1/6 Insurrection Investigation

[Rick Plant]

Jan. 6 panel to detail Trump’s 187 minutes of delay as insurrection grew



The U.S. House committee investigating the Jan.6 attack and Donald Trump’s role in it will focus in a Thursday evening hearing on the former president’s refusal for more than three hours to call off the rioters storming the U.S. Capitol, committee aides said Wednesday.

The hearing will be the eighth in the panel’s series to document its findings but is the first evening meeting since its initial presentation last month. It will begin at 8 p.m. ET and can be watched on a livestream here.

The committee leaders once indicated the series would comprise eight major public hearings, but aides now say more are likely, as the panel has heard from additional witnesses since the start of public meetings.

“There is potential for future hearings,” a committee aide said. “As we continue to gather evidence, continue to hear from witnesses, the committee will make a determination.” 

Committee members Elaine Luria, a Democrat from Virginia, and Illinois Republican Adam Kinzinger will lead the Thursday’s hearing, aides said. Chairman Bennie G. Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, will participate remotely after he tested positive for COVID-19 this week.

The hearing will examine Trump’s actions in the 187 minutes between the end of his speech on the White House Ellipse at about 1:10 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, and when he tweeted a video asking his supporters to leave the Capitol at 4:17 p.m., aides said.

Trump knew of the violence happening at the Capitol, where Congress was scheduled to certify the 2020 election results, aides said. Trump was the only person with the power to call off the attack, but declined to do so, the committee will show, according to aides.

Rather than intervene, Trump inflamed the mob with a tweet about Vice President Mike Pence.

Wendy Via, the president and cofounder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a group that has provided expert analysis to the committee, said in a Wednesday interview that the Pence tweet “shows intent” to incite a riot to disrupt the transfer of power.

Trump knew or should have known that tweet would agitate the crowd, she said.

The panel will show who in the White House, including Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman, spoke to Trump on Jan. 6.

The panel has not announced which witnesses will testify live, citing security concerns.

Testimony from the deposition of Trump White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, whom the committee questioned last week after it had already conducted six hearings, is expected to be a major part of the hearing.

Cipollone provided information on every aspect of Trump’s plan to overturn the election result, which the committee has detailed over its seven previous hearings, aides said.


The panel changed course and reordered the information it presented as more testimony came in, Via said. Cipollone coming forward “was huge,” she said.

Former Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson also provided much more information midway through the series after she changed her legal team. Hutchinson was the sole witness at a surprise hearing last month that detailed Trump’s activities on Jan. 6 and the days leading up to it.

https://www.azmirror.com/blog/jan-6-panel-to-detail-trumps-187-minutes-of-delay-as-insurrection-grew/


J6 to air damning video evidence of Trump on Jan. 7 during Thursday primetime hearing



New video evidence of Donald Trump will be played at Thursday's primetime hearing by the House Select Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

"One day after the last rioter had left the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump’s advisers urged him to give an address to the nation to condemn the violence, demand accountability for those who had stormed the halls of Congress and declare the 2020 election to be decided," The Washington Post reported Thursday. "He struggled to do it. Over the course of an hour of trying to tape the message, Trump resisted holding the rioters to account, trying to call them patriots, and refused to say the election was over, according to individuals familiar with the committee’s work."

The hearing will occur despite the select committee only now getting documents from the Secret Service, which deleted text messages.

"The public could get its first glimpse of outtakes from that recording Thursday night, when the Jan. 6 committee plans to offer a bold conclusion in its eighth hearing: Not only did Trump do nothing despite repeated entreaties by senior aides to help end the violence, but he sat back and enjoyed watching it," the newspaper reported. "He reluctantly condemned it — in a three-minute speech the evening of Jan. 7 — only after the efforts to overturn the 2020 election had failed and after aides told him that members of his own Cabinet were discussing invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office."

J6 aides are calling Thursday's hearing the "187-minute hearing."

"The hearing is also expected to tie together details from prior hearings, including the inflammatory presidential rhetoric that drew thousands to Washington that day, Trump’s willingness to grant audiences to fringe figures peddling fabulist and unconstitutional theories on how he could keep hold of the presidency and the many times he was urged to intervene during the violence but refused to do so," the newspaper reported. "All of it points to one conclusion, which the committee plans to argue Thursday: Trump wanted the violence, he is responsible for it and his unwillingness to help end it amounts to a dereliction of duty and a violation of his oath of office."

Read the full report: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/20/even-day-after-jan-6-trump-balked-condemning-violence/

[Rick Plant]

'I smell a rat': J6 panelist questions the Secret Service's 'disappeared' text messages from Jan. 6



WASHINGTON, D.C. — It was revealed on Tuesday evening that the U.S. Secret Service turned over a single text message from what their agents exchanged on Jan. 5 and 6.

Ahead of a data migration, the Secret Service received four requests from congressional committees to preserve records on Jan. 16, but on Jan. 25 they moved through a migration process anyway, despite knowing the data wasn't backed up to comply with the subpoenas.

"It's still a mystery to me, but I smell a rat," Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told reporters on Wednesday on Capitol Hill. "That seems like an awfully strange coincidence for all of those text messages to be vanished into oblivion on two days when there was also the worst violent insurrection after the Civil War."

What isn't currently clear is if the Secret Service also has no texts or communications from Jan. 4, 7, 8 or other days in Jan. 2021.

Former White House photographer Pete Souza explained that due to the Presidential Records Act, it didn't matter if someone deleted something from their device that all emails and texts were automatically backed up to the system. He asked if the Department of Homeland Security has an exception and if so, why.

Speaking to MSNBC on Wednesday, Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig revealed "there are a lot of techies out there who think they can recreate their records, but stay tuned. We'll see."

Former Watergate Prosecutor Jill Wine Banks noted, responding to reporter Hugo Lowell's piece at The Guardian, that the Secret Service is good at reconstructing lost text messages then which likely means "they are also good at deleting them completely from all backup devices and the cloud. Doubtful it's accidental if they can be recovered."

Under its umbrella, the Secret Service operates The National Computer Forensics Institute, which calls itself an "innovative facility is the nation’s premier law enforcement training facility in cyber and electronic crime forensics." Their site says that they are there to "educate state, local, tribal, territorial law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges in the continually evolving cyber and electronic crime related threats, and educate, train and equip them with the tools necessary for forensic examinations to combat those crimes."

When asked if she thinks there are more text messages that the Secret Service can find, House Select Committee member, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), simply said, "We'll find out."

Read More at The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/19/secret-service-one-text-message-january-6-committee



Here's how the J6 committee can recover the Secret Service's vanished information



On Wednesday's edition of MSNBC's "The ReidOut," former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner outlined the best way to recover the information wiped by Secret Service agents off their equipment, in what some experts believe to be a violation of the law.

Even if the data is not recoverable, said Kirschner, the January 6 Committee can put them under oath and make them recall as much of it as they can.

"Glenn, the Federal Records Act, violating that law, there would in fact be consequences for that, but since they can't find these records, you can't really reconstruct what the texts might have said," said anchor Joy Reid. "How would this each be approached potentially if there were violations of the law here?"

"Well, one way you can try to recreate what those text messages said is to put everybody under subpoena," said Kirschner. "Place them under oath and ask them, for example, when you were in the basement of the Capitol in the loading dock trying to urge the vice president to get into the car and he said what Representative Raskin said were the six most chilling words, 'I'm not getting in the car,' what did you communicate to your fellow Secret Service agents? I mean, put them under oath and sweat them."

Even just what is already known about the text message deletion, argued Kirschner, is enough for prosecutors to start investigating.

"You know, look, at this point, Joy, let's call it what it is," said Kirschner. "They were asked to preserve texts and they deleted them. That, to me, feels like what we call adequate predication, a fancy term for enough evidence to open a criminal probe. If the Secret Service did nothing wrong, then they should welcome an FBI investigation into something that really looks nefarious?"

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

Jan. 6 committee reveals new details about Secret Service deleting critical evidence



One day before the eighth public hearing by the Jan. 6 select committee, it is revealing new details about the text messages reportedly destroyed by the U.S. Secret Service.

"The U.S. Secret Service has determined it has no new texts to provide Congress relevant to its Jan. 6 investigation, and that any other texts its agents exchanged around the time of the 2021 attack on the Capitol were purged, according to a senior official briefed on the matter," Carol Leonnig reported for The Washington Post on Tuesday. "Also, the National Archives on Tuesday sought more information on 'the potential unauthorized deletion' of agency text messages."

On Wednesday, 560 days after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, the select committee revealed that the Secret Service has begun producing documents.

"The Secret Service has begun producing records pursuant to the subpoena we issued last week and our investigators are assessing that information," the select committee announced. "We have concerns about a system migration that we have been told resulted in the erasure of Secret Service cell phone data."

"The U.S. Secret Service system migration process went forward on January 27, 2021, just three weeks after the attack on the Capitol in which the Vice President of the United States while under the protection of the Secret Service, was steps from a violent mob hunting for him," the select committee continued. "The procedure for preserving content prior to this purge appears to have been contrary to federal records retention requirements and may represent a possible violation of the Federal Records Act. The Select Committee is seeking additional Secret Service records as well."

The deletion has drawn increased scrutiny as the Secret Service runs a "state-of-the-art, 40,000 square foot" National Computer Forensics Institute (NCFI).

"Irony with the missing US Secret Service texts from 5 January and 6 January 2021 is that their cyber forensics team is considered by top current and former US Attorneys as the best in the business — and if anyone could reconstruct lost texts, they could," Guardian correspondent Hugo Lowell reported.

But MSNBC legal analyst Jill Wine-Banks, who was a Watergate prosecutor before serving as the first female general counsel of the U.S. Army, had a different take than that it was ironic.

"The thing is if they are good at reconstructing lost texts, they are also good at deleting them completely from all backup devices and the cloud. Doubtful it's accidental if they can't be recovered," she argued.

Read More Here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/19/secret-service-texts/


Legal experts lash out at Secret Service in scathing op-ed: Your explanations won't wash



The U.S. Secret Service motto is "Worthy of Trust and Confidence." Recent events, including the apparent deletion of Jan. 6 evidence, have put a large question mark after that phrase, and the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection is moving to answer the question. Producing a complete inventory of the agency's texts around Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, is vital to the committee's search for truth.

The Secret Service was already embroiled in controversy about whether former agents may have been involved in witness intimidation targeting star committee witness Cassidy Hutchinson for her testimony about Trump's violent intent on Jan. 6. Then, on July 13, it emerged that the agency had deleted text messages relating to what happened on Jan. 5 and 6, and apparently did so after Inspector General Joseph Cuffaris requested them. Next, Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said that some of the agency's phone data had been lost due to a "pre-planned, three-month system migration" requiring agents to reset their mobile phones. The committee subpoenaed the texts. According to committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, the Secret Service said "they, in fact, had "pertinent texts." But on July 19, the Service announced it had nothing further to produce, apparently contradicting the statement that "none of the texts . . . had been lost."

The Service has vigorously denied the IG's charges that it obfuscated or "maliciously" deleted texts. But when an agency cannot seem to keep its story straight, it is Congress' oversight responsibility to penetrate the fog of facts.

That the agency has offered shifting explanations about the disappearing texts is alarming — their relevance would have been obvious to any law enforcement agency. Without question, any scheduled data deletion or device-replacement program should have been immediately suspended due to the paramount importance of preserving evidence regarding the historically unprecedented events of Jan. 6.

One of us (Eisen) worked regularly with the Secret Service, including on records-handling issues, as a former White House special counsel. The other two (Baron and Aftergut) are former federal prosecutors and experienced civil lawyers. We can say without hesitation that multiple Secret Service leaders and their attorneys would have known on Jan. 6 that an investigation of the Capitol insurrection was inevitable and that the Service would be asked for all pertinent communications, including its texts.

We can say without hesitation that Secret Service leaders and their attorneys would have known immediately that an investigation of the Capitol insurrection was inevitable.

Any litigator, including those at Secret Service, would also know that once the agency received a specific document preservation request, they were obligated to issue instructions throughout the agency regarding actions required to preserve data with potential evidentiary value. Lawyers who fail in that duty are subject to professional disciplinary action.

Companies changing information systems and migrating data routinely back up the data with multiple safeguards to ensure it is saved. Tools for such backups are widely available.

Even without backup, in the modern world deleted text messages are rarely irretrievable. Computer forensic recovery capabilities are so robust that data seldom truly disappears. Data security experts can usually show whether someone tried to scrub information — and those experts can often reconstruct the deleted data.

Because deletions of Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, texts apparently occurred after requests by Inspector General Cuffari, the Secret Service has some uncomfortable explaining to do for its failure to create adequate backup. Should the missing texts be forensically retrieved, they may help call Donald Trump to account, along with his tight circle of advisers who assisted in fomenting the Jan. 6 violence.

If the committee finds intentional deletion at the Secret Service after an IG information request, then another piece in an emerging obstruction of justice mosaic may fall into place. Destroying evidence with the intent to influence or obstruct a federal investigation is a federal offense. Multiple other potential offenses are cited by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in a July 18 complaint letter to the attorney general and FBI regarding the text deletions.

Recovered text messages could shed bright light on multiple central issues:

- Advance information, if any, the Secret Service possessed about firearms, bear spray and other weapons in the hands of pro-Trump demonstrators marching on the Capitol – or any coordinated planning to interfere with the Electoral College process.The extent to which Trump had been briefed on intelligence about potential violence and electoral disruption.

- Further corroboration of Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony that after Trump's Jan. 6 Ellipse speech, he directed his Secret Service detail to take him to Capitol Hill to lead marchers whom he knew were armed and attempting to interfere with the constitution's electoral certification process.

- Whether Trump or the Secret Service had planned to remove Vice President Mike Pence from the Capitol to prevent him from presiding over the electoral vote count. Pence reportedly told the Secret Service detail on Jan. 6, when agents asked to evacuate him: "I'm not getting in the car. If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off." Had Pence entered the vice presidential limo, he might have never certified the presidential election results, plunging the nation into uncharted waters.

In fairness, the Secret Service says it has already turned over phone data from 20 agents, 790,000 unredacted emails and other documents, as well as providing hours of formal testimony from its agents. Perhaps more is coming.

In any case, one question committee investigators cannot avoid is whether the Secret Service deviated from standard procedures at the behest of people the Trump administration placed in command there.

During Trump's administration, unprecedented coziness appears to have existed between the Secret Service and the White House. For example, Anthony Ornato was the Service's deputy assistant director who headed Trump's security detail until Trump made him White House deputy chief of staff for operations in December 2019.

While on Trump's staff, Ornato helped coordinate the infamous June 2020 Trump photo-op across from Lafayette Park, when police and military forcefully attacked peaceable political demonstrators. Following Hutchinson's June 2022 testimony, other former Trump administration aides have said that Ornato has a history of changing his story to protect Trump. Ornato is now back at Secret Service as an assistant director, and should be available to return to testify before the committee.

Given the reasonable probability of the House select committee recovering missing texts, Secret Service witnesses must bear in mind the danger of getting caught in a lie under oath. The committee has shown time and again that there is no substitute for the truth that is emerging from many of those closest to the events of Jan. 6.

The Secret Service deserves an opportunity to fully explain the process by which the texts came to be deleted. But it is clear that this most important chapter in the history of our republic can only be fully and accurately written with access to those missing texts or truthful testimony about what they would have revealed.

https://www.rawstory.com/secret-service-2657700184/

[Rick Plant]

MAGA world is going to have a hard time attacking Thursday's witnesses at Jan. 6 committee: Former Trump aide



Former White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin said that former President Donald Trump's allies in "MAGA world" are going to have a hard time trying to destroy the witnesses coming before the House Select Committee in the public hearing on Thursday.

Speaking to CNN, Griffin explained that Sarah Matthews, in particular, is a long-time Republican aide and she had been with Trump since the 2016 campaign.

She was "hand-picked by Kayleigh McEnany to work in the White House," Griffin explained. They aren't "going to be able to attack her as a 'Never-Trumper' or as a RINO."

Matthew Pottinger, the former deputy national security adviser, similarly is someone who has "enormous credibility on both sides of the aisle as a national security professional," she explained.

"He was the senior most NSC official in the White House on Jan. 6th," Griffin explained. "So, two very strong witnesses who are going to be able to talk about that critical day and what the former president was and was not willing to do and say, what the threat assessments were that were presented to him, and I think it's going to shed a lot of light. The one other thing I would note, I'd expect to hear a lot more of Pat Cipollone's testimony. We only got a little bit of that in the previous hearing. There are still hours of tape from that deposition that I think we'll hear in tomorrow's hearing."

See the conversation below:

‘Everybody knows they’re lying’: Morning Joe unloads on Secret Service for aiding coverup of Trump’s ‘fascist takeover’



MSNBC's Joe Scarborough bashed the U.S. Secret Service for losing text messages requested by a Cabinet-level inspector general from Jan. 6, 2021, and the day before.

The Secret Service has determined that data requested by the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general cannot be retrieved after an agency-wide reset of staff telephones starting in mid-January 2021, and the "Morning Joe" host said they were aiding a coverup of Donald Trump's attempt to overthrow the government.

"According to testimony before the [Jan. 6] committee and corroborated by others, Donald Trump lunged and grabbed the steering wheel and lunged at a Secret Service member's neck telling him to take him up to the Capitol, and that was known within Secret Service circles," Scarborough said. "Now, of course, the Trumpers that he put in place in the Secret Service, that politicized the Secret Service was reported, now, they're denying it. As in the past with Donald Trump, everybody knows they're lying, but now we're supposed to think that would we have text messages that would back this up from the Secret Service, we're supposed to think it's a bureaucratic snafu. It doesn't work that way."

"They knew, again, this is like the days after Pearl Harbor, it's like the days after Pearl Harbor, the people running radar are burning all their documents at the base there," Scarborough added. "Nobody would believe that was a bureaucratic snafu. It was the destruction of documents that could help us better understand what unfolded as a president who was defeated at the polls was attempting a fascist takeover of American democracy."

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

Trump made video condemning Capitol riots because he feared cabinet would use 25th Amendment to remove him: CNN

Thursday night's House Select Committee hearing is expected to dive into former President Donald Trump's actions during the January 6th Capitol riots -- and also his actions in the immediate aftermath.

On January 7th, 2021, Trump made a video in which he condemned the riots at the Capitol as lawless acts of violence.

However, the J6 Committee is reportedly preparing to show outtakes of Trump's riot-condemning speech in which he expresses reluctance to condemn the attackers.

CNN's Kaitlan Collins said on Wednesday that sources have told the network that "one of the only reasons Trump actually made that video was aides warned him about the fact that his own cabinet might be preparing to use the 25th Amendment to remove him from office" if he failed to do so.

The January 7th video in question is much more forceful in condemning the violence at the Capitol that Trump made on January 6th.

Although the twice-impeached former president did call on the rioters to leave the Capitol on that day, he also told them that "we love you, you're very special" and again repeated his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was "stolen" from them.

Watch the CNN report below:

[Rick Plant]

Adam Kinzinger offers video preview of Thursday's blockbuster J6 Committee hearing

On Thursday, ahead of the latest public hearing by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) released a clip showing some of the information that will be discussed during the hearing.

One of the key points laid out in the video — which depicts various witnesses sitting for depositions — is that former President Donald Trump was removed from the fray, watching everything on television and not doing anything to respond to the violence.

The question of what the former president was actually doing during the attack has loomed large over the proceedings, as it has bearing on whether or not Trump can be considered culpable for the attackers' actions, and whether he approved of their actions.

This comes amid other evidence that the former president did not activate the National Guard to protect members of Congress during the attack, and other people lower or even outside of the chain of command had to step in to keep them safe — something several retired generals and admirals publicly condemned as a "dereliction of duty."

A previous witness, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, testified that insofar as Trump wanted to do anything, it was to travel to the Capitol and join the rioters — and that at one point he even lunged at his own security detail for refusing to take him to the scene.

Adam Kinzinger @RepKinzinger

What was Donald Trump doing while the Capitol was under siege? Take a look.

Watch: https://twitter.com/i/status/1550107400232992768

[Rick Plant]

Live updates: Jan. 6 panel says Trump chose not to act during Capitol attack
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/21/1112023963/jan-6-hearing-livestream-how-to-watch-live-updates