he shot back: “That's right. You're an environmental lawyer. How about you go back to your office, and we'll call you when there's an oil spill."
READ THIS LIST
Klepper Confronts Clueless Trumpers With Jan 6 Hearing Clips
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/06/the-glue-that-connects-jeffrey-clark-john-eastman-ginni-thomas-and-the-guy-who-was-air-dropped-into-the-doj-is-charles-kochs-money/
in September 1999 the U.S. Department of Justice filed racketeering charges against the major tobacco companies and two of their front groups. The court filings in that case carefully pieced together a half century of conspiratorial conduct and lies that gravely harmed the health of the American people, while lining the pockets of the tobacco industry, its lawyers and its paid shills.
The January 6 Select House Committee has that same, once-in-a-lifetime power in its hands. But that window of opportunity will close soon. The January 6 Committee can connect all the dots of the attempted coup leading to the doorstep of Charles Koch and expose his four decades of establishing front groups to shill for the fossil fuels industry and anti-climate change groups, or it can present a false and narrow view that this was all about the ego and narcissism of Donald Trump.
Charles Koch is the Chairman and CEO of one of the largest private companies in the world, Koch Industries, a fossil fuels and chemicals conglomerate that has been a serial polluter of the air and water for decades. According to Forbes, Koch has a net worth of $59.8 billion, making him the 17th richest man in the world. Charles Koch, and his late brother, David, functioned as backroom party bosses, behind the veil of a sprawling network of tax-exempt front groups, for 40 years.
Wall Street On Paradehas already produced the evidence tying the groups involved in the planning of the January 6 event to Charles Koch. See our report: The Money Trail to the Siege at the Capitol Leads to Charles Koch and Koch Industries.
We have already written about how the Trump administration was staffed up with Koch-related people and took its marching orders from a Koch-related entity, Freedom Partners.
There is also documented evidence that the Koch network engaged in a multi-faceted strategy to discourage progressives and liberals from turning out in the 2016 presidential election, thus tipping the victory to Trump. Not only did the Koch network fund Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners Action Fund ads portraying Democrats as tax and spend bureaucrats but the Koch-controlled i360 voter database and voter-targeting operations may have demoralized the progressive base from turning out while those same operations spurred Republicans to the polls.
And, today, we will show how key collaborators in the attempted coup on January 6 – Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, Ginni Thomas, Cleta Mitchell, and Kenneth Klukowski – the attorney who was air-dropped into the U.S. Department of Justice just 35 days before the end of Trump’s term – all have ties to front groups funded by Charles Koch or his related nonprofits.
Let’s start withJeffrey Clark, the environmental lawyer at the Department of Justice with no criminal experience that Trump wanted to name U.S. Attorney General because he was willing to go all-in with the attempted coup. After the failed coup, Clark was out of a job at the Department of Justice. He was, in short order, named Chief of Litigation and Director of Strategy at a group called the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA). That’s a curious hire for someone likely facing a long criminal investigation and possible conviction.
NCLA has received millions of dollars from Charles Koch related entities. The Charles G. Koch Foundation gave NCLA $1 million in 2017, $1 million again in 2018, and $1 million again in 2019 for “general operating support,” according to its publicly-available 990 tax filings with the IRS. The Charles Koch Institute gave NCLA $1 million in 2020. Donors Trust, a dark money nonprofit with Charles Koch’s fingerprints all over it, gave NCLA more than $2 million from 2018 through 2020, according to its 990 filings.
In addition to needing a job after the failed coup attempt, Jeffrey Clark needed a plugged-in attorney. Somehow, he found his way to Harry MacDougald, a Managing Partner at Caldwell, Carlson, Elliott & DeLoach. The fossil fuels industry watchdog, DeSmog, describes MacDougald as follows:
“MacDougald was part of the legal team that worked with the Southeastern Legal Foundation to challenge the EPA‘s endangerment finding on greenhouse gases.In its lawsuit against the EPA, Southeastern Legal identified its allies in the effort as ‘like-minded organizations’ including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and the Independent Women’s Forum, among others.”
DeSmog notes that MacDougald spoke at the Heartland Institute’s “America First Energy Conference” in New Orleans in 2018. The Heartland Institute is a climate science denier that has received more than $26 million from two Koch-related groups, Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust, according to the Conservative Transparency Project using publicly available 990 IRS tax filings. The conference was promoted as follows:
“The purpose of this event is to promote and expand energy freedom in the United States, as outlined in President Donald Trump’s bold America First Energy Plan, a proposal first released during the 2016 presidential campaign. The president’s plan marks a decisive change in direction from the Obama administration’s ‘war on fossil fuels’…”
Two of the allied groups mentioned above, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, have long histories with Koch money.Charles Koch and his late brother, David, were actually secret owners of the Cato Institute for decades. Greenpeace has called the Heritage Foundation “Koch Industries’ Climate Denial Front Group” and reports that it has received $6,130,201 from Koch foundations from 1997 through 2017.
Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who was firing off all of those emails to Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, to press for the attempted coup, had previously received $1,051,214 in compensation from the Heritage Foundationover a number of years. Clarence Thomas failed to report that compensation on his financial disclosure forms at the Supreme Court, even though he was required to do so.
The ties between Ginni Thomas and another attempted coup collaborator, Cleta Mitchell, run deep – with all roads leading to Koch money. As we reported in March:
In the emails that Ginni Thomas sent to Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, one of the people that she told Meadows to listen to was attorney Cleta Mitchell – a woman who has both a longstanding association with Ginni Thomas as well as with Koch front groups. Trump’s phone log for January 6 shows that Cleta Mitchell was one of the people that Trump spoke with at 7 :53 p.m. on the evening of the attack on the Capitol.
Cleta Mitchell has been in the news previously as the lawyer who was on the January 2, 2021 call with Donald Trump when he phoned the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, and told him: “I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.” That call took place two months after the presidential election. (Mitchell stepped down from her long-term employment at law firm Foley & Lardner after her presence on that call was made public.)
Cleta Mitchell is also the attorney who filed an amicus brief in the Citizens United case before the Supreme Court that was decided on January 21, 2010. That case would be the tipping point to allow unlimited sums from corporations – like Koch Industries — in U.S. elections.
Just eight days after Justice Thomas voted in favor of that decision to open the floodgates to corporate money in campaigns, Cleta Mitchell made a move that looked very much like a quid pro quo to Ginni Thomas.Mitchell, then still a partner at Foley & Lardner, filed an application with the Internal Revenue Service to set up a nonprofit called Liberty Central, Inc. on behalf of Ginni Thomas. According to IRS tax filings, Liberty Central received a combined $1.478 million from dark money donors in 2009 and 2010.
On the IRS tax filings for Liberty Central for 2009 and 2010, Ginni (Virginia) Thomas is listed as President and CEO. The 2010 tax filing shows that Ginni Thomas received $120,511 in compensation from Liberty Central that year. She eventually stepped down from an official post at the nonprofit, stating she would serve as a consultant.
Liberty Centralhad the fingerprints of Charles Koch all over it. Acting as General Counsel in 2010 for Liberty Central was a former lawyer for the Charles G. Koch Foundation, Sarah Field. A former Koch lobbyist, Matt Schlapp, served on the Board of Liberty Central at inception.
Mitchell’s law firm, Foley & Lardner, employed three attorneys working as lobbyists for a Koch Industries affiliate, Koch Companies Public Sector, LLC in Madison, Wisconsin in 2011. The Koch-related lobbyists were Ray Carey, Jason Childress and Kathleen Walby.
Mitchell was a former lobbyist at the federal level in years 2005 through 2008 for the Alliance for Charitable Reform, a project of The Philanthropy Roundtable, another tax-exempt organization. Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, two dark money groups which also have Charles Koch’s fingerprints all over them, were spun off from the Philanthropy Roundtable in 1999. (See our report: Koch Footprints Lead to Secret Slush Fund to Keep Fear Alive.)
The financial disclosure forms filed by Clarence Thomas show that from 2011 through 2017, Ginni Thomas received a “salary” from the Daily Caller, a right-wing spin organization founded in 2010 by Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson and former Dick Cheney aide Neil Patel. Its creation was announced at a gathering at the Heritage Foundation. The Daily Caller’s affiliated News Foundation has received funding from the Koch Family Foundations and the Charles Koch Institute.
Despite the previous scandal over Clarence Thomas failing to report that Ginni Thomas had received income from the Heritage Foundation, there are no dollar ranges listed on his financial disclosure forms to show the range of “salary” Ginni Thomas actually received from the Daily Caller from 2011 to 2017.
From 2011 through 2020, Clarence Thomas shows that his wife was receiving “salary and benefits” from Liberty Consulting. But again, there is no range of salary and benefits shown. Instead, Liberty Consulting is listed under “Investments” and shows a “book value” of $100,000 to $250,000 in 2019, which then drops to $15,000 to $50,000 in 2020.
Then there is Ken Klukowski, the man air-dropped into the Department of Justice just 35 days before Trump’s term ended to work at the elbow of Jeffrey Clark. The Select Committee believes that Klukowski may have been involved in drafting the proposed letter to state officials which falsely claimed that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” about the vote totals in those states and the states should consider sending “a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump.”
Klukowski had been a writer at the right-wing outlet, Breitbart, which was formerly led by former Trump White House advisor, Steve Bannon. Bannon was the long-tenured filmmaker for Citizens United, the nonprofit involved in the history-making case at the U.S. Supreme Court that opened the floodgates to corporate money in campaigns.
Bannon made right-wing propaganda documentaries for Citizens United like “Fire from the Heartland,” a glowing tribute to Michele Bachmann; “The Undefeated,” profiling the rise of Sarah Palinto national prominence and the darling of the Tea Party movement; “Generation Zero,” blaming the 2008 financial crash on liberals instead of the Wall Street bank executives who presided over the unprecedented frauds; and 
,” demonizing the young people attempting to remove their democracy from the iron grip of the one percent as sinister criminals.
Klukowski got his law degree from George Mason University, one of the largest and longest recipients of Koch money. In just the three most recent years that public 990 tax filings are available, they show that the Charles G. Koch Foundation gave a total of $46.89 million to George Mason University from 2017 through 2019.[prez busted for academic appt bribes?] see BH LEO
In 2018, New York Times reporters Erica L. Green and Stephanie Saul wrote about how newly-released documents showed that Koch’s money came with strings attached at George Mason University:
“The documents reveal in surprising detail that for years, as George Mason grew from a little-known commuter school to a major public university and a center of libertarian scholarship, millions of dollars in donations from conservative-leaning donors like the Charles Koch Foundation had come with strings attached.
“As early as 1990, entities controlled by the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch were given a seat on a committee to pick candidates for a professorship that they funded, the records show. Similar arrangements that continued through 2009 gave donors decision-making roles in selecting candidates for key economics appointments at the Mercatus Center,a Koch-funded think tank on campus that studies markets and regulation. The appointments, which also created faculty lines at George Mason, were steered to professors who, like the Kochs, embraced unconstrained free markets.”[pbs newshour had one jan 6 hearing trump beast whl grab]
And, finally, there is John Eastman, the Trump lawyer who ranted on the stage before the crowd at the Capitol on January 6 about widespread voter fraud in the election and, according to the Select Committee, played a key role in the attempted coup.
Both Cleta Mitchell and John Eastman are tied to the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Mitchell is the Chair of the Board and Eastman is a Director. The New York Times has reported that it was Mitchell who “enlisted John Eastman, the lawyer who crafted specious legal theories claiming Vice President Mike Pence could keep Mr. Trump in power.”
Eastman is also Chairman of the Board of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) according to its website, a group opposing same-sex marriage. Wall Street On Parade looked into that group in 2011. We found multiple ties to the Koch network’s pursuit of the Citizens United decision at the U.S. Supreme Court.
When Ginni Thomas filed her registration statement for her own tea party group, Liberty Central, Inc., with the state of West Virginia on December 31, 2009, she listed her accountant as Neil Corkery with an address of 8665 Sudley Road, Suite 182 in Manassas, Virginia. According to a UPS store employee located there, there was no other business located at this site; just post office boxes. When Ginni Thomas filed her first IRS 990 form for tax year 2009 for Liberty Central, she listed her tax preparer as Conlon and Associates LLC.
These same two names, Neil Corkery andConlon and Associates LLC,would end up on the 2009 tax filings of the National Organization for Marriage.
The IRS 2009 tax filing for the National Organization for Marriage, Inc. shows it took in $7.1 million and made five grants totaling $2,105,000. Stand for Marriage Maine received 93 percent of those funds, or $1,960,000. Stand for Marriage Maine waged the successful 2009 repeal of same-sex marriage in Maine, using the same tactics and, indeed, the same ad and marketing firm that was used in the California Proposition 8 battle.
Secret donors washing money through a 501(c)(4) tax exempt organization and then funneling it to a Political Action Committee in Maine brought a request for an investigation to the Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices by Fred Karger, founder of Californians Against Hate. The Commission initiated an investigation. Stepping forward to represent both the National Organization for Marriage and Stand for Marriage Maine PAC was the law firm Bopp, Coleson & Bostrom.
James Bopp of Bopp, Coleson & Bostrom is (wait for it) the lawyer who represented Citizens United in the lower courts and, hoping to gut campaign financing reform, maneuvered the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The law firm Bopp, Coleson & Bostrom is located in Terre Haute, Indiana. What is the statistical probability of it being sheer coincidence that an Indiana law firm is involved in a nonprofit advocacy group case in Maine involving secret donors; also involved in the Citizens United case before the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington D.C. involving secret donors; and the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas is using the same Neil Corkery and Conlon and Associates for her Tea Party nonprofit as Bopp’s anti same-sex marriage clients in the Maine case?
We strongly urge the January 6 Select Committee to provide the full, unvarnished truth to the American people.
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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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“Steve, you wouldn’t resign, would you?” Trump asked.
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“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.
Breitbart.com writer Ken Klukowski has joined the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.The right-wing pundit and lawyer has a history of pushing anti-LGBTQ commentary, including telling readers there’s a “homosexual agenda” moving forward in the courts and falsely claiming that research proves that same-sex parents are bad for children.
Klukowksi was previously the director of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Family Research Council. Family Research Council is an influential and extreme anti-LGBTQ group with high levels of access to the Trump-Pence administration. [cnp ginni?] The organization has comparedLGBTQ people to pedophiles and advocated for the discredited and harmful practice of conversion therapy.
As a commentator, Klukowski frequently warned against LGBTQ equality, claiming that “the entire homosexual agenda is moving forward in federal court, where judges are disregarding the will of the American people.” He’s also attacked same-sex parenting, falsely claiming that research shows that having “two parents - one man and one woman” gives children the best chance to succeed.
ref
https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/ken-klukowski-breitbartcom-writer-and-anti-lgbtq-lawyer-joins-trump-administration
Breitbart.com writer Ken Klukowski has joined the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. The right-wing pundit and lawyer has a history of pushing anti-LGBTQ commentary, including telling readers there’s a “homosexual agenda” moving forward in the courts and falsely claiming that research proves that same-sex parents are bad for children.
Klukowski has worked for a variety of right-wing organizations, including Breitbart.com, theAmerican Civil Rights Union, First Liberty Institute, Liberty University School of Law, and Family Research Council. As a lawyer, Klukowski has filed numerous briefs supporting right-wing causes. He joined the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as a special counsel in late August. OMB, which is under the direction of Mick Mulvaney, “oversees the performance of federal agencies, and administers the federal budget.”
Klukowksi was previously the director of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Family Research Council.Family Research Council is an influential and extreme anti-LGBTQ group with high levels of access to the Trump-Pence administration. The organization has comparedLGBTQ people to pedophiles and advocated for the discredited and harmful practice of conversion therapy. It also states on its website: “Family Research Council believes that homosexual conduct is harmful to the persons who engage in it and to society at large, and can never be affirmed.”
Klukowski is also an ally of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF),another of the most influential anti-LGBTQ groups in the country. Sarah Posner wrote in The Nation that “Klukowski has said that he attended ADF legal trainings, and he also authored a rosy profile of the organization for Breitbart in 2012, in which he lauded its ‘massive and growing impact in courtrooms across America.’” He joins numerous other ADF-allied lawyers who have held government positions; Media Matters has identified more than 100 such allies who worked in Congress, federal agencies, state and federal courts, city and state governments, and local school boards in 2018.
As a commentator, Klukowski frequently warned against LGBTQ equality, claiming, for instance, that “the entire homosexual agenda is moving forward in federal court, where judges are disregarding the will of the American people.” He’s also attacked same-sex parenting, falsely claiming that research shows that having “two parents - one man and one woman” gives children the best chance to succeed.
Klukowski: “The entire homosexual agenda is moving forward in federal court, where judges are disregarding the will of the American people.”From a September 2010 op-edin the Washington Examiner by Klukowski, h/t GLAAD:
The Perry and Log Cabin cases, taken with the recent Massachusetts federal decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (currently on appeal), paint a picture of astounding judicial activism.
The entire homosexual agenda is moving forward in federal court, where judges are disregarding the will of the American people, as expressed through the democratic process. Agenda-driven judges are doing this by declaring brand new constitutional rights not found anywhere in the words of the Constitution, mowing down every law that stands in their way.
Klukowski: “The fundamental institution of human civilization should be preserved as it has been known through the entirety of American history and Western civilization.”In an August 2010 op-ed he wrote for FoxNews.com with Family Research Center’s Kenneth Blackwell, Klukowski warned Republicans against accepting same-sex marriage, writing:
The GOP platform could not be more explicit: Marriage is the union of one man and one woman. The fundamental institution of human civilization should be preserved as it has been known through the entirety of American history and Western civilization. Supporters of same-sex marriage had the full opportunity to make their case to the party. They made it, and they lost.
Klukowski falsely argued that same-sex parents won’t give “children the best chance to become happy and successful.” In a 2011 Daily Caller op-ed written with Blackwell, Klukowski claimed that research proves that same-sex parents are inferior to opposite-sex parents. In reality, Cornell University’s Public Policy Research Portal wrote that there’s “an overwhelming scholarly consensus, based on over three decades of peer-reviewed research, that having a gay or lesbian parent does not harm children.”
The data contradicts [MSNBC host Chris Matthews’] televised encyclical.
Children thrive best in a household with a father and a mother. Not just two individuals who call themselves "parents" — and if both adults are of the same gender, it is biologically impossible for them to both be the natural parents — but a father and a mother.
Men and women are equal, but not interchangeable. The research — as exemplified by our colleague Dr. Pat Fagan in his new report — show that the economics are compelling: While there are exceptions to every social norm, men and women tend to bring different strengths to raising children. Firmness and gentleness. Physical security and emotional security. Challenges and comfort. Discipline and nurturing.
Many families do not have the benefit of both parents. Often the reasons behind this reality rightly tug on our heartstrings. And millions of single parents deserve lavish praise for their magnificent work at raising wonderful children, with inspiring personal success stories.
But the ideal remains. Two parents — one man and one woman — raising their children in a loving and supportive marriage gives children the best chance to become happy and successful.
Klukowski: “The social science is clear that children thrive best not just in the two-parent home but in a home with a biological father and biological mother.”Klukowski also repeated his false claim about same-sex parenting during a February 23, 2012, appearance on Fox Business’ Stossel (via Nexis):
JOHN STOSSEL (HOST): If the state approves marriages between heterosexuals people, why not gays?
KEN KLUKOWSKI: Well, the states are softening in that regard and every chance that the states have had to speak in that regard where the voters of the states 30 of them have adopted -- have adopted constitutional amendments --
STOSSEL: It's not the tyranny of the majority just because we have majority rule. Why can't --
KLUKOWSKI: In this regard, the states are sovereign and the social science is clear that children thrive best not just in the two-parent home but in a home with a biological father and biological mother. People fall short of that all time but government has a vested interest in promoting the ideal even if we all fall short of it to one extent or another.
Klukowski criticized the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell because “in the military you are often forced into quarters so close that they’re sometimes nothing short of intimate.”Klukowski wrote in his book Resurgent: How Constitutional Conservatism Can Save Americaof Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell:
A fantastic example of a failure of leadership is President Obama calling on Congress to repeal the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law (DADT). Ever since the founding of the Republic, homosexuals have not been able to serve openly in the military. Setting aside religious beliefs, moral convictions, and natural law, this still makes sense, given that in the military you are often forced into quarters so close that they’re sometimes nothing short of intimate, with no privacy or personal space whatsoever in an extremely stressful, emotional, and adrenaline-filled environment. As a sop to the gay rights community, when Democrats had control of both Congress and the White House, President Bill Clinton softened this policy to say that it was still illegal for gays to serve in the military, but that no one could ask you about it so you were okay as long as you didn’t tell anyone or get caught doing anything.
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The military is no place for social engineering. No doubt many homosexuals can be trusted not to make sexual advances, just as many heterosexuals can likewise be trusted in close quarters. But we don’t allow men and women to bunk together, or deploy them alone together in a forward position with no privacy, even though we trust them to remain professional and adhere to standards of conduct. Homosexuals should not get any special treatment denied to heterosexuals.
Klukowski: “The media is as much in the tank for gay marriage as it is for every other major part of President Barack Obama's agenda.”From a July 2013 Breitbart.com column criticizing PolitiFact’s reporting:
In case you just arrived from a different planet and didn’t yet know the media is as much in the tank for gay marriage as it is for every other major part of President Barack Obama’s agenda, you need only read Politifact’s recent post on Tony Perkins, where reporter Amy Sherman claims Perkins’s recent statements on how some wedding vendors are being forced to participate in same-sex marriages “under threat or even jail” are only “half true.”
In fact, Perkins’ claims are entirely true. For an organization that supposedly investigates facts (and incidentally is part of a solidly-liberal newspaper), to say Perkins’ claims are only half true is to post a story that is half fiction.
splc sept 2019
no lnx
Right-wing attorney, writer and legal analyst Ken Klukowski has landed a position in the Trump administration in the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Klukowski has a long history with right-wing organizations, including anti-LGBT hate groups. The OMB is one of the most influential offices in government. It reports directly to the president and determines how money is spent on everything from national security to the environment. The OMB ensures White House policies are carried out across federal agencies.
He is a special counsel reporting to Mark Paoletta, OMB general counsel,The New York Post’s Jon Levine tweeted recently.
Ken Klukowski (right) talks with Steve Bannon on "Breitbart News Daily" during the Republican National Convention in 2016 in Cleveland. (Photo by Ben Jackson/Getty Images for SiriusXM)
Klukowski joins OMB staff with their own right-wing connections. OMB’s director is Mick Mulvaney, who is also acting White House chief of staff. Mulvaney has tea party ties and was a co-founder of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus. [scott perry] Acting OMB Director Russell Vought is an ally of Vice President Mike Pence and is a former vice president of Heritage Action, the lobbying arm of the anti-LGBT Heritage Foundation. As chief counsel and assistant to Pence, Paoletta was “very involved” in the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch,according to CNN.
When reached by Hatewatch via email, OMB press secretary Chase Jennings passed along this comment from someone he described as being close to Klukowski: “It is well-known that Ken has a strong work history defending religious freedom and the unborn with several organizations – including Family Research Council.”
Klukowski has played an important role in writing amicus briefs for right-wing issues before the Supreme Court, including opposition to the Affordable Care Act and gun control measures. He was one of the attorneys who filed an amicus brief in support of Colorado baker Jack C. Phillips in theMasterpiece Cakeshop case. Phillips refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, citing his religious beliefs. His attorneys argued that the First Amendment gave him the right to refuse service on free speech grounds. (The high court narrowly ruled for the baker, citing “hostility” to religion by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.)
Klukowski has also made anti-LGBT statements through his writings for right-wing outlets such as Breitbart News, where he has been its senior legal editor. He has said that a “homosexual agenda is moving forward in federal court” and that same-sex parents are not as good for children as those of the opposite sex. He has criticized “liberals’ homosexual and transgender agenda” and the Obama administration for its federal hiring policies on LGBT people.
In a 2019 piece for Breitbart, Klukowski asserted that under a Pennsylvania school’s trans-inclusive policy, a “17-year-old boy can identify as a girl, and then has the right to use a shower next to a 15-year old girl in the locker room while that girl is fully undressed.” Anti-LGBT groups use this trope to imply that transgender people are somehow predatory or inconsistent with their gender identities.
Discussing the reinstatement of the ban on transgender troops in the military, Klukowski argued on Breitbart that the Department of Defense has prohibited people with “mental disorders” from serving for decades. He cited a Supreme Court filing that explained the majority of Americans are ineligible to join the military without a waiver for medical, mental or behavioral reasons. Transgender individuals are among those ineligible, he wrote.
Klukowski’s most recent Breitbart article accused some Democratic senators of making “court-packing” threats, saying they demanded in an amicus brief that the Supreme Court decline to hear a case over a gun control law. He warned that if Democrats win the White House and Senate in 2020, “they will fundamentally remake the High Court.”
Klukowski has held pivotal positions at anti-LGBT organizations since graduating from George Mason University’s law school in 2008and doing a law clerkship for Judge Alice Batchelder of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
He was a research fellow at the ultra-conservative Liberty University School of Law and also the director of the Center for Religious Liberty for the Family Research Council (FRC), an anti-LGBT hate group.
He has co-authored two books with FRC senior fellow Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state known for his anti-LGBT rhetoric. One of the books accused Barack Obama of trying to subvert the Constitution and “build an imperial presidency,” while the other claimed that constitutional conservatism can “save America.”
Anti-LGBT First Liberty Institute hired Klukowski in 2015 as senior counsel and director of strategic affairs “to litigate cases involving the First Amendment and freedom of belief and expression.” Anti-LGBT hate group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) referred to Klukowski in 2017 as an ally at First Liberty, andKlukowski has said he has participated in ADF legal trainings, according to The Nation.
Klukowski served on the Trump transition team with Blackwell, who was domestic policy chair. According to a HuffPost report, Blackwell said that Klukowski “structured” the draft of the controversial “religious freedom” order. A draft was leaked in early 2017 and included exemptions for people and organizations claiming religious objections to abortion, premarital sex, transgender rights and same-sex marriage. Trump later signed an executive order in May 2017 to “enhance religious freedom and freedom of speech.” This version did not include language from the earlier draft that would have allowed federal contractors to discriminate against LGBT employees on the basis of religion.
Klukowski’s appointment is “another example of the increasingly cozy relationship between this administration and elements of the far-right,” said Gillian Branstetter, media relations manager at the National Center for Transgender Equality, in an email to Hatewatch. “Entrusting implementation of administration policies to someone with Mr. Klukowski’s track record will further pave the way for this administration to endanger the rights of transgender people to live, labor, and learn as who we are.”
Rachel Janik contributed to this report.
levey pow ~ vawa, AA, sotomayor:
WTF?
Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy [Vol. 37
https://www.harvard-jlpp.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2014/05/37_2_377_Levey_Klukowski.pdf
TAKE CARE NOW: STARE DECISIS AND THE
PRESIDENT’S DUTY TO DEFEND ACTS OF CONGRESS
CURT A. LEVEY* & KENNETH A. KLUKOWSKI**
INTRODUCTION
On January 20, 1981, Ronald Wilson Reagan took the Article
II oath of office to become the fortieth President of the United
States.1 Following his inaugural address to the assembled
throng on the National Mall streaming west from the Capitol,
Reagan entered the Capitol building for the traditional lunch
with members of Congress in Statuary Hall.2 On that day,
President Reagan also established what is now a tradition of going
to the President’s Room in the Capitol after taking his oath to
sign a series of executive orders and officially transmit to the
Senate his first series of nominations for many Cabinet-rank
officials and various other principal officers.3
Now step away from history into an alternate reality.
Imagine that in the aforementioned series of nominations, there was
no Secretary of Education. The explanation is found in one of
President Reagan’s executive orders. The President is acting
upon the position he articulated as a candidate in 1980, that the
* President, Committee For Justice. J.D. 1997, Harvard Law School.
** Research Faculty, Liberty University School of Law. Senior Legal Analyst,
Breitbart News. B.B.A. 1998,University of Notre Dame; J.D. 2008, George Mason University.
- See U.S. CONST. art. II, § 1, cl. 8 (Presidential Oath Clause).
- Fifty-Seventh Presidential Inauguration: Inaugural Luncheon, JOINT CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE ON INAUGURAL CEREMONIES,
http://www.inaugural.senate.gov/days-events/days-event/inaugural-luncheon,
[http://perma.law.harvard.edu/0VWv4bKbMBp].
- See Obama to officially sign Cabinet nominations, ASSOCIATED PRESS (Jan. 21,
2013), http://news.yahoo.com/obama-officially-sign-cabinet-nominations163831156--politics.html, [http://perma.law.harvard.edu/08xjhbKD2v6]. In the
Appointments Clause, U.S. CONST. art. II, § 2, cl. 2, the Constitution differentiates
principal officers from inferior officers in the Executive Branch, where the former
are presidential nominees subject to Senate confirmation, and the latter can be
directly appointed by the President, department heads, or the courts. Morrison v.
Olson, 487 U.S. 654, 670–73 (1988).
p2
378 p
Department of Education is unconstitutional, 4 as is the Act of
Congress that created it and annually authorizes it. Therefore,
President Reagan (1) will not nominate any principal officers to
lead this agency; (2) will not appoint any inferior officers to
implement its programs; (3) will order all civil servants in the
agency not to do any work for its programs; (4) will spend no
money on any of the agency’s programs (beyond the salaries
and benefits for employees), even if appropriated by Congress;
and (5)—especially relevant to this Article on the duty to defend—will not defend any aspect of the agency or its programs
against any legal challenges.
Similarly, the Reagan Administration will not enforce or defend myriad provisions of the Clean Air Act,5 Clean Water Act,6
and Endangered Species Act,7 as the President deems those
statutes to be in excess of Congress’s enumerated powers under the Commerce Clause.8
:{
}:
Moreover, the President is ordering
the Attorney General to identify additional Acts of Congress
that are unconstitutional in whole or in part, as determined in
accordance with the original meaning of Congress’s enumerated powers in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, so that he
may order such acts to be left dormant and undefended. The
President is confident there are many such statutes and will
also, by executive order, repeal all regulations implementing
those statutes, once identified.
President Reagan informs the nation that he can do so because the Constitution requires him to “take Care that the Laws
- See Julie Borowski, Abolishing the Department of Education is the Right Thing to
Do, FREEDOMWORKS (Sept. 19, 2011), http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/
jborowski/abolishing-the-department-of-education-is-the-righ,
[http://perma.law.harvard.edu/0AqLHzdhUwM].
- Pub. L. No. 91-604, 84 Stat. 1676 (1970); Pub. L. No. 95-95, 91 Stat. 685 (1977).
Although the 1970 statute is commonly referred to as the Clean Air Act, the original
Clean Air Act is Pub. L. No. 88-206, 77 Stat. 392 (1963). It has been amended several
times. The official titles of the 1970 and 1977 statutes are the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970 and 1977, respectively. (Years later, there would also be the Clean Air
Act Amendments of 1990. Pub. L. No. 101-549, 104 Stat. 2399). The 1970 and 1977
amendments largely supplanted the 1963 statute with sweeping expansions of federal power that generated the constitutional concerns relevant to this Article.
- Clean Water Act of 1977, Pub. L. No. 95-217, 91 Stat. 1566. A predecessor to
this statute was the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972,
Pub. L. No. 92-500, 86 Stat. 816, passed shortly after the Clean Air Act, see supra
note 5, as part of the same legislative agenda.
- Endangered Species Act of 1973, Pub. L. No. 93-205, 87 Stat. 884.
- See U.S. CONST. art. I, § 8, cl. 3.
end
424
Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy [Vol. 37 Affordable Care Act in its entirety.198 Even though this is only a district court decision, all the relevant federal departments and Cabinet secretaries were named as defendants in the case, and so they are bound by the district court’s order permanently enjoining any of them from implementing any provision of the Act. The President then further orders the Attorney General not to appeal the district court’s decision. We doubt that those who have cheered President Obama’s refusal to defend DOMA would likewise applaud the scenario we have just painted. Yet, the only barrier to such a scenario is the Take Care Clause and the President’s duty to defend. In sum, the President’s duty—subject to the narrow exceptions discussed in this Article—is to facilitate a judicial determination of a challenged statute’s constitutionality and to provide the best possible arguments in its defense, even if he regards the law as unconstitutional. That duty is fully discharged even if the statute is struck down, as the President believes it should be. Thus, in a strong sense, the President cannot lose: If the law truly is unconstitutional, then the court system will vindicate the President by striking it down. If, instead, the courts uphold the statute, the President will have fulfilled his constitutional duty and can rest assured that the law was determined to be constitutional only after thorough consideration of the best arguments on both sides.
ggl 6 22
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