Jan 6 comm bak

8 22 not so much a bak as annex for nyt:

SEE LIE GASLT REVISONISM

NOTE BS GOP REBOOT LOUDERMILK

see retaliation

SEE BIG LIE

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OMFG

AN 9 25

WASHINGTON — At the insistence of President Donald Trump, U.S. House Republicans launched a new Jan. 6 investigation earlier this month. This time, though, the GOP is investigating the investigators, namely the bipartisan Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, which finished its exhaustive work two years ago.

“I want to see all the docs and find out how many lies were told by the people that were sitting on that committee,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) — who was referred to the Ethics Committee after refusing a request to testify from the first Jan. 6 panel — told Raw Story. “That's what I want.”

While the vote setting up the initial Jan. 6 select committee was bipartisan, earlier this month the new Select Subcommittee on January 6 was approved on a party line vote.

“Trying to rewrite history, that's just kind of clearly what they've done since January 6th, so this all fits the narrative,” Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-CA), who served on the initial committee, which disbanded before the GOP took the House in 2023, told Raw Story. “It’s dangerous.”

IFrame Content

It’s not just Democrats waving warning flags. Moderate Republicans say their leaders are making a mistake.

“I just feel like both sides lost their minds, because having the debate again is kind of bad for the nation,” retiring Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) told Raw Story.

Regardless, Trump wants it.

Unlike a GOP-led J6 investigation in the last Congress, this time House Republicans have subpoena power and are promising to use it.

‘What are they looking for?’

Before releasing their 845-page report in 2022, the bipartisan Jan. 6 committee interviewed upwards of 1,000 witnesses and reviewed more than a million pages of documents.

That’s why its chair, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), and other former members decry the new GOP effort.

“The question is what are they looking for? We have no idea. We stand by the work of the committee. Anybody — whoever — wanted to come talk to us, we invited them,” Thompson told Raw Story before dismissing what he sees as an effort to change the narrative.

“They're trying to, but it doesn't change the facts,” Thompson said.

Republicans beg to differ.

“The sham committee did an injustice,” Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) told Raw Story. “The only thing they did is they wanted to blame Trump for everything. They weren't out there to seek the truth. We have an opportunity now to help kind of clear the air and let the American people know.”

On Jan. 6 2021, Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” in support of his lie that the 2020 election was stolen. They then marched from the White House to the Capitol, most seeking to block certification of Joe Biden’s win.

Nine deaths have been linked to the riot, including law enforcement suicides. After returning to power, Trump issued more than 1,500 pardons or acts of clemency, affecting convictions for offenses as serious as seditious conspiracy.

*Nehls is one of five Republicans on the new J6 subcommittee. He’s already come to many conclusions, as laid out in his 2022 book, The Big Fraud: What Democrats Don’t Want You to Know about January 6, the 2020 Election, and a Whole Lot Else.

“Why was the Capitol so ill prepared that day?” Nehls asked Raw Story. “I tell you why, because the leadership of the Capitol Police and others didn't want to share the intelligence reports, and they were f------ clear.

“It was quite clear that things were going to get stupid up here.”

Nehls isn’t the only Republican pushing a narrative. In December, the new subcommittee chair, Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), released a report recommending former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), a member of the original J6 panel, be investigated by the FBI “for potential criminal witness tampering.”

"Right now, we're casting a pretty broad net trying to bring in any documents that were not preserved or we don't currently have," Loudermilk said. “Basically going out to all the organizations that provided information to the original select committee.”

“How much is your job, as you see it, or your mandate, to investigate the original J6 committee?” Raw Story pressed. “Or how much is your job investigating what happened Jan. 6, 2021?”

“It's both,” Loudermilk said, “because there are decisions being made in some elements based off that report that should not be made. In fact, because that's the official report, they've literally ruined people's lives from that.”

Loudermilk has plenty of questions.

“Did the FBI have actionable intelligence that this was happening? And what did they do with it? Did they pass it to Capitol Police? Was it passed on? Same with Homeland Security. We're investigating there, and we have reason to believe they had intelligence, it wasn't passed on.”

After an 18-month investigation, the bipartisan committee referred Trump to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution. Loudermilk and other Republicans claim much remained unanswered.

“How did this Capitol get breached? Regardless of who did it, it should have never been breached,” Loudermilk said.

“An unarmed mob was able to get in the Capitol, you can't find anything in their report about that. ‘Pipe bombs’ are mentioned five times only in passing, but ‘Donald Trump’ was mentioned over a thousand. So that's why we're looking into it.”

In fact, court records show rioters were armed with weapons including firearms, tasers and knives, as well as makeshift implements used to attack police.

Loudermilk was investigated by the initial Jan. 6 committee after video surfaced of him giving a Capitol tour the day before the attack. Like other Republicans, he refused to sit for an interview.

‘Run the tape’

Democrats plan to hammer home that Loudermilk and other Republicans repeatedly rebuffed fact-finding efforts.

“We can go back to some of the people who didn't testify before and who blew off their subpoenas to see if they're ready to testify,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told Raw Story.

Since serving on the initial Jan. 6 committee, Raskin has become top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, making him an ex-officio member of the GOP’s new panel.

While he dismisses the investigation, Raskin promises to use his perch to highlight the terror of Jan. 6, 2021.

“It's going to be an opportunity for us to talk about the tremendous damage inflicted on the police,” Raskin said.

While Raskin is the only carryover from the initial select committee, other alumni also see Trump’s effort to rehash Jan. 6 as a chance to remind the nation of the attempt to overturn the will of the people that culminated in the brutal attack.

“Ridiculous, but it will give us an opportunity to run the tape over and over again. Why do they want to do this?” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) told Raw Story.

“We found the facts. We posted them. It's terabytes of information. Anyone can get it. They're trying to erase history.”

‘Whitewashing’

Even some in Trump’s own party are questioning his goal.

“Why can't we just say those who hurt cops, they were wrong?” Bacon told Raw Story.

“They deserve to be punished — 140 cops were injured. I don't know why we can't have just some honesty, that there were some bad apples in this whole crowd. They deserve to be punished.”

Not according to Trump, who granted blanket pardons. Democrats see the new committee as an extension of that effort.

“The president, on day one, pardoning 1,500 insurrectionists, criminals — violent criminals — was a whitewashing, an attempt to rewrite history,” Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) told Raw Story. “Most importantly, he was pardoning himself. This is a continuation of that.

“It's so infuriating. Just distraction, that's what the administration wants. A little more whitewashing. Absolutely.”

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Ex-Trump ethics lawyer's Jan. 6 Committee lawsuit dismissed

law and crime jan 2025

A federal judge in Georgia has tossed out a lawsuit filed by a former Trump White House ethics lawyer accusing members of the House Committee to Investigate Jan. 6 of civil conspiracy and invasion of privacy in connection with their investigation into the attack on the Capitol.

U. S. District Judge Eleanor L. Ross on Wednesday granted the government's request to dismiss the case brought by Stefan Passantino, who claimed that members of the Committee leaked transcripts of confidential interviews to CNN to "ensure maximum damage" was done to his "reputation and his existing and future legal, political, and business clients."

Passantino was deputy White House counsel during the first Trump administration who went back to the private sector during the Biden administration and worked for the Trump-supporting political action committee, Save America Leadership. There, he represented several people who testified before the Jan. 6 Committee.

Passantino was the first lawyer to represent Cassidy Hutchinson, the former special assistant to President Trump and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, in her meetings with the Committee.

According to Passantino, then-Congresswoman Liz Cheney and Senior Investigative Counsel Dan George in May 2022 contacted Hutchinson without his knowledge and advised his client that he "would not be advancing her interests" because he "was being paid by a Trump-affiliated third-party," which ultimately led to her seeking new counsel.

Hutchinson participated in several additional interviews and in December 2022, a CNN reporter contacted Passantino and said an unreleased transcript from one of Hutchinson's interviews suggested he had counseled her "not to answer the Committee's questions fully and honestly."

Hutchinson testified that before her initial sessions with the Committee, Passantino would dangle potential jobs "in Trumpworld" and tell her she would be "taken care of."

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an 1 25

no lnx

'We're gonna come get you now:' Threats flood J6 committee members after Trump pardons

Matt Lasloand Raw Story January 23, 2025

WASHINGTON — The threats are back.

Since President Donald Trump issued sweeping pardons — along with 14 communications — on Monday for the roughly 1,500 people convicted of storming the U.S. Capitol and attacking law enforcement four years ago, there’s been an uptick in threats to the members who served on the January 6 Select Committee.

"Well, already the crazy calls have started coming back," a former member of the committee told Raw Story. The member is not being named due to safety concerns.

"Are you getting threats?" Raw Story asked.

ALSO READ: Inside the parade of right-wing world leaders flocking to D.C. for Trump's inauguration

"Oh yeah,” the member said. “Several members have indicated that since the pardon that they're getting, 'Hey, we're gonna come get you now' and that kind of thing."

"So has your office gotten them?" Raw Story inquired.

"Oh, yeah," they said.

"Does that worry you though?" Raw Story pressed.

"Personal safety is a concern, I think, for a lot of people," the committee member continued. "It puts the public at risk when you put people who have been convicted of assaulting law enforcement back on the streets and you kind of embolden the conduct that they did, like it was somehow okay? So you legitimize bad behavior by people who broke into the Capitol and did all kinds of crazy stuff."

While the former select committee member doesn’t think the threats are coming from those who’ve been pardoned, they’re bracing for what’s to come.

"Some of the folks that he pardoned are still a clear and present danger to the public, members of Congress, staff here on the Hill," the committee member said. "Some of them, as you know, have already publicly said that they're not going to change.”

That’s a far different tune than House Speaker Mike Johnson is singing this week.

Earlier Wednesday, the speaker unveiled a new Jan. 6 subcommittee intended to “uncover the full truth that is owed to the American people,” according to his statement.

“House Republicans are proud of our work so far in exposing the false narratives peddled by the politically motivated January 6 Select Committee during the 117th Congress, but there is still more work to be done,” Johnson’s office released in a statement.

While the speaker’s office didn’t expound on what they now term "false narratives," the former January 6 Select Committee member told Raw Story the only falsehoods they’ve heard this week have come out of the White House — and now Republicans in Congress.

"You know, we had 140 people get hurt. Obviously, some lost their lives. Now to pretend like that was nothing, that what you saw with your own eyes somehow didn't happen, I'll just say, it's a blot on this institution,” the committee alum said. “It's a blot on the people who support people like that being pardoned."

wapo phil bump 12 24

As his former attorney Michael Cohen once explained, Donald Trump often doesn’t need to tell his loyalists precisely what he expects them to do. He hints at it, nudges them and expects that they understand what is intended.

Sometimes, though, he’s more explicit.

In March, for example, he said that former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) should “go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee” — a reference to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Cheney served as vice chair of the panel.

He was responding to a preliminary report compiled by the House Administration oversight subcommittee, which Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Georgia) leads. That report, a review of the Capitol riot investigation, suggested that the select committee had withheld evidence. This triggered Trump’s recommendation of criminal charges for its members.

Loudermilk is a Trump ally whose subsequent claims that the select committee had also failed to adequately preserve evidence evolved into a Trumpworld insistence that evidence had been destroyed. This has been debunked, but Trump nonetheless referred to that idea during an interview with NBC News this month in which he again suggested that Cheney should “go to jail.”

“They deleted and destroyed a whole year and a half worth of testimony,” he falsely claimed, referring to the select committee. “I think those people committed a major crime.”

Donald Trump awake just a few hours ago posting about...

Trump warns on social media 'Liz Cheney could be in a lot of trouble'

vid]](https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/news/trump-warns-on-social-media-liz-cheney-could-be-in-a-lot-of-trouble/vi-AA1w59zp)

On Tuesday, the final report from Loudermilk’s subcommittee was made public. In it, the subcommittee does recommend criminal charges against Cheney, as Trump had repeatedly demanded. But — probably in recognition that the “destroyed evidence” claim was a canard — the recommendation centers on Cheney’s alleged “tampering” with one of the committee’s key witnesses.

The report’s conclusion summarizes the claim:

“Based on the evidence obtained by this Subcommittee, numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney, the former Vice Chair of the January 6 Select Committee, and these violations should be investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Evidence uncovered by the Subcommittee revealed that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney tampered with at least one witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, by secretly communicating with Hutchinson without Hutchinson’s attorney’s knowledge. This secret communication with a witness is improper and likely violates 18 U.S.C. 1512. Such action is outside the due functioning of the legislative process and therefore not protected by the Speech and Debate clause.”

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation must also investigate Representative Cheney for violating 18 U.S.C. 1622, which prohibits any person from procuring another person to commit perjury.”

Trump, predictably, celebrated this determination, paraphrasing the vaguest snippet of that allegation on social media: “Numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney, and these violations should be investigated by the FBI.”

It’s an endorsement of a fishing expedition, a demand from Loudermilk and Trump that the FBI use this pretext to find something to pin to Cheney. But it sits alongside two actual allegations — both of them flimsy to the point of transparency.

At issue is the testimony of Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s last chief of staff when he previously served as president, Mark Meadows. Hutchinson, you will probably recall, offered shocking testimony at a June 28, 2022, hearing about Trump’s behavior on the day of the riot, including allegations about his dismissiveness about the threat posed by the crowd at his speech outside the White House that morning, Trump’s insistence on driving to the Capitol after the speech and how he responded to reports about the threat posed to Vice President Mike Pence.

That testimony, though, came about only after Hutchinson went through an internal struggle described in her 2023 book “Enough.” Hutchinson was a loyal Trump supporter and, as such, was provided by Trump’s team with an attorney, Stefan Passantino, when the select committee first subpoenaed her in January 2022.

She sat for two depositions with committee staffers in February and March of that year. Following Passantino’s advice, she didn’t volunteer information that would cast Trump in a negative light. But she began to have qualms about this approach, later reaching out to her former colleague Alyssa Farah for advice on how to proceed. Farah helped orchestrate a third deposition, in May 2022, during which Hutchinson was able to speak more freely. Her attorney was not pleased, and neither was Trumpworld.

In early June, Passantino recommended that Hutchinson stop complying with the committee’s efforts, including an anticipated fourth interview. In her book, she writes that she expected but “dreaded” Passantino forcing the issue, worried that she would be putting herself at risk of contempt charges. So, soon after, she contacted Cheney directly. Two months ago, Loudermilk’s subcommittee released some information about this communication, framing it in ethical, not legal, terms.

In a phone conversation with Cheney recounted in Hutchinson’s book, Hutchinson indicated that she intended to represent herself moving forward. Cheney recommended against doing so. When Hutchinson indicated that she’d previously had trouble identifying and affording counsel, Cheney said she would consult with her colleagues and get back to her. The next day she did, offering “contact information for multiple attorneys.” Hutchinson spoke with a number of them, ultimately deciding on attorneys Jody Hunt and Bill Jordan.

Later that month, she sat for another deposition. Freed from the constraints Passantino had encouraged, she offered much more detail on what she’d seen and, more explosively, what she’d been told about Jan. 6, 2021. The select committee quickly scheduled the aforementioned public hearing for June 28. Hutchinson would sit for recorded interviews twice more in September 2022.

The report from Loudermilk’s subcommittee twists Cheney’s role into criminal activity in two ways. The first is that her interactions with Hutchinson are described as “tampering,” citing federal witness-tampering statutes. But those are focused on inhibiting testimony (particularly through force), not on enabling it. What’s more, the report’s important claim that Hutchinson retained Hunt and Jordan “at the recommendation of Representative Cheney” ignores the nuances of the interactions both women describe in their respective books.

Much of Loudermilk’s report centers on discrepancies between Hutchinson’s testimony and the testimony of others, discrepancies that are often in part because (as Hutchinson always represented) her testimony included secondhand information. But because the subcommittee presents Hutchinson’s testimony as intentionally false, the second recommended charge against Cheney proposes that she intentionally orchestrated Hutchinson’s testimony so that the witness could provide that false information.

In a statement offered in response to the Loudermilk report, Cheney wrote that “[n]o reputable lawyer, legislator or judge would take [the allegations] seriously.” And that’s probably true. But the report’s recommendation for an FBI probe will most probably be taken seriously by the incoming head of the FBI — if not Trump first choice, fervent loyalist Kash Patel, then whoever ends up being confirmed by the Senate.

Trump sent his Capitol Hill allies an unsubtle signal: Cheney must pay, even beyond her Trump-orchestrated ouster from the House. Loudermilk and his subcommittee were no doubt cognizant of that signal when they upgraded their allegations against Cheney from ethical to legal ones. And now Trump’s incoming FBI director has a trivial predicate, in case he even sought one, to start the fishing expedition that Loudermilk and Trump endorse.

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Chairman Loudermilk Responds to Former Member Liz Cheney's Baseless Claims, Debunks Claims with Receipts

December 19, 2024

WASHINGTON - Today, Committee on House Administration's Subcommittee on Oversight Chairman Barry Loudermilk (GA-11) released the following statement.

"Liz Cheney and Bennie Thompson are trying to say that my investigation has disregarded the truth of January 6, pointing to their Select Committee’s 'tremendous weight of evidence'," said Chairman Loudermilk. "We evaluated that exact weight based on their records and found it slimmer than claimed.

"Cheney claims the Select Committee's report was based on the testimony of hundreds of witnesses, whose testimony was made public. However, Cheney and Thompson did not make ALL transcripts public. They hid transcripts of first-hand witnesses who directly refuted their 'star witness' Cassidy Hutchinson's sensational story, which Cheney had personally procured.

"Americans can see the facts for themselves. That is why I have always released first-hand accounts and evidence, including today, where I am releasing the transcripts from the interview of USSS employees who directly refute Hutchinson's story. Cheney and Thompson's Select Committee conducted these interviews and had this information but chose not to release it publicly.

"Former Chairman Thompson might not be aware of these transcripts, which refute the narrative put forward by his committee, so I understand his confusion. I encourage him to read these transcripts taken by his select committee.

"I also invite Chairman Thompson to explain why the Vice Chair of his committee, Liz Cheney, was having secret conversations with the committee’s “star witness”, behind his back."

Click here to read the United States Secret Service transcripts taken, but never released, by the January 6 Select Committee under Chairman Thompson and Vice Chair Liz Cheney.

eg ornato

suv driver

USSS Transcripts - Google Drive

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retaliation

an 3 23 deep state BS?

Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) revealed over the weekend that he and other right-wing lawmakers may intend to pursue criminal charges against members of the House Select Committee that investigated the January 6th, 2021 Capitol insurrection.

"Is there a chance that you guys could prosecute certain members of Congress, Congress, or former members of Congress over the January 6th riots?" asked Gateway Pundit correspondent Jordan Conradson.

"I, I, I would not, uh, leave it just that. I think there's also military that are involved and I think that there, you know, heads have to roll.Otherwise, you condone this, uh, lawlessness and that's what America sees. We see lawlessness in Chicago. We see lawless on our border. We see lawlessness everywhere," Gosar said. "And that's part of the purpose. Precipitating actions that congresses is had allowed."

Gosar also implied that he believes in a nationwide conspiracy concocted by high-level officials to make the country more dangerous.

"So are you looking into any inquiries, resolutions of inquiries into [Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman] Mark Milley or [Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro] Myorkas over their handling of our national security?" Conradson wondered.

"Stay tuned," Gosar joked.

Watch below or at this link.

How Paul Gosar emerged as a far-right favorite and subsequently the 'most dangerous man in Congress’

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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rww Tags: Ali Alexander Gary Bauer Jack Posobiec Jenna Ellis Marjorie Taylor Greene **Tom Fitton** Capitol Insurrection House select committee on Jan. 6 Jan. 6 **Judicial Watch**

1 23 fresh air purple team

cal sil vly pass?

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/26/1151360750/social-medias-role-in-jan-6-was-left-out-of-the-final-report

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I am Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross, who's off this week. Meta, the owners of Facebook and Instagram, announced Wednesday that both platforms will restore the accounts of former President Donald Trump, ending a two-year suspension that began after the assault on the U.S. Capitol in 2021. The congressional committee that investigated the January 6 riot spent considerable effort looking into the role of social media in assembling the mob and fueling the violence. But very little of their evidence and findings made it into the committee's 800-page final report.

Our guest today, Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell, is part of a team of reporters who brought those findings into the public sphere. They wrote an article about a 122-page memo investigators circulated among the committee based on their interviews with employees of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other tech platforms as well as other research. They found that tech companies failed to act on their own employees' warnings about violent rhetoric growing on their platforms in part out of reluctance to penalize conservatives, particularly then-President Trump. Drew Harwell is a technology reporter for the Post. He was part of an international reporting team that won a George Polk Award in 2021. Before he joined the Post in 2014, he worked for the Tampa Bay Times.

...

HARWELL: Yeah, we had a story on January 5 that was all about just the volume of rage you could see on these sites. It was not hidden at all. It was very overt. It was very direct. It was, you know, maps of the U.S. Capitol. It was bridges into D.C., where people suspected there would be police checkpoints. It was strategies on how to sneak firearms into D.C., where they are banned. It was really a road map for literally what we saw happen on January 6. And we had been following disinformation around the election for months. And you could tell that on that day, it had really reached a fever pitch. I mean, there was clear mobilization.

And so the question at the time was, what's going on with these companies that we can see this in plain sight? Shouldn't there be something more robust to tackle these very direct calls for violence and threats and lies about the election being stolen? And at the moment, we didn't really know how bad it was inside of these companies. But, you know, now we get a sense of there was a real, clear failure here - not just political, but from these companies that really run the backbone of how we all communicate with each other.

DAVIES: In a general way, how much effort went into looking into the role of social media companies by the staff of the January 6 Committee? I mean, do you have any general sense of - I don't know - how many interviews, what kind of documents? How much effort went into looking into this?

HARWELL: A lot. I mean, in the committee, there were multiple teams approaching this question from different angles. There was a - specifically a purple team that focused on social media and its role in the violence. And they were experts, political staffers, smart people who were part of this committee. And they sifted through tens of thousands of documents from more than a dozen of these big tech companies. They interviewed executives, former employees. They assessed thousands of Twitter messages from Trump and his supporters and many other people. They had subpoena power, so they could really get information.

I mean, they - we have rarely seen a federal body with this kind of people power and resources look into social media. And, you know, you understand why because this was a massive event in American history. And so when they started out, they really had a big concentration of power here looking at this problem. And you could see that in this hundred-page memo, they really focused on this problem very, very specifically and very concretely. And they had a lot of material to back it up.

DAVIES: Right. Which raises another question - why didn't this get more attention in the final report?

HARWELL: Yeah, so that was what we were really kind of interested in. When the final report came out late last year, the material that the purple team had uncovered was almost totally absent. You know, there was this 800-page final report that really didn't dig into social media as an entity in this problem. It was very focused on Trump and his orbit, which were important. But the purple team was dismayed at how much was left on the cutting room floor. And so that was kind of what we wanted to find out when we did our reporting.

And from, you know, a number of interviews with people who were sort of close to this process and understood, their takeaway was that some of this was shaped by political sensibilities, right? You had people on this committee who were reluctant to make this a battle with the tech companies. They didn't want to get in this tit for tat with these very important American firms. And some of those people were congresspeople with jurisdictions in California close to Silicon Valley. So that was a factor of it. There was also some worry from these committee members that they didn't want to distract from Trump.They wanted to keep this really tightly focused on Trump because they worried about the message getting diluted.

But, you know, one other factor in this was that focusing too much on social media cast an inconvenient glimpse at not just far-right QAnon people, who were very conspiratorial, but also the Republican Party itself and its role in tolerating this kind of chatter online from Trump and Americans at large. So there was a worry that, you know, digging in too much on these issues was going to reflect poorly on, you know, Republicans as a party. And so the result of that was the report ended up being a bit watered down. And a lot of this incisive material about social media, which is really important in everybody's lives not just on this day but every day, just was left out.

DAVIES: You know, it's interesting. On that particular point, I do recall, you know, the co-chair, Liz Cheney, the Republican, sharply condemning her Republican colleagues who, as she put it, were defending the indefensible. You think there was still some sensitivity on not holding Republicans to account for their complicity in the social media end of this?

...

davies: ...

You know, it's interesting. There was some mention in the public hearings of the committee in July of Twitter. They played testimony from a former Twitter employee saying that the platform had given Donald Trump special treatment. The employee was anonymous at the time. It was audio, not video, and in fact, the voice was distorted to protect the employee's identity. You later interviewed this employee on the record, right? You want to tell us a bit about her?

HARWELL: Yeah, that's right. Her name is Anika Collier Navaroli. She worked for Twitter for several years, including on the day of January 6 and before. And her role was as a legal expert on the safety policy team helping Twitter craft rules for how to approach content, protect the free speech of what people were talking about, but also take down calls to violence, set up clear red lines against extremism, and just play this kind of middle role of trying to protect the platform. So she had a really interesting view on this, and, you know, she had seen the company approach geopolitical issues all the time, right? Riots and political unrest. How do we approach this? How do we allow - what do we allow in terms of protest language that doesn't go too far over the edge?

So she was cognizant of these things and her feeling as the election became this moment where Trump was saying that the vote had been stolen - she had been seeing Twitter really erupt with a lot of people kind of mobilizing their messaging, going from just sort of vague anger to real clear directions of where they were going to go, what they were going to do, and how much they felt like Donald Trump was talking to them. You know, this whole stand by, you know, call that he gave for the Proud Boys. So, you know, she, inside the company, was pushing them - and not just her, but others, too, pushing the company to enact some new rules that would just take a tougher stance on this. One of these was a policy - she called it coded incitement to violence. So incitement to violence is not allowed on Twitter, but you can sort of code it a little bit - right? - and this is what people were doing. They were saying, I'm locked and loaded, but not specifically say where they were going. And yet, you know, by the context of it, it was pretty clear.

So she could see there was starting to be more talk of bringing guns, more talk of really sowing this anger against the federal government, and she was pushing the company to do more. And, you know, what she told the committee, and what others ended up telling the committee as well, was that Twitter was really resistant to any kind of rule that could have helped on January 6th. I mean, they passed some policies, but the company employees who spoke to the committee felt like it was just clearly not enough, and they felt like some of what happened on January 6th was really inflamed by the company's lack of action and reluctance to delve into these issues and to, really, even hold former President Trump to account for what he was saying on Twitter as well.

DAVIES: Right. Of course, Trump loved Twitter. I mean, he did tens of thousands of tweets over the years. Was Twitter's management motivated in part, according to these employees, by them enjoying the spotlight, enjoying being Donald Trump's chosen social media vehicle?

HARWELL: Yeah, 100%. I think that was the most stunning claim she made, and that was one that was a real headline from one of the committee hearings, which was that Twitter, in her words, protected Trump because he was a star.You know, he had brought a large amount of attention and clout to Twitter. Twitter in social media is effectively an also-ran, right? They're not a Facebook or an Instagram or a TikTok. They're a news platform, and Donald Trump helped make Twitter into a very influential company. And so in her words, she felt like the company had become deferent to Trump because they felt like they couldn't punish somebody who was beneficial in this way. There was kind of a mutually beneficial arrangement here.

But there were other people who spoke to the company, too, from inside Twitter that also suggested that there was some fear of the backlash of being too tough on Trump. And, you know, even before January 6, Trump had always been very infamous for what he would say on Twitter, as anybody who was online during those years knew. I mean, it was a lot of borderline or over-the-line tweets that people were wondering, why is Donald Trump able to talk like this on the platform? Anybody else who was sharing these kinds of messages would be treated differently, and this is what Anika ended up saying to the committee - was that he was treated differently. He was given special treatment because of this impactful role he had in the company....

You know, I will say Facebook had stood up some election integrity efforts even before January 6 that were about, you know, if somebody posts something about the election being stolen, we're going to post a disclaimer that actually that's false. We're going to link you to proactive, right, accurate information. Facebook had very notably disbanded those efforts before January 6. I think they sort of felt like the election's over; we're not needed anymore. That was specifically called out as an institutional failure that could have led to some of these things. But it all sort of came back to, could the company have done more, taken down more, been more active in addressing these calls to violence? And would that have made any difference on January 6?

DAVIES: There was also mention in this memo that you and your colleagues found of a white list that Facebookkept of certain accounts that were exempted from the fact-checking that would occur on other accounts. Among the people on that list -Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr. Glenn Beck, Gateway Pundit, various other conservative things. Did the committee find that troubling, the committee's investigators?

HARWELL: Yeah, they did. I mean, this was clearly special treatment for very high-profile people with big audiences who were known for saying things that would otherwise be fact-checked. Yeah, this was an issue because here was Facebook making a technically defensive position that would help the company, but that would actually contribute to a lot more lies and misinformation being spread to general users. So yeah, there was a feeling that this was a secret list that was not shared with the general public that was not just damaging their experience, but actively fostering these false narratives that, you know, many of which became pretty central to January 6. And there was a frustration that these elite provocateurs were getting to play by a different set of rules than anybody else.

DAVIES: And what, if anything, did Facebook executives say in defense of this to the committee?

HARWELL: Their argument was that this is a way to streamline the moderation process, right? These are people who - anything they say that becomes a controversy for Facebook, they want to handle at a high level and treat them with a different pair of gloves than people like you and me. I mean, you know, Facebook's argument in some of this is that these are people who will be targeted for, you know, mass reporting or, you know, will just sort of be at the center of a lot of kind of mucky battles. So they want to have a bigger, sort of different level of special treatment for these folks.

But, you know, I think what it ends up being is that these people can break rules, push the boundaries without penalty or consequence. And you certainly saw this with Donald Trump on Twitter where his profile cannot not even be accessed in the same way as anybody. He was constantly, no matter what he said, he was on zero strikes forever. And there was nothing he could say that would really push him over the line until we actually saw January 6. So this was a clear sort of technical measure that had become really problematic for the committee and for the general public.

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no vid twt

Hours before it disbanded forever, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol released a final slate of depositions of witnesses that it interviewed during its probe of former President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election and remain in power.

CBS News congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane tweeted video clips of key Trump allies – including coup memo author John Eastman, ex-Trump defense attorney Rudy Giuliani, Ivanka Trump, and then-Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office John McEntee – recalling what they saw and heard leading up to and during the Trump-inspired insurrection.

Eastman is shown repeatedly invoking his 5th Amendment right against self-crimination.

Giuliani, however, was far more forthcoming, admitting that he remembers "saying to people that somebody should be put in charge of the Justice Department who isn't frightened of what's gonna be done to their reputation." Trump wanted to replace Attorney General Bill Barr with Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division Jeffrey Clark but abandoned the effort when faced with the prospect of mass resignations.

Giuliani added that while he "didn't know him that well," he was confident that "others" viewed Clark as a "good alternative" to Barr due to his willingness to do Trump's bidding and because "he's not intimidated by the press."

Trump's eldest daughter Ivanka, who at the time worked in the Oval Office, said that Trump's call with Vice President Mike Pence "was heated." Another Trump aide, Nicholas Luna, told the Committee that “I remember hearing the word wimp.”

McEntee testified that Trump appeared "shocked" over the demonstrations "getting a little out of control."

The Select Committee also provided footage of a rioter threatening Republican lawmakers who refused to cooperate with Trump's scheme.

"If you voted for treason, we're going to drag your ass through the streets," the man exclaimed while marching toward the Capitol. "We're nice people, but when you treason our country, we'll drag your ass."

Watch below or at this link.

https://www.alternet.org/unequal-justice-crime-and-punishment/

j6 comm good at narr]

...

Trump’s prosecution, at least at the federal level (he’s also under serious investigation in the states of Georgia and New York), now rests in the hands of the Justice Department and special counsel Jack Smith. The DOJ has received criminal referrals from the committee for four overlapping federal felonies committed by the former President:

Obstruction of an official proceeding, referring to the joint session of Congress convened on January 6, 2021, to confirm the election of Joe Biden, and the effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify Biden’s victory;
Conspiracy to defraud the United States, referring to the former president’s multi-phase scheme to overturn the election;
Conspiracy to make a false statement, referring to the plan to submit false slates of electors to Congress and the National Archives; and
Inciting, assisting, or giving aid and comfort to an insurrection, referring to Trump’s incendiary speech immediately prior to the riot at the Capitol and his behavior during the riot.

The committee has also referred five of Trump’s former aides and associates to the Justice Department: John Eastman, Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, Kenneth Cheseboro and Jeffrey Clark. Trump, however, is the only member of the crew who has been referred for insurrection. The report singles out the ex-commander-in-chief on the insurrection charge, stating “the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump.”

Although the referrals are non-binding, Smith is already in the thick of investigating the insurrection and the plot to overturn the 2020 election, presenting evidence to at least two grand juries. The special counsel is also leading the investigation into Trump’s removal of top-secret government documents to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

Convicting Trump will not be easy, especially on charges related to January 6. Each of the felonies referred to the Department of Justice requires proof of criminal intent. The government will have to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump knew he had lost the election and was acting with a “corrupt purpose” to obstruct the work of the joint session of Congress or, on the conspiracy referral, that he had an intent to defraud the nation with the submission of fake slates of electors.

It will be particularly challenging to prove that Trump incited or assisted the insurrection as Trump would likely mount a First Amendment defense. In its landmark 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court articulated a two-part test for punishing incendiary speech, holding that the First Amendment protects advocating the use of force or lawbreaking “except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action” (emphasis added).

Still, it’s easy to understand why the committee chose to cite Trump for insurrection. Trump knew that members of the crowd who had gathered to hear him talk were armed when he urged them to march to the Capitol to “fight like hell.” And amid the ensuing melee, he accused Pence of cowardice for not using his authority as Vice President to change the outcome of the election, seething in a Tweet, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution…USA demands the truth!” Almost immediately after the Tweet was posted, the report notes, “the crowd around the Capitol surged, and more individuals joined the effort to confront police and break further into the building.”

Should Trump be tried and convicted of insurrection, he would face a prison sentence of up to ten years. He would also be barred from holding federal office for life.

So, what are the odds that Trump is finally held to account? Will Jack Smith prove to be Trump’s Porfiry Petrovich, the police investigator who brought Raskolnikov to justice, or will he turn out to be another Robert Mueller? We may have the answer in a matter of months.

rww 12 22

House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection released a 150-page summary of its findings and voted Monday to send the Justice Department criminal referrals for former President Donald Trump and others who assisted his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Right-wing political groups and leaders generally responded either by ignoring the historic action altogether or by dismissing it as a partisan move without engaging substantively with the committee’s extensively documented findings.

Far-right activist Ali Alexander, who was a leader of the so-called “Stop the Steal” effort to overturn the 2020 election and keep Trump in power, called the committee’s criminal referrals “a coup against the voters.” Alexander, who participated in the recent disastrous Kanye West and Nick Fuentes appearance on Alex Jones’ show that turned into a festival of praise for Adolph Hitler, also released a statement purportedly on behalf of “Team Ye,” accusing Democrats and the “Republican Establishment” of working together “to rig our GOP primary or choose which candidates can be in the ballot before the American Voter.”

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton took to Twitter to charge that “’January 6’ is all about Biden/Left seeking to suppress/jail political opponents who blow the whistle on their election misconduct — and suppressing political opponents in 2024…” Fitton shared a video of himself claiming that “The left has decided that if you are challenging results they like in elections, you’re breaking the law and you should be jailed and prosecuted.”

Fitton also retweeted Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Jeremy Carl’s suggestion that the threat to democracy was somehow not Trump’s effort to overthrow the election or the violent effort to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, but the committee’s investigation: “A completely partisan House panel is trying to work hand-in-glove with a completely partisan DOJ to bring criminal charges against the previous U.S. President. If you still think we live in a functional democracy you need to wake up and realize what time it is.”

Former Trump attorney and self-styled “America’s lawyer” Jenna Ellis claimed, “It’s all a political pretext with zero basis in fact or law”—a ridiculous statement given the committee’s meticulous gathering of evidence, including testimony from many Trump administration officials.

Not to be outdone, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene dismissed the House committee as “communist.”

Writing in his daily email newsletter, longtime religious-right activist Gary Bauercalled the committee a “kangaroo court” and referred to the criminal referrals as outgoing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi “seeking to extract one last act of revenge against Donald Trump.” Bauer was similarly grumpy about the committee referring four Republican congressmen to the House ethics committee for refusing to comply with committee subpoenas. Bauer didn’t defend their defiance of the law but railed against what he called a “despicable precedent established by petulant progressives.”

Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec greeted the conclusion of the committee’s final public meeting with a message on Telegram: “Bring it, demons.” Posobiec didn’t pass up the chance to raise money, urging his readers Monday night to buy Christmas presents from MyPillow using a code that would presumably give Posobiec a cut: “Jan 6 wasn’t an insurrection to overthrow the govt but promocode Poso is an insurrection to overthrow prices this Christmas!”

The committee is reportedly set to release a massive amount of additional documentation Wednesday.

Tags: Ali Alexander Gary Bauer Jack Posobiec Jenna Ellis Marjorie Taylor Greene Tom Fitton Capitol Insurrection House select committee on Jan. 6 Jan. 6 Judicial Watch

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An ethics attorney to Donald Trump _{allegedly instructed}_ former White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson to lie about her own recollection of events during _{her notable testimony}_ in June, CNN reports.

Stefan Passantino, who Hutchinson fired as her attorney prior to her testimony, _{was paid by}_ Trump’s political action committee, Save America for his legal services. The former Deputy White House Counsel _{claims that}_ many people drop their lawyers “because their interests or strategies change.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a member of the committee said to CNN, “She was advised to say that she didn’t recall something when she did. So that’s pretty serious stuff.”

Passantino _{said in a statement}_ to CNN that any claims of him advising Hutchinson to deceive the committee are untrue. “I represented Ms. Hutchinson honorably, ethically, and fully consistent with her sole interests as she communicated them to me,” he said. “I believed Ms. Hutchinson was being truthful and cooperative with the Committee throughout the several interview sessions in which I represented her.”

The committee also alleges that the attorney provided Hutchinson’s testimony to fellow lawyers, as well as the press, despite her disapproval.

Passantino claimed, “External communications made on Ms. Hutchinson’s behalf while I was her counsel were made with her express authorization.”

Michael Best & Friefrich LLP, the law firm he’s served as partner, _{deleted}_ the long-time attorney’s headshot and bio from its website this week. Although, he says “given the distraction of this matter” he’s only on “a leave of absence.” The firm maintains that they _{were not involved }_in any way and Hutchinson was never a client, according to CNN.

The Jan. 6 committee included their assessment of this matter in the executive summary of their report. “The lawyer had advised the witness that the witness could, in certain circumstances, tell the Committee that she did not recall facts when she actually did recall them,” the report says.

“When the witness raised concerns with her lawyer about that approach,” according to the summary, the lawyer said, “They don’t know what you know, [witness]. They don’t know that you can recall some of these things. So you saying ‘I don’t recall’ is an entirely acceptable response to this.”

The report continues, “The lawyer instructed the client about a particular issue that would cast a bad light on President Trump: ‘No, no, no, no, no. We don’t want to go there. We don’t want to talk about that.’”

The committee stated that it will share the transcript of the witness testimony in question with the public.

ref cnn ref no lnx

Exclusive: Trump’s former White House ethics lawyer told Cassidy Hutchinson to give misleading testimony to January 6 committee, sources say

Katelyn Polantz Pamela Brown Jamie Gangel Jeremy Herb

Wed December 21, 2022

UNITED STATES - JUNE 28: Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testifies during the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol hearing to present previously unseen material and hear witness testimony in Cannon Building, on Tuesday, June 28, 2022. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Rep. Lofgren says executive summary will have 'very bad' previously unreleased evidence from Jan. 6 hearings

Exclusive: Trump lawyer allegedly urged WH aide to mislead Jan. 6 cmte

The January 6 committee made a startling allegation on Monday, claiming it had evidence that a Trump-backed attorney urged a key witness to mislead the committee about details they recalled.

Though the committee declined to identify the people, CNN has learned that Stefan Passantino, the top ethics attorney in the Trump White House, is the lawyer who allegedly advised his then-client, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, to tell the committee that she did not recall details that she did, sources familiar with the committee’s work tell CNN.

Trump’s Save America political action committee funded Passantino and his law firm Elections LLC, including paying for his representation of Hutchinson, other sources tell CNN. The committee report notes the lawyer did not tell his client who was paying for the legal services.

Over the summer, Hutchinson emerged as a blockbuster witness for the committee, providing key insight into Trump’s state of mind and his actions leading up to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Before her public testimony, Hutchinson dropped Passantino and got a new lawyer.

When asked about pressure on Hutchinson after Monday’s hearing, committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren, told CNN: “She was advised to say that she didn’t recall something when she did. So that’s pretty serious stuff.”

The episode is just one of several instances in which the committee has accused members of Trump’s orbit of trying to obstruct the panel’s investigation.

Two sources familiar with the situation tell CNN that Hutchinson has discussed the episode with the Justice Department. CNN has previously reported that Hutchinson was cooperating with the Justice Department’s January 6 investigation, after she became a crucial public witness in the House probe.

CNN reached out to the Justice Department for comment.

Passantino has not been accused of a crime. He said House investigators never reached out to him for an interview.

In a statement to CNN, Passantino said he didn’t advise Hutchinson to mislead the committee. “I represented Ms. Hutchinson honorably, ethically, and fully consistent with her sole interests as she communicated them to me. I believed Ms. Hutchinson was being truthful and cooperative with the Committee throughout the several interview sessions in which I represented her.”

Passantino pointed out it’s not uncommon for people to change lawyers “because their interests or strategies change,” according to his statement. He also said political committees sometimes cover client fees “at the client’s request.”

In response to an accusation from the committee that he also shared her testimony with other lawyers and the press even when she told him not to, he said, “External communications made on Ms. Hutchinson’s behalf while I was her counsel were made with her express authorization.”

By Tuesday, Passantino’s professional biography had been removed from the website of a midwestern-based law firm where he was a partner – and he acknowledged in his statement he was on a leave of absence from the firm “given the distraction of this matter.”That firm, Michael Best & Friedrich LLP, said on Tuesday it was not involved in the situation and Hutchinson wasn’t a client.

Passantino said he remains a partner at Elections LLC.

Concerns over witness tampering

The House January 6 committee, during hearings over the summer, said it was concerned about potential witness tampering. CNN has reported that witness was Hutchinson.

The committee summary stated that the panel “is aware of multiple efforts by President Trump to contact Select Committee witnesses. The Department of Justice is aware of at least one of those circumstances.”

Then on Monday, in the executive summary of the final report, the committee revisited the issue in its handoff of the investigation to the Justice Department.

According to the report, “the lawyer had advised the witness that the witness could, in certain circumstances, tell the Committee that she did not recall facts when she actually did recall them.”

“The lawyer instructed the client about a particular issue that would cast a bad light on President Trump: ‘No, no, no, no, no. We don’t want to go there. We don’t want to talk about that,’” the report said.

At the committee’s final public hearing, Lofgren said: “The witness believed this was an effort to affect her testimony, and we are concerned that these efforts may have been a strategy to prevent the Committee from finding the truth.”

Lawyers must follow extensive ethics guidelines as part of their profession, including avoiding conflicts of interest that could compromise their representation of a client. According to legal ethics experts, a lawyer swaying their client’s testimony in a way that wouldn’t be entirely truthful could be looked at as possible obstruction of an investigation.

Elections LLC, a political law practice Passantino and other Trump lawyers founded after he left the Trump White House, has received regular payments from Save America PAC and other Trump-backed groups, according to FEC filings. The Save America PAC distributions to the firm for legal consulting total more than $150,000 in 2021, and about $275,000 in 2022. The firm also has worked for major Republican congressional campaigns.

This year, Trump’s Save America PAC has made payments to several law firms representing witnesses in the January 6 and Mar-a-Lago investigation. An issue only arises if the lawyer doesn’t follow the client’s wishes, legal experts and professional rules say.

Other obstruction concerns

The committee, in its summary Monday, gave several other examples of “evidence suggesting specific efforts to obstruct” their work. They noted efforts by Trump to contact some witnesses, as well as multiple Secret Service agents hiring private lawyers rather than agency-provided lawyers who would represent them for free. A Secret Service driver’s lawyer admitted to writing notes to the driver as they testified, about what was being said, according to the committee.

The committee also said it believed some witnesses, such as Trump’s former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and the former president’s daughter Ivanka Trump, weren’t as “frank or direct” as others.

The report also said the committee believed a White House staffer Anthony Ornato “gave testimony consistent with the false account” in a book written by Mark Meadows, downplaying Trump’s wish to go to the Capitol on January 6.

The committee says it plans to release transcripts that will shed further light on the witness testimony they found to be questionable.

This story has been updated with other potential examples of obstruction identified by the committee.

CNN’s Zachary Cohen and Gabby Orr contributed to this story

https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/fox-personalities-dismiss-january-6-committees-criminal-referrals-trump

an 12 22

Following reports of the Jan. 6 committee’s decision to refer Trump’s criminal charges to the Justice Department, _{social media users are asking}_ why Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas didn’t get the same treatment, Newsweek reports.

The wife of long-time Supreme Court judge Clarence Thomas, Thomas was in the spotlight earlier this year after a texting thread between her and Trump’s former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows came to light. In the texts, Thomas urged Meadows to use his influence and power _{to help overturn the 2020 election}_.

Not only was she in cahoots with Meadows, but Alternet previously reported that the conservative activist _{communicated with John Eastman}_ – the Republican lawyer who received criminal referral from the Jan. 6 committee for his attempt to deem Mike Pence powerful enough to discard electoral college votes.

Twitter users are not happy about the committee’s failure to refer Thomas as well.

Jonathan Goldman _{tweeted}_, "How do you make a criminal referral for John Eastman but not Ginni Thomas? They literally conspired to overthrow democracy together."

“So Ginni Thomas just gets away with it because she's married to a Supreme Court Justice?" _{another Twitter user}_ asked.

Adam Rifkin _{tweeted}_ "What about Ginni Thomas? #TrumpCoupAttempt"along with a video of a June MSNBC segment on Thomas and Eastman’s communication.

It is not confirmed that the Justice Department will carry out the recommended charges against Trump and Eastman. And _{according to a tweet}_ from CBS correspondent Robert Costa, it is currently “unclear” whether the “complete transcript” from Thomas’ September meeting with the Jan. 6 committee will be released to the public.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/j6-committee/ subpoena sent (dhillon)

11 22 ~ j6 comm

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/mike-pence-donald-trump-reckless/

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/clarence-thomas/

an comm dr 11 22

no lnx twt

A long-standing call for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to face impeachment proceedings was renewed Monday after the right-wing judge indicated in an unsigned dissent that he would have blocked enforcement of the House January 6 panel's subpoena for the communications records of Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward.

The House committee investigating the deadly January 6 insurrection "is seeking Ward's records related to her role in former President Donald Trump's effort to steal the 2020 election as a fake elector casting ballots in the Electoral College for Trump," HuffPost reported.

In a 7-2 vote, the Supreme Court on Monday paved the way for the panel to obtain Ward's phone records, rejecting the Arizona GOP chair's appeal. Right-wing Justice Samuel Alito joined Thomas in dissenting.

This marked the second time Thomas has tried to hinder the committee's probe of the Trump-led effort to remain in office despite his 2020 election loss—a plot in which Thomas' wife, right-wing activist Ginni Thomas, played a major role.

Thomas in January was the only justice to vote against the release of White House records to the panel.Two months later, text messages between former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Ginni Thomas showed that she had been in communication with Trump's team about efforts to overturn President Joe Biden's electoral victory.

Weeks later, it was revealed that Ginni Thomas had lobbied Republican lawmakers in Arizona and other states to reject Biden's electors and appoint fake ones who would support Trump. Since late March, congressional Democrats have called on Clarence Thomas to recuse himself, resign, or be impeached for apparently trying to shield his wife's anti-democratic political activities from scrutiny.

"His wife, Ginni Thomas, pressured Arizona officials to illegally overturn Trump's loss," Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a D.C.-based watchdog, noted Monday. "It's absurd that Thomas did not recuse."

"Justice Thomas must face an impeachment inquiry," the pro-democracy advocacy group Free Speech for People tweeted.

A petition calling for the impeachment of Clarence Thomas has garnered more than 1.2 million signatures since details about Ginni Thomas' direct participation in Trump's failed coup were first made publi

an 10 22

The phone records of Kelli Ward, who has unsuccessfully filed multiple lawsuits seeking to throw out the 2020 presidential election results and hand the state's electoral votes to Donald Trump, will now go to the committee after a split 9th Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to dismiss her motion to keep them hidden.

According to the report from Politico's Josh Gerstein, "Ward argued that the subpoena violates her First Amendment rights by intruding on her activities as chairperson of the Arizona Republican Party, but the order issued Saturday by the appeals court panel’s majority said those concerns weren’t serious enough to keep the House from accessing details about her calls."

In their ruling, Judges Barry Silverman andDonald Trump-appointed Eric Millerwrote, "The investigation, after all, is not about Ward’s politics; it is about her involvement in the events leading up to the January 6 attack, and it seeks to uncover those with whom she communicated in connection with those events. That some of the people with whom Ward communicated may be members of a political party does not establish that the subpoena is likely to reveal ‘sensitive information about [the party’s] members and supporters.’”

Ward was previously deposed by the committee and repeatedly pleaded the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions from the Jan. 6 committee.

You can read more here.

mma 10 22

after nearly five months of public testimony, the final hearing of the bipartisan House select committee investigating the insurrection at the Capitol concluded on October 13 with a unanimous vote to subpoena former President Donald Trump, sending right-wing media’s campaign to discredit the panel and downplay the insurrection into overdrive.

The panel presented mountains of evidence that displayed a clear, coordinated, and deliberate effort by Trump and his supporters to infiltrate the Capitol and overturn the results of the 2020 election. Evidence presented during Thursday’s hearing illustrated that Trump sought to sow chaos in his final days as president by authorizing the withdrawal of troops overseas; provided further evidence that Secret Service and law enforcement were aware of the threats ahead of January 6 and sought to cover up their failures; and aired footage and testimony laying out the actions of political leaders including House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and former Vice President Mike Pence on January 6, 2021.

Many right-wing figures, however, continued their longstanding campaign to brand the hearings as a politicized witch hunt andfalsely accuse the panel of failing to present evidence that directly connects the violence to Trump.

The conclusion of the October 13 hearing and the vote to subpoena Trump himself was followed by a new set of attacks from right-wing outlets which have consistently pushed lies about the insurrection and its investigation in order to downplay the panel’s findings and deflect from their own potential complicity, instead painting the hearings as a flashy distraction from “real” issues leading into the midterms.

Right-wing media outlets dismissed the hearings as “political theater” and downplayed the new evidence:

Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum tried to minimize Trump’s role in the riot, claiming, “What they have not been able to do so far, although they have said that President Trump was at the center of this from the very beginning, is directly tie him to the break-in and the riot at the Capitol.”
Fox News contributor Andy McCarthy told MacCallum, “This is show biz. This is not really a hearing.”
Washington Examiner correspondent Byron York accused the committee of treating the hearings like a TV show, saying, “You know, the committee very famously hired a former president of ABC News to kind of craft their hearings into an exciting series. And each one had kind of a beginning, and a climax, and a tease for the next episode. They all did that. And this is — the subpoena of the president is entirely theatrical.”
Right-wing radio host Erick Erickson took to Twitter, claiming that the committee’s move in “subpoenaing Trump at their last televised hearing is theater designed to affect an election, not procedure to seek the truth.”
Newsmax congressional correspondent Kilmeny Duchardt claimed, “So far, what we have seen revealed in that room today has not been anything corroborating the support, or rather, claims by the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson that there was an altercation between Trump's security detail and the former president when he demanded to be taken to the Capitol on January 6,” adding, “We don't know if this is a season finale or a series finale.”
Right-wing radio host Mark Levin tweeted, “The Jan 6 Committee hasn’t presented any evidence — NONE — linking Donald Trump to those who stormed the Capitol Building. Nothing. But there’s tons of evidence tying Joe Biden to foreign payoffs.”
Breitbart senior editor-at-large Joel Pollak tweeted, “Just in time for the midterms, the super-important January 6 show trial has resumed, touting new evidence that, once again, says nothing about anything except the desperation of Democrats to pervert justice and due process to prevent the opposition from competing fairly for power.”

Right-wing media pundits suggested Democrats are using the hearing to deflect attention from more important issues, namely, inflation:

On Fox News’ The Story with Martha MacCallum, network contributor Marc Thiessen said, “I don't think it's a coincidence that they scheduled — rescheduled this hearing for the day that the inflation numbers came out because, you know, we just found out that the record inflation continues and we got numbers on the consumer price index and they want everybody to be talking about January 6 instead of that. So I feel like it's not just political theater, it's political manipulation.”
On Newsmax’s John Bachman Now, host John Bachman said, “Another January 6 hearing is about to get underway. So why is the committee even meeting today? Does it have anything to do with these horrible inflation numbers?”
Curtis Houck, an editor for misinformation hub NewsBusters, tweeted, “The left and their so-called conservative allies don't care that you can't afford to pay rent, pay down debts, have been skipping grocery visits, and can't afford to go anywhere. They demand you care more about January 6 and Donald Trump than your livelihood.”
Former Daily Caller contributor Greg Price [twt
pundits critiqued the committee vote to subpoena Trump:

On Twitter, HotAir editor Ed Morrissey called the committee vote to subpoena Trump “an election stunt.”
Conservative nonprofit Citizens United tweeted, “Instead of doing something about Biden's 8.2 percent inflation crisis, Democrats in Congress are about to issue a subpoena for President Trump. This is a taxpayer funded political stunt designed to impact the midterm election that's coming in 26 days.”
On Telegram, conspiracy theorist and “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander posted that the subpoena was “a break from norms and separation of powers. … This was a psychological-operation by legislators who know the corporate media are too dumb to report this to the American people.”
Breitbart senior editor-at-large Joel Pollak tweeted, “Nothing says ‘apolitical’ like voting to subpoena the former president and likely future candidate less than four weeks before Election Day. Every member of this committee is a fraud.”
In a Fox News opinion piece, author Victor Davis Hanson wrote, “Frightened Democratic candidates on script are resorting to strategies of diversion. They avoid mention of their prior lockstep support for Biden agendas that induced current high gas prices, spiraling inflation, deflated 401(k) retirement plans, out-of-control violent crime, 3 million illegal aliens pouring across the southern border, and the disaster in Afghanistan and its aftermath.

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-jan-6-committee-exposes-how-trump-fomented-the-capitol-insurrection-every-step-of-the-way/

...Lofgen reminded the American public that Trump had been told repeatedly that he should not declare victory, that his election conspiracy theories were baseless, and that he had lost the election.

But she also revealed that the plan to declare premature victory was laid out in advance. The committee revealed that Tom Fitton—the president of Judicial Watch, a right-wing legal outfit known for spreading baseless claims of voter fraud to roll back Americans’ access to the polls—had sent a memo to Trump on Oct. 31, 2020, urging him to simply declare, “We had an election today and I won.” On Nov. 3, Election Day, at 5 p.m., long before all the votes had been counted, Fitton indicated that he had spoken to the president about the draft memo.

Former Vice President Mike Pence’s legal counsel Greg Jacob testified that Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short had also informed him of the president’s plan to prematurely declare victory, and that he had written a memo reflecting that it was imperative that the vice president could “not be perceived by the public as having decided questions concerning disputed electoral votes prior to the full development of all relevant facts.”

The committee also reviewed footage and audio recordings of Roger Stone—a longtime Trump confidant with connections to far-right groups who stormed the Capitol like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—and Steve Bannon—former Trump campaign chief strategist and White House adviser—who both suggested Trump would declare victory whether or not he had the votes.

“I really do suspect that [the election result] will still be up in the air,” Stone said on Nov. 1, as shown in the video clip provided by Danish documentary filmmakers of “A Storm Foretold.” “When that happens, the key thing to do is to claim victory. Possession is nine tenths of law. ‘No, we won, fuck you. Sorry, you’re wrong, fuck you.’”

Stone also advocated for violence. “I say fuck the voting, let’s get right to the violence,” Stone says in another clip a day before the election.

While Trump lied to the American people in public, in private, he admitted that he had lost the election, according to numerous witnesses. White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Trump was embarrassed to have lost to President Joe Biden and refused to publicly admit his defeat.

Kinzinger revealed that Trump had signed a memo to bring home troops from Afghanistan and Somalia by before the inauguration of Biden. That memo was reported by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book “Peril,” but the committee obtained interviews with those involved in drafting it and those who received it. It would have been “catastrophic,” according to officials, but it was evidence that Trump knew he was not likely to remain in the White House and was willing to sacrifice the national interest in order to create problems for Biden to deal with.

The committee also presented new evidence from the Secret Service. The agency had turned over more than 1 million pages after the agency came under fire for deleting texts from agents’ phone during that key period, a result, the agency claims, of a software update.

The emails and chat texts revealed by the panel provided further evidence that intelligence agencies and Trump knew that there were threats of violence on Jan. 6, and that Trump sent his armed supporters to the Capitol anyway.

In one report dated Dec. 26, 2020, the Secret Service received intel on the Proud Boys. “They think that they will have a large enough group to march into DC armed and will outnumber the police so they can’t be stopped,” the report read. “Their plan is to literally kill people.”

The panel also presented new footage of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, along with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnel and Pence, working to ensure the safety of those who worked in the Capitol and to finish vote counting. Notably missing from those videos and photos was the then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy.

According to the panel, while many witnesses have been cooperative, more than 30 witnesses pled the Fifth Amendment, every American’s right against self-incrimination, many in relation to their communications with Trump. That included Roger Stone, Mike Flynn, John Eastman, and Jeffrey Clark.

Whether or not they will be able to get Trump to testify before their committee comes to an end is another question. Republicans are expecting to win the House this November and are keen to shut down the investigation.

Throughout the country, election-deniers and Trump loyalists are running for office at every level of government. Right-wing groups are seeking to roll back access to the polls. They’re eager to make sure that Trump will be successful should he decide to make another run for the White House.

At the beginning of the hearings, Thompson and Cheney appeared to address this reality, reminding the American public of the importance of getting to the bottom of what happened on Jan. 6 and of protecting our democracy.

“This investigation is not about politics,” Thompson said. “It’s about the facts, plain and simple. And it’s about making sure our government functions under the rule of law as our Constitution demands.”

“Consider whether we can survive for another 246 years,” Cheney said. “Most people in most places on Earth have not been free. America is an exception, and America continues only because we bind ourselves to our founders’ principles, to our Constitution.”

“We recognize that some principles must be beyond politics, inviolate, and more important than any single American who has ever lived.”

Tags: Donald J. Trump Donald Trump Roger Stone Stephen K. Bannon Steve Bannon Tom Fitton 2020 election Capitol Insurrection House select committee on Jan. 6 Jan. 6

an 10 22

Former President Donald Trump and his aides crafted a proclamation that he won the 2020 election days before it took place, according to an email obtained from the National Archives by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-California), who serves on the bipartisan nine-member panel, stated at Thursday's hearing that "the draft statement which was sent on October 31st declares 'we had an election today and I won.'"

Trump wrote to Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton that "the Ballots counted by the Election Day deadline show the American people have bestowed upon me the great honor of reelection of President of the United States."

While prepping victory speeches in advance is not unusual under normal circumstances, Lofgren noted that Trump's instructions to Fitton signify an "intentional" and "premeditated" effort to subvert the democratic process.

"The Fitton memo specifically indicates a plan that only the votes counted by the Election Day deadline – and there is no Election Day deadline – would matter," Lofgren said. "Everyone knew the lawful counting would continue past Election Day. Claiming that the counting on Election Night must stop before millions of votes were counted was, as we now know, a key part of President Trump's premeditated plan."

Watch below or at this link.

10 22 hearing subpoena dt &? "They do expect it to be a unanimous vote by the committee, but what we saw here today was Liz Cheney really lay out Donald Trump — and I use the word coconspirators," Gangel reported. "Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, John Eastman, Jeff Clark, Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, and Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff who's refused to testify."

mma 10 22

MARK LEVIN (HOST): How the hell did the federal government get thirteen of my emails? I never got a subpoena. I was never given notice. And there's absolutely nothing in those emails that are worthwhile to anything. Zero. What else did they look at? I'm gonna get to the bottom of that, damn it.

I am telling you now, you stick with me. You stick with me, I'm gonna find out who every one of these G-D staffers are on that damn committee, every one of those Congress asses on that damn committee. Every damn one of them. I'm not gonna be intimidated. Life's too damn short to be intimidated.

an 10 22

The House Select Committee investigating the U.S. Capitol insurrection is reportedly seeking to conduct a for two former U.S. Secret Service officials closely connected to former President Donald Trump, according to The Washington Post's Carol Leonnig.

Speaking to MSNBC's Ali Velshi, The Post reporter noted that Tony Ornato, former U.S. Secret Service official and White House Deputy Chief of Staff, has been named as a person of interest for the committee.

The Jan. 6 panel's decision follows the development of new details in the investigation. Ornato's name has been dropped as the latest developments confirm that intelligence services raised warnings about potential violence that might arise after the former president's "Stop the Steal" rally.

According to Leonnig, the committee is said to have expressed interest in learning what Ornato and the head of Trump's security may remember.

"Let me tell you what I know from sources, which is that they have said that both Tony Ornato, who was a senior Secret Service executive that was then serving, oddly enough, as the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, a political role helping Donald Trump, and Bobby Engel, who was the head of President Trump's security detail, are likely to be re-interviewed," Leonnig said.

She added, "The question that has arisen for the committee is to, first, that both men have said that they didn't recall certain things, and they didn't see any intel of concern, they don't remember certain things happening that other witnesses said happened and the record seemed to raise serious concerns about the possibility that they could not have known these things."

Leonnig also noted one key detail that sticks out.

"The most important and obvious so far is Tony Ornato's claim that he was not aware of any intelligence that posed a threat to the protectees that they protect, the president and vice president," she explained. "That is just impossible."

Watch the video below or at this link.

raw 10 22

The Arizona Republican Party chair pleaded the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions from the Jan. 6 committee.

Kelli Ward, the top-ranking GOP official in the key swing state, invoked her constitutional right against self-incrimination during an interview with the House select committee, which she is trying to block from obtaining her phone records from the period between the 2020 election and Joe Biden's inauguration, reported Politico.

“Dr. Ward was deposed by the select committee, and she declined to answer on every substantive question and asserted her rights under the Fifth Amendment,” said Eric Columbus, an attorney for the select committee.

It's not clear when she sat for her deposition, but Columbus revealed her assertions in a hearing before Arizona-based U.S. District Court Judge Diane Humetewa related to her lawsuit seeking to block T-Mobile from turning over her phone records.

IN OTHER NEWS: Ketanji Brown Jackson levels long-standing conservative claims against voting laws

Humetewa recently rejected Ward's effort, but she has asked the judge for a delay while she seeks a review of her case by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Ward has complained that, as a medical doctor, her phone records could identify patients she's treating and possibly harm Republican activists she had been contacting, but Columbus argued that the select committee was only interested in the logs of incoming and outgoing calls to determine when relevant contacts took place.

“There is nothing unique about Dr. Ward here,” Columbus said, but noting that it was an "investigation of a very political event, an attempt to overthrow and subvert an election.”

Ward was among 10 pro-Trump electors from Arizona and also joined a December 2020 lawsuit pressuring vice president Mike Pence to seat them instead of Biden electors.

3 clar clerks on // jan 6 comm?!

finn

The lack of consensus also underscores the extent to which Justice Thomas’s shadow, including his network of supporters and former clerks, looms over various aspects of the investigation. Three of Justice Thomas’s former clerks — a federal judge, a top committee investigator and a key adviser to Mr. Trump — have major roles in the matter.

A main strategist in the effort to try to overturn the election, the lawyerJohn Eastman, was a former clerk of Justice Thomas’s. John Wood, one of the Jan. 6 committee’s top investigators and another former Thomas clerk, is leading the so-called gold team examining Mr. Trump’s inner circle.And a federal judge, Carl J. Nichols, who is hearing cases related to the Capitol riot, is also a former clerk of Justice Thomas’s.

This dynamic was on display during a deposition in December of Mr. Eastman, who was subpoenaed by the committee to talk about his role in helping Mr. Trump try to overturn the election. Mr. Wood began the questioning by noting that Mr. Eastman had once served as a clerk to Justice Thomas.

“Like you, John,” Mr. Eastman shot back....

no lnx https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/3662107-riggleman-at-center-of-new-jan-6-controversy/

Riggleman at center of new Jan. 6 controversy

BY MYCHAEL SCHNELL AND REBECCA BEITSCH - 09/27/22

Former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Va.), who previously worked as an adviser to the Jan. 6 select committee, is at the center of a new controversy engulfing the panel after he dropped a bombshell revelation while promoting his forthcoming book.

In an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” teasing his book, Riggleman said someone at the White House placed a late-afternoon call to a Capitol rioter while the attack was still underway.

“You get a real ‘aha!’ moment when you see that the White House switchboard had connected to a rioter’s phone while it’s happening,” he told Bill Whitaker of “60 Minutes.”

Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Va.) speaks during House debates regarding articles of impeachment against former President Trump following Trump’s actions leading up to and during the Capitol riot.

The revelation about the committee’s largely-private investigation drew swift pushback from committee members, who are downplaying Riggleman’s knowledge of the panel’s operation and brushing away the significance of the call.

It was an unwelcome distraction just days ahead of what may be the committee’s final public hearing on Wednesday, when panel members will seek to wrap up their case against former President Trump and his allies weeks before the midterm elections.

“I don’t know what Mr. Riggleman is doing, really,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a member of the Jan. 6 committee, told CNN during an interview Sunday when asked if he is a credible source when it comes to Jan. 6, 2021.

“I only saw him a few times when he was on the staff, and he did leave. He said he was going off to help Afghanistan refugees. So, you know, he does not know what happened after April, and a lot has happened in our investigation,” she said.

The California Democrat noted that all matters Riggleman brought up before his departure were looked into but “in some cases didn’t really [pan] out.”

“I will say this, that everything that he was able to relay prior to his departure has been followed up on and in some cases didn’t really [pan] out, or there might have been a decision that suggested that there was a connection between one number or one email and a person that turned out not to pan out,” Lofgren said. “So, we follow up on everything.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who also sits on the Jan. 6 panel, tried to trivialize Riggleman’s claims about the call during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

“Well, that’s one of thousands of details that obviously the committee is aware of,” Raskin said of the reported White House rioter call.

“I can’t say anything specific about that particular call, but we are aware of it.And we are aware of lots of contacts between the people in the White House and different people that were involved obviously in the coup attempt and the insurrection. And that’s really what all of our hearings have been about,” he said after being pressed on the matter.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) has been a leading figure among the Jan. 6 House committee investigating the Capitol riot.

CNN has since identified the rioter as Anton Lunyk, a 26-year-old Trump supporter. The Brooklyn native pleaded guilty to a charge associated with the Capitol riot and was sentenced to 12 months of probation. The call reportedly came after he and two friends left the Capitol.

But the individual who placed the call from the White House, shortly after Trump told his supporters to go home at 4:17 p.m., remains unknown. Call logs show the publicly available number for the White House without the relevant extension....

ballot:

https://ballotpedia.org/Select_Committee_to_Investigate_the_January_6th_Attack_on_the_United_States_Capitol

On July 22, 2021, Thompson announced the following individuals would serve as senior staff on the committee:[9]

Staff director: David Buckley, former inspector general of the CIA and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence minority staff director
Deputy staff director/chief counsel: Kristin Amerling, managing director at Lanthorn Strategies and former counsel to the Department of Transportation and several congressional committees
Counsel to the chairman: Hope Goins, staff director of the House Committee on Homeland Security
Senior counsel/senior advisor: Candyce Phoenix, staff director of the House Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
Communications director: Tim Mulvey, former communications director for the House Committee on Foreign Affairs

David Buckley [https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/23/politics/david-buckley-january-6-committee-accused-retaliation-whistleblower/index.html]

As the staff director for the select committee, Buckley, a former CIA inspector general, has led the overall direction of the investigation since the panel started its evidence-gathering work in earnest last September. According to sources familiar with the matter, Buckley has directed the contours of the inquiry and advised Thompson on the major decisions, including about whether to subpoena Republican members of Congress.

https://www.justsecurity.org/81729/covering-the-january-6th-select-committee-a-primer/

gold trump and assoc overturn: GA, fake electors

grn $ eg who fund militia travel

blue cops

red team rally planners stop steal:

january 6 rally organizers participated in “dozens” of meetings with White House staff, including Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, as well as some Republican members of Congress and their staff. » Rally organizers were reportedly concerned about the possibility that an unpermitted march planned by Stop the Steal activists could turn chaotic and lead to violence, and shared those concerns with Meadows, whose text messages reveal the extent of his involvement in the effort to overturn the election. » Rally organizers, Stop the Steal activists and militia groups participated in a group chat that included Roger Stone, who coordinated the effort to overturn the election with former national security advisor Michael Flynn, Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander, among others. » Two key organizers of the rally at the Ellipse, Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lynn Lawrence, turned over a trove of documents and messages and testified to the Committee. » A trove of material obtained by ProPublica includes documents, digital communications and audio recordings of a variety of individuals involved in the broader effort to sow doubt about the outcome of the election. » Trump affiliated lawyers have been sanctioned by courts, including Rudy Giuiliani. In an (oftoverlooked) decision to suspend Giuiliani’s New York State bar license, the state court said that Giuliani “communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign;” “[o]ne only has to look at the ongoing present public discord over the 2020 election, which erupted into violence, insurrection and death on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol, to understand the extent of the damage that can be done when the public is misled by false information about the elections.”

purple: dom terror: key figures that advanced baseless election fraud claims and courted the QAnon conspiracy movement included former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn and Trump affiliated lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood. All three were banned from Twitter for sharing QAnon conspiracies. Figures including Mike Lindell, Phil Waldron, and Ron Watkins (identified by some experts as Q) coordinated to advance false election claims

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/11/19/dustin-stockton-jen-lawrence-trump-profile-522823

liz

John Wood,a former U.S. attorney who served during the George W. Bush administration, to be senior investigative counsel. left to run; gold team trumpclarence luttig

guk https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/26/ginni-thomas-house-january-6-committee

members of the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack are weighing whether to demand that Ginni Thomas, the wife of the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, cooperate with the inquiry, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

A move to request cooperation from Ginni Thomas, who was revealed to have pushed in text messages to Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows to overturn the results of the 2020 election, would mark one of the most aggressive steps taken by the panel.

FILE - Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, left and his wife Virginia Thomas, right, leave the the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington after attending funeral services of the late Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, on Feb. 20, 2016. Virginia Thomas sent weeks of text messages imploring White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to act to overturn the 2020 presidential election — furthering then-President Donald Trump's lies that the free and fair vote was marred by nonexistent fraud, according to copies of the messages obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)

Ginni Thomas texts spark ethical storm about husband’s supreme court role

The select committee did not formally decide on whether to summon Thomas after a series of private deliberations on Friday, the sources said, even as the members discussed whether to request her voluntary cooperation or compel documents and testimony with a subpoena.

Italy election: far-right Brothers of Italy on course to win most votes; Russia ready for ‘constructive relations’ with party – live

But the renewed discussions – the panel weighed the matter for weeks after it first obtained the text messages – are likely to continue in huddles and on the House floor on Monday before the select committee moves to hold two Trump aides in contempt of Congress, the sources said.

The hesitation to date about demanding that Thomas cooperate with the inquiry appears to have centered in part from concerns that she likely has scant interest in assisting the panel and could seek to create a political spectacle to distract from the investigation.

Thomas, for instance, remains a close friend of prominent rightwing political operatives including Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon, who last year openly defied a subpoena as he sought to undermine the legitimacy of the select committee.

The other principal concern among some members on the panel is whether it would be worth it to pursue testimony from Thomas at potential political cost if she appears for questioning but then stonewalls the inquiry, one of the sources said, for instance by asserting the fifth amendment.

At least one member on the select committee also appeared to only just learn about the content of the text messages after reading them in news reports on Thursday, one of the sources said.

Justice Thomas remains an icon among the Republican base and some members have warned that a move against his wife would almost certainly be perceived as a partisan attack by Democrats trying to tarnish his reputation, the sources said.

The worries about political backlash has increasingly become a point of contention for the select committee in recent months. The Guardian first reported in January the panel had similar reservations about issuing subpoenas to House Republicans.

The select committee could yet demand cooperation from Thomas, seeking information on whether Thomas knew about the scheme to have then vice-president Mike Pence stop the certification of Joe Biden’s win or plans for Trump supporters to descend on the Capitol January 6.

Other lines of inquiry might include whether she connected lawyer John Eastman, who drew up the Pence scheme and clerked for Justice Thomas, to Trump, and whether she communicated with Meadows during a gap of unexplained correspondence between 24 November and 10 January.

The select committee would then find itself in the bizarre position of having John Wood, also a former clerk for Justice Thomas who now leads the “gold team” examining Trump’s role in the Capitol attack, questioning the senior justice’s wife.

A spokesperson for the select committee declined to comment.

Thomas is facing heightened scrutiny for working as a Republican activist while her husband sits on the supreme court after the Washington Post and CBS reported that she pushed Trump’s most senior White House aide to overturn the 2020 election results.

In one of 29 text messages from Ginni Thomas that Meadows turned over to the select committee, Thomas also pressured the former White House chief of staff to have Trump appoint the conspiracy theorist and lawyer Sidney Powell to lead his post-election legal team.

The communications are significant as they represent the first evidence that she was advising the White House on how to return Trump to office by any means, while her husband ruled on cases attempting to change the outcome of the election.

But Meadows did not turn over any text messages between 24 November and 10 January, the Washington Post and CBS reported – a gap in communications that overlaps with the Capitol attack and would almost certainly be an area of interest to the panel.

an 922

The House select committee issued a subpoena over the weekend to Wisconsin House speaker Robin Vos seeking his testimony about a July phone call with Donald Trump.

The panel wants Vos to testify Monday, but the Wisconsin Republican is suing to block the subpoena, which he argues is outside the scope of the committee's authority and posed an “undue burden” by requiring his cooperation on such short notice, reported Politico.

“Speaker Vos’ conversations with former President Trump pertained to a recently decided Wisconsin Supreme Court decision about Wisconsin election law and any actions that could be taken in response to this decision moving forward,” the lawsuit states. “These topics do not pertain to the events of January 6th, or even (to construe the authorizing resolution broadly) the events leading up to it or its immediate aftermath.”

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the select committee chairman, told Vos his interactions with the former president was relevant to the panel's investigation and proposed recommendations, but the lawsuit contends that the subpoena was timed to coincide with the public hearing scheduled for this week.

“The only explanation for such an extreme timeline is the Committee’s desire to conduct the deposition before its next publicly televised hearing on Wednesday, September 28, 2022,” the lawsuit stated.

The subpoena says the committee is seeking testimony about a call between Trump and Vos, who told the former president the state's Constitution would not allow him to change the results of the 2020 election after the Wisconsin Supreme Court prohibited the use of drop-off boxes for absentee ballots outside election offices in future elections.

Trump then attacked Vos on his Truth Social website and endorsed his Republican primary challenger in the August primary.

“This is not a time for him to hide, but a time to act!” Trump posted. “I don’t know his opponent in the upcoming primary, but feel certain he will do well if Speaker Vos doesn’t move with gusto.”

===

https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/qanon-believers-far-right-influencers-are-reigniting-fears-of-satanic-panic/

since former President Donald Trump left office, the widespread conspiracy theories of satanist pedophilia have slightly waned but now it appears those baseless claims are making their way back to the forefront.

In a new analysis published by NBC News, senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny explained the latest Satanic obsession brewing among members of the QAnon community.

"While the current obsession with Satan was boosted in part by the QAnon community, partisan media and conservative politicians have been instrumental in spreading newfound fears over the so-called ritualistic abuse of children that the devil supposedly inspires, sometimes weaving the allegations together with other culture war issues such as LGBTQ rights," Zadrozny wrote. "Those fears are powering fresh accusations of ritual abuse online, which are amplified on social media and by partisan media, and can mobilize mobs to seek vigilante justice."

Zadrozny went on to discuss the difference between witch hunts of the past and the current political climate as conspiracy theorists have begun circulating baseless claims about the existence of satanic rituals, graphic sexual abuse and underground pedophilia rings.

"Witch hunts have traditionally been associated with courts — even the kangaroo kind — but today, the accused can be branded satanist pedophiles at the speed of the internet," she wrote. "Online accusers can bypass police, therapists and the traditional media and out their alleged accusers straight to audiences of millions."

The latest claims have been perpetuated by individuals like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene(R-Ga.). Zadrozny recalled a number of recent incidents where Satanic conspiracy theories had taken centerstage.

Pointing to one incident back in June, Zadrozny noted that the Republican lawmaker "credited the devil with whispering to women who choose to have abortions and controlling churches who aid undocumented immigrants."

Back in June, Greene tweeted a clip of a man dressed as the devil "stating that the mythical creature would be the next witness called by the House Jan. 6 committee." The lawmaker wrote, "They all know him, they all love him, and some even worship him."

She also pointed to another recent tragedy that was also overtaken by conspiracies. "Conspiracy theories similarly engulfed the tragedy in Houston at the Astroworld music festival in November, in which 10 people were crushed to death as the rapper Travis Scott performed on stage," Zadrozny recalled. "Social media sleuths gathered livestreams of the performance and pieced them together to come to an otherworldly conclusion: that the concert was actually a satanic ritual. The videos weren’t widely shared by devoted conspiracy theorists or religious zealots, but by mainstream Gen Z and millennial users."

Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon, also weighed in to explain how conspiracy theories transformed over the last three decades.

“The ʼ80s and ʼ90s were terrifying and they ruined people’s lives, but they were constrained in certain ways by network technologies,” said Phillips, who co-authored the book, “You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape.”

Phillips also expressed concern about thepower of the internet and how it aids conspiracy theorists' ability to push their dangerous agendas.

“The internet has basically jumped over the need for other intervention,” Phillips said. “You can have an accusation that goes viral, be seen by millions of people by the end of that day. That was never possible before. You can almost foresee what is coming next. It’s what we’ve seen before, but all of the bulwarks are gone.”

https://january6th.house.gov/

Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol

Longworth House Office Building

Washington, DC 20515

Phone: (202) 225-7800

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Select_Committee_on_the_January_6_Attack

9 22

U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, titled often simply as the January 6th Committee, is a select committee of the U.S. House of Representatives to investigate the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021,^[1] which was the culmination of then-President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 US presidential election in part by telling many falsehoods about it instead of conceding defeat to Joe Biden.

The committee has said that Trump knew he did not win the election and was thus perpetrating a fraud, and it has referred to a "criminal conspiracy" that led to the attack on the Capitol.^[2][3]

The committee was formed through a largely party-line vote on July 1, 2021. Its membership was a point of significant political contention. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who both voted in favor to impeach Trump,^[4][5] were the only two House Republicans to serve on the committee, and the Republican National Committee eventually censured them for their participation.^[6]

By May 2022, the committee had interviewed more than 1,000 people.^[7] Some members of Trump's inner circle cooperated with the committee, while others defied it.^[8] Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro were indicted by federal grand juries for refusing to testify; Bannon has been convicted.^[9] Congress also held Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino in criminal contempt for refusing to testify, but the Justice Department said it would not prosecute them.^[10][11]

Members, 117th congress

Majority	Minority
Bennie Thompson, Mississippi, Chair Zoe Lofgren, California Adam Schiff, California Pete Aguilar, California Stephanie Murphy, Florida Jamie Raskin, Maryland Elaine Luria, Virginia	Liz Cheney, Wyoming, Vice Chair^[12] Adam Kinzinger, Illinois

In July 2021, Thompson announced the senior staff for the committee. They included:^[13]

David Buckley as staff director. Served as CIA inspector general, and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence minority staff director
Kristin Amerling as deputy staff director / chief counsel. Served as deputy general counsel at the Transportation Department and chief counsel of multiple congressional committees.
Hope Goins as counsel to the chairman. Served as top advisor to Thompson on homeland security and national security matters.
Candyce Phoenix as senior counsel / senior advisor. Serves as staff director of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
Tim Mulvey as communications director. Served as communications director for the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

In August 2021, Denver Riggleman, a former U.S. representative, and Joe Maher, a principal deputy general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, were hired as staffers,^[14] and Timothy J. Heaphy was appointed as the committee's chief investigative counsel.^[15] ^theaphy@virginia.edu

History

[January 6 United States Capitol attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack "January 6 United States Capitol attack")
[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capitol_DSC09156_%2850826223403%29.jpg) A gallows (top) and a crowd of attackers amid a cloud of gas (bottom) outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021
Timeline of events
Background
show 2020 presidential election and other causes
show Related groups and persons
Participants
show List
show Law enforcement response
Aftermath
show Biden inauguration
hide Investigations and charges <ul style="list-style-image: url(" w="w" skins="skins" vector="Vector" resources="resources" common="common" images="images" bullet-icon.svg="bullet-icon.svg" d4515="d4515" margin="margin" px="px" padding="padding"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font><li style="margin: 0px; display: inline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_proceedings_in_the_January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack" title="Criminal proceedings in the January 6 United States Capitol attack" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none; white-space: nowrap;">Criminal proceedings</a> </font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font><ul style="list-style-image: url(" w="w" skins="skins" vector="Vector" resources="resources" common="common" images="images" bullet-icon.svg="bullet-icon.svg" d4515="d4515" margin="margin" px="px" padding="padding" display="display" inline="inline"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font><li style="margin: 0px; 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background: none; white-space: nowrap;">list</a></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></li></ul></li><li style="margin: 0px; display: inline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_commission" title="January 6 commission" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none; white-space: nowrap;">January 6 commission</a></li><li style="margin: 0px; display: inline;"><a class="mw-selflink selflink" style="text-decoration: inherit; background: none; font-weight: bold; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;">Congressional committee</a> <ul style="list-style-image: url(" w="w" skins="skins" vector="Vector" resources="resources" common="common" images="images" bullet-icon.svg="bullet-icon.svg" d4515="d4515" margin="margin" px="px" padding="padding" display="display" inline="inline"><li style="margin: 0px; display: inline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_hearings_of_the_United_States_House_Select_Committee_on_the_January_6_Attack" title="Public hearings of the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none; white-space: nowrap;">public hearings</a></li></ul></li></ul>
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v t e

[January 6 United

States Capitol attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack "January 6 United States Capitol attack")

[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capitol_DSC09156_%2850826223403%29.jpg)

A gallows (top) and a crowd of attackers amid a cloud of gas (bottom) outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021

Timeline of events

Background

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2020 presidential election

and other causes

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Related groups and persons

Participants

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List

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Law enforcement response

Aftermath

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Biden inauguration

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Investigations and charges

<ul style="list-style-image: url(" w="w" skins="skins" vector="Vector" resources="resources" common="common" images="images" bullet-icon.svg="bullet-icon.svg" d4515="d4515" margin="margin" px="px" padding="padding"><li style="margin: 0px; display: inline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_proceedings_in_the_January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack" title="Criminal proceedings in the January 6 United States Capitol attack" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none; white-space: nowrap;">Criminal proceedings</a> <ul style="list-style-image: url(" w="w" skins="skins" vector="Vector" resources="resources" common="common" images="images" bullet-icon.svg="bullet-icon.svg" d4515="d4515" margin="margin" px="px" padding="padding" display="display" inline="inline"><li style="margin: 0px; display: inline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_proceedings_in_the_January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack#Specific_arrests_and_charges" title="Criminal proceedings in the January 6 United States Capitol attack" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none; white-space: nowrap;">list</a></li></ul></li><li style="margin: 0px; display: inline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_commission" title="January 6 commission" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none; white-space: nowrap;">January 6 commission</a></li><li style="margin: 0px; display: inline;"><a class="mw-selflink selflink" style="text-decoration: inherit; background: none; font-weight: bold; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;">Congressional committee</a> <ul style="list-style-image: url(" w="w" skins="skins" vector="Vector" resources="resources" common="common" images="images" bullet-icon.svg="bullet-icon.svg" d4515="d4515" margin="margin" px="px" padding="padding" display="display" inline="inline"><li style="margin: 0px; display: inline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_hearings_of_the_United_States_House_Select_Committee_on_the_January_6_Attack" title="Public hearings of the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack" style="text-decoration-line: none; background: none; white-space: nowrap;">public hearings</a></li></ul></li></ul>

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Corporate actions

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Reactions

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Impeachment

In the aftermath of the January 6 United States Capitol attack, the proposal to form a bicameral commission failed due to a filibuster from Republicans in the Senate.^[16] In late May, when it had become apparent that the filibuster would not be overcome, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi indicated that she would appoint a select committee to investigate the events as a fallback option.^{[17][18][19][20]}

On June 30, 2021, the resolution to form the committee passed by a vote of 222 to 190, with all Democratic members and two Republican members, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, voting in favor. Sixteen Republican members did not vote.^[21] The resolution empowered Pelosi to appoint eight members to the committee, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy could appoint five members "in consultation" with Pelosi.^[22] Pelosi indicated that she would name a Republican as one of her eight appointees.^[23]

On July 1, Pelosi appointed eight members, seven Democrats and one Republican, Liz Cheney (R-WY); Bennie Thompson (D-MS) would serve as committee chair.^[24] On July 19, McCarthy announced the five members he would recommend as the minority on the select committee. He recommended that Jim Banks (R-IN) serve as Ranking Member, and minority members be Jim Jordan (R-OH), Rodney Davis (R-IL), Kelly Armstrong (R-ND), and Troy Nehls (R-TX).^[25] Banks, Jordan, and Nehls voted to overturn the Electoral College results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Banks and Jordan had also signed onto the Supreme Court case Texas v. Pennsylvania to invalidate the ballots of voters in four states.^[26]

On July 21, Thompson stated in an interview that he would investigate Trump as part of the inquiry into Capitol attack.^[27] Hours later, Pelosi said in a statement that she had informed McCarthy that she would reject the recommendations of Jordan and Banks, citing concerns for the investigation's integrity and relevant actions and statements made by the two members. She approved the recommendations of the other three.^[28] McCarthy then pulled all of his picks for the committee and stated that he would not appoint anyone on the committee unless all five of his choices were approved.^[29][30]

After McCarthy rescinded his recommendations, Pelosi announced on July 25 that she had appointed Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) to the committee.^[31][32] Kinzinger was one of the ten House Republicans who voted for Trump's second impeachment.^[33] Pelosi also hired a Republican, former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA), as an outside committee staffer or advisor.^[14] Cheney voiced her support and pushed for both of their involvement.^[33]

On February 4, 2022, the Republican National Committee voted to censure Cheney and Kinzinger, which it had never before done to any sitting congressional Republican. The resolution formally drops "all support of them as members of the Republican Party", arguing that they are, through their work on the January 6 House Committee, hurting Republican prospects in the midterm elections.^[6][34] Kinzinger had already announced on October 29, 2021 that he would not run for reelection.^[35] Cheney lost the primary for her reelection on August 16, 2022.^[36]

Investigation

The select committee's work is ongoing. Its investigative teams each focus on a specific area like funding, individuals' motivations, organizational coalitions, and how Trump may have pressured other politicians.^[37] The investigation commenced with public hearings on July 27, 2021 when four police officers testified. As of the end of 2021, it had interviewed more than 300 witnesses and obtained more than 35,000 documents.^[38] By May 2022, those totals had surpassed 1,000 witnesses and 125,000 records.^[2] Some interviews were recorded.^[39] While the investigation is still in progress, the select committee publicly communicates some, but not all, of the information it finds.

The select committee has split their multi-pronged investigation into four color-coded teams.^[40][41] The teams consist of:

Green Team, which is tasked with investigating the money trail and whether or not Trump and other Republican allies defrauded their supporters by spreading misinformation regarding the 2020 presidential election, despite knowing the claims were not true.
Gold Team, which is tasked with investigating whether members of Congress participated or assisted in Trump's attempted to overturn the election. They are also looking into Trump's pressure campaign on local and state officials as well as on executive departments, like the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and others to try to keep himself in power.
Purple Team, which is tasked with investigating Domestic violent extremist groups, such as the QAnon movement and the militia groups, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys and their involvement with the attack.
Red Team, which is tasked with investigating the planners of the January 6th rally and other "Stop the Steal" organizers and if they knew the rally would intentionally become violent.

Ultimately, the select committee's findings may be used to inform new legislation. For example, in October 2021, committee members were already collaborating to draft a bill that would clarify the procedures for certifying presidential elections.^[42] Election certification is governed by the 1887 Electoral Count Act.

The select committee's findings may also be used in arguments to hold individuals, notably Donald Trump,^[2] legally accountable. Possible criminal charges for Trump are obstruction of the electoral certification proceedings, which could carry a maximum sentence of 20 years;^[43] "dereliction of duty" in not stopping the riot,^[44] especially given testimony from his inner circle who say he was repeatedly advised to stop it;^[45] and seditious conspiracy.^[46][47][48] Other Republicans could face charges of wire fraud for telling lies in their fundraising efforts.^[49][50]

A conviction, in turn, may be used to bar individuals from running for office in the future, as insurrectionists are constitutionally ineligible to hold public office. It is, however, unclear who enforces that.^[51][52] In January 2022, lawyers challenged Representative Madison Cawthorn's eligibility to run for reelection,^[53][54] and, in March 2022, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene's eligibility was similarly challenged.^[55]

The select committee's work may also aid the state of Georgia if it decides to prosecute Trump for solicitation of election fraud. On May 2, 2022, Fulton County's District Attorney Fani Willis opened a special grand jury to consider criminal charges.^[56]

Simultaneous investigations by the Justice Department

The Department of Justice has the authority to open criminal investigations and bring criminal charges against political leaders.^[57] It initially focused on prosecuting rioters and did not openly ask the House select committee to halt its investigation into Trump's inner circle.^[58] Later, however, the Justice Department also investigated Trump's allies. In March 2022, it had reportedly seated several grand juries, including one regarding the fake electors scheme, to help prosecutors decide whether to bring charges against Trump's inner circle.^[59][60] Among those high-level investigations:

On June 22, 2022, several FBI agents with a warrant approached John Eastman in public and confiscated his phone^[61] while others searched the home of Jeffrey Clark and confiscated his devices.^[62]
On June 29, 2022, the FBI interviewed Trump's attorney, Justin Clark, regarding Steve Bannon's refusal to testify to the House committee.^[63]
On July 22, 2022, Marc Short, who was a top aide to Pence, and Greg Jacob, who was Short's counsel in the White House, testified before a grand jury.^[64]
On August 9, 2022, the FBI approached Representative Scott Perry (who had previously been uncooperative with the committee) and seized his cell phone.^[65]
A grand jury was scheduled to hear subpoenaed testimony from former White House counsel Pat Cipollone and his former deputy Patrick Philbin on September 2, 2022.^[66]

On July 26, 2022, it was reported that the Justice Department's criminal probe was examining Trump's actions.^[67] On August 4, 2022, it was reported for the first time that Trump's lawyers were speaking directly to the Justice Department.^[68] Attorney General Merrick Garland said "everyone, anyone who was criminally responsible" would be held accountable.^[67] On August 8, 2022, the FBI searched Trump's residence at Mar-a-Lago for classified documents that they believed Trump had improperly removed from the White House instead of sending them to the National Archives.^[69] Regarding Trump himself, the Justice Department was probing the months-long efforts to falsely declare that the election was rigged, including pressure on the Justice Department and the fake-electors scheme, as well as the events of January 6 itself, namely, seditious conspiracy and conspiracy to obstruct a government proceeding.^[70]

It was long anticipated that the House select committee would formally recommend that the Justice Department bring criminal charges.^[71] At this point, however, it may not. Congressional committees typically are supposed to stick to legislative goals.^[72] Congress does sometimes recommend criminal charges, but their "recommendation" or "referral" has no legal force in itself,^[73] and the Justice Department is already investigating anyway.

The select committee is sharing certain information with the Justice Department: for example, the committee's suspicion of witness tampering in Trump's placing of a phone call to a witness.^[74]

However, the committee has not yet fulfilled the Justice Department's request that it turn over all its interview transcripts. The Justice Department sent a letter on April 20, 2022 asking for transcripts of past and future interviews. Thompson, the committee chair, told reporters he did not intend to give the Justice Department "full access to our product" especially when "we haven't completed our own work." Instead, the select committee negotiated for a partial information exchange.^[75] On June 15, the Justice Department repeated its request. They gave an example of a problem they had encountered: The trial of the five Proud Boys indicted for seditious conspiracy had been rescheduled for the end of 2022 because the prosecutors and the defendants' counsel didn't want to start the trial without the relevant interview transcripts.^[76] On July 12, 2022, the committee announced it was negotiating with the Justice Department about the procedure for information-sharing and that the committee had "started producing information" related to the Justice Department's request for transcripts. Representative Thompson told CNN that they would likely "establish a procedure to look at some of the material" later in July after the eighth public hearing.^[77]

In 2022, the Justice Department subpoenaed NARA for documents twice.^[78]

Information received from Mark Meadows

In September 2021, the select committee subpoenaed former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Meadows initially cooperated but ultimately did not provide a complete set of requested documents.^[79] On December 14, 2021, the full House voted to hold Meadows in contempt of Congress.^[80]

While the Justice Department decided not to charge Meadows for the contempt charge,^[81] they do believe the subpoena was justified. On July 15, 2022, at the request of U.S. District Court Judge Carl J. Nichols, the Justice Department filed an amicus brief^[82] regarding Meadow's claim of immunity from the congressional subpoena.^[83] The Justice Department said that Meadows had "qualified", not "absolute", immunity given that "the President's term of office has ended" and that Congress had made "a sufficient showing of need" for the information.^[84][85]

Before Meadows stopped cooperating, he provided thousands of emails and text messages^[86][79] revealing how certain people participated in efforts to overturn the election results:

The day after the election, former Texas governor and former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry sent Meadows a proposed strategy for Republican-controlled state legislatures to choose electors and send them directly to the Supreme Court before their states had determined voting results.^[87][88]
Fox News host Sean Hannity exchanged text messages with Meadows suggesting that Hannity was aware in advance of Trump's plans for January 6. The committee wrote to Hannity asking him to voluntarily answer questions.^[89][90]
Representative Jim Jordan asked Meadows if Vice President Mike Pence could identify "all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional".^[91]
The day after the riot, one text stated that "We tried everything we could in our objections to the 6 states. I'm sorry nothing worked."^[92][91]

Meadows also participated in a call with a Freedom Caucus group including Rudy Giuliani, Representative Jim Jordan, and Representative Scott Perry during which they planned to encourage Trump supporters to march to the Capitol on January 6.^[93]

Meadows also exchanged post-election text messages with Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in which they expressed support of Trump's claims of election fraud. On November 5, in the first of 29 text messages, Ginni Thomas sent to Meadows a link to a YouTube video about the election.^[94] She emailed Arizona and Wisconsin lawmakers on November 9 to encourage them to choose different electors, exchanged emails with John Eastman, and attended the rally on January 6.^[95][96][97]

Some of the communications revealed Trump allies who privately expressed disagreement with the events of January 6 while defending Trump in public:

Donald Trump Jr. pleaded with Meadows during the January 6 riot to convince his father that "it has gone too far and gotten out of hand."^[98]
Similarly, Fox News hosts Brian Kilmeade, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham asked Meadows to persuade Trump to appear on TV and quell the riot.^[99]

In mid-2022, CNN spoke to over a dozen people who had texted Meadows that day, and all of them said they believed that Trump should have tried to stop the attack.^[100]

One of the most revealing documents provided by Meadows was a PowerPoint presentation^[101][102] describing a strategy for overturning the election results. The presentation had been distributed by Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel (now owning a bar in Texas)^[103] who specialized in psychological operations and who later became a Trump campaign associate. A 36-page version appeared to have been created on January 5,^[104][101] and Meadows received a version that day.^{[105][106][107]} He eventually provided a 38-page version to the committee.^[104] It recommended that Trump declare a national security emergency to delay the January 6 electoral certification, invalidate all ballots cast by machine, and order the military to seize and recount all paper ballots.^[105][106] (Meadows claims he personally did not act on this plan.^[105]) Waldron was associated with former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn and other military-intelligence veterans who played key roles in spreading false information to allege the election had been stolen from Trump.^[108][103] Politico reported in January 2022 that Bernard Kerik had testified to the committee that Waldron also originated the idea of a military seizure of voting machines, which was included in a draft executive order dated December 16.^[109][110] The next month, Politico published emails between Waldron, Flynn, Kerik, Washington attorney Katherine Friess and Texas entrepreneur Russell Ramsland that included another draft executive order dated December 16. That draft was nearly identical to the draft Politico had previously released and embedded metadata indicated it had been created by One America News anchor Christina Bobb. An attorney, Bobb had also been present at the Willard Hotel command center.^[111][112]

Obstacles

Trump tying up release of documents from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

One of the main challenges to the committee's investigation was Trump's use of legal tactics to try to block the release of the White House communication records held at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).^[113] He succeeded in delaying the release of the documents for about five months. The committee received the documents on January 20, 2022.^[114][115]

Some of the documents had been previously torn up by Trump and taped back together by NARA staff.^[116] Trump is said to have routinely shredded and flushed records by his own hand, as well as to have asked staff to place them in burn bags, throughout his presidency.^[117][118] Additionally, as the presidential diarist testified to the committee in March 2022, the Oval Office did not send the diarist detailed information about Trump's daily activities on January 5 and 6, 2021.^[119]

Trump's phone records from the day of the attack, as provided by NARA to the committee, have a gap of seven-and-a-half hours that spans the time when the Capitol was being attacked. It is not that pages were removed from his call logs; rather, no calls during this period were ever logged,^[119] suggesting he was using a "burner" cell phone during that time.^[120] He is said to have routinely used burner phones during his presidency.^[121] The committee had not subpoenaed his personal phone records as of July 2022.^[122]

The committee began its request for the NARA records in August 2021.^[123][124] Trump asserted executive privilege over the documents.^[125] Current president Joe Biden rejected that claim,^[126][127] as did a federal judge (who noted that Trump was no longer president),^[128] the DC Circuit Court of Appeals,^[129] and the U.S. Supreme Court.^[130][131] While the request for NARA documents was being litigated, the committee agreed to a Biden administration request that they forgo obtaining certain documents from NARA relating to sensitive national security matters that had no bearing on events of January 6.^[132]

Trump warning Republicans not to testify

Another difficulty is that Trump has told Republican leaders not to cooperate with the committee.^{[133][134][135][136]} Messages intended to pressure witnesses may constitute witness tampering, punishable by up to 20 years in prison.^[137] While hundreds of people have testified voluntarily,^[138] the committee has also had to issue dozens of subpoenas^[139] to legally compel certain uncooperative individuals to testify. Some people who were subpoenaed nevertheless refused to testify: Roger Stone and John Eastman pleaded their Fifth Amendment rights, while Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows were found in contempt of Congress. In December 2021, Michael Flynn sued to block a subpoena for his phone records and to delay his testimony, though a federal judge dismissed his suit within a day.^[140]

Secret Service, DHS and Pentagon text messages deleted

Soon after the attack on the Capitol, the Secret Service assigned new phones.^[141] In February 2021, the office of Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, a Trump appointee, learned that text messages of Secret Service agents had been lost. He considered sending data specialists to attempt to retrieve the messages, but a decision was made against it.^[142] In June 2021, DHS asked for text messages from 24 individuals—including the heads for Trump and Pence security, Robert Engel and Tim Giebels—and did not receive them. In October 2021, DHS considered publicizing the Secret Service's delays.^[143][144] On July 26, 2022, Chairman Thompson, in his capacity as Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Carolyn Maloney, Chair of the House Oversight & Reforms Committee, jointly wrote to the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency about Cuffari's failure to report the lost text messages and asked CIGIE chair Allison Lerner to replace Cuffari with a new Inspector General who could investigate the matter.^[145] Additionally, renewed calls to have President Biden dismiss Cuffari have started gaining traction, with Senator Dick Durbin, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee requesting Attorney General Garland to investigate the missing text messages. However, as of July 2022, it is unknown if President Biden will fire Cuffari as he made a campaign promise to never fire an inspector general during his tenure as POTUS.

On August 1, 2022, House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson reiterated calls for Cuffari to step down due to a "lack of transparency" that could be "jeopardizing the integrity" of crucial investigations regarding the missing Secret Service text messages.^[146] That same day, an official inside the DHS inspector general's office told Politico that Cuffari and his staff are "uniquely unqualified to lead an Inspector General’s office, and ... The crucial oversight mission of the DHS OIG has been compromised."^[147] Congress also obtained a July 2021 e-mail, from deputy inspector general Thomas Kait, who told senior DHS officials there was no longer a need for any Secret Service phone records or text messages. Efforts to collect communications related to Jan. 6 were therefore shutdown by Kait just six weeks after the internal DHS investigation began. The Guardian wrote that "Taken together, the new revelations appear to show that the chief watchdog for the Secret Service and the DHS took deliberate steps to stop the retrieval of texts it knew were missing, and then sought to hide the fact that it had decided not to pursue that evidence."^[148]

On August 2, 2022, CNN reported that relevant text messages from January 6, 2021 were also deleted from the phones of Trump-appointed officials at the Pentagon, despite the fact that FOIA requests were filed days after the attack on the Capitol.^[149][150]

Trump funding legal defense of Republicans who might testify against him

Trump's Save America PAC has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to lawyers representing over a dozen witnesses called by the committee. It is not illegal to pay someone else's legal fees, but it raises the question of why Trump would do so and what kind of influence he might have over those people's testimony.^[151]

The American Conservative Union is providing legal defense funds for some people who resist the committee. The organization says it only assists people who do not cooperate with the committee and who oppose its mission, according to chairman Matt Schlapp.^[152]

Republican National Committee (RNC) claiming committee is illegitimate

Though the Republican National Committee has long insisted that the committee is invalid and should not be allowed to investigate, a federal judge found on May 1, 2022 that the committee's power is legitimate.^[153]

Witness not appearing for public hearing

Bill Stepien, Donald Trump's final campaign manager, cancelled his plans to testify for the second hearing, under subpoena, an hour before it started, due to his wife's going into labor, resulting in a delay of 45 minutes while the Select Committee scrambled to rearrange its presentation, with Bill Stepien's lawyer to read a statement for him.^[154][155] Instead, they used clips of his deposition.^[156]

Public findings

Main article: United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack public hearings

2021 public hearings

The House select committee began its investigation with a preliminary public hearing on July 27, 2021 called "The Law Enforcement Experience on January 6th".^[157][158] Capitol and District of Columbia police testified, describing their personal experiences on the day of the attack, and graphic video footage was shown.^[159]

2022 public hearings

Part of this section is transcluded from Public hearings of the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. (edit | history)

On June 9, 2022, the Committee began holding live televised public hearings.^[160] During this first hearing of 2022, the chair and vice-chair (Democrat Bennie Thompson and Republican Liz Cheney, respectively) said that President Donald Trump tried to stay in power even though he lost the 2020 presidential election. Thompson said it was a "coup".^[161] Cheney said the hearings would present evidence showing that Trump used a seven-part plan, culminating in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The committee has been calling live witnesses, most of whom are Republicans, and some are Trump loyalists.^[162][163] They testified under oath. The committee is also making extensive use of video from a number of sources, including sworn deposition testimony obtained earlier. During this hearing, the committee shared footage of the attack, discussed involvement of the Proud Boys, and included testimony from a documentary filmmaker and a member of the Capitol Police.

The second hearing on June 13, 2022 focused on evidence showing that Trump knew he lost and that most of his inner circle knew claims of fraud did not have merit. William Barr testified that Trump had "become detached from reality" because he continued to promote conspiracy theories and pushed the stolen election myth without "interest in what the actual facts were."^[164][165]

The third hearing on June 16, 2022 examined how Trump and others pressured Vice President Mike Pence to selectively discount electoral votes and overturn the election by unconstitutional means, using John Eastman's fringe legal theories as justification.^[143]

The fourth hearing on June 21, 2022 included appearances by election officials from Arizona and Georgia who testified they were pressured to "find votes" for Trump and change results in their jurisdictions. The committee revealed attempts to organize fake slates of alternate electors and established that "Trump had a direct and personal role in this effort."^[166][167]

The fifth hearing on June 23, 2022 focused on Trump's pressure campaign on the Justice Department to rubber stamp his narrative of a stolen election, the insistence on numerous debunked election fraud conspiracy theories, requests to seize voting machines, and Trump's effort to install Jeffrey Clark as acting attorney general.^[168]

The sixth hearing on June 28, 2022's exclusive witness was Cassidy Hutchinson, top aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.^[169] Conversations within Trump's inner circle revealed White House officials knew, days in advance of January 6, that violence was possible. Her testimony showed Trump knew supporters at the Ellipse rally were armed with AR-15s and other weapons and that he wanted less stringent security checks at his speech. Trump planned to join the crowd at the Capitol and became irate when the Secret Service refused his request. Closing the hearing, Rep. Liz Cheney presented evidence that witness tampering may have occurred.^[170]

The seventh hearing on July 12, 2022 showed how Roger Stone and Michael Flynn connected Trump to domestic militias like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys that helped coordinate the attack.^{[171][172][173]}

The eighth hearing on July 21, 2022 presented evidence and details of Trump's refusal to call off the attack on the Capitol, despite several hours of repeated pleas from numerous officials and insiders. According to The New York Times, this final July hearing focused on evidence and witness testimony that highlighted two significant positions that the select committee wanted to communicate to the American people. First, Rep. Liz Cheney made the case that Trump should never hold office again, asking: "Can a president who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of Jan. 6 ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?" Secondly, there were urgent calls for legally-binding federal investigations into the actions of the former president and his associates: "If there is no accountability for Jan. 6, for every part of this scheme, I fear that we will not overcome the ongoing threat to our democracy," Rep. Bennie Thompson said. "There must be stiff consequences for those responsible."^[174]

On July 22, 2022, The New York Timespresented a detailed summary of all hearings to date.^[174]

Final report

Following public hearings in June and July 2022, the committee may release an interim report.^[175] The committee is expected to hire a writer to help produce its final report, which will be presented in a multimedia format,^[176][175] and torelease the report in September 2022 before the midterm elections.^[177]

Timeline of proceedings [long]

2021

...

https://theintercept.com/2022/08/22/january-6-secret-service-texts-dhs-oversight-investigation/

stonewalled

an 9 22

Longtime Republican disruptor **Newt Gingrich**, Senior Advisor to then-President Donald Trump **Jared Kushner**, and longtime campaign advisor Jason Miller conducted an email discussion about posting ads falsely disputing the results of the 2020 election, according to a letter sent to Gingrich by the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.

“The goal is to arouse the country’s anger,” Gingrich said in one email, the Committee states in its letter which asks him to testify voluntarily and preserve all related documents.

The Committee says it also has evidence Gingrich was “involved in the fake elector scheme.”

Even in the hours after the violent but failed January 6 coup, the Committee says Gingrich “continued to push efforts to overturn te election results,” and emailed Mark Meadows at 10:42 PM.

Attorney and Professor of Law Anthony Michael Kreis says it “sounds like the January 6th Committee may have the goods on Newt Gingrich orchestrating part of a broader conspiring to solicit election fraud and/or commit unlawful interference with election administration under Georgia law.”

In its letter the Committee writes it “has obtained information indicating that you have knowledge about former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and we write to seek your voluntary cooperation.Some of the information that we have obtained includes email messages that you exchanged with senior advisors to President Trump and others, including Jared Kushner and Jason Miller, in which you provided detailed input into television advertisements that repeated and relied upon false claims about fraud in the 2020 election.”

“These advertising efforts were not designed to encourage voting for a particular candidate. Instead, these efforts attempted to cast doubt on the outcome of the election after voting had already taken place.,” the Committee’s letter to Gingrich reads. “They encouraged members of the public to contact their state officials and pressure them to challenge and overturn the results of the election. To that end, these advertisements were intentionally aired in the days leading up to December 14, 2020, the day electors from each state met to cast their votes for president and vice president,” the Committee adds.

“Among the numerous emails you exchanged regarding purported election fraud, you wrote on December 8, 2020, urging Donald Trump’s campaign to air advertisements promoting the false narrative that election workers had smuggled suitcases containing fake ballots at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta, Georgia.This email shows that you provided line edits to the scripts used to produce television advertisements andsuggested that the advertisements include a ‘call-to-action’ of pressuring state officials. You specifically pushed for national advertisements to include false allegations about what you called the ‘suitcase scandal.'”

mma 9 22

The House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection sent a letter on Thursday to Fox contributor and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich seeking his testimony. The committee says he advised former President Donald Trump’s effort to subvert the 2020 election. Gingrich also frequently pushed conspiracy theories about what he described as a “stolen election” during his media appearances, according to a Media Matters review.

Gingrich’s role, the committee wrote, included providing Trump’s senior advisers Jared Kushner and Jason Miller with “detailed input into television advertisements that repeated and relied upon false claims of fraud.” Those ads ran in the days leading up to December 14, 2020, the day the Electoral College convened. In a December 8, 2020, email obtained by the committee, Gingrich wrote:

The goal is to arouse the country’s anger through new verifiable information the American people have never seen before[.] . . . If we inform the American people in a way they find convincing and it arouses their anger[,] they will then bring pressure on legislators and governors.

The letter further stated: “Information we have obtained also suggests you were involved in the fake elector scheme,” a Trumpist plot to create a dueling slate of electors pledged to the defeated president in states won by Joe Biden.

Gingrich similarly used his media appearances to “arouse the country’s anger” with false claims of voter fraud and to try to encourage Trump supporters to “bring pressure on legislators and governors.”

“I would say to every person in Georgia who favors Donald J. Trump: Go to the governor's mansion, physically. Go to the Capitol, physically,” Gingrich said during a November 18, 2020, interview on Fox host Sean Hannity’s nationally syndicated radio show. “Communicate that you're prepared to stand up for America and you're prepared to stand up for an honest election and that you are sick of politicians selling you out.”

On January 5, 2021 — less than 24 hours before a violent mob breached the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election — Gingrich told Hannity’s radio audience that “Biden may at some place get sworn in. But I think for 40 or 45% of the American people, he will never be seen as a legitimate president, because the very process that put him there is so totally corrupted.”

He added, “I think this is the most dangerous assault on the very nature of America, certainly in our lifetime, and maybe since the previous Civil War.”

Gingrich joined Fox as a contributor in 1999 and is known for his demagogic commentary. In recent weeks, he has warned that “a cult of anti-white racism” is attempting to “impose itself on the country” and alleged that the FBI, which “could actually be called the American Stasi,” had “declared war on the American people” by executing a judge-approved search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.A close Trump ally, he was considered for the vice president slot in 2016, and the pair were reportedly working together to craft a GOP platform for the 2022 midterm elections.

Gingrich made at least 24 appearances on Fox weekday programming between Election Day 2020 and January 6, 2021, according to Media Matters' internal database. Fox personalities constantly alleged during that period that the election had been rigged, often promoting conspiracy theories that have led to multiple lawsuits against the network.

The former speaker repeatedly argued that Democrats had used systemic voter fraud to steal several states from Trump.

On November 4, 2020, the day after Election Day, Gingrich suggested that Democrats had “a setup to steal the presidency by the Democrats” and specifically may have stolen votes in Pennsylvania and Nevada, which Biden won. He urged Trump to get Senate Republicans to “open up investigations on all these different states” and to “be prepared to file suit in every single state.”
That night, he claimed that Democrats “are breaking the law in every possible way. And the correct answer is fine, none of those votes count. If you are going to be corrupt and illegal, we don’t have to count your votes. That means automatically in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, in Wisconsin, in Georgia, that Trump will carry every single state by a surprising margin.” He added that Trump “either has to fight and protect America, or he has to surrender to corrupt forces.”
The next night, Gingrich claimed that Democrats are “trying to steal the presidency, and we should not allow them to do that.” He described the situation as a “crisis” comparable to “Washington on Christmas Eve” and “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” and urged then-Attorney General Bill Barr to arrest election workers who he baselessly claimed “are breaking the law.”
On November 8, 2020, the day after Fox and other news outlets called the election for Biden, Gingrich claimed Democrats stole “five or six states” in a “corrupt, stolen election.” He added that “these people are thieves” and cited a pollster to claim that “this clearly was a stolen election,” a remark Trump live-tweeted.
On December 7, 2020, Gingrich said, “The objective fact isI believe Trump probably did actually carry Georgia,” adding that in Georgia’s Senate runoff elections, “Republicans simply have to turn out more votes than Stacey Abrams can steal.”
He pushed several conspiracy theories in a second interview the same day, including one in which he suggested voting machinesmay have been “rigged” because results supposedly “went through Barcelona, Spain, to Frankfurt, Germany to be counted.”

Since the January 6 insurrection, Gingrich has continued to use his Fox platform to allege that elections Republicans lose are implicitly the result of fraud; that the 2020 election in particular was stolen; and that the goal of Democratic voting reform measures is to “steal elections on a grand scale.”

no lnx

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/06/28/us/jan-6-hearing-today#trump-jan-6-mags-mob-takeaways

Witness Details Trump’s Rage and Meadows’s Inaction on Jan. 6

Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to President Donald J. Trump’s final chief of staff, said Mr. Trump wanted armed protesters to move freely and that her boss, Mark Meadows, sought a pardon. A lawyer for the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas said she wouldn’t testify.

Published June 28, 2022

Updated July 12, 2022

ImageThe testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, former top aide to Mark Meadows, contained revelations about the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

The testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, former top aide to Mark Meadows, contained revelations about the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Carl Hulse

Six takeaways from Cassidy Hutchinson’s explosive testimony.

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Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, revealed new details about the actions of Donald J. Trump and his allies before, during and after a riot that breached the capitol.CreditCredit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The surprise hearing on Tuesday of the special House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack lived up to the drama that preceded it, providing the most detailed and intimate picture yet of President Donald J. Trump’s actions as a mob was assaulting the Capitol in his name.

The explosive and cinematic firsthand testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a trusted longtime aide of Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, portrayed the president as almost unhinged with fury when his Secret Service detail told him he could not go to the Capitol as his supporters, many of them armed, descended on it. Ms. Hutchinson said Mr. Trump knew of the threat of violence by his supporters but was unconcerned by it, since they were not targeting him; and that he sympathized with them as they chanted for the execution of Vice President Mike Pence, who had refused his entreaties to overturn the election. And she testified that senior aides had tried in vain to persuade Mr. Trump to call off the mob, but he resisted for hours. Her testimony was replete with stunning revelations.

Here are six main takeaways:

‘They are not here to hurt me.’ Trump encouraged an armed mob to go to Capitol Hill.

Upset that the crowd at his rally on Jan. 6, 2021, didn’t fill the cordoned-off space on the Ellipse, a furious Mr. Trump ordered security officials to allow people milling outside the security perimeter into the space so the event would appear well attended. Informed that some of those people were standing outside because they had weapons and didn’t want to pass through metal detectors, the president urged that they be allowed in anyway.

“They are not here to hurt me,” he said, according to Ms. Hutchinson, who was within earshot of the president at the time. Using a string of expletives, she testified, Mr. Trump said he wanted the security features removed. She also said the president had been told that the crowd of his supporters were threatening violence and had come armed including with guns, knives, spears and flagpoles, and wearing body armor. Mr. Trump encouraged them to go to the Capitol anyway, a detail that could prove legally problematic for him.

Trump refused to call off the mob.

Ms. Hutchinson provided sworn testimony of an accusation that the panel has alluded to previously — that, despite the violence at the Capitol and the threats to Vice President Mike Pence, Mr. Trump refused repeated exhortations from his staff to intervene. Responding to a series of appeals from Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, Mr. Meadows said that Mr. Trump was not inclined to try to call off the mob, according to Ms. Hutchinson’s account. “He doesn’t want to do anything,” Mr. Meadows told the White House lawyer when informed that violence was breaking out. Mr. Cipollone tried a second time, noting that the mob was chanting, “Hang Mike Pence.”

“You heard him, Pat, he thinks Mike deserves it,” Ms. Hutchinson said Mr. Meadows responded. “He doesn’t think they are doing anything wrong.”

Trump had bouts of fury.

Mr. Trump was prone to rage as his attempts to get the election results overturned fell on deaf ears in his administration.

Upon learning on Dec. 1 that Attorney General William P. Barr had publicly declared the allegations of widespread voter fraud unfounded, Ms. Hutchinson said Trump slammed his lunch against a wall in his dining room in the White House, as she learned from the valet who cleaned up the broken china and ketchup dripping down the wall.

“There were several times throughout my tenure with the chief of staff that I was aware of him either throwing dishes or flipping the tablecloth to let all the contents of the table go on to the floor and likely break or go everywhere,” she said of the president.

Ms. Hutchinson said she had been told that on Jan. 6, an irate Mr. Trump, when informed he could not go to the Capitol to join his supporters, sought to wrench the steering wheel away from the Secret Service agent driving him. He continued to press to head there even after they returned to the White House.

Two top Trump advisers sought pardons after Jan. 6

Mr. Meadows and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, both sought pardons from Mr. Trump before he left office in case they were implicated criminally in any events leading up to Jan. 6 or the assault itself. As she closed her testimony, Ms. Hutchinson stated very clearly that her former boss had joined Mr. Giuliani in asking for a pardon, though neither was granted one. Just their interest in obtaining clemency demonstrated they were worried about the potential consequences from their efforts on the president’s behalf.

She also testified that at one point, Mr. Cipollone said he had serious concerns about what Mr. Trump had planned that day, including his desire to march to the Capitol. “We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable,” Ms. Hutchinson quoted Mr. Cipollone as saying.

Trump’s cabinet weighed removing him after Jan. 6

Members of the president’s Cabinet were distressed enough by the assault on the Capitol and the president’s encouragement of the mob and refusal to intervene that they quietly discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office, Ms. Hutchinson testified. The ignominious prospect of being the first president to be subject to the amendment was one of the reasons he agreed to record a video on Jan. 7 committing to a peaceful transfer of power.

The panel believes Trump is discouraging cooperation with its inquiry.

Members of the committee are hoping that Ms. Hutchinson’s willingness to come forward and provide such significant testimony will encourage others still holding back to do the same.

“To that group of witnesses, if you’ve heard this testimony today and suddenly you remember things you couldn’t previously recall, or there’s some details you’d like to clarify, or you discovered some courage you had hidden away somewhere, our doors remain open,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and chairman of the committee, said.

Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and vice chairwoman of the committee, suggested the panel had learned of attempts by Mr. Trump and his allies to influence witnesses and would be considering a response to such efforts.

Show less

Maggie Haberman

June 28, 2022, 8:20 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 8:20 p.m. ET

Maggie Haberman

A lawyer for Virginia Thomas said she would not testify to the House panel for now.

Image

Virginia Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, watching Justice Amy Coney Barrett being sworn in to the Supreme Court in 2020.

Virginia Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, watching Justice Amy Coney Barrett being sworn in to the Supreme Court in 2020.Credit...Patrick Semansky/Associated Press

A lawyer for Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a supporter of President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to stay in power after the 2020 election, told the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot that he saw no reason for her to testify before the panel.

The letter from her lawyer, Mark Paoletta, obtained by The New York Times, came after the committee made a fresh request to secure an appearance from Ms. Thomas, who had exchanged text messages with the White House chief of staff at the time, Mark Meadows, in which she urged on efforts to challenge Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.

The committee also obtained email exchanges that included Ms. Thomas, who goes by Ginni, and John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who promoted the notion that Vice President Mike Pence could block or delay the Electoral College certification on Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. Paoletta’s letter suggested that the communications between Ms. Thomas and Mr. Eastman, turned over to the committee after Mr. Eastman sued to try to avoid doing so, contain little of note.

“The only other email Mr. Eastman produced where he and Mrs. Thomas communicated directly is from Nov. 6 — a month before Mr. Eastman filed anything on President Trump’s behalf and two months before” the Jan. 6 riot, Mr. Paoletta wrote. “In that email, Mrs. Thomas merely forwarded a document with a few comments to Mr. Eastman and another person. Someone else drafted the document, which discussed ways to address the election fraud concerns held by millions of Americans.”

He described nine more documents that were “duplicates or emails that Mr. Eastman appears to have received because he is on a wide distribution list.”

“Not a single document shows any coordination between Mrs. Thomas and Mr. Eastman,” he wrote, saying they all had been sent “on or before Dec. 9.”

Image

John Eastman, left, appearing in a video deposition.

John Eastman, left, appearing in a video deposition.Credit...House Select Committee, via Associated Press

Mr. Paoletta, who is close with the Thomases and has written a book about Justice Thomas, maintained that Mrs. Thomas has been a victim of false information.

“It is in this context that Mrs. Thomas has expressed a willingness to try to come before the committee as a means of clearing her name,” Mr. Paoletta wrote. “But, based on my understanding of the facts the committee has in its possession, I do not believe there is currently a sufficient basis to speak with Mrs. Thomas.”

Mr. Paoletta allowed that if the committee revealed additional information, he could reconsider his position. But he expressed concerns about Ms. Thomas appearing before the committee amid what he described as a highly charged atmosphere in which Ms. Thomas had been criticized in the press for her political activity.

Maggie Haberman

June 28, 2022, 8:12 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 8:12 p.m. ET

Maggie Haberman

Cassidy Hutchinson provides stunning testimony about Trump on Jan. 6.

Image

Representative Liz Cheney hugged Cassidy Hutchinson after her testimony before the House select committee on Tuesday.

Representative Liz Cheney hugged Cassidy Hutchinson after her testimony before the House select committee on Tuesday.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

She was 22 years old, a rising college senior who went to work as a summer intern in the Trump White House in 2018. She soon landed in the office of the chief of staff, an omnipresent aide with ambitions of a career in government, like so many others in Washington.

But on Tuesday, Cassidy Hutchinson, now 26, distinguished herself as the most powerful witness yet in the House select committee’s investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol — and as one of the most forceful and compelling aides to testify about former President Donald J. Trump’s bizarre and violent behavior during his four years in the White House.

For two stunning hours on live television, Ms. Hutchinson described an unhinged former president who, she said, was warned that his supporters were carrying weapons and expressed no concern because they were not a threat to him. She said that Mr. Trump tried to grab the steering wheel of the presidential limousine and lunged for his Secret Service agent because he wanted to go to the Capitol, and added that at one point he hurled his plate of lunch at a wall in the White House.

“I grabbed a towel and started wiping the ketchup off of the wall to help the valet out,” Ms. Hutchinson testified.

(Later in the day, Secret Service officials who requested anonymity said that the two men in the presidential limousine with Mr. Trump were prepared to state under oath that neither was assaulted by the former president and that he did not reach for the wheel.)

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On Twitter, Ms. Hutchinson was compared to John Dean, the former White House counsel to President Richard M. Nixon, whose public hearing testimony proved pivotal in describing his role in the Watergate cover-up. In a brief interview on Tuesday, Mr. Dean said Ms. Hutchinson had met the “standard” of being a significant witness and that she did so quickly.

Mr. Dean pointed to Alexander Butterfield, the former Nixon aide who ultimately testified to the existence of a secret recording system in the White House. “With Butterfield, we just learned there was the taping system, and it took us decades to really understand it,” Mr. Dean said. “She was able to fill in the information from her observations instantly.”

Appearing nervous initially but growing more comfortable as she went on, Ms. Hutchinson described efforts by Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s last White House chief of staff, to aid Mr. Trump’s desire to stay in office. She described her revulsion at Mr. Trump’s attacks on former Vice President Mike Pence, including his Twitter post condemning Mr. Pence while the Capitol riot was taking place.

“It was un-American,” Ms. Hutchinson said of the post. “We were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie.”

She described how Mr. Meadows seemed almost frozen by the violence that was unfolding at the Capitol and how he told the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, that Mr. Trump was uninterested in trying to calm his supporters. “He doesn’t want to do anything, Pat,” Ms. Hutchinson recounted Mr. Meadows as saying.

For decades, from Mr. Trump’s earliest days in business in New York to the final moments of his presidency, various aides have tried to minimize his behavior. But other than Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, few have gone under oath to describe his temper and erratic personality to the extent that Ms. Hutchinson did.

Mr. Trump swiftly condemned Ms. Hutchinson on Tuesday on Truth Social, his social media network, as “a total phony” and “a leaker,” and asserted that he hardly knew her. But the committee, anticipating what has become Mr. Trump’s standard reaction of disavowing any familiarity with his critics, established through photographs of Ms. Hutchinson with top White House aides shown at the hearing that she was, as Representative Liz Cheney, the vice chairwoman of the committee, put it, “in a position to know a great deal about the happenings in the Trump White House.”

“She worked in the West Wing, several steps down from the Oval Office,” Ms. Cheney said. “Ms. Hutchinson spoke daily with members of Congress, with high-ranking officials in the administration, with senior White House staff, including Mr. Meadows, White House Counsel’s Office lawyers, and with Mr. Tony Ornato, who served as the White House deputy chief of staff.”

Ms. Hutchinson, who grew up in New Jersey and received her degree in 2019 from Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va., was the first in her family to graduate from college, according to a former colleague. She began her career in Washington as an intern on Capitol Hill for Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the second-ranking House Republican.

Ms. Hutchinson was at the White House, in the office of legislative affairs, when Mr. Meadows became chief of staff in March 2020. Mr. Meadows already knew Ms. Hutchinson because she had often escorted him on and off White House grounds when he visited as a member of the House and a leader of the conservative Freedom Caucus.

Mr. Meadows ultimately plucked Ms. Hutchinson from that office to serve on his team. She became one of his top aides and would often attend meetings when he could not.

“She was a close confidant of his,” said Sarah Matthews, a former deputy White House press secretary.

Known at the White House and in Republican circles on Capitol Hill as garrulous, smart and at ease with powerful people, Ms. Hutchinson was the rare example of someone close to both Mr. Meadows and Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, who deeply dislike each other. Other members of Congress would call her to reach Mr. Meadows.

Ms. Hutchinson was supposed to go work for Mr. Trump during his post-presidency in Florida, but the plan was abruptly dropped before she was to join. In the past several months, she has testified under subpoena four times before the committee, behind closed doors.

Throughout her public testimony on Tuesday, she focused largely on what she saw or was told but did offer up her personal feelings about Jan. 6. She said she grew increasingly frustrated that Mr. Meadows did not seem to care that the protest was growing out of control. She described the day as watching a “bad car accident that was about to happen, where you can’t stop it, but you want to be able to do something.”

“I just remember — I remember thinking in that moment — Mark needs to snap out of this, and I don’t know how to snap him out of this, but he needs to care,” she said.

Until recently, Ms. Hutchinson was represented by a former deputy White House counsel, who had been recommended to her by two aides to Mr. Trump. She then switched lawyers, to Jody Hunt. She became interested in testifying publicly, and her discussions with the committee about testifying in public became more productive, according to a person briefed on the discussions who insisted on anonymity.

After Ms. Hutchinson’s public testimony, Mr. Dean warned that she needed to be prepared for what comes next.

“Maybe when you’re young, you don’t know you should be frightened,” he said. “She’s at the beginning of a process that can turn ugly. There will be efforts to discredit her and they will get printed and she will read things about herself that aren’t true or incidents will be slanted in ways she never dreamed because she’s going after Trump and Meadows, the two most powerful people in that White House.

“It’s sad,” he said, “but that’s the way the system plays.”

Maham Javaid

June 28, 2022, 8:04 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 8:04 p.m. ET

Maham Javaid

What are magnetometers, or mags?

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Supporters of President Trump at a rally on Jan. 6, 2021. The Secret Service set up metal detectors to screen members of the public for weapons, but many attendees refused to go through them, deciding instead to watch from outside the security cordon.

A portion of Tuesday’s testimony about the Capitol riot focused on magnetometers, or mags.

The metal detectors were at the heart of a dispute between the Secret Service and President Donald J. Trump on Jan. 6, 2021, according to testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mr. Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

The Secret Service insisted on making rally attendees pass through the machines as a safety precaution. Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and vice chairwoman of the Jan. 6 committee, said during the hearing that the magnetometers are typically used to screen members of the public who come to see a president speak.

Several thousand members of the crowd refused to go through the machines to enter the rally space, and instead watched from the lawn near the Washington Monument, Ms. Cheney said. Those who chose to go through the detectors had various weapons confiscated, including pepper spray, knives, brass knuckles, tasers, body armor, gas masks, batons and blunt weapons.

Some of those who stayed outside of the security cordon were reported to have firearms, including AR-15s, Ms. Cheney said, citing police radio transmissions from that day.

But Mr. Trump, Ms. Hutchinson testified, “was furious because he wanted the arena that we had on the Ellipse to be maxed out at capacity for all attendees.”

She added: “Everybody who wanted to come in had already come in. But he still was angry about the extra space and wanted more people to come in.”

Ms. Hutchinson testified that Mr. Trump was not concerned about the fact that some attendees were armed. “They’re not here to hurt me,” he said.

“Let my people in,” he added. “They can march to the Capitol from here. ”

Continue reading the main story

Zolan Kanno-Youngs

June 28, 2022, 7:56 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 7:56 p.m. ET

Zolan Kanno-Youngs

Asked about the claim that Trump urged the Secret Service to remove metal detectors and magnetometers, Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said, “We have never and would never take direction from a protectee to vacate those principles. We just wouldn’t do it.”

Zolan Kanno-Youngs

June 28, 2022, 7:14 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 7:14 p.m. ET

Zolan Kanno-Youngs

Both Robert Engel, the head of Trump's security detail, and the driver of Trump’s SUV are prepared to testify under oath that neither man was assaulted by the president and that he did not reach for the wheel of the vehicle, as Hutchinson testified today, according to Secret Service officials who requested anonymity to discuss the potential testimony. They will not deny that Trump wanted to go to the Capitol.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs

June 28, 2022, 7:10 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 7:10 p.m. ET

Zolan Kanno-Youngs

Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service, issued the following statement in response to Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony: “The United States Secret Service has been cooperating with the Select Committee since its inception in spring 2021, and will continue to do so, including by responding on the record to the Committee regarding the new allegations surfaced in today’s testimony.”

Catie Edmondson

June 28, 2022, 6:57 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 6:57 p.m. ET

Catie Edmondson

Here is a timeline of the key scenes in Cassidy Hutchinson’s Jan. 6 testimony.

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Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to President Donald J. Trump’s final chief of staff, testified that Mr. Trump knew the crowd he had amassed in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, was armed and could turn violent.

WASHINGTON — Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to President Donald J. Trump’s final chief of staff, delivered explosive testimony on Tuesday to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, providing a vivid minute-by-minute account of heated confrontations she witnessed play out in the White House.

Ms. Hutchinson testified that Mr. Trump knew the crowd he had amassed in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, was armed and could turn violent but encouraged them to march on the Capitol anyway, and said she had heard that he had lunged at one of his Secret Service agents when he was told he could not join his supporters on Capitol Hill.

And she detailed how her boss, Mark Meadows, was seemingly unmoved by reports of violence on Capitol Hill, even as other aides to Mr. Trump grew agitated.

Below is a timeline of the key moments from Jan. 6, as described in her testimony.

AROUND 10:00 A.M. OR 10:15 A.M.

Mr. Meadows and Mr. Trump are told that attendees at the president’s rally are armed.

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Ms. Hutchinson and Anthony M. Ornato, the deputy White House chief of staff, met with Mr. Meadows to tell him that law enforcement was reporting that multiple individuals were arriving at Mr. Trump’s rally on the Ellipse carrying weapons including knives, guns, bear spray, body armor, spears and flagpoles.

“Tony relayed to me something to the effect of, ‘These f-ing people are fastening spears to the end of flagpoles,’” Ms. Hutchinson testified.

Mr. Meadows appeared unmoved, asking only if Mr. Ornato had relayed the information to the president. Mr. Ornato replied that he had, Ms. Hutchinson said.

12:45 P.M.

Mr. Trump demands that security checkpoints at his rally be removed, saying, ‘They’re not here to hurt me.’

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WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 —> 00:00:03.090 When we were in the offstage announce area 00:00:03.090 —> 00:00:05.940 tent behind the stage, he was very 00:00:05.940 —> 00:00:09.270 concerned about the shot, meaning the photograph 00:00:09.270 —> 00:00:13.830 that we would get because the rally space wasn’t full. 00:00:13.830 —> 00:00:16.110 One of the reasons which I’ve previously stated 00:00:16.110 —> 00:00:19.590 was because he wanted it to be full 00:00:19.590 —> 00:00:22.230 and for people to not feel excluded 00:00:22.230 —> 00:00:25.710 because they’d come far to watch him at the rally. 00:00:25.710 —> 00:00:26.580 And he thought the mags (magnetometers) 00:00:26.580 —> 00:00:27.210 were at fault 00:00:27.210 —> 00:00:28.430 for not letting everybody in. 00:00:28.430 —> 00:00:32.940 But another leading reason, and likely the primary reason, 00:00:32.940 —> 00:00:35.680 is because he wanted it full and he was angry 00:00:35.680 —> 00:00:37.680 that we weren’t letting people through the mags 00:00:37.680 —> 00:00:39.210 with weapons — 00:00:39.210 —> 00:00:44.520 what the Secret Service deemed as weapons and are weapons. 00:00:44.520 —> 00:00:47.400 But when we were in the onstage announce tent, 00:00:47.400 —> 00:00:49.620 I was part of a conversation. 00:00:49.620 —> 00:00:51.960 I was in the, I was in the vicinity of a conversation 00:00:51.960 —> 00:00:53.835 where I overheard the president say something 00:00:53.835 —> 00:00:55.910 to the effect of, “You know, I don’t 00:00:55.910 —> 00:00:58.253 think that they have weapons. 00:00:58.253 —> 00:00:59.420 They’re not here to hurt me. 00:00:59.420 —> 00:01:01.200 Take the f-ing mags away. 00:01:01.200 —> 00:01:02.110 Let my people in. 00:01:02.110 —> 00:01:04.410 They can march to the Capitol from here, let the people in. 00:01:04.410 —> 00:01:07.250 Take the f-ing mags away.”

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Early that afternoon, Ms. Hutchinson texted Mr. Ornato that Mr. Trump was “furious” that rallygoers were being forced to pass through magnetometers, according to messages she provided to the committee. Backstage at the rally on the Ellipse, she overheard Mr. Trump angrily tell aides to let his supporters into the event space, concerned that the area looked empty.

Mr. Trump, she testified, said “something to the effect of, ‘I don’t f-ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the mags away. Let the people in, they can march to the Capitol from here.’”

AROUND 1 P.M.

White House aides learn that Capitol Police were at risk of becoming ‘overrun’ by rioters.

While Mr. Trump was addressing his supporters at the Ellipse, backstage, Ms. Hutchinson learned that Secret Service agents were reporting that Trump supporters mobbing the Capitol were getting close to the building, and that it was becoming clear that “security at the Capitol would not be sufficient” to hold them off, she testified.

When she got to Mr. Meadows to relay that Capitol Police were being “overrun” by rioters, he “almost had a lack of reaction,” Ms. Hutchinson testified.

“I remember him saying, ‘All right,’” she said. “Something to the effect of, ‘How much longer does the president have left in his speech?’”

AROUND 1:10 P.M.

Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader, angrily calls Ms. Hutchinson and tells her not to let Mr. Trump come to the Capitol.

After Mr. Trump told rally attendees that he planned to march to Capitol Hill with them, Mr. McCarthy furiously called Ms. Hutchinson, she testified, demanding to know why he had been misled.

“You told me this whole week you aren’t coming up here. Why would you lie to me?” Mr. McCarthy said, according to Ms. Hutchison.

Ms. Hutchinson said she replied: “I wasn’t lying to you, sir. We’re not going to the Capitol.”

“He said, ‘Well, he just said it onstage, Cassidy. Figure it out. Don’t come up here,’” she testified.

AROUND 1:20 P.M.

Mr. Trump becomes furious when told he cannot go to the Capitol with his supporters.

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WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 —> 00:00:02.730 “When you returned to the White House in the motorcade 00:00:02.730 —> 00:00:06.092 after the president’s speech, where did you go?” 00:00:06.092 —> 00:00:07.550 “When I returned to the White House, 00:00:07.550 —> 00:00:10.430 I walked upstairs towards the chief of staff’s office 00:00:10.430 —> 00:00:12.984 and I noticed Mr. Ornato lingering outside 00:00:12.984 —> 00:00:13.960 of the office. 00:00:13.960 —> 00:00:15.240 Once we had made eye contact, 00:00:15.240 —> 00:00:18.170 he quickly waved me to go into his office, which was just 00:00:18.170 —> 00:00:20.270 across the hall from mine. 00:00:20.270 —> 00:00:22.140 When I went in, he shut the door. 00:00:22.140 —> 00:00:24.710 I noticed Bobby Engel, who was the head of Mr. Trump’s 00:00:24.710 —> 00:00:26.840 security detail, sitting in a chair, 00:00:26.840 —> 00:00:29.340 just looking somewhat discombobulated and 00:00:29.340 —> 00:00:32.000 a little lost. 00:00:32.000 —> 00:00:35.070 I looked at Tony, and he had said, 00:00:35.070 —> 00:00:37.890 ‘Did you f-ing hear what happened in ‘the beast?’ 00:00:37.890 —> 00:00:41.100 I said, ‘No, Tony, I just got back. 00:00:41.100 —> 00:00:44.260 What happened?’ 00:00:44.260 —> 00:00:47.980 Tony proceeded to tell me that 00:00:47.980 —> 00:00:49.600 when the president got in ‘the beast,’ 00:00:49.600 —> 00:00:52.390 he was under the impression from Mr. Meadows 00:00:52.390 —> 00:00:55.000 that the off-the-record movement to the Capitol 00:00:55.000 —> 00:00:57.340 was still possible and likely to happen, 00:00:57.340 —> 00:01:00.040 but that Bobby had more information. 00:01:00.040 —> 00:01:01.840 So once the president had gotten 00:01:01.840 —> 00:01:04.843 into the vehicle with Bobby, he 00:01:04.843 —> 00:01:06.760 thought that they were going up to the Capitol, 00:01:06.760 —> 00:01:09.530 and when Bobby had related to him, ‘We’re not. 00:01:09.530 —> 00:01:11.080 We don’t have the assets to do it. 00:01:11.080 —> 00:01:12.430 It’s not secure. 00:01:12.430 —> 00:01:15.310 We’re going back to the West Wing.’ 00:01:15.310 —> 00:01:22.900 The president had very strong, very angry response to that. 00:01:22.900 —> 00:01:25.360 Tony described him as being irate. 00:01:26.960 —> 00:01:29.550 The president said something to the effect of, 00:01:29.550 —> 00:01:31.040 ‘I’m the f-ing president. 00:01:31.040 —> 00:01:35.540 Take me up to the Capitol now,’ to which Bobby responded, 00:01:35.540 —> 00:01:39.740 ‘Sir, we have to go back to the West Wing.’ 00:01:39.740 —> 00:01:42.530 The president reached up towards the front 00:01:42.530 —> 00:01:46.510 of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel. 00:01:46.510 —> 00:01:49.870 Mr. Engel grabbed his arm, said, ‘Sir, 00:01:49.870 —> 00:01:52.720 you need to take your hand off the steering wheel. 00:01:52.720 —> 00:01:54.980 We’re going back to the West Wing. 00:01:54.980 —> 00:01:58.250 We’re not going to the Capitol.’ 00:01:58.250 —> 00:02:00.710 Mr. Trump then used his free hand to lunge 00:02:00.710 —> 00:02:03.800 towards Bobby Engel, and when Mr. Ornato 00:02:03.800 —> 00:02:05.170 had recounted this story to me, 00:02:05.170 —> 00:02:08.680 he had motioned towards his clavicles.”

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After Ms. Hutchinson returned to the White House from the rally, she said, Mr. Ornato and the head of Mr. Trump’s security detail, Robert Engel, described to her a shocking scene that had unfolded inside the president’s vehicle.

Told after his speech that he could not go to the Capitol because of security concerns, Mr. Trump became “irate” and said “something to the effect of, ‘I’m the f-ing president, take me up to the Capitol now,’” Ms. Hutchinson testified she had been told.

When Mr. Engel responded that they needed to go back the White House, Mr. Trump “reached up toward the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel,” and lunged at him, Ms. Hutchinson said.

Secret Service officials said Mr. Engel and the driver of Mr. Trump’s SUV are prepared to testify under oath that neither man was assaulted by the president and that he did not reach for the wheel of the vehicle. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the potential testimony. The two men will not deny that Mr. Trump wanted to go to the Capitol, the officials said.

AROUND 2 P.M. TO 2:05 P.M.

White House counsel warns Meadows: ‘Something needs to be done or people are going to die.’

Ms. Hutchinson testified that as she and other White House aides were glued to the television, watching the scene at the Capitol grow increasingly violent, Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, stormed into Mr. Meadows’s office, and said something to the effect of, “The rioters have gotten to the Capitol, Mark. We need to go down and see the president now.”

Ms. Hutchinson testified that Mr. Meadows looked up at Mr. Cipollone and said: “He doesn’t want to do anything, Pat.”

Mr. Cipollone replied, according to Ms. Hutchinson: “Something needs to be done or people are going to die and the blood’s going to be on your f-ing hands. This is getting out of control. I’m going down there.”

AROUND 2:15 OR 2:25 P.M.

Mr. Meadows tells White House counsel that Mr. Trump thinks Vice President Mike Pence ‘deserves’ to be hung.

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0:00/0:55

WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 —> 00:00:03.450 I remember Pat saying something to the effect of, “Mark, 00:00:03.450 —> 00:00:05.460 we need to do something more. 00:00:05.460 —> 00:00:08.400 They’re literally calling for the vice president 00:00:08.400 —> 00:00:10.470 to be f-ing hung.” 00:00:10.470 —> 00:00:12.060 And Mark had responded something 00:00:12.060 —> 00:00:14.700 to the effect of, “You heard him Pat, he 00:00:14.700 —> 00:00:15.790 thinks Mike deserves it. 00:00:15.790 —> 00:00:18.810 He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.” 00:00:18.810 —> 00:00:21.780 To which Pat said something — 00:00:21.780 —> 00:00:23.310 “This is f-ing crazy. 00:00:23.310 —> 00:00:25.290 We need to be doing something more,” briefly 00:00:25.290 —> 00:00:28.350 stepped into Mark’s office, and when Mark 00:00:28.350 —> 00:00:30.008 had said something, when Mark had said 00:00:30.008 —> 00:00:31.800 something to the effect of, “He doesn’t think 00:00:31.800 —> 00:00:35.220 they’re doing anything wrong,” 00:00:35.220 —> 00:00:39.870 knowing what I had heard briefly in the dining room, 00:00:39.870 —> 00:00:44.250 coupled with Pat discussing the “Hang Mike Pence” chants 00:00:44.250 —> 00:00:46.470 in the lobby of our office and then Mark’s response, 00:00:46.470 —> 00:00:50.370 I understood ‘they’re’ to be the rioters in the Capitol 00:00:50.370 —> 00:00:52.820 that were 00:00:52.820 —> 00:00:56.620 chanting for the vice president to be hung.

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CreditCredit...Network Pool

After Mr. Meadows and Mr. Cipollone emerged from a meeting with Mr. Trump in the West Wing dining room, Mr. Cipollone was still frustrated, Ms. Hutchinson said, recounting a conversation between the two men that she overheard.

“I remember Pat saying something to the effect of, ‘Mark, we need to do something more. They’re literally calling for the vice president to be f-ing hung,’” she testified. “And Mark had responded something to the effect of, ‘You heard him, Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.’”

2:24 P.M.

Mr. Trump tweets that Mr. Pence ‘didn’t have the courage’ to overturn the election.

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0:00/1:27

WEBVTT 00:00:00.830 —> 00:00:03.290 “Ms. Hutchinson, do you recall seeing 00:00:03.290 —> 00:00:04.910 this tweet in which the president said 00:00:04.910 —> 00:00:07.490 the vice president did not have the courage 00:00:07.490 —> 00:00:10.270 to do what needed to be done?” 00:00:10.270 —> 00:00:11.768 “I do.” 00:00:11.768 —> 00:00:13.560 “And Ms. Hutchinson, what was your reaction 00:00:13.560 —> 00:00:15.330 when you saw this tweet?” 00:00:19.310 —> 00:00:22.850 “As a staffer that works 00:00:22.850 —> 00:00:25.850 to always represent the administration 00:00:25.850 —> 00:00:29.240 to the best of my ability, 00:00:29.240 —> 00:00:30.830 and to showcase the good things 00:00:30.830 —> 00:00:34.690 that he had done for the country, 00:00:34.690 —> 00:00:40.540 I remember feeling frustrated, disappointed 00:00:40.540 —> 00:00:42.760 and really, it felt personal. 00:00:42.760 —> 00:00:46.010 I, it was really sad. 00:00:46.010 —> 00:00:48.590 As an American, 00:00:48.590 —> 00:00:50.576 I was disgusted. 00:00:54.350 —> 00:00:58.530 It was unpatriotic, it was un-American. 00:00:58.530 —> 00:01:00.830 We were watching the Capitol building 00:01:00.830 —> 00:01:05.040 get defaced over a lie. 00:01:05.040 —> 00:01:08.610 And it was something that was really hard in that moment 00:01:08.610 —> 00:01:12.090 to digest, knowing what I’d been hearing down 00:01:12.090 —> 00:01:16.110 the hall and the conversations that were happening. 00:01:16.110 —> 00:01:19.140 Seeing that tweet come up, and knowing what 00:01:19.140 —> 00:01:21.640 was happening on the Hill. 00:01:21.640 —> 00:01:24.130 And it’s something that I, it’s still, 00:01:24.130 —> 00:01:28.650 I still struggle to work through the emotions of that.”

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Mere minutes after the mob breached the Capitol, Mr. Trump put out a broadside attacking Vice President Mike Pence for refusing to reject Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory, posting on Twitter: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

In some of the most emotional testimony of the day, Ms. Hutchinson recalled seeing the post and feeling “disgusted.”

“It was unpatriotic. It was un-American. We were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie,” she said.

AROUND 3 P.M.

White House aides draft a statement denouncing the rioters who breached the building, but it is never issued.

After Mr. Meadows and some of Mr. Trump’s attorneys huddle in a meeting, Mr. Meadows began dictating a statement to Ms. Hutchinson that they hoped the president would release, calling the actions of rioters who breached the Capitol “illegal.”

The statement was never released.

June 28, 2022, 6:19 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 6:19 p.m. ET

Maham Javaid

Today's hearing hasn't gotten much attention from Republicans on Twitter. Many focused instead on the 51 migrants who had been found dead in or around an abandoned truck near San Antonio. In a tweet, Senator Marco Rubio wrote that the migrant deaths were a "heartbreaking reminder that there is nothing compassionate about Biden’s open border policies that encourage human trafficking.”

Luke Broadwater

June 28, 2022, 4:55 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 4:55 p.m. ET

Luke Broadwater

We’re learning more about how this surprise hearing came together. Cassidy Hutchinson recently sat for a fourth interview with the committee behind closed doors and, with new counsel advising her, informed the panel of previously unknown information that lawmakers felt needed to get out quickly, according to a person familiar with the investigation. The panel had also grown concerned for Hutchinson’s security, so lawmakers decided to keep her planned testimony quiet for as long as possible, the person said on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak on the record.

Maggie Haberman

June 28, 2022, 4:44 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 4:44 p.m. ET

Maggie Haberman

Cassidy Hutchinson’s lawyers provided a statement after she finished testifying. “Ms. Hutchinson is justifiably proud of her service to the country as a special assistant to the president. While she did not seek out the attention accompanying her testimony today, she believes that it was her duty and responsibility to provide the committee with her truthful and candid observations of the events surrounding Jan. 6. Ms. Hutchinson believes that Jan. 6 was a horrific day for the country, and it is vital to the future of our democracy that it not be repeated,” the statement said.

Michael Bender

June 28, 2022, 4:25 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 4:25 p.m. ET

Michael Bender

Donald J. Trump has posted a dozen messages on his social media website attacking Cassidy Hutchinson and denying her most explosive testimony. Mr. Trump said he never complained about the crowd size on January 6, never claimed that Vice President Pence deserved to be hanged and never tried to grab the steering wheel when the Secret Service allegedly refused to drive him to the Capitol after his rally speech.

“Her fake story that I tried to grab the steering wheel of the White House limousine in order to steer it to the Capitol building is sick and fraudulent, very much like the unselect committee itself,” Mr. Trump wrote on his Truth Social website.

Katie Benner

June 28, 2022, 3:21 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 3:21 p.m. ET

Katie Benner

Hutchinson provided many bombshells. The shocking description of Trump wrestling the Secret Service for control of his car on Jan. 6 so he could go to the Capitol. Portraying Meadows, her former boss, as a man who abdicated responsibility to the nation and hoped to be pardoned. And saying Trump knew that his supporters had dangerous weapons when he asked them to march on Congress.

Cheney ended the hearing on a solemn note, saying that democracy is preserved by people “who know the fundamental difference between right and wrong.” People of high rank and power have refused to talk about that distinction with the committee, but Hutchinson, a low-ranking official, didn't shy from it today.

Maggie Haberman

June 28, 2022, 2:58 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:58 p.m. ET

Maggie Haberman

The committee has adjourned. We’ll know more about upcoming hearings soon.

Katie Benner

June 28, 2022, 2:56 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:56 p.m. ET

Katie Benner

Cheney says that Trump allies have been intimidating committee witnesses in messages that sound more like Mafia warnings than communications with a former president’s aides. “He wants me to let you know he’s thinking about you. He knows you’re loyal.”

Maggie Haberman

June 28, 2022, 2:55 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:55 p.m. ET

Maggie Haberman

Cheney is now raising the prospect of witness tampering with the people who have been called to testify.

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0:00/1:11

WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 —> 00:00:04.050 While our committee has seen many witnesses, including 00:00:04.050 —> 00:00:07.020 many Republicans, testify fully 00:00:07.020 —> 00:00:11.640 and forthrightly, this has not been true of every witness. 00:00:11.640 —> 00:00:15.870 And we have received evidence of one particular practice 00:00:15.870 —> 00:00:19.710 that raises significant concern. 00:00:19.710 —> 00:00:22.530 Our committee commonly asks witnesses connected 00:00:22.530 —> 00:00:25.500 to Mr. Trump’s administration or campaign 00:00:25.500 —> 00:00:27.390 whether they’ve been contacted by any 00:00:27.390 —> 00:00:29.730 of their former colleagues or anyone 00:00:29.730 —> 00:00:32.520 else who attempted to influence or impact 00:00:32.520 —> 00:00:34.360 their testimony. 00:00:34.360 —> 00:00:38.180 Without identifying any of the individuals involved, 00:00:38.180 —> 00:00:41.260 let me show you a couple of samples of answers 00:00:41.260 —> 00:00:43.840 we received to this question. 00:00:43.840 —> 00:00:47.560 This is a call received by one of our witnesses. 00:00:47.560 —> 00:00:48.480 Quote: 00:01:02.170 —> 00:01:04.930 I think most Americans know that attempting 00:01:04.930 —> 00:01:07.270 to influence witnesses to testify 00:01:07.270 —> 00:01:12.210 untruthfully presents very serious concerns.

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Maggie Haberman

June 28, 2022, 2:55 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:55 p.m. ET

Maggie Haberman

She’s describing a “concerning practice” by which people are reminded of the risks of being on Trump’s wrong side. We’ve heard versions of that kind of thing come up since the Mueller investigation.

Carl Hulse

June 28, 2022, 2:54 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:54 p.m. ET

Carl Hulse

Hutchinson's testimony is over. Cheney praises her courage in what had to be an incredibly trying experience given her ties to Meadows and others in the White House.

Katie Benner

June 28, 2022, 2:52 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:52 p.m. ET

Katie Benner

A serious blow for Meadows: Hutchinson testifies that he sought a pardon for his role in the Jan. 6 attack. No other witness has been so damning for the former chief of staff.

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Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Maggie Haberman

June 28, 2022, 2:51 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:51 p.m. ET

Maggie Haberman

Hutchinson also says Meadows sought a pardon for himself, amid the broader flurry of activity.

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Peter Baker

June 28, 2022, 2:49 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:49 p.m. ET

Peter Baker

“This is the smoking gun,” Solomon Wisenberg, a former deputy independent counsel in Ken Starr’s investigation that led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment, tells me. He says there's no question that today's hearing establishes a case for Trump's criminal culpability on “seditious conspiracy charges.”

Katie Benner

June 28, 2022, 2:49 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:49 p.m. ET

Katie Benner

Keep in mind that members of Trump’s own cabinet considered invoking the 25th Amendment to strip him of his powers not once, but at least twice. Early on in his tenure, Justice Department officials considered doing the same.

Maggie Haberman

June 28, 2022, 2:45 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:45 p.m. ET

Maggie Haberman

Trump, basically a one-man response team for himself, is going after Hutchinson on his social media site, Truth Social. He's using a familiar tack, that he hardly knows "who this person, Cassidy Hutchinson, is."

Peter Baker

June 28, 2022, 2:39 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:39 p.m. ET

Peter Baker

Hutchinson divides White House staff into three camps that day: those pleading with Trump to take action, including Cipollone and Ivanka; those more neutral knowing Trump didn’t want to act; and those who wanted to deflect and blame antifa. Meadows was in the deflect-and-blame camp but eventually took a more neutral position.

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Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Katie Benner

June 28, 2022, 2:34 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:34 p.m. ET

Katie Benner

This may be one of the most powerful quotes to come out of today’s hearing: “It was un-American,” Hutchinson says. “We were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie.”

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Carl Hulse

June 28, 2022, 2:34 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:34 p.m. ET

Carl Hulse

The committee sees that tweet at 2:24 p.m. on Jan. 6 from the president as an important bit of evidence, arguing that he was trying to stoke violence against the vice president and was unconcerned with Pence's well-being.

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Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Maggie Haberman

June 28, 2022, 2:31 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:31 p.m. ET

Maggie Haberman

Trump “thinks Mike deserves it,” Hutchinson recalls Meadows telling Cipollone about the rioters chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” Among the most remarkable pieces of information to emerge from the committee’s work.

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June 28, 2022, 2:27 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:27 p.m. ET

Maggie Haberman

“He doesn’t want to do anything, Pat,” Hutchinson recalls Meadows telling Cipollone about Trump’s reaction to the violence.

Peter Baker

June 28, 2022, 2:24 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:24 p.m. ET

Peter Baker

To see a retired three-star general who swore an oath to defend the country and the Constitution plead the Fifth when asked if he believed in the peaceful transfer of power in America is another stunning moment today.

Carl Hulse

June 28, 2022, 2:23 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:23 p.m. ET

Carl Hulse

Murmurs through the hearing room as Mike Flynn refuses to answer whether he believes in the peaceful transfer of power and whether the Jan. 6 violence was justified, citing his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

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WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 —> 00:00:04.440 “General Flynn has appeared before this committee, 00:00:04.440 —> 00:00:06.930 and when he appeared before our committee, 00:00:06.930 —> 00:00:08.760 he took the Fifth. 00:00:08.760 —> 00:00:12.870 Let’s briefly view a clip of Gen. Mike Flynn taking 00:00:12.870 —> 00:00:13.900 the Fifth Amendment. 00:00:17.160 —> 00:00:19.990 General Flynn, do you believe the violence on Jan. 6 00:00:19.990 —> 00:00:20.980 was justified? 00:00:26.670 —> 00:00:27.615 Yes. 00:00:45.270 —> 00:00:47.340 Yes, General Flynn, do you believe 00:00:47.340 —> 00:00:51.250 the violence on Jan. 6 was justified? 00:00:56.460 —> 00:00:59.110 I’m asking both. 00:01:14.030 —> 00:01:15.920 Do you believe the violence on Jan. 6 00:01:15.920 —> 00:01:17.785 was justified morally? 00:01:22.680 —> 00:01:24.330 Do you believe the violence on Jan. 6 00:01:24.330 —> 00:01:27.510 was justified legally? 00:01:29.930 —> 00:01:31.040 General Flynn, do you believe 00:01:31.040 —> 00:01:32.630 in the peaceful transition of power 00:01:32.630 —> 00:01:35.640 in the United States of America?

June 28, 2022, 2:20 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:20 p.m. ET

Alan Feuer

Big. Trump asked Meadows to contact both Roger Stone and Mike Flynn on the night before Jan. 6. Hutchinson does not know what was said. But knows the conversations took place.

Maggie Haberman

June 28, 2022, 2:19 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:19 p.m. ET

Maggie Haberman

This is new. Cheney says that Trump told Meadows to reach out to Stone and Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, on Jan. 5.

Maggie Haberman

June 28, 2022, 2:18 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:18 p.m. ET

Maggie Haberman

The hearing is back after a short break.

Emily Cochrane

June 28, 2022, 2:13 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:13 p.m. ET

Emily Cochrane

Meanwhile, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee — led by Jim Jordan of Ohio, a close Meadows ally — are repeatedly downplaying the explosive revelations from Hutchinson from their official account.

Emily Cochrane

June 28, 2022, 2:05 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:05 p.m. ET

Emily Cochrane

Here’s an immediate reaction from Representative Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat who was in the chamber during the Jan. 6 riot — “We can never let this man-child Trump ever become president again.”

Luke Broadwater

June 28, 2022, 2:05 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:05 p.m. ET

Luke Broadwater

Some of the Capitol police officers applaud Hutchinson as she exits the committee room.

Maggie Haberman

June 28, 2022, 2:04 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:04 p.m. ET

Maggie Haberman

Trump has, for decades, had staff who have swallowed a lot of information about his behavior. This level of behavior would not be a surprise to people who worked for him in the 1980s and 1990s.

Katie Benner

June 28, 2022, 2:02 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:02 p.m. ET

Katie Benner

Many Republicans have testified or publicly said they would vote for Trump again, including former attorney general Bill Barr, and former Arizona Republican House speaker Rusty Bowers. I wonder whether they stand by that assessment after today’s testimony, including the account of Trump physically fighting with the Secret Service to join a violent mob attacking Congress.

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Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Carl Hulse

June 28, 2022, 2:01 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:01 p.m. ET

Carl Hulse

As she unspools her insider account, Hutchinson is joining the lineup of explosive witnesses to appear at congressional hearings. Oliver North and John Dean among others come to mind.

June 28, 2022, 2:01 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 2:01 p.m. ET

Alan Feuer

Ketchup smeared on the wall and a broken plate: the results, according to Cassidy Hutchinson, of Trump’s reaction to his attorney general’s public refutation of his claims of fraud in the election. Trump had thrown his lunch against the wall.

Katie Benner

June 28, 2022, 1:59 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 1:59 p.m. ET

Katie Benner

It was widely predicted that Hutchinson would be one of the committee’s most explosive witnesses and she has so far delivered. Hutchinson is filling in key details about the White House’s knowledge ahead of the rally that violence could break out; the fight between Cipollone and Trump over whether the former president should join his supporters at the Capitol; and the widespread recognition, shared with Meadows and others, that Trump could be violating several different laws by marching on the Capitol. And yet, Trump tried to wrestle the steering wheel from his security to join the violent mob.

Peter Baker

June 28, 2022, 1:58 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 1:58 p.m. ET

Peter Baker

In covering the White House for most of the last quarter-century, it’s fair to say I’ve never heard of anything like a president practically accosting his own Secret Service detail.

Carl Hulse

June 28, 2022, 1:58 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 1:58 p.m. ET

Carl Hulse

Hutchinson is painting a picture of a furious, out-of-control chief executive who is trying to force his limousine to the Capitol over the wishes of the Secret Service and his top staff. Hard to envision the scene without this testimony.

June 28, 2022, 12:42 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 12:42 p.m. ET

The New York Times

Inside the Jan. 6 inquiry with Jamie Raskin

Julie Hirschfeld Davis

Reporting from Washington, D.C.

I chatted with Representative Jamie Raskin about what has happened so far during the Jan. 6 hearings and what is yet to come.

Here are his responses, edited and condensed for clarity →

Julie Hirschfeld Davis

Item 1 of 6

June 28, 2022, 12:38 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

Luke Broadwater and Michael S. Schmidt

A White House aide testified that Trump ordered security lifted on Jan. 6 though the crowd was heavily armed.

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WASHINGTON — The first White House aide to testify publicly before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack provided a damning account on Tuesday of how former President Donald J. Trump, knowing his supporters were armed and threatening violence, urged them to march to the Capitol and sought to join them there, privately siding with them as they stormed the building and called for the hanging of the vice president.

The testimony from the aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, was extraordinary even by the standards of Mr. Trump’s norm-busting presidency and the inquiry’s remarkable string of revelations this month. In fly-on-the-wall anecdotes delivered in a quiet voice, she described how frantic West Wing aides failed to stop Mr. Trump from encouraging the violence or persuade him to try to end it, and how the White House’s top lawyer feared that Mr. Trump might be committing crimes as he steered the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis.

Drawing from conversations she said she overheard in the West Wing and others contemporaneously relayed to her by top officials, Ms. Hutchinson, a 26-year-old who was an aide to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s final chief of staff, provided crucial details about what the former president was doing and saying before and during the riot. She painted a portrait of an unhinged president obsessed with clinging to power and appearing strong, and willing to tolerate violence as a result — as long as it was not directed at him.

“They’re not here to hurt me,” she testified that Mr. Trump said as he demanded that security checkpoints be removed outside his rally on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, knowing that many of his supporters were armed and threatening violence. “Take the f-ing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here.”

It was an act of vanity by Mr. Trump, who wanted his crowd to appear as large as possible, that recalled his first day in office, which was consumed by his false claims about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Ms. Hutchinson recounted it as she laid out a day of chaos in the White House, in which the president’s top advisers sought to rein him in and Mr. Trump pressed repeatedly to join up with his supporters.

She recalled being told of one particularly dramatic moment in which an irate Mr. Trump tried to grab the wheel of his vehicle from a Secret Service agent when he was told he could not go to the Capitol to join his supporters, an account that the former president quickly denied and that Secret Service officials said would be rebutted in forthcoming testimony.

The revelations, over a two-hour hearing, tied Mr. Trump more closely to the violence that disrupted the certification of President Biden’s victory, raising fresh questions about whether Mr. Trump could face criminal charges for his actions on Jan. 6. At the end, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the panel’s vice chairwoman, hinted at yet another potential area of liability, suggesting that Mr. Trump and his allies could be engaging in an effort to tamper with witnesses and obstruct the committee’s work.

Ms. Hutchinson testified that Mr. Trump’s anger had become so uncontrollable in the weeks after the 2020 election that when he was told in December that Attorney General William P. Barr had said publicly that there was no widespread election fraud, Mr. Trump threw a plate in the West Wing, shattering it and leaving ketchup dripping down a wall.

In the days leading up to the attack, she said, White House aides were concerned that Mr. Trump might be breaking laws against obstructing justice and impeding a congressional proceeding. On the day of the attack, Mr. Trump rebuffed efforts by aides and family members, including his daughter Ivanka, to put out a statement telling the mob to stand down. Instead, he posted a tweet attacking Vice President Mike Pence, who the committee has said came within 40 feet of the rioters at the Capitol.

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Committee members and staff listening to Ms. Hutchinson tesify on Tuesday.

Committee members and staff listening to Ms. Hutchinson tesify on Tuesday.Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

“Mark, we need to do something more,” Ms. Hutchinson said she heard the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, tell Mr. Meadows, when he came rushing into her office as Mr. Trump’s supporters entered the Capitol. “They’re literally calling for the vice president to be f-ing hung.”

“You heard him, Pat,” she said Mr. Meadows responded. “He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”

Ms. Hutchinson said that in the days after the siege, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, and Mr. Meadows discussed seeking pardons with the president; neither received one.

Her testimony elicited praise for her willingness to speak out against Mr. Trump and was compared to some of the most consequential moments in presidential history. John W. Dean III, whose testimony during Watergate rocked the Nixon presidency, compared Ms. Hutchinson’s appearance to the stunning moment in 1973 when Alexander Butterfield, another Nixon aide, revealed in a Senate hearing the secret taping system that would lead to the president’s downfall.

“Cassidy met the Butterfield standard with instant gratification,” Mr. Dean said. “It took a long time to learn the content of the tapes. Here we learn immediately what she heard and observed.”

No hearing had been scheduled for this week. But on Monday, the committee put out a cryptic news release saying that a witness with new information had come forward and would testify on Tuesday, touching off suspense and speculation about who it might be.

Ms. Hutchinson recently sat for a fourth interview with the committee, and, with new counsel advising her, informed the panel of previously unknown information that lawmakers felt needed to get out quickly, according to a person familiar with the committee’s work. More so than previous witnesses, the panel had also grown concerned for her security, and lawmakers decided to try to keep her planned testimony quiet for as long as possible, the person said.

The committee’s first four hearings this month had focused on Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, during which he sought to wield his presidential power to pressure the Justice Department, state officials and Mr. Pence to help him stay in office. But the session on Tuesday focused almost exclusively on Mr. Trump’s conduct, revealing how, as the White House learned of a potentially violent effort to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, the president not only failed to intervene, but appeared to be cheering it on.

In Ms. Cheney’s closing remarks, she read aloud from testimony given by two witnesses whom she declined to identify, in which they spoke about having been pressured by Mr. Trump’s allies to withhold information from investigators.

“They have reminded me a couple of times that Trump does read transcripts,” one witness told the committee.

Another witness, Ms. Cheney said, told the committee that a Trump ally said Mr. Trump wanted the witness to “know he’s thinking about you. He knows you’re loyal and you’re going to do the right thing when you go in for your deposition.”

Ms. Cheney said such attempts raised questions about whether Mr. Trump was engaged in ongoing criminal conduct.

“I think most people know that attempting to influence witnesses to testify untruthfully presents very serious concerns,” she said.

Dozens of Trump administration officials and aides have testified privately before the committee, and video and audio clips of what they told investigators have been a central part of the committee’s hearings. But until Tuesday, no official who worked directly for Mr. Trump in the White House had sat before the committee to give live, nationally televised testimony.

After the hearing, Ms. Hutchinson was immediately surrounded by a phalanx of news photographers who had been documenting her every gesture as she sat, alone at a witness table, facing the committee. At times during her testimony she seemed nervous, but she appeared to gain confidence as she testified. By the end, the panel’s chairman praised her courage, and made an appeal to other witnesses to follow her example and speak out.

“If you’ve heard this testimony today and suddenly you remember things you couldn’t previously recall, or there are some details you’d like to clarify, or you discovered some courage you had hidden away somewhere, our doors remain open,” Mr. Thompson said.

Ms. Hutchinson said Mr. Meadows was worried as early as Jan. 2 that Mr. Trump’s rally could get out of control — “Things might get real, real bad on Jan. 6,” she said he told her. She testified that Anthony M. Ornato, the former White House chief of operations, warned Mr. Meadows on Jan. 6 that the crowd seemed ready for violence, and had knives, guns, bear spray, body armor, spears and flagpoles.

She said Mr. Meadows appeared unmoved by the information, only asking Mr. Ornato whether he had informed Mr. Trump, which Mr. Ornato said he had.

Later, Ms. Hutchinson described being within earshot of Mr. Trump as he demanded that his supporters be able to move around the Ellipse freely even though they were armed.

As the mob began to descend on the Capitol, Ms. Hutchinson said she heard Mr. Trump insist on going to Capitol Hill to join them. When Mr. Cipollone heard of the prospect, she testified, he objected. “We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable,” Ms. Hutchinson said Mr. Cipollone told her.

Ms. Hutchinson said members of the president’s cabinet were distressed enough by the assault on the Capitol and the president’s encouragement of the mob and refusal to intervene that they quietly discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. The ignominious prospect of being the first president to be subject to the amendment was one of the reasons he agreed to record a video on Jan. 7 committing to a peaceful transfer of power, she said.

Mr. Trump responded angrily to Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony, using profanity and calling her “disgraceful” and a “phony.”

But she told the committee she was doing her duty, speaking out against what had happened on a dark day in American history. She said she had been particularly dismayed when, as violence raged at the Capitol and the mob chanted, “Hang Mike Pence,” the president had attacked Mr. Pence anew on Twitter.

“As an American, I was disgusted,” she said. “It was unpatriotic. It was un-American. We were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie.”

Reporting was contributed by Maggie Haberman, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Chris Cameron, Carl Hulse and Peter Baker.

Maggie Haberman

June 28, 2022, 12:24 p.m. ETJune 28, 2022

June 28, 2022, 12:24 p.m. ET

Maggie Haberman

Cassidy Hutchinson: A West Wing aide who witnessed key meetings and conversations as Trump clung to power.

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Cassidy Hutchinson, right, walking next to Mark Meadows, chief of staff to President Donald J. Trump, in 2020.

Cassidy Hutchinson, right, walking next to Mark Meadows, chief of staff to President Donald J. Trump, in 2020. Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

As a top aide to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, Cassidy Hutchinson was present for a number of key meetings and conversations in the weeks after the 2020 election as President Donald J. Trump tried to stay in power, and was inside the West Wing as the Capitol attack unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021.

She is the headline witness on Tuesday for a hearing abruptly called by the House select committee investigating the riot, at which the panel promised to show “recently obtained evidence” that would reveal more about the assault.

While not a senior administration official herself, Ms. Hutchinson had a front-row seat to the actions of senior aides during one of the most critical periods in modern American history.

She has sat for at least three interview sessions behind closed doors with the House investigators, appearing under subpoena, in which she told the committee about a range of activities involving Mr. Meadows, Mr. Trump and other officials.

Ms. Hutchinson, 25, has informed the committee that Mr. Meadows told colleagues that Mr. Trump reacted approvingly to chants of “Hang Mike Pence” that some of the rioters bellowed. She has described Mr. Meadows burning documents in a fireplace in his office. She has testified about Mr. Trump’s desire to join his supporters leaving what was billed as a “protest” at the Ellipse near the White House on Jan. 6 to travel to the Capitol.

And she has said that at least half a dozen House Republicans who were instrumental in Mr. Trump’s plan to disrupt Congress’s counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6 sought pardons after the attack. Many of those Republicans deny having done so.

Mr. Meadows, a former congressman who worked closely with his onetime colleagues in the House to try to overturn the election, has refused to cooperate with the inquiry beyond turning over hundreds of text messages to the panel last year. Ms. Hutchinson can fill in key pieces of the story.

Until recently, she had been represented by a former deputy White House counsel who was recommended to her by two aides to Mr. Trump. She then switched lawyers, to Jody Hunt, and her discussions with the committee about possibly testifying in public became more productive, according to a person briefed on the discussions who insisted on anonymity to discuss them.

Ms. Hutchinson first started working in the White House in 2018. Before that, she had been an aide working in Congress.

June 28, 2022, 12:10 p.m. ET

Maggie Haberman, Michael S. Schmidt and Alan Feuer

The panel has shown that Republican members of Congress sought pardons.

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Several Republican members of Congress expressed interest in pre-emptive pardons from President Trump, according to witnesses.CreditCredit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times

At least half a dozen Republican members of Congress sought pre-emptive pardons from President Donald J. Trump as he fought to remain in office after his defeat in the 2020 election, according to witness testimony that the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot disclosed last week.

Mr. Trump “had hinted at a blanket pardon for the Jan. 6 thing for anybody,” Mr. Trump’s former head of presidential personnel, Johnny McEntee, testified.

A former adviser to Mark Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson, testified that Mr. Gaetz, Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona all had expressed interest in pardons.

She also testified that Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio had “talked about” pardons but did not directly ask for one, and that she had heard of newly elected Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia also expressing interest to the White House Counsel’s Office.

June 28, 2022, 11:04 a.m. ETJune 28, 2022

The New York Times

Your Questions About the Jan 6. House Committee, Answered

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The House select committee is holding a series of public hearings on the Jan. 6 attack.

The House select committee is holding a series of public hearings on the Jan. 6 attack.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times

After spending nearly a year investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, the House select committee that was tasked with scrutinizing the riot is holding a series of public hearings to lay out the full magnitude of former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to remain in power after the 2020 election.

Here’s how to better understand the proceedings.

June 27, 2022, 6:06 p.m. ET

Alan Feuer and Adam Goldman

Federal agents seized the phone of John Eastman, a key figure in Jan. 6 plan.

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John Eastman, left, appeared on video during the House select committee hearings on the events of Jan. 6. last week in Washington.

John Eastman, left, appeared on video during the House select committee hearings on the events of Jan. 6. last week in Washington.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Federal agents armed with a search warrant have seized the phone of John Eastman, a lawyer who advised former President Donald J. Trump on key elements of the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to a court filing by Mr. Eastman on Monday.

The seizure of Mr. Eastman’s phone is the latest evidence that the Justice Department is intensifying its sprawling criminal investigation into the various strands of Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in power after he was defeated for re-election.

In the past week alone, the department has delivered grand jury subpoenas to a variety of figures with roles in backing Mr. Trump’s efforts and it carried out at least one other search of a key figure.

The filing by Mr. Eastman, a motion to recover property from the government, said that F.B.I. agents in New Mexico, acting on behalf of the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General, stopped Mr. Eastman as he was leaving a restaurant last Wednesday and seized his iPhone.

A copy of the warrant included as an exhibit in Mr. Eastman’s filing said that the phone would be taken to either the Justice Department or the inspector general’s forensic lab in Northern Virginia.

According to the filing, the seizure of Mr. Eastman’s phone came on the same day that federal agents raided the home and seized the electronic devices of Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who was central to Mr. Trump’s attempts to coerce the department’s leaders into backing his false claims of fraud in the election.

The inspector general’s office, which has jurisdiction over investigations of Justice Department employees, also issued the warrant in the search of Mr. Clark’s home, a person familiar with the investigation said. The warrant indicated that prosecutors are investigating Mr. Clark for charges that include conspiracy to obstruct the certification of the presidential election, the person familiar with the investigation said.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, which is overseeing the inquiry, declined to comment on Mr. Eastman’s court filing.

With Mr. Eastman and Mr. Clark, the department is gathering information about two lawyers who were in close contact with Mr. Trump in the critical weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.

The advice they were giving Mr. Trump involved separate but apparently intersecting proposals to provide him with a means of averting his defeat, with Mr. Clark focused on using the power of the Justice Department on Mr. Trump’s behalf and Mr. Eastman focused on disrupting the congressional certification of the election’s outcome.

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Jeffrey Clark at a news conference in October 2020.

The search warrant executed on Mr. Eastman by the inspector general’s office may have been issued because of his connections to Mr. Clark, which were briefly touched on at a hearing by the House select committee on Jan. 6 last week, a day after the raids on the two men.

At the hearing, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the panel’s vice chairwoman, said that Ken Klukowski, a Justice Department lawyer who was in contact with Mr. Eastman, also helped Mr. Clark draft a letter to Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia stating falsely that the Justice Department had identified “significant concerns” about the “outcome of the election” in Georgia and several other states.

The letter further recommended that Mr. Kemp call a special session of the state legislature to create “a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump.”

Mr. Klukowski, who briefly served under Mr. Clark at the Justice Department and had earlier worked at the White House budget office, also “worked with John Eastman,” Ms. Cheney said during the hearing. She went on to describe Mr. Eastman as “one of the primary architects of President Trump’s scheme to overturn the election.”

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Ken Klukowski, center, a Justice Department lawyer who was in contact with Mr. Eastman, arrived for a meeting with the Jan. 6 House select committee late last year.

Ken Klukowski, center, a Justice Department lawyer who was in contact with Mr. Eastman, arrived for a meeting with the Jan. 6 House select committee late last year.Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times

The inspector general’s office has the authority to look into any public corruption crimes committed by Justice Department personnel, said Michael R. Bromwich, a former department inspector general during the Clinton administration.

“Those investigations can lead to people and places outside the Justice Department,” Mr. Bromwich said. “There must be a connection between Eastman and someone who worked at the department.”

A former law professor in California, Mr. Eastman helped develop and promote a brazen plan to justify having Vice President Mike Pence single-handedly block or delay certification of the Electoral College results showing Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the 2020 election. In a series of meetings and phone calls, Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman pressured Mr. Pence to put the plan into action when Mr. Pence presided over a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.

Mr. Pence’s refusal to go along helped fuel the violence that overwhelmed the Capitol that day and became a bloody symbol of Mr. Trump’s efforts to subvert the outcome of the election. Earlier this a year, a federal judge in California considering a civil suit concerning the release of Mr. Eastman’s emails to the House select committee concluded that Mr. Eastman and Mr. Trump most likely committed two felonies — obstruction of a proceeding before Congress and a conspiracy to defraud the United States — for their joint role in the pressure campaign against Mr. Pence.

Mr. Eastman was also instrumental in advising Mr. Trump to create purported slates of electors backing Mr. Trump in key swing states won by Mr. Biden. These false pro-Trump electors were intended to give Mr. Pence a quasi-legal rationale for delaying or blocking the Electoral College certification on Jan. 6, or even trying to throw the election to the House of Representatives.

Last week, a federal grand jury in Washington issued subpoenas to several people who prosecutors believe may have information about the so-called fake elector plan. Among those who received subpoenas were top Republicans in key swing states who served as purported pro-Trump electors, including Kelli Ward, the chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party, and David Shafer, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party.

The subpoenas, some of which have been obtained by The New York Times, show that prosecutors are seeking information about lawyers like Mr. Eastman who were close to Mr. Trump during the chaotic postelection period. The subpoenas also seek information on other lawyers like Rudolph W. Giuliani, who oversaw Mr. Trump’s election challenges in general, and Kenneth Chesebro, who wrote legal memos laying out the viability of the fake elector plan.

In Mr. Eastman’s court papers, filed in Federal District Court in New Mexico, he says that the search warrant did not mention what underlying crime prosecutors were looking into by seizing his phone.

On Monday night, Mr. Eastman appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show and discussed the seizure of his phone, repeating his complaint that the warrant never specified what violation of the law prosecutors were investigating.

“There was no indication of any crime this is connected to,” he said.

June 23, 2022, 7:25 p.m. ET

Michael S. Schmidt

5 takeaways from Thursday’s hearing by the Jan. 6 committee.

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As President Donald J. Trump searched for any way to substantiate false election fraud claims, he also tried to install a loyalist as a special counsel to investigate them.

As President Donald J. Trump searched for any way to substantiate false election fraud claims, he also tried to install a loyalist as a special counsel to investigate them.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

The House committee’s fifth hearing focused on President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to harness the powers of the Justice Department to remain in office. Relying on testimony of three former top Justice Department officials who played central roles in the episode, the committee laid out in detail how Mr. Trump and his allies in the department and on Capitol Hill sought to install a loyalist atop the Justice Department and reverse the election results from a key swing state.

Here are five key takeaways.

It was the most blatant attempt to use the Justice Department for political ends at least since Watergate.

Mr. Trump aggressively pursued a plan to install as acting attorney general a little-known Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, who was prepared to take actions to reverse the election results. As they fought to head off the move, a group of White House lawyers and the leadership of the Justice Department feared that the plan was so ill-conceived and dishonest that it would have spiraled the country into a constitutional crisis if it had succeeded.

The president came so close to appointing Mr. Clark that the White House had already begun referring to him as the acting attorney general in call logs from Jan. 3, 2021. Later that day, Mr. Trump had a dramatic Oval Office showdown with top Justice Department officials and White House lawyers, who told Mr. Trump that there would be a “graveyard” at the Justice Department if he appointed Mr. Clark because so many top officials would resign.

Video

The House Jan. 6 committee painted a picture of how President Donald J. Trump schemed to pressure the Justice Department into overturning the 2020 election.CreditCredit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

In the meeting, Mr. Trump chastised the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, for refusing to do more to help him find election fraud. Only after hours of argument — partly about the lack of substance behind Mr. Trump’s claims of election fraud but also about the political ramifications for him if he took action that led to the exodus of top Justice Department officials — did Mr. Trump relent and back off his plan to replace Mr. Rosen with Mr. Clark.

The heart of the scheme was a draft letter to officials in Georgia.

At the center of the plan was a letter drafted by Mr. Clark and another Trump loyalist that they hoped to send to state officials in Georgia. The letter falsely asserted that the department had evidence of election fraud that could lead the state to rethink its certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory there. The letter recommended that the state call its legislature into session to study allegations of election fraud and consider naming an alternate slate of electors pledged to Mr. Trump.

The department’s top officials and Mr. Trump’s legal team in the White House were all appalled by the letter because it would be giving the imprimatur of the nation’s top law enforcement agencies to claims of election fraud that the department had repeatedly investigated and found baseless. The letter was so outrageous that a top White House lawyer, Eric Herschmann, testified that he told Mr. Clark that if he became attorney general and sent the letter he would be committing a felony.

The Justice Department’s acting deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, testified at the hearing that sending it would have been tantamount to the Justice Department intervening in the outcome of the election.

“For the department to insert itself into the political process this way, I think would have had grave consequences for the country,” Mr. Donoghue said. “It may have spiraled us into a constitutional crisis.”

Trump would not give up on his claims of fraud.

Time after time, the White House brought baseless and sometimes preposterous claims of election fraud — including internet conspiracy theories — to Justice Department officials so that they could use the nation’s law enforcement powers to investigate them. And time after time, the department and the F.B.I. found the claims had no validity.

The pattern became so extraordinary that at one point the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, sent a YouTube video to department officials from Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, that claimed an Italian defense contractor uploaded software to a satellite that switched votes from Mr. Trump.

A top Defense Department official, Kashyap Patel, followed up with Mr. Donoghue about the claim, and the acting defense secretary, Christopher C. Miller, reached out to a defense attaché in Italy to discuss the claim, which was never substantiated.

About 90 minutes after Mr. Donoghue had helped persuade Mr. Trump not to install Mr. Clark as acting attorney general, Mr. Trump would still not let go, calling Mr. Donoghue on his cellphone with another request: to look into a report that an immigration and customs agent in Georgia had seized a truck full of shredded ballots. There turned out to be nothing to it, Mr. Donoghue testified.

Trump considered naming a loyalist lawyer as a special counsel.

As Mr. Trump searched for any way to substantiate the false fraud claims, he tried to install a loyalist as a special counsel to investigate them. One of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, Sidney Powell — who had become a public face of Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election — said in testimony played by the committee that Mr. Trump discussed with her the possibility of taking on that position in December.

The committee also played testimony of William P. Barr, who was attorney general until the middle of December 2020, saying that there was no basis to appoint a special counsel. And the committee suggested that the idea was part of the larger effort to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s victory and open the door to Congress considering alternate slates of Trump electors from swing states.

“So let’s think here, what would a special counsel do?” said Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, who led the day’s questioning. “With only days to go until election certification, it wasn’t to investigate anything. An investigation, led by a special counsel, would just create an illusion of legitimacy and provide fake cover for those who would want to object, including those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.”

Mr. Kinzinger added: “All of President Trump’s plans for the Justice Department were being rebuffed.”

Members of Congress sought pardons — and Trump considered the requests.

In the days after Jan. 6, several of Mr. Trump’s political allies on Capitol Hill, who had helped stoke the false election claims and efforts to overturn the results, sought pardons from Mr. Trump, who considered granting them, according to testimony on Thursday.

Among those looking for a pardon was Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida. Mr. Gaetz was seeking a blanket pardon that would have essentially covered any crime he had committed in his entire life. Although it was not known publicly at the time, Mr. Gaetz was under Justice Department investigation for paying a 17-year-old girl for sex.

“The general tone was, ‘We may get prosecuted because we were defensive of, you know, the president’s positions on these things,’” Mr. Herschmann, the White House lawyer, said in a video clip of his testimony. “The pardon that he was requesting was as broad as you could describe. I remember he said ‘from the beginning of time up until today. For any and all things.’”

“Nixon’s pardon was never nearly that broad,” Mr. Herschmann recalled saying at the time in response to the request.

A slew of other allies asked for them. Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, sent an email to the White House seeking so called pre-emptive pardons for all House and Senate members who had voted to reject the Electoral College vote certifications of Mr. Biden’s victories in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

A former aide to Mr. Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson, testified that several other Republican House members expressed interest in pardons, including Mr. Perry and Representatives Louie Gohmert of Texas and Andy Biggs of Arizona.

Ms. Hutchinson said she had also heard that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia had reached out to the White House Counsel’s Office about a pardon.

Mr. Trump “had hinted at a blanket pardon for the Jan. 6 thing for anybody,” Mr. Trump’s former head of presidential personnel, John McEntee, testified.

Mr. Kinzinger suggested that the pardon requests were evidence that Mr. Trump’s allies had consciousness of guilt.

“The only reason I know to ask for a pardon is because you think you’ve committed a crime,” he said.

Chris Cameron contributed reporting.

June 23, 2022, 1:37 p.m. ETJune 23, 2022

June 23, 2022, 1:37 p.m. ET

Photographs and Text by Sinna Nasseri

In photos: The spectacle of the Jan. 6 hearings looms over Washington.

Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times

Inside the Capitol, television crews, reporters and photographers lay at the ready. Journalists lingered in the Cannon House Office Building’s halls for hours, ready to sprint, iPhones outstretched, after members of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Photographers pointed their lenses through cracks in doors, hoping to catch a rare unorchestrated moment.

The hearings themselves were stage-managed in part by a veteran television executive, hired to capture the attention of Americans weary from two impeachment trials and countless breaking news banners. But outside the building, Washington seemed unfazed. Masses of color-coordinated schoolchildren trudged from monument to monument, oscillating between wonder and boredom.

Washington has had its share of political spectacles over the years, but this one felt both enthralling and a little disappointing. The people who were always paying attention were engulfed in coverage, but the other side simply changed the channel.

Maggie Haberman

June 23, 2022, 11:20 a.m. ETJune 23, 2022

June 23, 2022, 11:20 a.m. ET

Maggie Haberman

A documentary filmmaker has emerged as a potentially key Jan. 6 witness.

Image

Alex Holder, a British documentary filmmaker, with Donald J. Trump. Mr. Holder’s footage has been subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the Capitol riot.

Alex Holder, a British documentary filmmaker, with Donald J. Trump. Mr. Holder’s footage has been subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the Capitol riot.Credit...via Alex Holder

Alex Holder, a British documentary filmmaker who had extensive access to President Donald J. Trump and his family ahead of and after the 2020 election, has emerged late in the House’s investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol as a new and potentially important witness.

Mr. Holder testified behind closed doors on Thursday morning before the House committee investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to subvert the results of the election he lost. His deposition took place ahead of a separate public hearing by the committee on Thursday about Mr. Trump’s effort to install a loyalist to run the Justice Department in the closing weeks of his administration.

Mr. Holder’s footage — some 11 hours of it with the Trump family discussing the campaign and the election for a planned documentary called “Unprecedented” — was subpoenaed by the committee ahead of the interview.

Precisely what the footage shows is still unclear. But Mr. Holder interviewed Mr. Trump once before the Jan. 6 riot and twice after Jan. 6, meaning he potentially can speak to Mr. Trump’s state of mind and whether he made clear he knew he had lost the election.

In an interview with The New York Times after his testimony, Mr. Holder said the committee’s investigators asked very specific questions about his footage and his experience with the Trump family. But he declined to provide a detailed account of what the committee’s questions had focused on.

Mr. Holder said he went into his interviews with Mr. Trump believing that the president could not actually believe what he was saying about the election but ended up being persuaded otherwise.

“After that interview, I remember being struck by how wrong I was,” he said. “He 100 percent believed the election was taken from him.”

He declined to say what Mr. Trump revealed about his thinking about the attack on the Capitol by his supporters. But in a video clip shared with The Washington Post, and confirmed by a person with access to it, Mr. Trump said his supporters that day “were angry from the standpoint of what happened in the election because they’re smart, and they see. And they saw what happened. I believe that that was a big part of what happened on Jan. 6.”

One person close to the Trump family said that they had believed they would have some editorial control over the project, which Mr. Holder denied.

Mr. Holder interviewed Mr. Trump’s oldest children; his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner; Vice President Mike Pence; and a few others for the project. One person familiar with the interviews said Mr. Pence’s team was approached by Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, about participating.

Mr. Holder said later through a spokesman that no Trump family member or representative was paid for the footage.

It is unclear how they are portrayed. Mr. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., sat with the filmmaker three weeks before Election Day, but he turned down a request for another interview after the election, a person familiar with the filming said. People close to the family signaled they were concerned that the Trumps, who were not particularly invested in the project, were not paying enough attention to what they said on camera, and that their remarks could look different in hindsight after Jan. 6.

The footage with the family could also be revealing. The Times was shown a short clip of Ivanka Trump, the former president’s elder daughter, discussing her view of her father’s repeated false claims that the election was stolen through widespread fraud. The clip was played for The Times by someone with access to it.

That video was recorded on Dec. 10, 2020, after Mr. Trump had been making the baseless fraud claims for weeks. In the clip, Ms. Trump said, “I think that, as the president has said, every single vote needs to be counted and needs to be heard, and he campaigned for the voiceless.”

She said that “a lot of Americans feel very, very disenfranchised right now, and really, question the sanctity of our elections, and that’s not right, it’s not acceptable.”

“He has to take on this fight,” she said. “Look, you fight for what you love the most and he loves this country and he loves this country’s people, and he wants to make sure that their voice is, is heard and not muted.” Mr. Trump “will continue to fight until every legal remedy is exhausted, and that’s what he should do,” Ms. Trump said.

The timing of the video, and her comments in it, are notable because she was shown in videotaped testimony before the House committee saying that she had “accepted” statements by Attorney General William P. Barr, including on Dec. 1, 2020, that there had been no widespread fraud.

“I certainly noted the sort of differences of position,” Mr. Holder said of the video footage of Ms. Trump that the committee played. He said he was “unsure” of whether Ms. Trump believed her father had lost or won.

“But with respect to what she said vis-à-vis what he should do, she was very clear,” Mr. Holder said of his interview with her. “It was consistent with what sort of she and her siblings have said about their father. They love their father, and they admire him immensely, and they sort of give the impression that they would do everything they can to help support him. They definitely gave me that impression, not necessarily just the election, but in general.”

Mr. Holder also said he was with Mr. Pence when Mr. Pence received an email about the 25th Amendment, which is used to remove a president from office, although it was unclear who sent it or what time of day he received it. The footage disclosing the email was reported earlier by The Washington Post.

However, a senior aide to Mr. Pence said the footage that Mr. Holder had shown people did not accurately portray what was happening in that moment. In reality, the aide said, it was Mr. Pence reacting to his own letter rejecting the call for the 25th Amendment from Speaker Nancy Pelosi being sent to Congress on Jan. 12, 2021.

To the extent that there is other footage with the Trump family discussing its views of the election, or the campaign’s efforts to fight Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, it could be significant to the committee’s investigation. Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the panel’s chairman, cited the access to the footage as a reason for delaying additional public hearings that the panel was expected to hold next week; those sessions have now been pushed into July.

The filmmaker was connected to Mr. Kushner through Jason D. Greenblatt, a former lawyer for the Trump Organization who became Mr. Trump’s White House envoy to the Middle East. The documentary was envisioned as a legacy project for Mr. Trump and, by extension, his family. Mr. Greenblatt forwarded questions that he said the filmmaker wanted to cover to some of the Trump family members.

But few if any senior campaign officials were told of it, and several were stunned when they learned it existed after Politico reported this week that the footage had been subpoenaed.

The footage was used for a series that is to be streamed by Discovery+ this summer.

Jan 6 comm bak

Chairman Loudermilk Responds to Former Member Liz Cheney's Baseless Claims, Debunks Claims with Receipts

December 19, 2024

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Contents

Members, 117th congress

History

Investigation

Simultaneous investigations by the Justice Department

Information received from Mark Meadows

Obstacles

Trump tying up release of documents from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

Trump warning Republicans not to testify

Secret Service, DHS and Pentagon text messages deleted

Trump funding legal defense of Republicans who might testify against him

Republican National Committee (RNC) claiming committee is illegitimate

Witness not appearing for public hearing

Public findings

2021 public hearings

2022 public hearings

Final report

Timeline of proceedings [long]

2021