1/6 Insurrection Investigation

[Rick Plant]

Watchdog to DOJ: Secret Service 'likely' broke federal criminal law by deleting text messages

A well-known non-partisan federal government accountability watchdog has filed a complaint with the U.S. Dept. of Justice, calling for an investigation into the Secret Service deleting text messages, saying it “likely” broke federal criminal law. The deletions reportedly occurred on messages sent between January 5 and 6, 2021, the day before and of the insurrection.

“It is extremely troubling to think that the Secret Service would destroy key evidence in any investigation, let alone one that is central to getting answers and accountability for the unprecedented attack on our democracy that occurred on January 6, 2021,” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) Chief Counsel Donald Sherman said in a statement.

The letter, dated Monday, is addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

“The Federal Records Act requires that agencies like the Secret Service preserve records so that there is a complete and accurate history of the government’s actions and decisions,” Sherman added. “It is especially distressing to see such behavior from a federal agency that had such critical duties during the attack on the Capitol and had a front row seat to former President Trump’s behavior that day. The Justice Department must take this apparent violation of federal law seriously.”

The Secret Service has offered differing explanations for the deletions.

AFP

[Rick Plant]

Jan. 6 committee reveals some of the Thursday witnesses for prime time hearing

The House Select Committee investigating the attack on Congress revealed that they will be calling former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews and Matthew Pottinger, a former deputy national security adviser, to answer questions.

Co-chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) made it clear in the last hearing that new witnesses would be heard and that those would be witnesses who Americans have not yet heard from.

Both of the individuals were on hand in the White House on Jan. 6 and could testify to what they witnessed in the 187 minutes that former President Donald Trump didn't act to help the vice president or officials, staff and police at the Capitol.

"Mr. Pottinger, who was in the White House much of the day of the riot, is one of the live witnesses for the hearing, which is expected to focus on the more than three hours in which Mr. Trump watched the violence unfold without taking any substantial steps to call off his supporters even as they threatened Vice President Mike Pence," said the New York Times.

Matthews, in particular, will speak to the efforts by White House staff to get Trump to issue a statement telling his supporters to stop the attack.

The hearing will air at 8 p.m. EST.

Read More Here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/18/us/politics/matthew-pottinger-jan-6-hearing.html


J6 chair announces committee's additional plans

The Chairman of the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, Bennie Thompson, has announced additional steps he is taking to keep the American people informed of the committee's findings.

On Thursday the Committee will hold its final event – at least for now – a primetime hearing that is expected to focus on Donald Trump's actions the day of, and especially during the actual January 6 insurrection. It will be the ninth public hearing the Committee has held, and like the others, it is expected to draw a huge audience.

But as Committee member Adam Kinzinger said over the weekend, they are finding more and more information and people willing to go on the record so the investigation is far from over.

NPR's Deirdre Walsh reports Chairman Thompson, citing the "flow of new info coming into [the] panel," Monday evening announced the Committee is changing its plans and will issue a "scaled-down" report of its findings in the fall, with its final report to be issued by the end of the year.

Axios' Andrew Solender notes the scaled-down report will likely be in September and adds that Chairman Thompson says the Committee will hold a hearing on both the scaled-down report and its final report.

Read More Here:

 https://twitter.com/AndrewSolender/status/1549166454414647303

[Rick Plant]

Trump and Giuliani prosecutions could create ‘headache’ for cases against Capitol rioters



The Department of Justice faces public and political pressure to investigate Donald Trump and his chief allies for their roles in the Jan. 6 insurrection, but hitting the former president with criminal charges could throw the cases against Capitol rioters into chaos.

Any decision to prosecute Trump is still probably several months away, at least, but DOJ charges against him or top allies such as Rudy Giuliani would create delays in cases against individuals who stormed the Capitol because their attorneys would almost certainly want evidence against the ex-president as part of the discovery process, reported Politico.

“If he does get indicted — Trump — that does seem better for all the other defendants,” said Nina Marino, of law firm Kaplan Marino in Los Angeles.

Defense attorneys could demand the mountain of evidence of Trump's actions around Jan. 6, 2021, to argue that his alleged incitement makes their clients less culpable, and there's already so much video, electronic and other evidence gathered about the Capitol riot that piling on that additional evidence could be even more costly and time-consuming.

“It’s messy. It’s a headache. And it’s a huge undertaking,” said Pace University law professor Bennett Gershman, an expert on discovery practices.

“It seems to me if you’re going through the Trump stuff or [Rudy] Giuliani stuff [and you find something potentially useful to defendants] you’ve got to turn it over,” Gershman added. “They would have to turn over information to them that is colorably favorable or would be something a defense attorney would want to see.”

Gershman and some other legal experts suspect that DOJ may be letting the House select committee take the lead in investigating Trump to avoid complicating lower-level cases.

“I think it’s logical to make that assumption,” Gershman said. “Why would they be going out ahead of the committee when what the committee is doing is gravy for them? The committee is giving them huge information that they might not otherwise have discovered. There’d be no reason why they would want to run out ahead here.”

Read More Here: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/18/probe-trump-existing-jan-6-cases-00046274

[Rick Plant]

Meet Garrett Ziegler: Today's top J6 witness was a key participant in Trump's election fraud scheme



Garrett Ziegler, a former aide to Trade Advisor Peter Navarro who acted as a key conduit between the Trump White House and the sprawling network of lawyers and conspiracy mongers promoting dubious election fraud theories in the final months of 2020, is expected to speak to the January 6th Committee on Tuesday morning.

Ziegler announced his interview in a message to his followers on Telegram at the stroke of midnight on Monday, writing, “Yours truly going before the scam committee on Tuesday morning. Such a joke, but don’t worry — I’ll do nothing but tell the truth: Trump did nothing wrong & the election was stolen!”

Fanatically loyal to Trump, Ziegler played a crucial role in facilitating an infamous late-night meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18, 2020 by using his access pass to usher lawyer Sidney Powell, retired Lt. General Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne into the White House, where they proposed a plan to have the president invoke the Insurrection Act while ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines and re-run the election in states narrowly lost to Joe Biden.

The meeting, which ran for four and a half hours, devolved into a screaming match between the Powell camp and White House lawyers led by Chief Counsel Pat Cipollone, with the two sides nearly coming to blows. At the end, Trump reportedly appointed Powell to the ill-defined position of special counsel, although nothing seems to have come of the action. Byrne, who reportedly spoke to the January 6th Committee on July 15, recently told the far-right outlet Epoch Times that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, told him he persuaded the president to reverse course by telling him that if they went forward with the plan “we’d all be in prison.”

Less than two hours after the raucous meeting broke up, Trump tweeted a call for his supporters to descend on Washington, DC on Jan. 6. Trump’s tweet included a link to the Navarro Report, which was prepared with Ziegler’s assistance. The president wrote, “Peter Navarro releases 36-page report alleging election fraud ‘more than sufficient’ to swing victory to Trump. A great report by Peter. Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

Byrne’s preexisting relationships with Ziegler and another White House staffer, Patrick Weaver, allowed Powell and Flynn to circumvent Meadows as a gatekeeper to the Trump White House.

“I was the one who pulled together kind of this plan without really even letting Sidney or General Flynn know what might be at the end of it,” Byrne said at a press conference in February. “I’d gotten to know some staffers who had always been inviting — ‘Oh, you gotta come over to the White House sometime and let us give you a tour.’” Byrne said he called one of the aides — it's not clear whether it was Ziegler or Weaver — around 6:15 p.m. to arrange the visit.

Ziegler described the visit in a June 2021 interview with David K. Clements, a former New Mexico State University professor who has traveled around the country promoting the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Ziegler told Clements that he used his visitors pass to get Byrne, Powell and Flynn into the White House, but that Weaver was the one who actually let them into the building. Once Meadows and Cipollone discovered that it was his pass that had been used to get the trio into the White House, Ziegler said, his visitors' privileges were taken away.

It is not clear how Byrne initially met Ziegler and Weaver, but by the time of the Dec. 18 meeting, Ziegler for one had been enmeshed in a frantic hive of effort to overturn the election with Byrne near the center as a financial sponsor.

From Nov. 15 to Jan. 12, Ziegler told Clements, he and three other aides, including Joanna Miller, helped Navarro assemble the three-volume report, adding that he often spent six hours a day beyond his formal duties in the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy working on the election effort.

Ziegler made frequent trips across the Potomac River to the Westin Arlington Gateway during the period he was helping Navarro gather information for the report. Shortly after the election, Michael Trimarco, a New York City businessman and Giuliani associate, had rented a bloc of hotel rooms at the Westin, where he provided Powell with workspace, he told far-right podcaster Ann Vandersteel in an interview earlier this year. In mid-November 2020, Powell and Flynn relocated to Tomotley, the estate owned by attorney Lin Wood, to continue to work on lawsuits to challenge the election outcome in states that Trump had narrowly lost.

“We kept those same rooms, or I kept them, and had the team that didn’t go down there continue to work on election integrity, and they largely were working with Garrett Ziegler,” Trimarco told Vandersteel.

Among those pushing election-fraud conspiracy theories, some of which made it into the lawsuits, who variously described themselves as whistleblowers, journalists and analysts, were Terpsehore “Tore” Maras, Millie Weaver, Gavin Wince and Patrick Bergy.

Trimarco mentioned a handful of key figures, including former White House strategist Steve Bannon, as working in tandem in an interview earlier this year with Maras.

“I gotta say, the level-headedness of looking at this stuff, you know, by yourself, Patrick, Steve Bannon and Rudy was what really kept us on track,” Trimarco told Maras. “Because the funnel — the mouth of the funnel was huge. There was information coming in so fast and furious that it was impossible with the team we had to really vet through it all.”

Trimarco described a campaign running parallel to the lawsuits filed by Powell and Giuliani, which were all ultimately dismissed, to build pressure on lawmakers to set aside Biden electoral votes in the six battleground states, culminating on Jan. 6.

“When I was saying it to you and Millie back then, you were like, ‘Yeah, but it’s already under control,’” Trimarco recalled in his conversation with Maras. “And actually when I would say it to Steve, too, he would be like, ‘Look those guys aren’t going to do anything. These are a relic of the past elections. They’re just spineless and they’re not going to do much, if anything. But maybe if we kick it right to them, they have to make a decision because constituency politics will overwhelm them and they’ll maybe pay attention to the evidence that will have been presented on January 6th for the two hours of debate in each of these' — which was it — six states.”

A large portion of the information in the Navarro Report “came from this group of analysts that were working out of the Westin that did not go to Tomotley,” Trimarco told Vandersteel. “Garrett was key. I mean, this guy — talk about people really working 24-7. He would come around at 11, midnight, 1, after he’s clearly done at the White House, to get information. I saw him come by one or two times. But he was working with a few key people on our team to get the information.”

Trimarco has described himself as the designated point person for relaying information between Powell’s team and Giuliani. While the Trump campaign, represented by Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, formally cut ties with Powell, in reality the two legal teams continued to coordinate. While Trimarco was vetting information for Giuliani, Byrne — associated more closely with Powell and Flynn — was regularly flying Trimarco back and forth between DC and Long Island so he could see his wife, who was pregnant. Meanwhile, Byrne has confirmed to Raw Story that he was paying for the hotel rooms at the Westin where Maras, Weaver, Wince and Bergy were staying.

With Trimarco preoccupied with his wife’s pregnancy and limited in his ability to fulfill his courier function, he said information from the researchers ensconced at the Westin often reached Trump before Giuliani knew about it.

“Ironically, a lot of the stuff that got back to Rudy didn’t end up coming through me,” Trimarco said. “Because once that connection was made, Garrett would give it to Peter, and Peter would give it to the president. And then it would circle back to Rudy.”

Ziegler noted in a Telegram post that the Navarro Report was heavily sourced “with hundreds of footnotes and affidavits,” and he boasted: “I still think I’m the only person in the USA with all the unredacted affidavits ha.”

In one instance, information gleaned from affidavits collected for the lawsuits was reportedly used in a report drafted by Ziegler’s White House colleague Joanna Miller, which was then forwarded to Giuliani for the purpose of pressuring state legislatures to reverse Biden’s win.

Entitled “Dominion Voting Systems: OVERVIEW 12/2/20 – History, Executives, Vote Manipulation Ability and Design, Foreign Ties,” the report drew on an anonymous declaration by a man described as “a former high-ranking Venezuelan military officer.” The affidavit was used in four lawsuits filed by Powell around the same time — between Nov. 25 and Dec. 2 — seeking to overturn election results in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona. Citing the affidavit, the report suggested that election software used in the 2020 US election was tied to vote-rigging in Venezuela.

In a defamation suit brought in November 2021, the election software company Smartmatic argued that Powell should have known the declarant wasn’t reliable because he claimed to have been present during discussions around February 2009 in which the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez “offered to pay Smartmatic to create or modify its voting system to rig elections,” and then to claim that he “closely observed” the same system rig votes three years earlier — a feat that “is clearly impossible absent the invention of time travel.”

The publicly available version of the Dominion report, which was first published in early December 2020 by the conservative outlet Gateway Pundit, named Katherine Friess, a volunteer on the Trump election legal team, as the author. The Guardian reported that the original version of the document named Miller as the author, but that her name was removed before it was sent to Giuliani on Nov. 29.

It is unclear whether Ziegler was directly involved in the production of the report, and he did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

One of Ziegler's claims directly reached the president, and was cited by Trump in his effort to enlist White House counsel in his campaign to cling to power.

“The young and earnest Garrett Ziegler rides to the sound of the guns in Nevada,” Navarro wrote in his book In Trump Time: A Journal of America’s Plague Year, recounting how Ziegler researched allegations of voter fraud immediately after the election. “He will soon find himself crisscrossing an Indian reservation investigating outrageously illegitimate bribes for Biden votes.”

As previously reported by Raw Story, although some election advocates such as Nevada Native Vote did offer free food, gift cards and raffle entries to voters, the giveaways were available to all voters, and not tied to support for any specific candidate.

“Then he went off on double voting,” former Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue’s testified during a June 13 hearing of the January 6th Committee, as he recounted a meeting with President Trump. “‘Dead people are voting. Indians are getting paid to vote.’ He meant people on Native American reservations. He said, ‘There’s lots of fraud going on here.’ I told him flat-out that much of the information he’s getting is false and/or just not supported by the evidence. We look at the allegations, but they don’t pan out.”

https://www.rawstory.com/garrett-ziegler-2657690865/

[Rick Plant]

Former high-ranking Trump official will testify at Jan. 6 hearing

Matthew Pottinger, who served on former President Donald Trump’s National Security Council will testify publicly at Thursday’s prime-time hearing held by the House select committee investigating the US Capitol attack, according to multiple sources familiar with the plans. Pottinger resigned in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

14 key moments from the Jan. 6 committee hearings — so far
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/19/1112177450/14-key-moments-from-the-jan-6-committee-hearings-so-far

[Rick Plant]

'What was he doing?' MSNBC analyst blows up at Republicans for standing by Trump as he did 'nothing' to stop the mob



On Tuesday's edition of MSNBC's "Deadline: White House," analyst Jason Johnson tore into former President Donald Trump for standing by and allowing his supporters to overrun the Capitol and endanger the lives of members of Congress.

Johnson also took aim at Republicans who continue to defend the former president in the face of all the evidence about his activities that has emerged from the House hearings on the matter.

"He sat on his rear end and willfully ignored the counsel from everyone around him, that what he sought to do on January 6th was illegal, ill-advised, what he sought to do at DOJ would lead to a Saturday Night Massacre, the likes of which would make the actual Saturday Night Massacre look small," said anchor Nicolle Wallace. "What the committee has succeeded in doing is showing that the president knew that January 6th was not an opportunity to overturn the election, that that was illegal."

"Nicolle, that's the thing," said Johnson. "He already knew, hey, dude, it's not working. Every piece of documentation, every corrupt crony that he had put in office, even they said, this is a bridge — this is a Chris Christie bridge too far, right? Just blocked. You can't do it. There's no way you can do this. He knew it already, and so January 6th can be seen as nothing but an attempt at a violent overthrow of the United States government."

"I think what's important, Nicolle, and this is what I'm really fascinated to see on Thursday, it's like, what on earth else could he have been doing at the time?" said Johnson. "What was he doing? What else could be more important? We're mad about Uvalde cops for waiting too long to go in to stop a mass shooter. Their lives were in danger, but that's what we expect them to do. This man's job was to protect the country. All he had to do was make a phone call or a tweet, and he wouldn't do it. In fact, he darn near encouraged people to kill his vice president."

"I'm curious as to what Republicans have to tell themselves at night before they go to bed, having survived last year, to tell themselves that made it okay that for hundreds of minutes, this man did nothing to protect the country as he attempted to slaughter every member of Congress," Johnson added.

Watch below: