1/6 Insurrection Investigation

[Rick Plant]

Liz Cheney 'has the goods' on Trump and doesn't need Bannon or Meadows to comply: reporter

MSNBC's Punchbowl News founder Jake Sherman explained that Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) doesn't need former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows or Trump ally Steve Bannon to testify to have the information necessary to sink former President Donald Trump.

Speaking to "Deadline White House" host Nicolle Wallace, Sherman made it clear that Cheney is making other Republicans "uncomfortable" because of the amount of evidence she and the Select Committee on Jan. 6 has and who they will expose.

"I would say even more than uncomfortable, what Cheney is doing -- and by the way, let's address the [Kevin] McCarthy dynamic," Sherman began. "Liz Cheney and Kevin McCarthy couldn't like each other less. He forced her out of the leadership. She thinks McCarthy is a stooge, she's said as much publicly. And McCarthy sees her as a hot dog, someone doing this for the attention. Clearly, there is no love lost between either one of those people."

He went on to say that what she's doing is showing that people are cooperating with the committee, and that the number of people who are resisting subpoenas are very few.

He went on to say that Trump's White House aides have been more than willing to come forward with information. So whatever information Meadows is holding back, the chances are, Cheney and the committee already has it.

"What is interesting to me is who is actually participating without getting subpoenaed," he explained. "And I know some of it has become public, ... but there are many White House aides, many of them, from the Trump era, who are talking to the committee voluntarily because they don't think they did any wrong and they are willing to participate and talk about what they think Donald Trump did wrong on those days. So, those dynamics here are really, really interesting. And she's showing that — in my estimation — that she has the goods and it doesn't much matter if these people defy subpoenas."

See the full discussion below:

[Rick Plant]

Hack Hannity is in the hot seat!

'More than a Fox host': Adam Schiff explains why the committee wants to hear from Sean Hannity
https://www.rawstory.com/hannity-capitol-riot/


Sean Hannity called to testify to Jan. 6 committee

Informal adviser to former President Donald Trump and Fox News host Sean Hannity is among those being called by the House Select Committee on the Capitol attack, reported Axios Tuesday.

It was reported in 2018 by the Washington Post that Trump would speak so frequently with Hannity that "he basically has a desk in the [White House]." One senior aide even went so far as to sarcastically claim that Hannity was the "real chief of staff." So, when the attack on the Capitol happened, the Fox host was among the voices that tried to reach Trump.

In a speech before the House, Committee co-chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) noted that on Jan. 6, "multiple Fox News hosts knew the president needed to act immediately. They texted Mark Meadows, and he has turned over those texts." Those hosts were Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Brian Kilmeade.

Hannity told Meadows that Trump should "make a statement" and "ask people to leave the Capitol." When the facts became known, Hannity then cried that it was part of a "smear campaign" against him.

Kilmeade begged Meadows "please get him on TV." He even went so far as to say that the attack was "destroying everything you have accomplished."

“If true, any such request would raise serious constitutional issues including First Amendment concerns regarding freedom of the press," said said Jay Sekulow, who is acting as Hannity's lawyer.

Read the full report at Axios:
https://www.axios.com/jan-6-committee-sean-hannity-d454ed9f-bec1-4d72-a160-6d742f3c3cb5.html


Hannity's texts show a broader 'betrayal' of Trump as the riot surged around him: CNN analyst



On Tuesday's edition of CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360," correspondent Jamie Gangel outlined how the Sean Hannity texts obtained by the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack reveal the breakdown and disunity in Trump's inner circle as events unfolded.

"What have we learned from these new text messages?" asked Cooper.

"This is bad news for Donald Trump," said Gangel. "These texts show Sean Hannity, Mark Meadows having exchanges that are, in effect, a betrayal. They are talking behind his back. And just for context, I want to point out what the committee's letter says at the top. They say that — to Hannity — quote, 'You seemed to have advance knowledge regarding President Trump's and his legal team's planning.' That he was, quote, 'providing advice,' and that he had relevant communications while the riot was underway. That these communications make you, Hannity, quote, 'a fact witness.'"

"It appears that Hannity may be talking to the White House counsel, Anderson," added Gangel. "But in any case, he understands and he's saying to Meadows that the pressure we know that Trump was putting on Mike Pence not to do the right thing on January 6th — this is evidence that the White House counsels were threatening to quit."

Watch below:

New Hannity texts revealed -- including one where he admits being 'very worried' one day before Jan. 6: CNN



On Tuesday's edition of CNN's "The Lead," correspondent Jamie Gangel detailed the specific requests made in the House January 6 Committee letter to Fox News' Sean Hannity.

"They're asking him for voluntary cooperation," said Gangel. "And it's based on the fact that they say they have a series of texts, multiple texts from him to former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, as well as other members of the White House staff ... they say to Hannity that it indicates that he had, quote, 'Advanced knowledge regarding President Trump's and his legal team's planning for January 6th.' It goes on to say that it appears Hannity was, quote, 'Expressing concerns and providing advice to the president and certain White House staff regarding the planning.' It goes on to say that Sean Hannity, quote, 'Also had relevant communications while the riot was underway, and in the days thereafter,' and that, quote, 'The communications make you a fact witness in our investigation.'"

"Within the letter, they have released a number of text messages," continued Gangel. "They refer to a text message on January 5th. This would be, obviously, the night before the riot. And they say, 'On January 5th, the night before the violent riot, you sent and received a stream of texts. You wrote, quote, 'I am very worried about the next 48 hours.'' With the counting of the electoral votes scheduled for January 6th at 1:00 p.m., this is now the committee saying to Hannity, why were you concerned about the next 48 hours?"

"I think it gives you a sense of two things," Gangel added. "One is while they say in the letter that they have the utmost respect for the First Amendment, they feel that Sean Hannity has relevant information that does not interfere with the First Amendment, and it's also obvious from their letter that they have, it would seem, dozens if not more email exchanges in this critical period of time."

Watch below:

[Rick Plant]

Girlfriend of police officer who died after Jan. 6 says Trump 'needs to be in prison' for sparking Capitol riot



The girlfriend of the Capitol Police officer who died after the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 is speaking out, saying that former President Donald Trump should serve prison time for his alleged role in sparking the riot.

Speaking to PBS News Hour, Sandra Garza, who was in a relationship with Officer Brian D. Sicknick, said she wants to see justice for Sicknick, who suffered two strokes just hours after rioters attacked him with chemical spray. He was 42. The medical examiner ruled his death to be from natural causes.

“I hold Donald Trump 100 percent responsible for what happened on January 6 and all of the people that have enabled him, enabled him that day, and continue to enable him now,” said Garza.

“Personally, for me, I think he needs to be in prison. That is what I think," she said after referring to Trump as a horrible person.

Watch the video below:
https://www.rawstory.com/sandra-garza-2656216456/



Jan. 6 committee already has a smoking gun to force changes to election law: columnist



The House select committee may already have enough evidence to push changes to the Electoral Count Act, which would undercut one of Donald Trump's arguments and possibly lead to penalties against him.

The twice-impeached one-term president's attorneys have argued the Jan. 6 investigation lacks a legitimate legislative purpose, but Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent argued that Rep. Liz Cheney has shown the panel has the "smoking gun" evidence they need to make changes to protect the electoral process.

"For weeks, Rep. Liz Cheney has hinted that the House select committee examining Jan. 6 might urge the Justice Department to consider prosecuting Donald Trump," Sargent wrote. "The grounds for this criminal referral might be that Trump obstructed the 'official proceeding' in which Congress counts presidential electors."

The Wyoming Republican says Trump stood by for more than two hours watching his supporters violently attack law enforcement as they tried to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden's election win, and Cheney accused the former president of inciting that crowd and ignored pleas from his family, White House staffers, lawmakers and media allies to call them off.

"Some comments from Cheney herself — and clarification I’ve now obtained from a Cheney spokesman — shed new light on where this is going," Sargent revealed. "The short version: It’s likely the committee will explore recommending changes to federal law to further clarify that obstructing the electoral count in Congress is a crime subject to stiff penalties."

Trump's failure was a "dereliction of duty," Cheney has publicly stated, and her spokesman made clear what legislative steps the committee was considering to hold him accountable and protect future elections.

“The committee will explore whether to make changes to current law to hold a future president accountable,” he told Sargent, without elaborating. “That’s part of the legislative purpose of the committee.”

The panel hasn't established, based on publicly known evidence, that Trump believed the violence would help him remain in power and that prevented him from intervening, but Sargent believes they will recommend changes to the law to make disrupting the electoral count a federal crime and introduce stiffer penalties.

"It will be interesting to see if Republicans will support strengthening the criminal code against disruption of the electoral count, and whether a certain pair of Democratic senators will support ending the filibuster to pass such a safeguard," Sargent wrote. "We may soon get answers to those questions. And they probably won’t be to our liking."

https://www.rawstory.com/electoral-county-act/


Merrick Garland should reveal any Jan. 6 probe of Trump to restore 'public confidence': MSNBC analyst



Attorney General Merrick Garland should use his planned speech about Jan. 6 on Wednesday to indicate that his office is investigating all responsible parties, including former President Donald Trump, according to former acting U.S. solicitor general Neal Katyal.

Katyal said he's been "very patient" with Garland, adding that no one was "more meticulous" or "more careful" as a judge.

"But I'm getting worried," Katyal said. "Nobody's asking Merrick Garland to get up in his speech tomorrow and announce indictments against Donald Trump and his pals. Merrick Garland is the attorney general; he is not Santa Claus. But we are all hoping for some reassurance from him that he's investigating all leads and all people who may be responsible. So that's what I want to hear tomorrow, and right now we've heard really crickets."

Katyal added that while Garland's Department of Justice has secured convictions against 275 "rank-and-file" Capitol rioters, there has been nothing but silence about "higher-ups." He said there are two main possibilities.

"One is that Garland is too scared of his shadow and he's doing nothing," Katyal said. "Or the other is that he's got a secret investigation, and we just don't know about it. And it's rare to think an investigation of this magnitude could be kept secret, but I suppose it's possible. The thing that concerns me is that the governing documents here, the U.S. Attorneys' Manuals, do say that when the public confidence requires an announcement of an investigation, it can be done, so we've heard silence in the teeth of what the U.S. Attorney's Manual says, and that to me is concerning."

Watch the full interview below:

[Rick Plant]

REVEALED: Jan. 6 committee has info on Trump aides discussing use of 25th Amendment to remove him



In its letter requesting Fox News host Sean Hannity's testimony on Tuesday, the House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection referenced efforts to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove former president Donald Trump from office.

According to the letter, Hannity sent chief of staff Mark Meadows a text message on Jan. 6 "relating to a potential effort by members of President Trump’s cabinet to remove him from office under the 25th Amendment."

"As you may recall, Secretaries DeVos and Chao both resigned following the President’s conduct on January 6th, as did members of the President’s White House staff," the committee wrote to Hannity. "We would like to question you regarding any conversations you had with Mr. Meadows or others about any effort to remove the President under the 25th Amendment."

CNN reporter Jamie Gangel addressed the letter's references to the 25th Amendment on Tuesday night.

"There is nothing that was put in this letter by accident, and that was mentioned very far down," Gangel said. "There was not a text (message) associated with it, but the words '25th Amendment' were repeated. And my understanding is that there is — we don't know, they didn't reveal texts there — but it appears the committee has information about conversations that were going on at the highest level about the 25th Amendment. And just to remind our audience ... we heard reporting that maybe some people in the cabinet thought Trump should be removed from office. The fact that the committee may have information about that will also speak, once again, to Trump's state of mind."

Watch below.:

[Rick Plant]

Three more cops sue Trump for inciting MAGA riots that left them with 'physical and emotional injuries'



Three more police officers are suing former President Donald Trump for the "physical and emotional injuries" they suffered as a result of the riots he incited at the United States Capitol building last year.

Politico reports that Capitol Officer Marcus Moore, who has spent the last decade on the force, filed a lawsuit in which he described "the intense terror of the day as he moved from his post at the Madison Building to the East Side of the Capitol and eventually into the House chamber, helping evacuate lawmakers to safety."

Moore is seeking damages against Trump, whom he says incited a riot that left him suffering from tinnitus, a condition that produces frequent ringing in a person's ear.

In a separate lawsuit filed against Trump, D.C. Metropolitan Police Officers Bobby Tabron and Dedevine Carter described "suffering physical assaults with poles, pepper spray and other projectiles, in addition to hand-to-hand violence," while also "seeking compensatory damages for their injuries," writes Politico.

Trump has sought to downplay the violence that his supporters inflicted upon police at the Capitol, and even falsely claimed that the MAGA rioters were "hugging and kissing" police who were guarding the building, when in reality they were beating them with blunt objects and attacking them with bear spray.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/04/police-officer-lawsuits-capitol-riot-trump-526491


FBI nabs Capitol rioter who said he was ‘involved with helping Lin Wood and Sidney Powell’



Atlanta home contractor Matthew Jay Webler said that Jan. 6, 2021, was his best birthday ever. Now he's been charged for partaking in the riot at the U.S. Capitol, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports.

Court records show that Webler was recorded by multiple security cameras wearing a bright yellow jacket and a QAnon flag as cape, making him easy to spot.

In one selfie video he took inside the Capitol, he says, “It’s my birthday, and it’s the best one ever.” The video, which he posted to Facebook, is among other social media posts used as evidence by authorities.

“Biden called Jan 6 the worst domestic terror attack in our history. Here’s some of my footage,” Webler posted to Facebook in April after dozens of Capitol rioters had already been arrested. “Can you find the terror?”

'I have been involved with helping Lin Wood and Sidney Powell try find all the information that we can,” Webler said in the video published Dec. 28, 2020. He also claimed that he conducted overnight surveillance on what he said was a “official election warehouse.”

Webler has a criminal history which includes two prison terms in Georgia and totalling more than six years for charges related to burglary, aggravated assault and auto theft, and other crimes.

He faces four misdemeanor charges related to the Capitol riot, each carrying up to a year in prison.

https://www.rawstory.com/capitol-rioter-matthew-jay-webler/

[Rick Plant]

Jan. 6 investigator reveals how Sean Hannity has landed in House probe's crosshairs



A member of the House select committee explained why Fox News host Sean Hannity has landed in the Jan. 6 investigation's crosshairs.

Congressional investigators have obtained text messages suggesting that Hannity was aware of and deeply concerned about Donald Trump's plans for the day Joe Biden would be certified as the 2020 election winner, and Rep. Jamie Raskin told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" why the panel has asked for the conservative broadcaster's voluntary cooperation in their probe.

"Sean Hannity is being, has become a figure of interest because he's a fact witness, obviously, to the planning that preceded both the attempt at a political coup on Jan. 6 and also, apparently, organizing for the insurrection," Raskin said. "Based on the evidence of the texts we've seen, it looks like he was very concerned about what was going to happen, and we just want to try to reconstruct the chronology of his involvement."

Raskin dismissed First Amendment concerns about Hannity's broadcast statements, saying investigators were only interested in his private communications with White House officials before and during the insurrection.

"Obviously, he is not a figure of interest because of whatever he may have said publicly, and we were clear it has nothing to do with any of his public pronouncements," Raskin said. "It all has to do with his role as a fact witness and player in these events."

The texts show Hannity was extremely concerned about the violence playing out at the U.S. Capitol and tried to urge Trump to call off his supporters, and they also show that he had advance knowledge of what might unfold on that day.

"That's why we want to bring him in, in order to get a statement in his own voice, but those are the bread crumbs we received, that he was concerned about where things were going," Raskin said. "Obviously, the president and his team were escalating their attacks on Mike Pence, their attacks on the election and the propagation of the 'Big Lie' in the days in advance. so anybody on the inside who was privy to their conversations, obviously, would have known about where they were headed in terms of both the inside attack on Pence, the attempt to destroy Joe Biden's majority in the Electoral College vote, but also the eliciting of violence and insurrectionary movement in the streets."

[Rick Plant]

REVEALED: Louie Gohmert's violent rhetoric was flagged by Capitol police 3 days before insurrection



Three days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, Capitol police intelligence analysts warned of potential danger stemming from comments made by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX).

The warning was part of a Special Event Assessment dated Jan. 3, 2021 — analyzing threats associated with Congress' impending vote on the certification of electoral votes on Jan. 6.

Politico's Betsy Woodruff Swan, who obtained a copy of the Special Event Assessment, reported Wednesday: "The Jan. 3 assessment noted that Gohmert had sued to try to get then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election results. The assessment added that a federal judge had thrown out Gohmert’s suit."

Capitol police analysts wrote in the intelligence assessment: “In an interview Friday evening on pro-Trump news network Newsmax, Representative Gohmert claimed that letting the will of the voters stand would ‘mean the end of our republic, the end of the experiment in self-government. Representative Gohmert then seemed to encourage violence as a means to this end. ‘But bottom line is, the court is saying, ‘We’re not going to touch this. You have no remedy – basically, in effect, the ruling would be that you gotta go to the streets and be as violent as Antifa and BLM.’”

Later in the report, Capitol police intelligence analysts noted that the White House was actively helping to plan a rally on the Ellipse on Jan. 6. And they warned that Trump supporters' "sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent."

At the time, Gohmert issued a statement claiming he had “not encouraged and unequivocally do not advocate for violence.”

A.J. Swinson, a spokesperson for Gohmert, alleged Wednesday that the intelligence assessment had taken the congressman's remarks out of context.

“Therefore, such an out of context statement promotes fake news, promotes injustice, and fails to note his ongoing advocacy as a former judge and appellate court Chief Justice," Swinson told Politico. "The institutions created to resolve disputes MUST have the courage to resolve the disputes they were created to resolve so our system can function peaceably.”

Appearing on MSNBC shortly after her story broke, Woodruff Swan said the intelligence assessment also raised concerns about white supremacists and people with weapons endangering lawmakers and law enforcement officers on Jan. 6.

"The problem with comments like this is that not every person hearing them is the most sophisticated news consumer," Woodruff Swan said of Gohmert. "When you have lawmakers making comments along the line of 'you've got to go out into the streets and be violent,' that's the kind of thing that worries people who are in the intelligence space, and it worried people in the Capitol police department just three days before this extraordinarily violent attack on the Capitol."

https://www.rawstory.com/louie-gohmert-2656239114/