1/6 Insurrection Investigation

[Rick Plant]

Feds seek pretrial jail for Jan 6 defendant Barry Ramey: "He violently attacked two Capitol Police officers at a key breach point alongside other Proud Boys who initiated that assault .. He did so with strong indicia of pre-planning—he had a tactical vest, a gas mask & knee pads".

[Rick Plant]

The 'lost' Secret Service texts are part of Donald Trump’s rolling coup

On January 6, 2021, armed MAGA supporters swarmed the US Capitol in a bid to stop the electoral count that would transfer the presidency to Joe Biden. Secret Service agents, who were detailed to protect Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, stayed in touch with each other, and with their supervisors, by cell phone.

Like everyone else that day, they were sending text messages.

But as with so many government documents generated by the Trump administration, the public – and the House select committee to investigate the J6 insurrection – will probably never see them.

Joseph Cuffari, the Trump-appointed Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees the Secret Service, doesn’t want to talk about those missing text messages.

On January 27, 2021, Congress told all departments to preserve their records. When subordinates at DHS reported to Cuffari’s chief of staff in April, 2022 – 15 months after a search was initiated – to say that the texts had been permanently deleted in a data migration, that memo was never seen again. Congress was finally informed by a July 14 report saying that these documents may be permanently lost.

Was it a coincidence?

Of course, we cannot know what these texts would or would not add to our understanding of a former president’s rolling coup attempt.

But it isn’t hard to imagine that an even marginally competent IT professional would have routinely backed up devices prior to such a migration. Nor is it too much to expect that the loss of these texts should have been reported, particularly since multiple House committees issued directives for the preservation on January 16, 2021 – eleven days before the alleged data migration took place.

Why? Because records requests now routinely include phone data. These devices report not only what we communicate, but when, and from where, those communications were sent. Digital communications provide a dense, real-time record. And computerized devices don’t do things by accident, or without warning. Permanently deleting such evidence requires either extreme premeditation or extreme negligence.

Text messages speak to witnesses’ state of mind, and decisions made in the moment. Think of the ones we do have: panicked texts from MAGA pundits like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, or the numerous Facebook posts by Stop the Steal activists, have helped tell a vivid story about January 6 that are seared in our memories.

On July 21, we learned the poignant fact that Pence’s Secret Service detail, trapped and hearing the crowd’s chanted death threats, used their cell phones to call their loved ones to say goodbye.

The missing Secret Service texts were important historical documents, but they might also corroborate testimony by Trump and Pence aides about what their bosses did, and said, on J6.

Curiously, however, the data migration that reportedly erased the Secret Service texts from that day occurred on January 27, 2021, two days after the House of Representatives forwarded articles of impeachment to the Senate, accusing the former president of inciting the attack on the Capitol, and one day after Trump was issued a summons notifying him to prepare for trial.

A coincidence? You decide.

Incompetence or malice?

But let’s be clear: Cuffari’s first move on J6, even without a request from Congress, should have been preserving the records of all DHS personnel on duty at the Ellipse, the Capitol and the Oval Office.

There were 24 Secret Service agents engaged that day, 10 guarding then-President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. Their phones should have been secured as soon as they went off duty. Although the messages they held might have also documented these agents’ valor, Cuffari’s job is to anticipate problems and mistakes.

Inspectors general are supposed to proactively investigate for failure, sometimes identifying a conflict of interest before a legal violation has occurred. That’s why they are nicknamed “watchdogs.”

Instead, Cuffari has been Trump’s fox and DHS his hen house.

He had already refused staff recommendations to investigate potentially improper conduct by the Secret Service and the Border Patrol, in 2021. So the Counsel of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, an interagency group that oversees inspectors general, launched an investigation into Cuffari’s unwillingness to do his job. On August 12, Republican senators, led by Missouri’s Josh Hawley, announced that they want that investigation to end.

This points us to a much larger pattern in Trump nominees, from Cabinet-level to administrative jobs: filling important positions with candidates whose history suggested they would dismantle, or disable, the government agency they were appointed to run.

For example, after almost 30 years of enhanced federal intervention in education, a Republican-led Senate confirmed Betsy DeVos, a longtime proponent of defunding public schools through voucher programs, as the secretary of education.

Health and Human Services Secretaries Tom Price and Alex Azar, both of whom became the focus of unrelated scandals, were tasked with reducing government-funded healthcare by weakening administrative provisions of Obamacare.

Surgeon and former presidential candidate Ben Carson retracted Obama-era policies designed to help poor renters and that required suburban districts to track enforcement of racial equity in housing.

Of course, hyper-partisanship at the top is partially offset by nonpartisan civil service employees, tens of thousands of workers, protected by federal law, that remain in place regardless of the party in power.

Yet Republicans have a plan for them too: Should Trump be reelected in 2024, he will come in armed with a plan, which he implemented in late 2020 and Joe Biden rescinded, to target 50,000 civil service workers for dismissal and replacement with party loyalists.

The fight goes on


It would be a mistake to think that Donald Trump’s power grab has been fully defeated, or that the story of the missing Secret Service text messages is only about one Trump partisan’s misplaced loyalty to a defeated president. Cuffari’s refusal to do his job is yet another chapter in the attack on the foundation of our democratic state.

The coup is not over.

https://www.rawstory.com/the-lost-secret-service-texts-are-part-of-donald-trumps-rolling-coup/

[Rick Plant]

Cheney says 1/6 committee in discussions with Pence team
https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/national/cheney-says-1-6-committee-in-discussions-with-pence-team

[Rick Plant]

Justice Dept is preparing plea offer for Floyd Roseberry, who was charged with threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction in incident one year ago today. The truck bomb threat forced evacuation on Capitol Hill. Plea will likely be revealed in court in October hearing.

[Rick Plant]

January 6th Committee @January6thCmte

Trump failed to act during the 187 minutes between leaving the Ellipse and telling the mob to go home.

"But there were hundreds that day who honored their oaths and put their lives on the line to protect the... Capitol and to safeguard our democracy."
-
@RepElaineLuria



https://twitter.com/January6thCmte/status/1560745253342248961

[Rick Plant]

Trial date is set. November 7, 2022 for high-profile Capitol riot defendant Riley Williams of Pennsylvania, who's accused of directing the mob on Jan 6.

Williams sought to have trial moved outta Washington DC.  Didn't work.

Trial will happen in DC.

[Rick Plant]

Trump removed lines in post-insurrection speech about prosecuting rioters: Jan. 6 committee

Former President Donald Trump did not want to call for the prosecution of Jan. 6 rioters after the Capitol attack, according to a video released Monday by the House select committee investigating the riot.

In a video tweeted by Virginia Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria, a member of the panel who led last week's hearing, the committee showed what appeared to be a draft of Trump's Jan. 7, 2021, remarks to the country -- with several proposed lines crossed out.

The new video cites previously unreleased witness testimony and a copy of a document titled "Remarks on National Healing" that showed Trump was reluctant to give a speech rebuking his supporters who attacked the Capitol and calling for the Justice Department to prosecute them.

"It took more than 24 hours for President Trump to address the nation again after his Rose Garden video on January 6th in which he affectionately told his followers to go home in peace," Luria wrote in her message posting the video. "There were more things he was unwilling to say."

The nearly four-minute video includes clips of depositions from Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, discussing how the Jan. 7 remarks came together.

Ivanka Trump told the committee that she could identify her father's handwriting in the copy of the Jan. 7 speech included in the video while Kushner repeatedly said "I don't know" when asked why the president had crossed out lines that read "legal consequences must be swift and firm" and "you do not represent me, you do not represent our movement."

Key Trump aide John McEntee told investigators in his own deposition that he was told by other aides to "nudge" the speech along if President Trump asked his opinion on it -- which he took as a sign that Trump didn't want to deliver the remarks as initially written.

In the speech he eventually delivered at the White House on Jan. 7, Trump accused the rioters of defiling "the seat of American democracy" and said, "You do not represent our country."

Cassidy Hutchinson, a committee witness who worked as a top aide to Trump's final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, told the committee that Trump's advisers pushed him to deliver remarks after the riot both to protect his legacy and to address concerns about how senators might respond if his Cabinet tried to remove him from office via the 25th Amendment.

"There was a large concern of the 25th Amendment potentially being invoked, and concerns about what would happen in the Senate," Hutchinson said in the new video. "So the primary reason that I had heard other than, you know, 'We did not do enough on the 6th' … was, 'Think about what might happen in the final 15 days of your presidency if we don't do this. There's already talk about the 25th Amendment. You might need this as cover.'"

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-removed-lines-post-insurrection-speech-prosecuting-rioters/story?id=87373758