1/6 Insurrection Investigation

[Rick Plant]

Troubling questions abound for Kansas police in wake of Jan. 6 Commission hearings



A chief of police candidate in Wichita a few years back said during the public interview process that an officer’s racism wasn’t necessarily a dealbreaker for employment. That response alarmed the Black community at the time — particularly because biased traffic stops around the country had recently escalated into shooting deaths — but nothing much came of it.

The question of what is or should be a disqualifying factor for police employment has taken on new urgency as the Jan. 6 commission uncovers more levels of criminality leading up to and taking place on that day. What are we to make of police officers who were among the white supremacists and seditionists storming the Capitol?

Should they be held to account just for their actions — which has been proved beyond doubt to be criminal — without regard for racist speech? Were they merely swept up in the moment, mimicking the language and actions of the president who summoned them there? (Recall, while still a private citizen living in his New York tower, Donald Trump claimed to have evidence proving that Barack Obama was ineligible to run for president because he wasn’t born in the United States. Birtherism, as it became known, was just the first of Trump’s numerous racist fictions unleashed for political gain.)

Or should they also be held to account for their words? Law enforcement officer salaries are paid through taxpayer funding. Does such speech demonstrate clear bias, a violation of their oath to serve and protect all members of the public equally?

Brandon Johnson, chairman of the Kansas Commission on Peace Officers Standards and Training, says actions of those storming the Capitol create a cut-and-dried case for firing. The words they used, he argues, also create such a case.

“Officers who traveled to the Capitol and took part in a direct attack on our democracy have broken their oath and because of the criminality of the insurrection should not be working in law enforcement,” he said.

“Officers who have stronger feelings of support for the disgusting rhetoric that the former president spewed regularly may have some biases that would potentially lead to biased negative treatment of members of those groups,” he added. “In my opinion, both racism and sexism should be dealbreakers in law enforcement due to the nature of their job of serving all of the public.”

Johnson’s commission has authority to investigate officers accused of wrongdoing — as long as an individual submits a request focused on a specific officer. A Kansas Open Records Act request for vacation days taken on or around Jan. 6, 2021, might mark a great starting point for such an investigation.

But we shouldn’t stop there. All complaints against officers and any disciplinary action reports should be made public.

The Jan. 6 hearings have implicated Trump more deeply in the horrid events of that day that left one woman dead, numerous officers injured and offices looted.

Trump reportedly asked rioters to show up armed and then wanted metal detectors removed. This may have led to the death and injury of officers who fought valiantly defending the Capitol, while Trump watched from the White House for hours as staffers and his daughter begged him to intervene.

The former president earned wide support from militant, white nationalist groups for his racially incendiary rhetoric. It was here that Johnson expressed concern about officers perhaps compromising their ability to mete out justice fairly in non-white communities.

Trump famously said there were good people on both sides of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Virginia where a Neo-Nazi sympathizer killed Heather Heyer when he drove his car into a crowd of counter protesters.

Trump’s rallies have continued to draw throngs of Confederate battle flag wavers, fatigue-wearing militiamen and survivalists and others seemingly obsessed with the rapidly changing racial demographics of our nation.

The fact that many white officers identify with a man with these kinds of views is chilling to people from communities who already disproportionately bear the brunt of stops, searches and police use of force. There’s not a ton of difference between racist language and racist actions where officers are concerned.

Johnson said if any officer was found to have committed one of the specific statutory offenses, they could be disciplined by the commission with a suspended or revoked law enforcement certification, depending on the infraction and the severity of it.

Johnson is right. This needs scrutiny.

Ideally, police protect communities. But if we’re sealing police files and remain unwilling to weed out officers with histories of discrimination and violence, it’s Black and brown communities that will need protection from police.

https://kansasreflector.com/2022/07/17/troubling-questions-abound-for-kansas-police-in-wake-of-jan-6-commission-hearings/

[Rick Plant]

Trump is trying to intimidate Jan 6th witnesses because he is running 'scared': former White House aide



Appearing on MSNBC on Sunday morning, a former aide to vice president Mike Pence said she is not surprised that Donald Trump is trying to potentially influence and/or manipulate the testimony of aides who might appear before the House Jan 6th committee.

Speaking with host Sam Stein, Oliva Trote said she believes that the former president is frightened about what they might say and her experience with him is that he wants people working under him to live in fear.

Reflecting on comments made by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) about a witness who was on the receiving end of an attempted Trump call, Troye said she was not surprised.

"First and foremost, I think Donald Trump is scared," the former White House aide responded.

"It's scary, it was a culture of fear in the White House for those of us that worked there and we're pretty much, people watched our every move, they watch what you are communicating, figure out how we were gonna deliver briefings on topics that they were not necessarily going to receive well," she explained. "So, this is intimidation and it wasn't surprising to me, which is actually more upsetting. I think that to Americans it should be."

"I wasn't shocked that Donald Trump would call someone and try to intimidate the witness in the sense because he kind of has the mob mentality," she added.

Trump is still facing prosecution in Georgia after a wiretapped call revealed that he had attempted to solicit Georgia officials to find more votes after he lost the state in the 2020 presidential election.

An aide for former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson, also testified against Trump recently to the January 6th committee.

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

Secret Service scrambling to explain deleted Jan. 6 texts to 'skeptical' House committee members: report

According to a report from the Guardian, Secret Service officials can't seem to get their story straight about why crucial texts on the day before and the day of the Jan 6th Capitol insurrection were deleted,

As the report notes, that has members of House select committee investigating Donald Trump and his links to the Capitol riot are skeptical about their claims.

According to the Guardian's Hugo Lowell, "The Secret Service’s account about how text messages from the day before and the day of the Capitol attack were erased has shifted several times, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security told the House January 6 select committee at a briefing on Friday."

The report notes that members were first told that the lost texts were the result of software upgrades only to later be informed that they vanished due to device replacements.

According to the inspector general who issued the bombshell report, the Secret Service is being less than transparent when asked for answers and has been stonewalling "by slow-walking production of materials."

"Members on the select committee were privately skeptical of the notion that the Secret Service managed to inadvertently erase key messages during a 10-day period that was among perhaps the most tumultuous for the agency, the participants said," the report states before adding, "If some of the texts were deliberately erased after the 16 January 2021 request, that could amount to obstruction of a congressional investigation, one of the select committee’s members added on Friday."

"The select committee has spent recent days trying to establish whether it was all texts from 5 January and 6 January 2021 that were lost or just some, exactly how the texts came to be erased, and whether additional days’ worth of texts from that month were missing," the Guardian's Lowell wrote. "The participants at the briefing said [IG Joseph] Cuffari was not able to provide clear answers on those questions, beyond the fact that he understood a proportion of texts from both the day before, and the day of, the Capitol attack remain unaccounted for."

You can read more here:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/16/secret-service-deleted-text-messages-january-6

[Rick Plant]

Hearing to show Trump’s Jan. 6 ‘dereliction of duty,’ House panel says

- A House committee’s hearing will offer the most compelling evidence yet of then-President Donald Trump’s “dereliction of duty” on the day of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

- New witnesses will detail his failure to stem an angry mob storming the Capitol, committee members said Sunday.

- The committee says it continues to receive fresh evidence each day and isn’t ruling out additional hearings or interviews with a bevy of additional people close to the president.



A House committee’s prime-time hearing Thursday will offer the most compelling evidence yet of then-President Donald Trump’s “dereliction of duty” on the day of the Jan. 6 insurrection, with new witnesses detailing his failure to stem an angry mob storming the Capitol, committee members said Sunday.

“This is going to open people’s eyes in a big way,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., a member of the House committee investigating the riot who will help lead Thursday’s session with Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va. “The president didn’t do anything.”

After a year-long investigation, the House Jan. 6 panel is seeking to wrap up what may be its last hearing, even as its probe continues to heat up.

The committee says it continues to receive fresh evidence each day and isn’t ruling out additional hearings or interviews with a bevy of additional people close to the president. One such figure is Steve Bannon, whose trial begins this week on criminal contempt of Congress charges for refusing to comply with the House committee’s subpoena.

The committee also issued an extraordinary subpoena last week to the Secret Service to produce texts by Tuesday from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021, following conflicting reports about whether they were deleted.

But panel members say Thursday’s hearing will be the most specific to date in laying out and weaving together previously known details on how Trump’s actions were at odds with his constitutional legal duty to stop the Jan. 6 riot. Unlike members of the public who generally have no duty to take action to prevent a crime, the Constitution requires a president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

“The commander in chief is the only person in the Constitution whose duty is explicitly laid out to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed,” Luria said. “I look at it as a dereliction of duty. (Trump) didn’t act. He had a duty to act.”

Thursday’s hearing will be the first in the prime-time slot since the June 9 debut that was viewed by an estimated 20 million people.

Luria said the hearing will highlight additional testimony from White House counsel Pat Cipollone and other witnesses, not yet seen before, “who will add a lot of value and information to the events of that critical time on January 6.” She cited Trump’s inaction that day for more than three hours, along with a tweet that afternoon criticizing Vice President Mike Pence for lacking courage to contest Democrat Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election that may have served to egg on the mob.

“We will go through pretty much minute by minute during that time frame, from the time he left the stage at the Ellipse, came back to the White House, and really sat in the White House, in the dining room, with his advisers urging him continuously to take action, to take more action,” Luria said.

The hearing comes at a critical juncture point for the panel, which is racing to wrap up findings for a final report this fall. The committee had originally expected at this point to be concluding much of its investigation with a final hearing but is now considering possible options for additional interviews and hearings, panel members said.

“This investigation is very much ongoing,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif. “The fact that a series of hearings is going to be concluded this Thursday doesn’t mean that our investigation is over. It’s very active, new witnesses are coming forward, additional information is coming forward.”

For instance, the committee took a rare step last week in issuing a subpoena to the Secret Service, an executive branch department. That came after it received a closed briefing from the Homeland Security Department watchdog that the Secret Service had deleted texts from around Jan. 6, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The finding raised the startling prospect of lost evidence that could shed further light on Trump’s actions during the insurrection, particularly after earlier testimony about his confrontation with security as he tried to join supporters at the Capitol.

“That’s what we have to get to the bottom of,” said Luria, regarding possibly missing texts. “Where are these text messages? Can they be recovered? And we have subpoenaed them because they’re legal records that we need to see for the committee.”

Luria spoke on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Lofgren was on ABC’s “This Week,” and Kinzinger appeared on CBS’ “Face the Nation."

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/17/hearing-to-show-trumps-jan-6-dereliction-of-duty-house-panel-says.html

[Rick Plant]

Justice Department asks court to continue holding high-level Capitol riot defendant Barry Ramey in pretrial jail.

They argued Ramey deployed chemical spray in the face of police and came to DC on Jan 6 with 'body armor, knee pads, pepper spray, and a gas mask."

[Rick Plant]

Update!

Feds to seek sentence of 15 years, no monetary fine for first Capitol riot defendant convicted at trial.

Guy Reffitt of TX, who was convicted of multiple counts & was accused of carrying gun while confronting police.

They seek multiple prison terms (concurrently 15 years)



Justice Department says Reffitt made advanced plans and “outfitted himself with weapons, body armor, and zip ties. This level of planning is consistent with application of the terrorism enhancement.”

Guy Reffitt had gun on his waist as he confronted police.

The Justice Department argued Reffitt engaged in acts of violence that were intended to influence the government through intimidation or coercion—acts that have been defined, by statue, as domestic terrorism".

[Rick Plant]

'Very suspicious': Secret Service expert questions use of texts on Jan 6th instead of agents using radios

Appearing on CNN on Monday morning, the co-author of a book on what it is like to be a Secret Service agent found Secret Service agents using texts during the Jan 6th insurrection -- instead of their radios -- to be highly "suspicious."

Speaking with host John Berman, Jeffrey Robinson, who co-wrote "Standing Next to History: An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service," claimed the entire story that the texts from Jan 5 and 6th were accidentally erased was not credible and suggested a cover-up by the Secret Service.

"Rep Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) says it's quite crazy that anything would be deleted. How crazy do you think?" host John Berman prompted.

"It's criminal," the author immediately shot back. "First of all, you have to understand something, and you've been in the business long enough to know that when you do any sort of investigative journalism there are two pillars, first is there is no such thing as a coincidence and the second thing is everybody lies. That explains the Secret Service response."

"Also, emails and texts do not get erased," he continued. "You may take them off of your phone, you may take them off of some server, but they exist somewhere out in cyberspace. So if the Secret Service cannot find them, cannot turn them over or, more relevantly, is not willing to turn them over, the NSA [National Security Agency] can get them and the committee should turn immediately to the NSA to have everything."

"But there's something else at work here," he continued. "These are texts and emails. You've followed the president, you know that when the secret service goes out with the principal, the president, there may be 150, 200 agents at every stop along the way in advance of where he's going, where he's been, whatever. They are all on the earpiece in their ear and the microphone on their sleeve. That's radio traffic going around all the agents in real time and that's all recorded. Why would anybody send a text or an email unless they didn't want to be on radio traffic -- that's very suspicious."

Watch: