1/6 Insurrection Investigation

[Rick Plant]

Cheney: Scott Perry sought pardon for role in trying to overturn 2020 election results

The new details surfaced during the Jan. 6 select committee's first public hearing, as it launched the unveiling of its findings of a yearlong investigation into the insurrection.



Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, as well as multiple other Republican lawmakers, contacted the White House in the weeks after Jan. 6, 2021, to seek presidential pardons for their roles in attempting to overturn the presidential election results, the Jan. 6 select committee revealed Thursday in its prime-time hearing on the Capitol attack.

“Rep. Scott Perry … has refused to testify here,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), vice chair of the select committee, said as she opened its case to the American public. “As you will see, Representative Perry contacted the White House in the weeks after Jan. 6 to seek a presidential pardon. Multiple other Republican congressmen also sought presidential pardons for their roles in attempting to overturn the 2020 election”

The new details surfaced during the panel’s first public hearing, as the bipartisan committee launched the unveiling of its findings of a yearlong investigation into the insurrection. It’s the first of a string of hearings scheduled in the coming weeks that are set to paint a picture of a carefully planned and orchestrated attack on American democracy.

Perry was a major actor in then-President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the election, connecting Trump with Jeffrey Clark, an official in the Department of Justice who supported Trump’s efforts, according to testimony and documents obtained by the committee.

Cheney on Thursday talked about how close the former president came to appointing Clark as acting attorney general, and that the former president wanted Clark to send a letter to Georgia and five other states saying that “the U.S. Department of justice had ‘identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election.’”

“This letter is a lie,” Cheney said.

Perry, who is now chair of the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus, repeatedly pushed Trump’s chief of staff at the time, Mark Meadows, to implement the plan to sow doubt in the election results.

“Mark, just checking in as time continues to count down,” Perry texted Meadows on Dec. 26, 2020, according to messages released by the select panel. “11 days to 1/6 and 25 days to inauguration. We gotta get going!”

These efforts were halted after other Justice Department leaders threatened to resign if Trump moved forward with selecting Clark as attorney general.

Perry has not complied with a subpoena for his testimony, and as POLITICO reported last week, the select committee was told that Meadows burned papers after meeting with the Republican in his office at the White House. The meeting took place in the weeks after Election Day in 2020, as Trump and his allies began seeking ways to overturn the loss against Joe Biden.

Watch video in link below:

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/09/cheney-scott-perry-jan-6-hearing-00038724

[Rick Plant]

A sitting member of Congress Lauren Boebert actively encouraged insurrection leading up to January 6 and then on January 6 tweeted Speaker Pelosi's movements DURING the attack.




The Clear Cider @TheClearCider

Lauren Boebert @laurenboebert attended Trump’s January 6th insurrection treason rally."Stop the Steal" organizer Ali Alexander too. What do you think Boebert did to acquire VIP front-row seats -- after only having been in Congress for 3 DAYS prior?

Watch: https://twitter.com/TheClearCider/status/1535036905183641614

[Rick Plant]

Liz Cheney: Trump unconcerned by Jan. 6 threats to hang Pence, said he 'deserves it'

Former President Donald Trump seemed to support threats from rioters to hang the former vice president during the attack on the Capitol, saying “Mike Pence deserves it,” House Jan. 6 committee vice chairman Liz Cheney said Thursday night.

Cheney, the top Republican on the panel, said that testimony from former Trump aides shows Trump was not concerned about stated threats on Pence’s life as pro-Trump rioters sacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Cheney also said that according to senior officials in the Trump administration, Trump knew that he lost the election.

"Trump’s intention was to remain president of the United States despite the lawful outcome of the 2020 election and in violation of his constitutional obligation to relinquish power,” Cheney said.

Thursday marked the first of a series of hearings investigating Trump’s efforts to overthrow the 2020 election results, something lawmakers dubbed an attempted “coup,” and the resulting attack on the Capitol.

The rioters got within 2 doors of Vice President Mike Pence's office. See how in this 3D explainer from Yahoo Immersive in link below.

https://news.yahoo.com/liz-cheney-trump-unconcerned-by-threats-to-hang-pence-said-he-deserves-it-005252594.html

[Rick Plant]

WATCH: 'It was carnage. It was chaos,' Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards says of Jan. 6 attack

Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards detailed the severe injuries she sustained trying to defend the Capitol from insurrectionists when it was attacked last year, telling the House Jan. 6 committee during its June 9 hearing one of the things she remembers most is looking out and seeing "the absolute war zone the west front had become."

Edwards was attacked by rioters multiple times as she tried to protect the Capitol that day. She was tear gassed and knocked down to the ground, at one point losing consciousness. At another time that day, she held the line against the rioters with Officer Brian Sicknick, who she described as “ghostly pale.” Sicknick collapsed the evening of the attack, suffering two strokes and dying the next day.

"I can't even describe what I saw. Never in my wildest dreams did I think as a police officer, law enforcement officer, I would find myself in the middle of a battle. I'm trained to detain a couple of subjects and handle a crowd, but I'm not combat trained. And that day, it was just hours of hand-to-hand combat, of dealing with things that were way beyond any law enforcement officer has ever trained for."

"There were officers on the ground. They were bleeding, they were throwing up. I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people's blood ... It was carnage. It was chaos," she said.

Edwards is believed to have been one of the first officers injured during the attack, the New York Times reported last year. The committee played several clips of her being attacked.

She described standing near a barricade as members of the Proud Boys, a far-right group that played a key role in the violence, escalated their attack. She described telling her sergeant they would need more people to defend the Capitol before a bike rack was thrown on top of her and she hit her head on nearby stairs, causing her to black out.

But after regaining consciousness, Edwards, then 31, returned to defending the Capitol. “Adrenaline kicked in. I ran towards the west front, and I tried to hold the line at the Senate steps at the lower west terrace. More people kept coming at us.”

The hearing June 9 was the first of several planned by the Jan. 6 committee in the coming weeks. In the year since its creation, the committee has conducted more than 1,000 interviews, seeking critical information and documents from people witness to, or involved in, the violence that day.

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

Key takeaways from the first Jan. 6 hearing: It's all about Trump

Behind the production was a message: Trump fed the lie that the election was stolen, stoked anger among his supporters  and then did nothing as they stormed the Capitol.

WASHINGTON — One person more than any other set in motion the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the committee investigating the riot argued at its first public hearing Thursday.   

And that person is Donald Trump.

He sparked the riot at the Capitol and nearly shredded American democracy in pursuit of power, the House Jan. 6 committee contended in what will serve as the opening argument in a weekslong effort to make a case to the public.

Members of the committee set out to explain a multilayered scheme to overturn the 2020 election and nullify millions of votes cast for Joe Biden.

The committee rolled out never-before-seen video of interviews with Trump’s inner circle and graphic images of the siege at the Capitol.

But behind all the production was a recurring message: Trump fed the lie that the election was stolen, stoked anger among his supporters who stormed the Capitol and then did nothing when lawmakers, aides and family members implored him to stop the attack.

In fact, Trump began yelling and became “really angry at advisers who told him he needed to be doing something more,” Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the vice chair of the committee, said in her opening statement.

Holding its initial public hearing in prime time, the committee faced a tricky challenge: capturing the attention of Americans who may feel they know all they need to know about a dark episode in U.S. history that has gotten extensive coverage. But having interviewed 1,000 people behind closed doors and collected 140,000 records, the committee presented findings that proved surprising enough to elicit gasps from lawmakers in the hearing room.

These are the takeaways from the first hearing:

As rioters stormed the Capitol, Trump was fixated on politics

Trump believed that his supporters “were doing what they should be doing,” Cheney said. Indeed, the riot was, in some sense, the inevitable result of his plan to sow doubts about the election results and persuade Americans that he legitimately won, according to the committee.

“As you will see, this misinformation campaign provoked the violence on January 6th,” Cheney said.

His top aide, meanwhile, didn’t want Trump to be upstaged by the vice president. The panel played audio of an interview with Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Milley described a conversation he had with Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, on Jan 6. Meadows, he testified, told him: “We have to kill the narrative that the vice president [Mike Pence] is making all the decisions. We need to establish the narrative that the president is still in charge and that things are steady or stable, or words to that effect.” Milley dismissed Meadows’ focus as, simply, “politics,” and added, “I don’t do political narratives.” 

Nor should the committee, some observers warn. By making Trump a singular focus, the committee risks appearing to be a partisan player, not a neutral fact-finder. Before the hearing, Doug Jones, a former Democratic senator from Alabama, cautioned that the committee would lose credibility if it dwells on Trump.

The committee painted Pence as an unlikely hero

And yet, in important ways, Pence was in charge that day.

He was in the building presiding over the counting of electoral votes when the mob broke through police lines. Secret Service agents rushed Pence to safety as rioters roamed the Capitol.

With the building overrun, Trump didn’t alert any arm of government to defend the people inside, the committee said. He didn’t speak to his attorney general or his defense secretary, nor did he order the deployment of the National Guard.

Pence did all that.

Milley described Pence as “very firm,” issuing instructions to “get the military down here, get the [National] Guard down here. Put down this situation.”

A coming hearing will spell out how Pence and his staff told Trump repeatedly that it would be illegal for the vice president to refuse to count certain electoral votes, as Trump wanted him to do.

Loyal though he was, Pence chose to break with Trump rather than subvert the election.

Trump’s appointees worried he was unfit to govern, threatened to quit

Trump’s behavior was so disturbing that his Cabinet considered whether he needed to be removed. Cabinet members discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, a vehicle for replacing a president. And one unnamed Cabinet member suggested that, in the face of Trump’s behavior, they all start playing a more direct role in running both the White House and the administration.

"They knew that President Donald Trump was too dangerous to be left alone,” Cheney said.

Turnover was always a problem in Trump’s White House. His White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, was “so concerned about potentially lawless activity he threatened to resign multiple times,” Cheney said. 

Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner suggested the White House counsel’s staff were crybabies
But Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, appeared dismissive of the warnings.

When he testified before the committee, Cheney asked him about Cipollone’s threats to quit.

The committee aired a snippet of Kushner’s response, in which he said Cipollone and people in his office often said they would leave. “So I kind of took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you,” he said.

Future hearings will reveal other parts of Trump’s plan to stay in power

The hearing served as something of a teaser. Over the coming weeks, the panel plans to hold at least six more public hearings and flesh out various pieces of the plot to keep Trump in power.

Another hearing will reveal how Trump wanted to fire senior Justice Department officials who refused to follow his instructions and “just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”

Cheney also said that the committee continues to investigate and that more information could come to light. She left open the possibility that the hearings might extend through the summer.

The final hearings this month will include Trump aides who were in the West Wing that day, Cheney said.

Trump was told that Biden won fair and square

Trump and his top aide were specifically told there was no widespread ballot fraud. The committee aired a videotaped deposition with one of Trump’s campaign lawyers, Alex Cannon, who spoke to Meadows about allegations of election fraud. Cannon testified that he informed Meadows that “we weren’t finding anything that would be sufficient to change the results in any of the key states.”

In response, Meadows said: “So there’s no there there.”

Trump had gotten much the same message. The panel aired part of a deposition in which former Attorney General William Barr said he told Trump directly that “I did not see evidence of fraud that would have affected the outcome of the election.”

Barr went on to say he warned Trump that “it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on that and that it was doing great, great disservice to the country.

Trump had gotten much the same message. The panel aired part of a deposition in which former Attorney General William Barr said he told Trump directly that “I did not see evidence of fraud that would have affected the outcome of the election.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/jan-6-hearing-committee-takeaways-day-one-rcna32656

[Rick Plant]

Jan. 6 committee puts Proud Boys at center of Trump's plot to overthrow the election



Most of the media coverage of this year's first major public hearing by the House Jan. 6 committee focused on the visceral horrors of the day, and the committee's firm conviction that this was what Donald Trump wanted to happen. Certainly, the newly released video footage was wrenching, and especially when Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards sat quietly through footage of her own assault at the hands of rioters. The committee also laid out the case that Trump was gleeful about the insurrection and, as Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said, told aides and associates that the rioters "were doing what they should be doing."

That case was presented in a compelling fashion, but for most people who have been following the reporting about what happened — and particularly Trump's role in it — very little of it was new. What was likely the biggest revelation of the night, however, was the central role played by the Proud Boys in the committee's narrative of the events of Jan. 6. Using footage and testimony from documentary filmmaker Nick Quested, the committee presented the case that the right-wing men's group, along with the similarly organized Oath Keepers, functioned as a vanguard that led the way for the rest of the mob, incited by Trump himself, that would storm the Capitol.

"The attack on our Capitol was not a spontaneous riot," Cheney explained. Over the two-hour hearing, the committee laid out evidence strongly suggesting not just that these far-right groups had coordinated the attack on the Capitol, but had anticipated that Trump would send them reinforcements, in the form of the "Stop the Steal" rally-goers he implored to march on the Capitol that day.

The crux of the case comes from Quested's testimony. He had been embedded with the Proud Boys before and during the events of Jan. 6, and had witnessed them communicating with members of the Oath Keepers. Perhaps most important, Quested's experiences showed that the Proud Boys weren't primarily in Washington for the rally itself. As Quested explained, the Proud Boys didn't seem particularly interested in Trump's speech and, rather than listening to it, went to the Capitol to do "recon" — in other words, to find weak spots in the building's security.

There were only a couple of hundred Proud Boys present that day, a crucial point that committee members made sure to emphasize. That's not enough people to take the Capitol by force, especially as very few were carrying firearms. Previous reporting on Oath Keeper text messages suggests that many of the alleged conspirators were worried that carrying guns into the District of Columbia, which is illegal, could lead to their arrest before they could spark a riot. The plot to take the Capitol wouldn't have made much sense with just the manpower those two groups could marshal on their own.

But of course, they weren't on their own. They had the large crowd of people attending Trump's rally, who followed along enthusiastically and provided exactly the overwhelming numbers the Proud Boys needed to pull it off. Most of those people were clearly not in on the plan to storm the Capitol, and many of them probably hadn't even considered doing so until they were caught up in the riot.

That's why Trump's speech matters so much. The president of the United States told his followers to march on the Capitol and promised, falsely, that he would join them. Indeed, recent reporting shows that Trump may have even vaguely wanted to do so, and had floated the idea for a couple of weeks until the Secret Service said no. Who knows what the mass of people who marched on the Capitol thought was going to happen when they started moving in that direction? But by the time they got there, the Proud Boys were leading the way, breeching the barriers and setting a tone of violence and mayhem that many other people in that crowd emulated.

"What you witnessed was what a coordinated plan effort would look like," explained committee chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss.

The implication here is hard to miss and — astonishing: The Proud Boys needed people to pull off an audacious scheme they could never have managed on their own. Trump provided those people. It's possible, although not proven, that the Proud Boys knew what Trump was going to say during the rally. It's possible they planned their actions assuming they would be joined by a crowd and angry crowd that they might be able to whip up into a violent mob. It's possible that the reason Trump was so focused on "marching" to the rally in the days leading up to Jan. 6 was because he shared this understanding.

After the hearing, Thompson appeared on CNN, where Jake Tapper asked him explicitly if we would hear from "witnesses that describe actual conversations between these extremist groups and anyone in Trump's orbit?"

"Yes," Thompson replied, though he did not elaborate on what those conversations were about.

As Peter Baker of the New York Times wrote, the committee is arguing that Trump "intentionally summoned a mob to stop the transfer of power" to Joe Biden. There's a lengthy record of public communications in which Trump makes winking references to his desire to see that happen, and at least some of his followers took that as a directive. Perhaps the most dramatic of those public communications was the Dec. 19, 2020, tweet urging supporters to come to the Jan. 6 protest, declaring it "will be wild!" As Cheney noted, Trump's adviser Steve Bannon released a podcast on Jan. 5 in which he said that "all hell is going to break loose tomorrow."

As provocative as those statements were, however, it's remains within the realm of plausibility that Trump and Bannon were hyping a more or less peaceful protest rather than deliberately inciting a riot. But if there's real evidence of coordination with the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, that's a very different story. The existing public evidence shows that these groups kicked off the riot deliberately, and that the rest of the crowd got swept up in the moment and joined in. What remains to be asked and answered is the question of whether that was the plan all along — and whether Donald Trump was in on it and his speech was part of the plan. In the coming weeks, we'll see how much solid evidence the committee has, and how much of this is mere implication.

https://www.rawstory.com/jan-6-committee-puts-proud-boys-at-center-of-trump-s-plot-to-overthrow-the-election/

[Rick Plant]

Ivanka's House hearing testimony undercut by former White House press secretary

Appearing on CNN's "New Day" the morning after the House Select Committee investigating the Jan 6th Capitol insurrection held its first televised hearing, former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham was less than impressed by a clip of Ivanka Trump claiming she knew her father Donald Trump's claim the 2020 presidential election was stolen was a lie.

The clip, shown early in the televised hearing, showed the first daughter telling investigators that after former Attorney General Bill Barr called accusations of voter fraud "bull**it," she acquiesced and said, "It affected my perspective. I respect Attorney General Barr so I accepted what he said."

According to Grisham, Ivanka's comment was important, but her actions after Jan 6th tell another story.

"Ivanka Trump is saying that she took Barr at his word that there was no fraud," host Berman prompted. "Was that your experience within Trump world that people knew that there was no there there?"

"Well, yes," she replied. "It reminded me of two things I want to say, number one with regard to Ivanka: I think that that's all well and good that she said that she believed Bill Barr, but if I remember correctly she was still traveling with her father while he pushed this big lie."

"If she was truly that impacted by Bill Barr which she should have been -- and I don't know what kind of conversations she was having privately with her father -- but perhaps she could have done a little bit more and not stood by his side while he publicly pushed the big lie," she continued. "It also reminded me very much of our White House and how everybody -- it was a workaround -- everybody knew, you know, that he was, one thing he was saying wasn't true and so we all just tried to work around him to get the best outcome we could for the country, all the while trying to keep this weird secret from this man."

"It was just an interesting thing to see and I wish she would have. if that were the case, she would have spoken up more," she added after turning back to Ivanka.

Watch: