1/6 Insurrection Investigation

[Rick Plant]

What does it mean to say there are "no illegals dying from COVID-19 anywhere"?  You believe that illegal immigrants are impervious to the virus from some reason and that only Trump supporters can get sick?  That is downright bizarre even from you. 

To compound Biden's fiasco in Afghanistan, we also learn today that the suicide bomber who killed 13 American soldiers and dozens of Afghan citizens was released from the Bagram airbase prison after it was hastily abandoned on Biden's orders.  Biden then compounded this incident by directing the military to retaliate with a drone strike that killed more innocent civilians including seven children.  None of whom were terrorists.  And tried to cover it up as a successful strike to cover for his previous weakness.  But that is all somehow Trump's fault.  LOL.

There are no illegals dying from COVID-19 inside hospitals anywhere. That's a bogus right wing propaganda talking point.

The man who ordered the release of 5000 Taliban terrorists and removed our troops is Donald Trump.   

Own it. 

[Rick Plant]

Trump is committing a criminal conspiracy in plain sight — and DOJ needs to take action: ex-prosecutor



The United States Department of Justice should be opening an investigation into alleged efforts by former President Donald Trump to block the investigation being conducted by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to a former federal prosector.

Glenn Kirschner explained the situation on the latest episode of his "Justice Matters" podcast.

He noted a new report by the Guardian.

"The former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and other top aides subpoenaed by the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack are expected to defy orders for documents and testimony related to 6 January, according to a source familiar with the matter," the Guardian reported. "All four Trump aides targeted by the select committee – Meadows, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, strategist Steve Bannon and defense department aide Kash Patel – are expected to resist the orders because Trump is preparing to direct them to do so, the source said."

Kirschner offered his analysis.

"Now friends, let's be clear, Donald Trump telling these individuals — his criminal associates in a very real sense — not to testify against him, not to testify at the select committee hearing investigation the January 6th attack, is no different that a mob boss telling his capos, his underbosses, his consigliere, do not testify against me," he explained.

Kirschner noted that Trump pardoned Bannon for a scam to rip off MAGA supporters with a border wall fundraising effort. He explained how Trump essentially let Bannon get away with keeping the money, and is now reportedly asking Bannon to impede the investigation.

"When will the Department of Justice begin indicting these people for the crimes that they continue to commit in the harsh light of day?" he asked.

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

'This is because of you!' Adam Schiff recalls furious Dems screaming at Republicans as the Jan. 6 attack unfolded

Oct. 6 marks another anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol and the House committee investigating the attacks are having hearings, issuing subpoenas and doing some questioning behind closed doors.

Writing about his experience Wednesday, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) recalled the shouting matches that broke out as the Capitol came under siege. He noted how everyone began to put on their plastic masks and that Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) had to tell folks to breathe slowly because the fan didn't circulate air quickly enough to ensure people hyperventilating wouldn't pass out.

"This is because of you!" Schiff said Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) yelled from the gallery at Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), who was speaking when the chamber was stopped.

"Shut up!" the GOP members shot back.

"Call Trump, tell him to call off his revolutionary guards," Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) yelled.

"Phillips wasn't wrong," wrote Schiff. The attack was caused by what has become known as "the big lie," he said, the belief by Republicans that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election and was entitled to the White House. Despite exhaustive efforts, Republicans haven't been able to provide evidence to back up any of their allegations.

"Because of the pandemic, Phillips, Cohen, and other members had been required to wait in the gallery before their chance to speak, and they were the most exposed," Schiff explained. "Down on the House floor, we could barricade ourselves in, but upstairs there are multiple doors to the gallery and little to prevent the rioters from entering."

Some members were crying, afraid for their lives, hiding in the front row. There's a notorious photo of Rep. Jason Crow (D-WI), an Army Ranger, reached to hold the member's hand.

Just a "normal tourist visit"
Representative Jason Crow comforting Representative Susan Wild in the House chamber on Jan. 6. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call, via AP Images


Members congress shelter in the House gallery as protesters try to break into the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)


Schiff recalled people screaming to lock doors and officers not knowing which. Police found a route out to get everyone to safety and Schiff said he stayed behind to let others go ahead. His young staffer was concerned and asked why he wasn't leaving. He wasn't panicked, but that's when the loud "thud" sounds came against the doors.

"You need to get out!" Schiff recalled a police officer shouting. "Move!"

"You can't let them see you," he said that a Republican member said to me.

"He's right," another Republican member said. "I know these people, I can talk to them, I can talk my way through them. You're in a whole different category."

He said that in the moment he was "oddly touched" by the Republican members with concern. But he'd been getting death threats for years

"That feeling soon gave way to another: If these Republican members hadn't joined the president in falsely attacking me for four years, I wouldn't need to be worried about my security, none of us would. I kept that thought to myself."

He remembered one Republican who grabbed a wooden post with hand sanitizer on it to use as a weapon.

"Are you that worried?" Schiff asked him. The member confessed he was, noting, "I think I just heard gunshots."

"I was just elected. I replaced John Ratcliffe. I'm Pat Fallon."

Schiff promised the new member it wasn't always like that.

He went on to write that he remembered when he knew Republicans accepted Trump's guilt in the Jan. 6 attack but made the decision that they wouldn't do anything about it.

He said that during the Senate trial members would walk past him or speak directly to him, but the intelligence from Sen. Chuck Schumer's (D-NY) staffers revealed questions they were getting. He explained that for years Republicans would confide in him and other Democrats about the "misgivings" they had about Trump. They were people who would go on Fox News and bash Schiff while saying the opposite in private. Some even told him to keep doing what he was doing with his investigation.

"And it became clear that many Republicans felt someone needed to do it, someone needed to put a stop to it all, even if they couldn't, or wouldn't," he wrote.

And the question wasn't so much "Why should he be removed?" as "Why should I be the one to remove him? Why should I risk my seat, my position of power and influence, my career and future? Why should I?"

He had to figure out how to convince Republicans not that they should convict Trump but why they should risk their own seats to remove a president who was already gone. In the end, they weren't willing to do it.

Read the full essay here:


SCREAMING MATCHES, OXYGEN MASKS, AND WILD STAMPEDES: A CONGRESSMAN DESCRIBES JANUARY 6 FROM THE HOUSE FLOOR

This is because of you!” a Democrat yelled at a Republican as protesters battered at the doors and Capitol police officers urged lawmakers to “move!” In Adam Schiff’s new book, Midnight in Washington, he recounts the horrific scene—and the events that enabled it

BY ADAM SCHIFF

OCTOBER 6, 2021

Please grab a mask!” a Capitol Police officer shouted from the well of the House floor. Up until this point, I still wasn’t sure what was happening outside the chamber and whether we were at serious risk. There were rioters in the building, that much I knew. How many of them, or how great a threat they posed, it was impossible to tell. I looked around at my colleagues to see if they were as perplexed as I was, and besides, what were we supposed to do in an emergency? I suddenly wished I had been paying more attention at freshman orientation twenty years earlier.

Sensing our confusion, the officer continued: “Be prepared to don your mask in the event the room is breached.” He told us that we did not need to put the masks on yet, but tear gas was being deployed, so we should get them ready. “Be prepared to get down under your chairs if necessary. So, we have folks entering the Rotunda and coming down this way...Just be prepared. Stay calm.” I pulled a rectangular canvas pouch from under my seat and unzipped it. Inside was a strongly sealed plastic container with no obvious opening. I flipped it from side to side and upside down, trying to open the damned thing. Finally figuring it out, I helped the members around me open theirs, and we removed the plastic hoods. These hoods didn’t resemble the gas masks you see police wearing during a riot; instead, they were a large polyethylene bag that you pulled over your head, with a small motor attached to circulate and filter the air. As you removed the hood from its packaging, the motor began running, and suddenly there was a din of dozens of these hoods buzzing, which only added to the growing sense of alarm.

“When you put on the hood,” one of my colleagues and a former Marine, Ruben Gallego of Arizona, shouted, “breathe slowly.” Ruben was standing behind me, and he could see the panic spreading from member to member. “Take slow, steady breaths. Your impulse will be to hyperventilate, but you need to breathe slowly.” This was very helpful advice. I have a bit of claustrophobia, and the idea of pulling a bag over my head already had my pulse quickening. I resolved to wait until the last moment before I had to don the thing, since I wasn’t smelling tear gas, not yet. “Breathe slowly when you put it on,” Ruben intoned again, “or you will pass out. That is how people can die from wearing these.” Okay, that wasn’t so helpful.

"This is because of you!” yelled Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota from the gallery at Representative Paul Gosar, who had been at the microphone. “Shut up!” came the Republican reply. “Call Trump, tell him to call off his revolutionary guards,” screamed Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee. He was also in the gallery, above me and to the right, his face red with anger. Other members tried to settle things down and not allow the recriminations to spread, but Phillips wasn’t wrong. We were here for what should have been the ceremonial certification of the 2020 presidential election results, but instead we were now in danger. For months, GOP members of Congress had propagated the president’s big lie about the elections, and you could draw a direct line between those lies and the threat we all now faced. Because of the pandemic, Phillips, Cohen, and other members had been required to wait in the gallery before their chance to speak, and they were the most exposed. Down on the House floor, we could barricade ourselves in, but upstairs there are multiple doors to the gallery and little to prevent the rioters from entering.

“Lock the gallery doors!” someone shouted from down below, but it wasn’t clear to police upstairs which doors in the gallery remained open. “Not those doors—those doors!” came another excited shout. “Those doors over there!”

A police officer returned to the well again: He told us that they had secured an escape route and he wanted us to exit the chambers and proceed immediately down the stairs. Now. There are two sets of double doors behind the Speaker’s chair and raised dais, and the doors to our right were pulled open. Members and staff quickly moved toward the exit and I was suddenly aware of just how many people had been on the floor, in the cloakroom or elsewhere, as they crowded by the exit and created a real logjam. I waited by my seat, still feeling relatively calm and wanting to give other members and staff a chance to go first. Besides, so many of the Republican members were not wearing masks, I wasn’t eager to be jammed in with them shoulder to shoulder on my way out the doors. Eventually, I wandered over to the GOP side of the chamber and waited there alone, several rows above the well, until a young staff member approached me, perplexed why I wasn’t leaving.

"Are you okay, Mr. Schiff?” she asked. I was astonished. She was all of about twentysomething and she was asking me if I was okay. What a remarkable calm amid the chaos. “I’m fine,” I said, “just don’t want to add to the melee. Thought I would let others go ahead.” And then, as an afterthought, I asked her—“Are you okay?” She nodded.

Suddenly I could hear the crowd of insurrectionists outside the chamber. They had migrated from the Senate side of the building and were approaching the House floor from Statuary Hall, on the opposite side of the chamber from where members were exiting. And from the noise, it sounded like a lot of them.

Just then came a tremendous thud—something had been thrust against the doors not twenty yards away from me, battering them. Thud. A moment later, again: thud.

“You need to get out!” a police officer shouted. “Move!”

I made my way down to the well and joined the remaining members and staff filing out, looking back at the doors being hammered to the rear of the chamber, glass now shattering. Police officers pushed large cabinets in front of the doors and would soon draw their weapons.

“You can’t let them see you,” a Republican member said to me. “He’s right,” another Republican member said. “I know these people, I can talk to them, I can talk my way through them. You’re in a whole different category.” In that moment, we were not merely members of different political parties, but on opposite sides of a much more dangerous divide. At first I was oddly touched by these GOP members and their evident concern. But by then, I had been receiving death threats for years, and that feeling soon gave way to another: If these Republican members hadn’t joined the president in falsely attacking me for four years, I wouldn’t need to be worried about my security, none of us would. I kept that thought to myself.

As I made my way out of the back of the chamber, I took another look at the Republicans walking out with me. One had grabbed a wooden post with a hand sanitizer dispenser attached to it and was carrying it like a club, in case he needed it to defend himself against the rioters. “Are you that worried?” I asked him, as we began filing down the stairs from the Speaker’s lobby and through the corridors below the Capitol. “Yes,” he said agitatedly. “I think I just heard gunshots.” He was right—only fifty feet away from the stairs, on the other side of the lobby, Ashli Babbitt, a fourteen year veteran of the Air Force, had just been shot to death by a Capitol Police officer. In all the commotion, I had just assumed it was a tear gas canister.

“How long have you been here?” I asked the Republican.

“Seventy-two hours,” he replied.

“What?”

“I was just elected. I replaced John Ratcliffe. I’m Pat Fallon.”

I looked him in the eye and said: “It’s not always like this.”

It was not always like this, it must be said, because the Republican Party has also not always been like this. The four years of the Trump presidency destroyed many friendships, and not a few marriages. But it also destroyed the Republican Party—once devoted to robust alliances, a healthy mistrust of executive power, and the expansion of democracy around the world—and turned it into something else: a party willing to tear down the institutions of its own government, a party willing to give aid and comfort to a malign foreign power that wishes to destroy us, a party hostile to the truth.

This was only possible because many of the Republican members of Congress, people I served with for years, liked, and respected—turned out to prize power and position, even if it meant imperiling the country. I remember precisely the moment during the first impeachment trial when it became so tragically apparent to me that Republicans accepted the President’s guilt but were unwilling to do anything about it. Especially tragic, because we might have avoided the terrible trauma that was to come.

“They think we’ve proven him guilty,” my staff told me just before I would make a closing argument on the second day of the trial. “They need to know why he should be removed.”

I didn’t have time to ask who “they” were. We had been getting feedback during the course of the trial, sometimes directly from senators who would walk past us in the small lobby behind the Senate floor, going to and from lunch, or on a break, or who would wander up to our small table on the Senate floor when the day’s presentations were done. But the best sources of information came from Senator Schumer’s staff, passed on to my staff in whispers and handwritten notes. Were these questions coming from Democratic senators, like Joe Manchin from West Virginia, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, or Doug Jones of Alabama? If so, we were in trouble.

Or was this feedback coming from Republican senators, several of whom had kept their cards close to the vest? If the Republican senators were asking, that meant their minds were still open to conviction, and that was good, even though at this point in the trial they had yet to hear the defense case.

And still, what were “they” really asking? If senators believed that we had proven Trump guilty of withholding hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid from an ally at war in order to coerce that nation into helping him cheat in the upcoming election, wasn’t that enough? Had the bar become so high with this president? It was like a juror in an extortion case asking the judge, “Okay, he’s guilty, but do we really need to convict?”

But as I walked to the lectern, I suddenly understood, in a way I hadn’t fully appreciated until that moment, that this was the central question: Why should he be removed? He was the president of their party. He was putting conservative judges on the court. He was lowering their taxes. Why remove him? I had watched during breaks in the trial as the president’s Senate defenders took to the airwaves to proclaim his innocence, and I had believed them—not their claims about the president’s conduct, but that they believed what they were saying, that they believed there had been, to quote the president’s mantra of defense, no quid pro quo. But I could see now that that wasn’t it at all.

For the past three years, Republicans had confided, to me and to many of my Democratic colleagues, their serious misgivings about the president. Some would go on Fox News and bash me, only to urge me privately to keep on with the investigation. And it became clear that many Republicans felt someone needed to do it, someone needed to put a stop to it all, even if they couldn’t, or wouldn’t. And the question wasn’t so much “Why should he be removed?” as “Why should I be the one to remove him? Why should I risk my seat, my position of power and influence, my career and future? Why should I?”

There was only half an hour left of our case that day when I made those seven short paces from the House managers’ table to the lectern, and I had no idea how I was going to answer that question. I had prepared to go through the record of the president’s call again, the one in which he says “I want you to do us a favor, though”—because I had discovered there was so much more to that transcript, so much more now that we understood the whole scheme. I had planned to go through it line by line. But the call record now seemed insignificant, compared to the question: Why should I?

Most of the senators were listening politely after a long day, but their concentration was wandering, and so was mine. I was doing a kind of extreme multitasking, reading and speaking about the call but thinking about the question I needed to answer, and all the other questions it presumed: What made this man so dangerous? What had he done to the country? How, in three short years, had he been able to so completely remake his own party, get it to abandon its own ideology, get my friends and colleagues to surrender themselves to his obvious immorality? How had he caused us to question ourselves, our values, our commitment to democracy? How had he been able to convince so many of our fellow citizens that his views were the truth?

When I could delay no longer, I told the senators, “This brings me to the last point I want to make tonight.” At the end of the trial, I said, I believed we would have proven the president guilty—that is, that he had done what he was charged with. But it was a slightly different question, I acknowledged, than whether he really needed to be removed. And all of a sudden, every senator seemed to be watching, alert and keenly interested in the answer. The moment stretched on in silence. “This is why he needs to be removed,” I said at last, and did my best to tell them.

In the year and a half since, I have thought a lot about what I might have said differently to persuade the senators of what a danger the now former president posed then, and poses still. Whether there was any course we might have taken, not just in the trial but in the years that preceded it, to prevent what was coming: a violent insurrection at the Capitol, a wave of antidemocratic efforts, and a full-out assault on the truth.

There is now a dangerous vein of autocratic thought running through one of America’s two parties, and it poses an existential danger to the country. In this we are not alone. All around the world, there is a new competition between autocracy and democracy, and for more than a decade, the autocrats have been on the rise. This trend toward authoritarianism began before Donald Trump and will not have spent its force when he steps off the political stage for good. It will require constant vigilance on our part to ensure it does not gain another foothold in the highest office in our land.

The actions of our government, like the broader sweep of history, are not taken on their own; they are not the product of impersonal forces operating without human actors and agency. We made Donald Trump possible. We the voters, yes, but we in Congress even more so. He would not have been able to batter and break so many of our democratic norms had we not let him, had we not been capable of endless rationalization, had we not forgotten why we came to office in the first place.

Midnight is the darkest moment of the day everywhere in the world. But it is also the most hopeful, because everything that comes after holds the promise of light. America has a genius for reinvention, and we must use it. As Lincoln said, we must “disenthrall ourselves” to save our country. From the same forces of bigotry that divided and nearly defeated us in the Civil War, yes, but from something new to the American landscape as well: a dangerous experimentation with a uniquely American brand of authoritarianism. We must all confront the question: Why should I?

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/adam-schiff-describes-january-6-from-the-house-floor

[Rick Plant]

Trump's coup plot was worse than anyone knew

It seemed odd last December when then-Attorney General Bill Barr resigned before the end of President Trump's term. Barr had been such a loyal soldier throughout, defending Trump's misdeeds and corrupting the Department of Justice (DOJ) on his behalf over and over again. Barr had broken DOJ protocols repeatedly as well, most recently ordering the department to investigate claims of voter fraud before any suit or legal proceedings had been initiated. But it all fell apart when Barr said in an interview that he had not actually seen any evidence of such fraud. The president was very displeased. Barr later told him to his face that the claims were "nonsense" and a major rift developed between the two.

Nonetheless, Barr apparently still tried to appease Trump and later told the U.S. Attorney in Georgia to look into Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani's wild claims and make it a priority. But within a few days, Trump announced that Barr would be leaving his post and he was gone by the end of the month, replaced by his deputy Jeffrey Rosen.

I don't think we know the full scope of what was going on with Barr and Trump during this period despite Barr's self-serving recitations to several authors of books on the final days. But it's clear that he knew that Trump was out of control and he decided to jump off the sinking ship before it went under.

On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee released an interim Senate Judiciary Committee Report covering the testimony of various high-level Department of Justice officials during that period between the election and the insurrection and it is a blockbuster. It's titled "Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election," which pretty much says it all.

We knew quite a bit of this already. There was earlier reporting about how Trump had called Acting Attorney General Rosen to instruct him to "just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen." And we knew that an obscure Justice Department lawyer in the civil division by the name of Jeffrey Clark had somehow found his way into Trump's inner circle and was pushing some corrupt schemes to overturn the election which Trump liked very much. But until this report we didn't know the scale of this plotting to get the DOJ to step in and use its muscle to carry out Trump's coup.

Trump worked hard to twist Rosen's arm. He had Clark calling him with threats that he was going to replace him and demanding that he send a letter to Georgia and other states to advise them of "serious irregularities" in their elections, telling them to call special sessions of their legislatures and deal with the electoral votes however they chose. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was haranguing him as well demanding that he look into Giuliani's crazy conspiracy theories, as well as odd lawyers involved in Trump lawsuits around the country, one of whom told Rosen "you're going to force me to call the President and tell him you're recalcitrant," as if that would frighten him into compliance.

Trump himself inappropriately called Rosen and his deputy nine times, and met with him personally several more, the final denouement coming just days before the January 6th insurrection in which he literally said, "one thing we know is you, Rosen, aren't going to do anything to overturn the election." As usual, he said the quiet part out loud.

The report is damning. The president of the United States tried for weeks to get the Attorney General to overturn the election. That is the definition of an attempted coup.

The ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, R-Ia, issued a GOP rebuttal to the report. It is truly mind boggling and makes you wonder if the Republicans even bothered to read it. It suggests that Trump was right to be skeptical of Rosen and Donohue because of Carter Page and the FBI and some other irrelevant nonsense from the Russia investigation. This was pure red meat for their base, of course. But this line is so fatuous you have to wonder if they were just trolling for laughs:

"The available evidence shows that President Trump did what we'd expect a president to do on an issue of this importance: He listened to his senior advisers and followed their advice and recommendations,"

Yes, we expect our presidents to refuse to admit they lost elections and plot a coup to stay in power. It's perfectly normal. And yes, he did back down on firing Rosen and replacing him with his lackey — only once his White House counsel's office and the entire top level of the Department of Justice said they would quit en masse if he did it. I guess you can call that "advice and recommendations" but Trump's White House counsel had another term for it: "a murder-suicide pact."

And anyway, once that part of the plot was foiled, he just switched to plan B — the right-wing lawyer John Eastman's plot to have Pence refuse to count the electoral votes. At the same time, he had his crack legal team of Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani all over the country filing half-baked, embarrassing lawsuits and was egging on activists to come to the Capitol on January 6th saying it was going to be "wild." He was juggling several coup plots at the same time. And he's still at it today, calling for "forensic audits" even in states he won! This deranged plot is still unfolding even though he's been out of office for nine months.

That Senate Republicans would actually defend these actions is outrageous. It's also chilling.

It's quite clear that that brief moment after January 6th when the Republicans seemed shaken by Trump's incitement of a violent insurrection passed very quickly and they have comfortably settled back into rationalizing their complicity by saying that it's no harm no foul if the president tries to extort foreign leaders to help him sabotage a rival's campaign or plan a coup to overturn an election if he doesn't manage to pull it off.

Grassley is appearing with the former president at a rally this weekend where Trump will no doubt insist that he actually won the election. Grassley won't blink an eye, apparently believing that if Trump gets back in power, it will be perfectly fine if he behaves exactly the same way as he did during those insane final weeks of his term. This is how pathetically corrupt and compromised the GOP's moral reasoning has become. According to one of the major political parties in the country, attempted coups are now normal politics in America. And as a result we can be quite sure this isn't the last time that will happen. The only question is whether they can corral enough accomplices to actually succeed next time.

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-s-coup-plot-was-worse-than-anyone-knew/

[Rick Plant]

Throw her in jail. Being unvaccinated is not an excuse. Who cares about her business losses. She chose to take part in an insurrection. Throw her in jail.   

Unvaccinated Capitol rioter begs judge to not send her to jail over fear of getting Covid

On Friday, NBC4 Washington reporter Scott MacFarlane reported that Dona Bissey, an Indiana woman who participated in the January 6 Capitol insurrection, is imploring a judge not to sentence her to prison — in part because she is afraid she will contract COVID-19.

"Simply put, if Ms. Bissey is incarcerated at the D.C. Jail or in the BOP, which has seen 259 inmate deaths and over 43,000 infections from COVID-19, she is extremely likely to suffer severe illness or even death," wrote an an attorney representing Bissey in the filing. The attorney acknowledged that his client "has not helped her chances of fighting the virus by remaining unvaccinated."



Bissey, who has described herself in filings as "God-fearing" and "law-abiding" despite having been involved in an attack on the U.S. Capitol, has asked instead for 18 months probation. She has also lamented in her filings that she is being "shunned" in her small Indiana town upon her neighbors learning she was a Capitol rioter, and that her hair salon has suffered "huge losses" in business.

https://www.rawstory.com/capitol-rioter-2655254594/

[Rick Plant]

Scumbag Steve Bannon will be arrested for defying a congressional subpoena. These criminals are NOT above the law. Private citizen Donald Trump has no executive privilege. 

Steve Bannon says he 'stands with Trump' and will defy subpoena from Jan 6 committee

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon says he will defy a subpoena from the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot, CNN reports. According to a source speaking to CNN, Bannon's rationale for defying the subpoena is that he "stands with Trump."

Four associates of Trump were sent subpoenas by the House select committee. But as The Washington Post reported this Thursday, Trump's legal team sent a letter instructing them not to comply, citing "executive and other privileges, including among others the presidential communications, deliberative process, and attorney-client privileges" as justification.

In addition to Bannon, Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino, and Kash Patel are among the former Trump advisors to be subpoenaed.

Speaking to the Post, Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich said that the records request is "outrageously broad" and "lacks both legal precedent and legislative merit."

"Executive privilege will be defended, not just on behalf of President Trump and his administration, but also on behalf of the Office of the President of the United States and the future of our nation," Budowich said, according to the Post.

https://www.rawstory.com/steve-bannon-2655256230/


Jan. 6 committee will 'swiftly consider' criminal referral for Steve Bannon over subpoena defiance

The House select committee will "swiftly consider" making a criminal referral for Steve Bannon if he continues to defy their subpoena.

Bannon's lawyer told House investigators that former President Donald Trump had instructed him not to comply on the basis of executive privilege, but committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) said they would not wait for a court to settle the dispute, reported Politico.

"We will not allow any witnesses to deny a lawful subpoena or attempt to run out the clock, and we will swiftly consider a criminal contempt of Congress referral," the pair said in a statement.

The lawmakers said former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former Defense Department chief of staff Kash Patel have been engaging with the committee, while longtime Trump aide Dan Scavino still has not been served with his subpoena.

All four were ordered to turn over documents by Thursday and appear next week for testimony.

NEWS: Jan. 6 committee will "swiftly consider" whether to advance a criminal referral due to Bannon's noncompliance with a subpoena.

Meadows and Kash Patel are engaging with the committee

[Rick Plant]

Capitol Police whistleblower delivers scathing rebuke to two of its senior leaders on Jan. 6

The whistleblower alleges, among multiple serious allegations, that former acting chief Yogananda Pittman lied to Congress about an intelligence report Capitol Police received before that day’s riot

A former high-ranking Capitol Police official with knowledge of the department’s response to the Jan. 6 attack has sent congressional leaders a scathing letter accusing two of its senior leaders of mishandling evidence and failing to respond properly during the riot.

The whistleblower, who requested anonymity for privacy reasons and left the force months after the attack, sent the 16-page letter late last month to the top members of both parties in the House and Senate. His missive makes scorching allegations against Sean Gallagher, the Capitol Police’s acting chief of uniformed operations, and Yogananda Pittman, its assistant chief of police for protective and intelligence operations — who also served as its former acting chief.

The whistleblower accuses Gallagher and Pittman of deliberately choosing not to help officers under attack on Jan. 6 and alleges that Pittman lied to Congress about an intelligence report Capitol Police received before that day’s riot. After a lengthy career in the department, the whistleblower was a senior official on duty on Jan. 6.

The whistleblower’s criticism went beyond Capitol Police leaders to Congress. Without naming specific lawmakers, his letter accuses congressional leaders of having “purposefully failed” to tell the truth about the department’s failures.

USCP letter to Congress p.4


POLITICO obtained the letter detailing the allegations, which is circulating among Capitol Police officers, and is publishing portions of it here. To protect the whistleblower’s identity, POLITICO is not publishing the letter in full.

“The truth may be valued less than politics by many members of the congressional community to include those that have made decisions about the leadership of the USCP post January 6th, but I believe the truth still matters to real people and certainly the men and women of the U.S. Capitol Police,” the whistleblower wrote.

A spokesperson for the Capitol Police sent a statement in response to the letter that begins: “A lot has changed since January 6. Although there is more work to do, many of the problems described in the letter have been addressed.”

The spokesperson added that the department “has implemented, and continues to implement, many of the critical recommendations called for in” a Senate inquiry into Jan. 6, a separate review conducted by retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, and multiple probes by its own inspector general.

“The letter from the former employee echoes the thoughtful recommendations in those reports,” the Capitol Police spokesperson continued. “USCP leaders, under new Chief Tom Manger, are committed to learning from prior mistakes and protecting our brave officers, who fought valiantly on January 6, so we can continue to carry out the Department’s critical mission. The men and women of this Department are committed to that critical mission. Our goal is to work as a team, to move forward, and advance the work that keeps the U.S. Capitol and the people who work here safe.”

The letter was sent to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. The House Administration Committee’s Republican staff was also sent a copy.

The whistleblower accused Pittman of lying to Congress about a key intelligence report the department received in late December. That report noted that a blog called "thedonald.win" posted a map of the Capitol campus, and that commenters on the site called for protesters to carry guns and confront members of Congress on Jan. 6.

Pittman told congressional investigators in April that a cohort of senior officials in the department were also aware of that intelligence before the attack. The whistleblower claimed in his letter, however, that other officials did not receive the intelligence report, and that Pittman lied when she said they did.

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“These officials were the only officials that had all the intelligence information for the 6th,” the whistleblower wrote, regarding Gallagher and Pittman.

“The single most important piece of intelligence information ... was never shared with any members of USCP leadership,” the whistleblower added, asking: “Why did they approve the operational plan for the 6th if they knew the intelligence?”

A senior law enforcement official said that other people in the department actually did have the intelligence, but that it clearly should have been distributed more widely. The Capitol Police spokesperson disputed the allegation that Pittman lied to Congress and noted that the department has changed its internal and external intelligence-sharing practices because of the attack.

However, the report in question wasn’t the only key piece of intelligence that didn’t reach the right people in the department, according to the whistleblower. Gallagher and Pittman also had information showing groups that received permits to hold events surrounding the Capitol on Jan. 6 were all front operations for Stop the Steal, the whistleblower wrote.

Stop the Steal was a movement promoting the conspiracy theory that nefarious forces stole the election from Trump. The movement’s organizers promoted a rally on the National Mall that preceded the attack on the Capitol.

That was “game changing information,” the whistleblower added, but operational commanders — meaning, the law enforcement officers in the field supervising police activity — never learned about it.

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In the whistleblower’s view, Gallagher and Pittman had all the intelligence needed to justify demanding reinforcements from the National Guard, closing the doors to the Capitol and using tougher but less-than-lethal weapons on the morning of Jan. 6. But they didn’t share that intelligence with the right people, the whistleblower wrote, and instead approved a woefully inadequate security plan.

The whistleblower also said he spent hours during the attack in the Capitol Police’s Command Center with Pittman and Gallagher, claiming that they did little to stop the violence. The whistleblower's presence in the command center on Jan. 6 was confirmed by two other law enforcement officials and a third person who was there during the attack.

Those three people gave different accounts of how long the whistleblower was there. One of the people said he was there for six hours, another said he was there for “several” hours and a third said he was there for less than two hours.

“What I observed was them mostly sitting there, blankly looking at the TV screens showing real time footage of officers and officials fighting for the Congress and their lives,” the whistleblower wrote.

“It is my allegation that these two with intent and malice opted to not try and assist the officers and officials, blame others for the failures, and chose to try and use this event for their own personal promotions,” he added. “This was done not after the event but while officers and officials were still fighting the demonstrators.”

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They watched “mostly with their hands in their laps,” he added, and “did not try to help or assist as officers and officials were literally fighting for each other, their lives and the Congress.”

The two law enforcement official who confirmed Pittman and Gallagher's presence in the command center disputed the claim that they passively watched the attacks. Those officials said Gallagher focused on bringing in support from the National Guard and law enforcement partners, and that Pittman focused on the evacuation and protection of members of Congress and the vice president.

The whistleblower, however, wrote that officials and officers have resigned from the department en masse because Pittman and Gallagher haven’t been held accountable for what happened that day.

“This concerted effort to protect the two members of the Department without question the most responsible for the tragic events of January 6th is repulsive,” the whistleblower wrote.

And the whistleblower lambasted congressional leadership for letting Gallagher and Pittman maintain their senior roles in the police department even as a new chief took over at the Capitol Police.

“t is immensely embarrassing to the congressional leadership and staff that they selected the two individuals most responsible for the 6th to lead the Department after the 6th,” he wrote in his conclusion. “Especially since some entity selected them without any investigation. To hold them accountable would require this same group to admit they were wrong.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/08/capitol-police-whistleblower-rebuke-jan-6-515696