1/6 Insurrection Investigation

[Rick Plant]

Jan. 6 committee to add hearings until July as new evidence pours in

The House select committee will add more public hearings next month after receiving significant new evidence related to Donald Trump's effort to overturn his election loss.

The panel will hold another hearing Thursday focused on Trump's pressure campaign against the Department of Justice, but select committee chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) told reporters on Wednesday the remaining hearings would be rescheduled for July.

"The panel is reassessing its schedule after significant new tranches of evidence have arrived — including documentary footage, NARA productions and new tips," reported Politico's Kyle Cheney.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) had said after Wednesday's hearing that the committee was "picking up new evidence on a daily basis with enormous velocity," and Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) said the schedule was "fluid" as committee members sorted the evidence and tried to determine which hearings it best fit.

A source familiar with the matter also said the committee was discussing the possibility of scheduling additional hearings to present some of the new evidence.

Thompson has solicited testimony and other evidence during the public hearings and has said that additional witnesses have come forward as a result.

Kyle Cheney @kyledcheney

NEWS: Bennie Thompson tells us that after Thursday, the select committee will resume hearings in July. The panel is reassessing its schedule after significant new tranches of evidence have arrived — including documentary footage, NARA productions and new tips.

https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1539644114014072833

[Rick Plant]

Tuesday's January 6th hearing was the closest yet to directly accusing Donald Trump of crimes



The J6 committee set out Tuesday to illustrate for the public just how the former president and his advisers tried getting state lawmakers and election officials to overturn the result of the 2020 election, thus potentially breaking myriad state and federal laws in the bargain.

I think the committee succeeded.

But it did more than that.

It underscored a theory of mine, which is this: Donald Trump had and still has at his disposal two groups ready to commit acts of political violence, or threaten acts of political violence, when he gives the word. These people are not going away. They live and work among us.

One is paramilitaries of the kind who sacked and looted the US Capitol with the clear intention of murdering members of the Congress in order to terrify Vice President Mike Pence into completing the coup.

Armed men showed up at the homes of witnesses as well as their family member’s homes. Armed men were outside the Arizona House of Representatives while inside Jacob Chansley (“the QAnon Shaman”) led an illegal protest. Rusty Bowers, who testified, is the speaker of the Arizona House. He said the Proud Boys called him out by name. Some people broke into a witness’s widowed daughter-in-law’s house.

The other group is bigger. It’s a vast informal network of Trump supporters prepared to pressure, harass, intimidate and threaten lawmakers and election officials who said no to the former president.

Trump supporters posted online personal information on lawmakers and election officials, including home addresses and phone numbers. Some victims were so inundated with emails, texts and calls they couldn’t function. Georgia Secretary of State Ben Raffensperger’s wife was sexually harassed. The worst story came from a normal person.

Shaye Moss used to work in the Georgia elections office. She and her mom, Ruby Freeman, became the center of a conspiracy theory cooked up by Trump and his campaign goons, especially Rudy Giuliani.

The theory focused on a video he claimed showed Moss and Freeman adding ballots to Biden’s total in Georgia. Giuliani told the state senators that they were passing “USB ports” between them “as if they were vials of cocaine.” Trump told Raffensperger in a long phone call that Freeman was “a professional vote scammer and hustler.”

Per testimony from Raffensperger and lieutenant Gabriel Sterling, the video showed, when seen in its entirety, normal vote processing as well as an error. Poll workers had thought they could go home late in the evening. Then they were told they had to finish the count. As for the “vials of cocaine,” Moss said her mom passed her a “ginger mint.”

Did I mention Moss and Freeman are Black?

Due to the threats, harassment and intimidation she received (Trump said her name 18 times during his call to Raffensperger), Ruby Freeman no longer uses her name in public. She’s too “worried about who is listening.” She had to move out of her house for two months before and after the J6 insurrection. “Do you know how it feels like to have the president of the United States target you?” Freeman asked.

The J6 committee, led Tuesday by California Congressman Adam Schiff, demonstrated how the former president and advisers used the Big Lie to straw-boss state lawmakers and state election officials into doing one of two things: “decertify” state electors or send fake slates of state electors to Washington. For either, “there was no legal pathway,” Bowers said, which is a careful way of suggesting each was illegal.

Indeed, this fourth committee hearing came closest, I think, to suggesting Trump and allies committed state and federal crimes. “We have a lot of theories; we just don’t have the evidence,” Bowers said Giuliani said. And yet they pressed on knowing everything was a lie.

They duped people into thinking it was legal to serve on a fake slate of electors. They told fake electors that they were assembling just in case the court’s broke Trump’s wake. They did not break his way, but that didn’t stop Trump and his advisers from sending fake certificates validating fake electors to the National Archives. The last time I checked, submitting fake documents to the government is bad.

“I would not have participated,” said a fake elector, if he had known the former president's own legal counsel – Justin Clark, Matt Morgan and Josh Finley – washed their hands of any plan involving fake electors.

The biggest criminal red light, it seemed to me, was Trump threatening Raffensperger with either criminal investigation by federal authorities or intimidation and worse from his vast networked mob.

“When you talk about no criminality [no voter fraud], I think it’s dangerous stuff for you to say that,” Trump told Raffensperger.

Republican Vice Chair Liz Cheney leaned in: “Each of these efforts to overturn the election is independently serious,” she said. “Each deserves attention both by Congress and by our Department of Justice.”

I don’t think anything said so far has jumped out so far.

AFP

[Rick Plant]

Former acting Trump AG will publicly testify there's no proof of widespread election fraud



The man whom former President Donald Trump appointed to be his acting attorney general in the wake of Bill Barr's resignation will publicly testify to the House Select Committee investigating January 6th on Thursday that there is no proof that the 2020 election was stolen.

CNN has obtained a copy of Rosen's pre-prepared remarks and they show the former Trump DOJ official will directly contradict the former president's claims of widespread election fraud.

"Some argued to the former President and public that the election was corrupt and stolen," Rosen will say. "That view was wrong then and it is wrong today, and I hope our presence here today helps reaffirm that fact."

During his brief tenure as acting AG, Rosen was asked by Trump to declare the 2020 election "corrupt" as a pretext for sending certified votes back to Republican-controlled state legislatures.

When Rosen resisted, Trump then mulled appointing loyalist Jeffrey Clark as his new acting AG. The former president backed off when Rosen and multiple other top DOJ officials, as well as White House counsel Pat Cipollone, threatened to resign in protest.

Rosen's testimony will come as part of a hearing that will examine how Trump attempted to use the Department of Justice to stay in power despite having lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/23/politics/january-6-hearings-day-5-what-to-expect/index.html

[Rick Plant]

Who you'll hear from and what to expect in today's Jan. 6 House committee hearing



The fifth hearing of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol will focus on former President Donald Trump's pressure on the Department of Justice to help him overturn the 2020 election.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the committee, will lead Thursday's hearing, set for 3 p.m. It is expected to last roughly two hours like previous hearings.

This hearing was supposed to take place last Wednesday but was postponed for what panel member Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., called "technical issues."

The witnesses are former top DOJ officials

Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and former Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue are among Thursday's witnesses. Both refused to give in to Trump's efforts to get the DOJ to advance his fraudulent claims of voter fraud and overturn the election.

When former Attorney General Bill Barr announced his resignation in December 2020, Trump badgered Rosen and Donoghue in at least nine calls and meetings, according to a report by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen," Trump told the two men, according to their testimony.

Also to appear in Thursday's hearing is Steven Engel, who headed DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel. Engel was one of the officials who told the former president he would have no choice but to quit if Trump replaced the acting attorney general with environmental lawyer Jeffrey Bossert Clark. Clark was reportedly more willing to go along with Trump's fraudulent claims of a stolen election.

Several other DOJ lawyers, including Donoghue, also threatened to quit if Clark was appointed.

"The President said 'Suppose I do this. Suppose I replace him, Jeff Rosen, with him, Jeff Clark. What do you do?' And I said 'Sir, I would resign immediately. There is no way I'm serving one minute under this guy, Jeff Clark,'" Donoghue said in a piece of video testimony played at Tuesday's hearing.

Clark appeared before the House committee in February for a deposition, but pled the Fifth dozens of times.

It's unusual for DOJ lawyers at this level to testify in public about interactions with the White House, but President Biden said that executive privilege should not apply to conversations involving Trump's efforts to overthrow the 2020 election.

How Trump pressured the DOJ

The committee plans to outline several ways in which Trump pressured the DOJ and tried to use it for his own personal agenda.

Committee aides said in a call with reporters that the hearing will lay out how Trump wanted the DOJ to publicly state there was election fraud. More testimony from Barr and other officials is expected.

The committee will also show how Trump asked the DOJ to file lawsuits with his campaign on behalf of his election fraud claims. He also pressured the DOJ to appoint a special counsel to look into his claims and he wanted it to issue letters to states to question the sanctity of their elections.

Thursday's hearing will also detail a Jan. 3 meeting in the Oval Office between Trump and senior DOJ officials as the former president tried to place Clark as the head of the department.

What we've heard in past hearings and what's to come

In the last four hearings, the committee has laid out the case against Trump and how he was at the center of the election fraud conspiracy which ultimately led to the deadly insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The committee has presented evidence for how Trump ignored several in his circle who said his claims of election fraud were false, and then proceeded to pressure Vice President Mike Pence and state election officials to overturn the election in his favor.

Thursday's hearing is the fifth of several that were supposed to take place in June. But now committee members are saying the process could go into July.

Committee Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., told reporters that today's hearing will be the last for this month with more hearings to come after Congress' July 4th recess. The House will reconvene the week of July 11, and Thompson indicated that's the earliest hearings would resume.

Thompson said the new evidence the committee has includes hours of video footage handed over by a British documentarian who followed Trump, his family and aides, and conducted interviews with them, for weeks before and after the 2020 election.

Thompson also said there is "a lot of information to the tip line" that the committee has set up.

Where to watch Thursday's hearing

You can watch the hearing starting at 3 p.m. ET on NPR.org. NPR will also broadcast live special coverage of the hearings. Find your local member station or use the NPR One app to listen.

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/23/1106863016/who-youll-hear-from-and-what-to-expect-in-todays-jan-6-house-committee-hearing

[Rick Plant]

January 6 hearings Day 5 focus on DOJ's 'big lie' last stand

Involving Trump, acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Jeffrey Clark, this was a bizarre situation. But everything about those early days of 2021 was bizarre.



Imagine for a moment the uproar that would have occurred on Jan. 3, 2021, if 100 or so top Justice Department lawyers had resigned en masse.

Our country narrowly dodged that turmoil following an Oval Office meeting that Sunday afternoon, three days before Congress would convene to certify Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election. Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen requested the meeting after he learned earlier that day that President Donald Trump planned to fire him and replace him with an underling. Rosen’s offense? Refusing to go along with Trump’s false claims that the Justice Department had found fraud in the election.

On Thursday, the Jan. 6 committee will conduct Day 5 of its hearings on the attack on the U.S. Capitol and related events. The announced witnesses are Rosen and two other former Justice Department officials who attended the Oval Office meeting, Richard Donoghue and Steve Engel. We can certainly expect the committee to ask these officials about the Oval Office meeting and, more generally, the role of the Justice Department in stopping the “big lie.” But based on testimony provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee last July, we already know quite a bit about the Oval Office incident.

As described in a Senate report, Rosen told the committee that at about 3 p.m. on Jan. 3, another Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, had told him that Trump would be replacing Rosen with Clark as acting attorney general. This was a bizarre situation. As anyone familiar with the Justice Department knows, a president typically does not replace an acting attorney general in the waning days of an administration. And it would be even more bizarre for the attorney general to be notified of his dismissal by a subordinate.

But everything about those early days of 2021 was bizarre. According to the testimony provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Clark had taken an active role in pushing Trump’s claims of election fraud after Rosen refused.

Before he resigned in December 2020, Attorney General William Barr had publicly stated that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the election. As we heard during the House’s Jan. 6 committee’s first hearing this month, Barr told Trump that claims of election fraud were “bullspombleprofglidnoctobuns.”

Following Barr’s departure, Rosen took over as acting attorney general and promptly became the target of “persistent” demands by Trump to discredit the election results. Donoghue, who served as Rosen’s deputy, has also testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about this tense period. According to Donoghue’s handwritten notes, Rosen refused to open an investigation because there was no evidence of fraud, telling Trump that the Justice Department “can’t + won’t snap its fingers + change the outcome of the election.” Rather than back down, Donoghue’s notes state, Trump told Rosen to “just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R Congressmen.” We can expect to hear more about these exchanges during Thursday’s hearing.

But while Rosen and Donoghue refused to support Trump’s efforts, Clark was apparently only too willing. After having met directly with Trump — in violation of the Justice Department’s White House contacts policy — Clark drafted a letter to the members of the Georgia Legislature noting nonexistent “irregularities” and suggesting that they convene to select their own slate of electors for the state. This letter was drafted as a “proof of concept” that could be used in other swing states Biden won. Rosen flatly refused to sign it.

All of this was the context for Rosen’s requested showdown with Trump. Expecting the worst, Rosen and Donoghue scrambled to alert their colleagues. They convened a conference call with seven top Justice Department leaders, all of whom agreed to resign together if Trump fired Rosen. As detailed by the Senate report, an email message was prepared that would be sent in the event of Rosen’s firing to the heads of all Justice Department components, the staffs of the attorney general and the deputy attorney general, and the U.S. attorneys who were serving as co-chairs of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee, or AGAC. As a former U.S. attorney who once served as vice chair of the AGAC, I am confident that the co-chairs would have shared the email with the country’s 91 other U.S. attorneys.

The draft email explained that Trump fired Rosen because he had “repeatedly refused the President’s direct instructions to utilize the Department of Justice's law enforcement powers for improper ends.” It also stated that Donoghue was resigning and appeared to suggest the recipients consider doing the same: “the decision of whether and when to resign and whether the ends of justice are best served by resigning is a highly individual question, informed by personal and family circumstances.”

It is unclear whether everyone in this group would have actually resigned, but no doubt many would have, possibly more than 100 lawyers. Mass resignations of that magnitude over an attack on the institution by the president would have sent an earthquake through the 115,000-employee Justice Department. It most certainly also would have thwarted Trump’s objective of clinging to power.

But, of course, the email would never be sent. Rosen and Donoghue were joined at the meeting in the Oval Office by Clark and Engel, the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, who will also testify Thursday. White House counsel Pat Cipollone and deputy Patrick Philbin were also there. After three hours, the other Justice Department officials, and even Cipollone and Philbin, threatened to resign if Trump replaced Rosen and if Clark’s letters were sent to state legislatures. Cipollone reportedly called Clark’s letter a “murder-suicide pact.”

While Trump backed down from firing Rosen, he did so only in the face of mass resignations, which would likely have triggered scores more. He must have realized that the consequences of resignations at this level and on this scale would be disastrous. Of course, Trump did not abandon his plan to challenge the election results. He simply chose a different path. As we know even more clearly after last week’s Jan 6 hearing, his next target would be Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump pressured to refuse to certify the election results.

The testimony of Rosen, Donoghue and Engel on Thursday promises to show a president willing to abuse the Justice Department, in the words of Donoghue, “for improper ends.” This testimony is important because it shows — again — the lengths to which Trump would go to win the election. It also helps establish the corrupt intent needed to make a criminal referral to the same department Trump tried to decapitate.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/january-6-hearing-spotlights-trump-jeffrey-clark-doj-n1296509

[Rick Plant]

Adam Kinzinger attacks Republicans begging for pardons while not upholding their oath to the Constitution

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) played a leading role in the fifth public hearing for the House Select Committee on Thursday. Among the things that Kinzinger revealed was that a number of Republican members of Congress asked for preemptive pardons.

He explained that the only reason he knows that someone would ask for a pardon is if they committed a crime.

Speaking to CNN, Kinzinger said that he's not going to make a decision on what should happen to his colleagues named, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Andy Biggs, Mo Brooks, Matt Gaetz and Louie Gohmert.

"My job is to put the evidence out there," Kinzinger told Jake Tapper. "And as I said at the end of that, I only know of one recent to seek a pardon -- because you are worried that you are guilty. That you committed a crime. This is something they have to answer to their constituents. You know, I can't enforce the rules of the House or do certain things unilaterally. But I — this is the biggest point is, listen, America: do you really want your possible members of Congress out there trying to bend or break the law so that they can maintain political power? That is like anathema to everything we learned in history class whether in third grade or a senior and that is got to stop."

Tapper pointed out the recent raid of Jeffrey Clark that happened just before the hearing on Thursday. The hearing focused on how corrupt and incapable Clark was at the Justice Department.

"Just a handful of Jeffrey Clark's replacing any of those individuals and all these individuals I am talking about Trump loyalist conservative Republicans, and we very well could have lost democracy in the united states," said Tapper.

"Yeah. Do you know who else knows that? Not just you. Not just me but the steve Bannons of the world that actually planning this," Kinzinger said. "They think, under the radar, they can put in loyalists and frankly they can. I mean, that is the point. Every one of these hearings we have done, we have shown a layer of stuff that could go wrong. And there is really no magic police force that if people don't follow through on their oath is going to come in and enforce that. It is really just us having to hold true to what we believe. And, you know, it's what happens in Trump's second term, in theory, or a Trump accolade in his term in the presidency. Now, he can interview anybody for DOJ or any position and says is your loyalty to me or is to the Constitution? And eventually, trust me, you are gonna find people that will say I will pledge my loyalty to you over the Constitution."

"I mean, you see it probably saves someone's life if you destroy a car but we are going to plunge off a cliff," Kinzinger explained. "We are really there and this is the thing. it is great to tell the story but the biggest point is, ladies and gentlemen, you have to vote not based on every little issue that bothers you but based on who is going to uphold their oath to the Constitution. Because that's the only thing that matters."

See the video below:

[Rick Plant]

‘The committee had the receipts’: CNN panel taken aback by 'a very disturbing day of testimony'

CNN's panel on Thursday praised the latest public hearing of the House Select Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

"All right, there it is," Jake Tapper said immediately following the end of the hearing. "The end of a very disturbing day of testimony from top officials of the Trump Justice Department, talking about how Donald Trump tried to weaponize the justice department to steal the election from not just Joe Biden, but from the American people"

"We had testimony today, Jamie Gangel from Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, one of his top aides talking about the Republican members of Congress who reached out to try to get a pardon because of their participation in this scheme," Tapper said.

"Members of Congress who have been saying they never did anything such thing, the committee had the receipts," Gangel replied.

"There was an email there from Mo Brooks (R-AL), the headline was, the slug was 'pardons,' and they had testimony from several White House aides, Cassidy Hutchison, Johnny McEntee, others from the White House counsel's office, Eric Hershmann, each saying that these congressmen had reached out. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), [Louie] Gohmert (R-TX), Scott Perry (R-PA), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) according to Cassidy Hutchison, she heard she reached out to the White House counsel's office."

"And as Adam Kinzinger said at the end, you ask for a pardon if you have done something wrong," Gangel noted.

Watch: