#House Select Committee on January 6 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dreaminginthedeepsouth · 1 year

Link

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 6, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson

Today, President Joe Biden traveled to Arizona to highlight how the CHIPS & Science Act is bringing innovation and jobs to the country. He visited a facility that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is building north of Phoenix, where he met with chief executive officers from several companies and with lawmakers. TSMC has recently committed to investing $40 billion in Arizona to produce advanced semiconductors, the very sort of investment the CHIPS & Science Act was designed to attract.

Biden noted that this investment will bring more than 10,000 construction jobs and 10,000 jobs in high tech, and he emphasized that the Democrats’ investment in the nation’s economy is paying off. The country has added jobs in every month of Biden’s administration—10.5 million of them—and exports are up, helping the economy to grow at 2.9% last quarter. And Walmart’s chief executive officer yesterday said that prices are coming down for toys, clothing, and sports equipment, while the chief executive officer of Kroger says prices for fresh food products are also easing.

But, Biden said, he is “most excited” about the fact that “people are starting to feel a sense of optimism as they see the impact of the achievements in their own lives. It’s going to accelerate in months ahead, and it’s part of the broad story about the economy we’re building that works for everyone: one… that positions Americans to win the economic competition of the 21st century.”

“Where is it written that America can’t lead the world once again in manufacturing?” Biden said. “We’re proving it can.”

Biden has apparently tried to undercut the radical right by ignoring its demands and demonstrating an America in which everyone works together to solve our biggest problems. His trip to Arizona was in keeping with that program, with White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre telling reporters that his trip was about “the American manufacturing boom we’re seeing all across the country thanks to, again, his economic policies… [and] in large part thanks to the CHIPS and Science Act the President signed into law—and a historic—let’s not forget—a bipartisan piece of legislation.”

But reporters immediately asked if President Biden would visit the border in Arizona, bowing to a right-wing talking point. Jean-Pierre responded that Biden would not engage in a political “stunt,” as the Republicans have been doing, and was instead going to Arizona “to talk about an important initiative that’s going to change Americans’ lives, specifically in Arizona.”

The follow-up? “If the President is not going to make time to visit the border during [this] trip…, will he do it… in the new year?”

The news from the right-wing faction in the nation often seems to steal the oxygen from the sober, stable politicians trying to address real issues and doing so with more than a little success.

Today, fewer eyes were on the $40 billion investment in Arizona than were on the verdict in the trial of the Trump Organization and the Trump Payroll Corporation. Late this afternoon, the jury found the two entities guilty on all counts for a range of crimes surrounding the company’s payments to its senior employees through apartments, school tuition, cars, and so on, to avoid taxes. The company was charged with scheming to defraud, criminal tax fraud, falsifying business records, and conspiracy. The key witness was Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty to tax fraud, grand larceny, and conspiracy last August and received a reduced sentence in exchange for testifying against the company (but not against former president Trump or members of his family).

Trump promptly issued a statement. He blamed everything on Weisselberg and promised to appeal.

House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) told reporters today the committee will make criminal referrals to the Department of Justice. Those referrals, a source told Sara Murray, Annie Grayer, and Zachary Cohen of CNN, “will be focused on the main organizers and leaders of the attacks.” The Department of Justice is engaged in its own investigation, of course, but such a referral places a marker from a bipartisan group of lawmakers—many of whom are lawyers—indicating that they believe crimes have been committed.

Special counsel Jack Smith is now in charge of investigating the events surrounding January 6 as well as Trump’s theft of government documents, and news broke today that on November 22, just two days after he began work, he sent grand-jury subpoenas to officials in Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin, asking for all communications officials had with Trump, his campaign, or many individuals associated with the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration continues to govern. Tomorrow, Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff will convene a roundtable discussion with leaders from 13 Jewish groups from across the country to discuss the rise in antisemitism. Mr. Emhoff is the first Jewish individual married to a president or a vice president, and he has called out the escalating antisemitism as the former president elevates white supremacists.

“I do not see this just as a Jewish issue,” Emhoff said. “This is an issue for all of us. Because we’ve seen this before. This is how it started 70 years ago. So I don’t want it to feel normal. I don’t want people to think, ‘Well it’s just words, it’s just Kanye.’ No. This matters.”

And finally, tonight, as I finished up this letter, the news networks called the Georgia Senate runoff race for Democratic senator Raphael Warnock, giving the Democrats a 51–49 majority in the Senate. This means that the Democrats will have the power to issue subpoenas without getting Republicans to sign on to them. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post pointed out a few weeks ago that Democrats could use this power to demonstrate what actual congressional oversight should look like, compared to House Republicans’ threatened investigation of Hunter Biden, perhaps drowning out the Republicans’ tactic of endless “investigations” to tarnish their opponents.

After the results came out, Vox senior correspondent Ian Millhiser tweeted: “Huh, so Democrats managed to pick up a Senate seat in a cycle where they should have been crushed. Consider the possibility that Joe Biden is very good at his job.”

—

Notes:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2022/12/06/press-gaggle-by-press-secretary-karine-jean-pierre-and-national-economic-council-director-brian-deese-en-route-phoenix-arizona/

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/12/06/remarks-by-president-biden-at-an-international-brotherhood-of-electrical-workers-phone-bank-2/

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2022/12/05/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-karine-jean-pierre-december-5-2022/

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2022/12/06/president-biden-in-arizona-live-updates-at-semiconductor-plant/69703569007/

Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 @RonFilipkowskiTrump issues a statement reacting to the verdict, blaming everything on Allen Weisselberg https://t.co/KJ9sVlp0i0

11:39 PM ∙ Dec 6, 20229,871Likes1,557Retweets

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/06/politics/january-6-committee-criminal-referrals/index.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/walmart-prices-falling-for-toys-sporting-goods-ceo-says-rcna60388

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/12/06/trump-organization-guilty-tax-fraud/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/06/jack-smith-trump-communications-subpoenas/

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/05/politics/doug-emhoff-antisemitism-summit-white-house/index.html

Ian Millhiser @imillhiserHuh, so Democrats managed to pick up a Senate seat in a cycle where they should have been crushed. Consider the possibility that Joe Biden is very good at his job.

2:49 AM ∙ Dec 7, 20221,762Likes270Retweets

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/22/trump-kevin-mccarthy-gop-investigations-raphael-warnock/

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From An American #Biden-Harris Administration #Democratic governance #Warnock #political #jobs #House Select Committee #January 6 Commission

4 notes · View notes

panicinthestudio · 2 years

Video

youtube

‘Enraging’: How The Willful Blindness Of ‘Team Normal’ Enabled Trump’s Coup, July 13, 2022

Chris Hayes: Trump was not shy about the fact that he would never accept an election loss. And just because some people, like Pat Cipollone, lied to themselves and collaborated with this monstrous sociopath who almost ended American democracy, that does not mean that it was a hard thing to see.

MSNBC

#Chris Hayes #January 6 #House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack #Donald Trump #Pat Cipollone #Mark Meadows #politics #USA #enabling #complicity #MSNBC #Sidney Powell #Rudy Giuliani #Bill Stepien #William Barr #Michael Flynn #John Eastman #US Department of Justice

9 notes · View notes

richdadpoor · 8 months

Text

Website for Donald Trump's Legal Defense Fund Is Hacked

Screenshot: Lucas Ropek/Patriot Legal Defense Fund The website for former President Donald Trump’s legal defense fund appears to have been hacked and defaced over the weekend. As of the writing of this blog, the defacement is still live on the site and has not been taken down. The Patriot Legal Defense Fund is a fundraising effort launched approximately a week ago by high-level members of the…

View On WordPress

#Donald Trump #Gizmodo #In American television #Public hearings of the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack

1 note · View note

martinwilliammichael · 2 years

Link

#january 6 #house select committee on the january 6 attack on the united states capitol #kash patel

0 notes

reportwire · 2 years

Text

House Committee Reveals More of Arizona’s Role in January 6 Attack on Capitol

Familiar names and faces continue to pop up in public hearings of the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, as federal prosecutors continue to slowly peel the curtain back on Arizona’s integral role in the unrest. On Tuesday, in the seventh public hearing, U.S. Representative Stephanie Murphy, a Florida Democrat, revealed new information about the…

View On WordPress

#Ali Alexander #Andy Biggs #capitol attack #cassidy hutchinson #David Schweikert #debbie lesko #House Select Committee #insurrection #January 6 #January 6 committee #Kelli Ward #Michael Ward #Rusty Bowers #Stephanie Murphy #Stop the Steal

0 notes

cultml · 2 years

Link

#house select committee to investigate the january 6 attack

1 note · View note

carolinemillerbooks · 2 years

Text

New Post has been published on Books by Caroline Miller

New Post has been published on https://www.booksbycarolinemiller.com/musings/the-outer-limits-of-democracy/

The Outer Limits Of Democracy

The man had fallen near an electrified rail of a Chicago subway. Unconscious, he lay convulsing on the bare track. People on the platform above looked down, stunned. A few whipped out their cell phones to record the incident. One African American, Anthony Perry, age twenty, made a different choice. He leaped onto the track, avoiding the hotline, and saved the unconscious man. That evening the media blazed with reports of his heroism. If members of Congress had a quarter of his courage and selflessness, our democracy would be less endangered. To be specific, we have a Republican Party that lacks a moral compass, showing, instead, a marked propensity for criminal intent. Fearing the National Rifle Association, (NRA) for too long, our weak-kneed leaders have been willing to witness the mass murder of children and innocent bystanders rather than pass meaningful gun regulations. Only recently, embarrassed by the blood running in our streets, have a few Republicans joined with Democrats to propose modest reforms. Now they expect the public to applaud though they’ve done nothing to keep assault rifles off the streets and allowed a stronger House bill to languish. Congress’s fear to tackle the assault rifle issue is puzzling. Most voters want meaningful gun regulation. A few might fall back upon the shibboleth of state rights, but it’s a bogus excuse. Have we learned nothing from the public’s long skirmish with the cigarette industry? Commerce that flows from coast to coast doesn’t respond to patchwork regulations. That job belongs to the federal government. Sadly, reason, logic, and courage have no purchase when they conflict with vested interests. Republican Liz Cheney’s values are an exception. Her participation in the House Select Committee investigation of the January 6 insurrection may end her political career, but she chose to do what was right for the country. Look for no similar moral compass from Fox news reporters. They refused to cover the hearing though it proved our former president, Donald Trump, not only encouraged the January 6 insurrection but instigated it with a 7-point plan. The newscasters justified their blackout believing that few cared about the facts. Dereliction of duty has become the new norm in our democracy. Moral outrage is common. Moral behavior is in short supply. Too many assume corruption has little effect upon freedom. The assumption is false and marks the end of its existence. Pity those who live long enough to see the fruits of this corruption. In truth, each of us is culpable. To mistake freedom for self-indulgence is dangerous. Many of us are willing to turn a blind eye to corruption if it serves our purpose. Sometimes, we knowingly elect criminals if they do our bidding. The rising tide of self-interest makes fools of us all. Like harlots, we give our affection to those who pander to our ambitions. Politicians who pretend difficult problems like the rising tide of inflation are easily fixed are liars. No ready solution exists because the causes–the supply chain problem the pandemic created. and the Ukraine war– are beyond the control of a single nation. If we wish to recover our economy, we must close our ears to siren songs. We must stop playing Russian roulette between the political parties at each election as if change for the sake of change made a difference. Twenty million Americans watched the House Select Committee’s first report on the January 6 insurrection. “Twenty million!” The headlines shout as if that number were extraordinary. Yet, we are a nation of 329.5 million. Where were the remaining 300 million during the hearing? How many among that number still believe the 2020 election was rigged? As voters, too often we mistake our self-interest for freedom, preferring quick response strategies to long-term solutions. Like the children of the marshmallow experiment, we prefer a dollar in our pocket today to $10 at the end of the year. But the freedom to pursue personal happiness is a fragment of the whole. Our primary obligation isn’t to ourselves. Our obligation is to each other. Without social cohesion, we live in a jungle of individual appetites–a place where no one would dream of leaping across an electrified subway line to save the life of another. As citizens of this democracy, we must be wary. Without a moral compass, we will soon reach the outer limits of our democracy. John F. Kennedy pointed us in the right direction decades ago. Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. Have we listened? We still have time to save our nation. We can begin by voting a Democratic ticket up and down the November ballot.

#a moral compass #Anthony Perry #Donald Trump #Fox News #gun reform #House select committee on January 6 Insurrection #Liz Cheney #marshmallow experiment #NRA #Republicans/Democrats on gun regulation

0 notes

bloodpen-to-paper · 2 years

Text

So to recap (July 2022 edition) we got:

- 4th of July shooting in Highland Park + a shooting in Chicago

- anyone with a uterus has less rights than an assault rifle in the U.S.; right-wing Scotus can get hit by a plane

- Edit: Native Americans have been added to the list of people with less right than an assault rifle in the U.S.

- a third of the British Parliament resigning from various government positions cause of how much everyone hates Boris Johnson

- Edit: Boris Johnson has now resigned cause of how much everyone hates Boris Johnson

- Shinzo Abe, former Prime Minister of Japan, got shot while giving a speech

- Edit: *Former Former Prime Minister... he got Lincoln’d

- a far-right French politician accidentally pinned the assassination of Shinzo Abe on popular video game designer Hideo Kojima, which a major Greek news outlet relayed, only furthering the idea that Kojima did it

- the war in Ukraine is still going on

- the state of Canada can be summarized by this image: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/862558639735046146/995130724791365652/unkown.png

- Hunter Biden got trending on twitter for the hundredth time and nobody gives a shit seriously who gives a shit conservatives get him trending for literally breathing why is this still happening-

- Edit: ... Users of the well known “incel” website 4chan supposedly hacked the iPhone of U.S. President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden and allegedly exposed the both of them as pedophiles, among many other things. Sweet shitting Christ almighty, if this is true, I have been proven incorrect in possibly the most cursed way imaginable, and it is a testament to my willpower and spite that I have not fallen in alcoholism from this news piece alone

- Baymax is a Leftist

- the U.S. House Select Committee began holding live public hearings for the January 6 insurrection and no one noticed

- Kazuki Takahashi, the creator of the popular anime and playing card game Yu-Gi-Oh!, passed away (R.I.P., may he finally be free to kick Shinzo Abe’s ass without consequence in that great dueling arena in the sky...)

- the Argentinian economic minister has resigned (an announcement that was made not through any official news outlets, but via a Tweet) following an inflation crisis that is crippling the country, but all you’ll find on Twitter is people excited about the new futbol jersey for the next World Cup (no one is surprised by this)

- Elon Musk backed out of his deal to purchase Twitter for $44 billion; it was believed he didn’t know the meaning of the term “pulling out” so this was quite the surprise

- Edit: Twitter is now suing Elon Musk for not buying Twitter

- the President of Sri Lanka (not to be confused with the Prime Minister, because they apparently have both) pulled a Ted Cruz and has fled the country after citizens stormed the presidential palace in a mass riot following the announcing of the country being officially bankrupt (which the Prime Minister, not to be confused with the President, totally didn’t cause via corruption in office). The citizens involved in the protest then stormed the house of the PM, and took a swim in his pool promptly before sacking and burning the place, thus proving the month of July is truly a Hot Girl Summer

Edit: Both the PM and President of Sri Lanka have agreed to resign their positions; that is two world leader resignations and one former world leader assassination in one week; I now have the sudden urge to drink myself into 2040

12K notes · View notes

bighermie · 2 months

Text

Evidence That Could Have Exonerated Trump Over Jan. 6 Was Suppressed

Evidence That Could Have Exonerated Trump Over Jan. 6 Was Suppressed https://link.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/epochtv/evidence-that-could-have-exonerated-trump-over-jan-6-was-suppressed-5605377?utm_source=andshare

65 notes · View notes

mongowheelie · 1 year

Text

Marjorie Taylor Greene calls for 'serious criminal charges' against Liz Cheney over January 6th panel - Alternet.org

The stupid, it burns!

174 notes · View notes

mariacallous · 4 months

Text

Two days before the January 6 insurrection, the Trump campaign’s plan to use fake electors to block President-elect Joe Biden from taking office faced a potentially crippling hiccup: The fake elector certificates from two critical battleground states were stuck in the mail.

So, Trump campaign operatives scrambled to fly copies of the phony certificates from Michigan and Wisconsin to the nation’s capital, relying on a haphazard chain of couriers, as well as help from two Republicans in Congress, to try to get the documents to then-Vice President Mike Pence while he presided over the Electoral College certification.

The operatives even considered chartering a jet to ensure the files reached Washington, DC, in time for the January 6, 2021, proceeding, according to emails and recordings obtained by CNN.

The new details provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the chaotic last-minute effort to keep Donald Trump in office. The fake electors scheme features prominently in special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal indictment against the former president, and some of the officials who were involved have spoken to Smith’s investigators.

The emails and recordings also indicate that a top Trump campaign lawyer was part of 11th-hour discussions about delivering the fake elector certificates to Pence, potentially undercutting his testimony to the House select committee that investigated January 6 that he had passed off responsibility and didn’t want to put the former vice president in a difficult spot.

These details largely come from pro-Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who was an architect of the fake electors plot and is now a key cooperator in several state probes into the scheme. Chesebro pleaded guilty in October to a felony conspiracy charge in Georgia in connection with the electors’ plan, and has met with prosecutors in Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, who are investigating the sham GOP electors in their own states.

Chesebro is an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal election interference indictment against Trump.

CNN has obtained audio of Chesebro’s recent interview with Michigan investigators, and exclusively reported earlier this month that he also told them about a December 2020 Oval Office meeting where he briefed Trump about the fake electors plan and how it ties into January 6.

An attorney for Chesebro declined to comment. A spokesman for the special counsel’s office did not reply to a request for comment for this story.

‘A high-level decision’

Emails obtained by CNN corroborate what Chesebro told Michigan prosecutors: He communicated with the top Trump campaign lawyer, Matt Morgan, and another campaign official, Mike Roman, to ferry the documents to Washington on January 5.

From there, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and a Pennsylvania congressman assisted in the effort to get the documents into Pence’s hands.

“This is a high-level decision to get the Michigan and Wisconsin votes there,” Chesebro told Michigan prosecutors. “And they had to enlist, you know, a US senator to try to expedite it, to get it to Pence in time.”

Chesebro also discussed the episode with Wisconsin investigators last week when he sat for an interview with the attorney general’s office as part of a separate state probe into the fake electors plot, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.

Wisconsin prosecutors asked about the episode “extensively,” the source said, noting Chesebro discussed how a Wisconsin GOP staffer flew the certificate from Milwaukee to Washington and then handed it off to Chesebro.

The firsthand account from Chesebro’s perspective helps fill in the narrative behind the effort to hand-deliver elector slates to Pence, which is vaguely referenced in Smith’s federal indictment.

Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges, which include conspiring with Chesebro and others to obstruct the January 6 certification proceeding. Before Chesebro’s guilty plea in Georgia, his attorneys reached out to Smith’s team. As of this week, he has not heard back from federal prosecutors, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.

Federal investigators have spoken with several individuals involved in the scramble with the phony elector certificates, according to a source familiar with the matter. This includes interviews with Trump staffers who were tapped to fly the papers to DC, and some fake electors who knew of the planning.

A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not reply to a request for comment.

Asked about the episode, a spokesperson for Johnson pointed to his previous comments, where he said, “my involvement in that attempt to deliver spanned the course of a couple seconds,” and that, “in the end, those electors were not delivered.”

‘Day-by-day’ coordination

According to the recordings of Chesebro’s sit-down with Michigan prosecutors, he explained how a legal memo he wrote for Wisconsin transformed into a nationwide operation, where Trump lawyers were “day-by-day coordinating the efforts of more than a dozen people with the GOP and with the Trump campaign.”

On January 4, 2021, Morgan sent an email to Chesebro and Roman asking for confirmation that all of the Trump elector slates had been received by Congress, according to the documents obtained by CNN.

Roman responded that the Michigan certificate had been mailed on December 15 but was still “in transit” at a US Postal Service facility in DC. Wisconsin’s certificate also had apparently not arrived.

Chesebro told prosecutors that Morgan was “freaked out” when the campaign realized the phony certificates from Michiganwere still in the mail.

That same day, Morgan weighed in over email asking Chesebro and Roman to rethink how they would deliver the certificates to Pence.

“As I thought about this more, a courier will not be able to access the Capitol to deliver a sealed package,” Morgan wrote on January 4, according to emails obtained by CNN “You will probably need to enlist the help of a legislator who can deliver to the appropriate place(s). I strongly recommend you guys discuss a revised delivery plan with Rudy (Giuliani) to make sure this gets done the way he wants.”

‘Can we charter a flight?’

Roman was concerned the Wisconsin documents wouldn’t reach Washington in time.

“Can we charter a flight? The only available commercial from MKE (Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport) to DCA (Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport) arrives at 2130 tomorrow night,” Roman wrote to Chesebro on January 4 at 11:24 p.m.

The job of physically flying the elector documents to Washington fell to two people: A Trump campaign staffer and a Wisconsin GOP official, according to the emails and what Chesebro told prosecutors.

The Wisconsin GOP official who had that state’s elector documents landed after 10 a.m. on January 5 at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, according to the emails.

Trump campaign aide Michael Brown flew with the Michigan certificates to Washington National Airport with a scheduled arrival around 1 p.m., according to emails obtained by CNN. A source familiar with the matter told CNN that Brown flew to DC from Atlanta, because the Trump staffers who had custody of the Michigan ballots were in Georgia for the Senate runoffs.

The campaign booked and paid for Brown’s flight on Southwest Airlines, the source said. Federal campaign finance records indicate that a pro-Trump super PAC paid the airline on the day of Brown’s flight for travel related to election “recount” efforts.

Trump Hotel meetup

The emails show that Brown and the Wisconsin GOP official were instructed to meet Chesebro at the Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington to hand off the fake elector certificates. Chesebro said in an email that he’d keep the ballots in his hotel room safe until it was time to pass them along.

Wisconsin Republican Party officials were annoyed at the request to courier the fake elector certificates to Washington. “Freaking trump idiots want someone to fly original elector papers to the senate President,” a Wisconsin GOP official wrote to then-state party chairman Andrew Hitt on January 4, according to the January 6 committee report.

Hitt – who has provided information to federal investigators about the efforts to get the fake elector certificates to Washington, according to a source familiar with the matter – told the January 6 committee that the couriering ended up being overkill, because the original documents that the state party had mailed to Washington actually made it in time.

Getting the certificates inside the Capitol

The documents still had to be hand-delivered to Pence’s Senate office in the Capitol.

The electors plot – as envisioned by Chesebro and other Trump allies – was that Pence could reject Biden’s legitimate electors and recognize Trump’s “alternate electors” on January 6, while lawmakers tallied the electoral votes from each state. Per federal law, the certificates need to be physically presented on the floor of Congress during the joint session, while lawmakers tally the electoral votes.

Chesebro told investigators that Roman connected him with an aide for a Pennsylvania GOP lawmaker that he believed was Rep. Scott Perry to turn over the documents. Chesebro wasn’t certain which congressman the staffer worked for – and the January 6 report says a staffer for a different Pennsylvania Republican, Rep. Mike Kelly, helped shuttle the documents that day.

“I had the Wisconsin stuff. [Trump campaign aide] Mike Brown had the Michigan stuff. We walked to the Longworth Office Building, and the guy with Perry, or whatever his name is, and some other fellow, that were like staff members of the House, took them and said, ‘We’re going to walk them over to the Senate and give it to a Senate staffer,’” Chesebro told Michigan prosecutors, according to the audio obtained by CNN.

“I don’t know why logistically we didn’t take it directly to Johnson. But that’s how we did it,” he added.

Kelly and Perry’s offices did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.

Brown did not comment for this story. CNN previously reported that he testified in June to Smith’s grand jury in the Trump election subversion probe.

CNN previously reported that Roman sat for a proffer interview with Smith’s team before Trump was indicted. He was also indicted in the sweeping Georgia election racketeering case, in connection with the fake electors scheme, and has pleaded not guilty.

Roman’s attorney did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The details from Chesebro put a finer point on how members of Congress, including a sitting US senator, were involved in making sure the electoral certificates for Trump ended up in Pence’s hands.

The January 6 committee first revealed last year Johnson’s involvement in trying unsuccessfully to deliver the fake elector certificates to Pence, who announced on the morning of the joint session that it would be unconstitutional to do what Trump wanted and unilaterally overturn the election results.

The committee revealed text messages during their hearings last year that Johnson aide Sean Riley sent to Pence aide Chris Hodgson, saying that Johnson “needs to hand something to VPOTUS please advise.”

“What is it?” Hodgson asked.

“Alternate slates of electors for MI and WI because archivist didn’t receive them,” Riley responded.

“Do not give that to him,” Hodgson said.

‘F**k these guys’

In his Michigan interview, Chesebro also dished on some of the internal disagreements among the Trump lawyers, campaign officials and other allies, who clashed over the purpose of the electors’ plan and how far to take things on January 6.

Chesebro has maintained – then, and now – that the plan was a lawful move to preserve Trump’s legal rights.

Even before the Trump electors met in their state capitals on December 14, 2020, to cast their fake ballots and sign the certificates, Chesebro heard about concerns from some of the electors about possible legal jeopardy, according to emails and text messages reported by the Detroit News and obtained by CNN.

Chesebro added hedging language for the faux certificates from Pennsylvania and New Mexico in response to those concerns. He proposed to Roman and Morgan that they add the contingency caveats to the paperwork for all seven states in the plan. But Roman rejected the idea, according to the emails.

“F**k these guys,” Roman texted Chesebro on December 12, 2020.

By this time, the Trump campaign had essentially cleaved in two. Top officials who had managed day-to-day activity for Trump up to the election, including in court, say they ceded responsibility to Rudy Giuliani and others, such as Chesebro, according to congressional testimony transcripts. Roman effectively switched teams to work under Giuliani’s structure, according to the testimony from Morgan and others.

A spokesperson for Giuliani did not reply to a request for comment.

‘It really went south on me’

Chesebro told Michigan investigators that his own emails show that Morgan remained deeply involved, including in the final hours before January 6, to ensure that the certificates reached DC.

“I don’t have a really warm feeling toward, at least, the top Trump lawyers that did this, hid from me what they were doing and then lied to Congress about me. So, it’s been really difficult,” Chesebro said.

In his congressional testimony, Morgan said he knew of the elector plan but wanted to distance himself from the effort, delegating the work to others, including those under Giuliani.

Morgan told the January 6 committee last year that he initially believed the electors were only meant to be used as a contingency. The electors, he believed, should meet in their state capitals and cast their electoral votes but “not necessarily submit” the certificates to Congress unless “we prevailed” in court.

Morgan told the committee that the plan changed in December, saying it morphed from a “cast-and-hold” operation and had “shifted to cast-and-send.” And that’s when Morgan told the committee that he backed out, testifying that he directed an aide to “email Mr. Chesebro politely to say, ‘this is your task. You are responsible for the Electoral College issues moving forward.’”

“This was my way of taking that responsibility to zero,” Morgan told the committee, later adding that he “moved on” after that email was sent.

Morgan explained that he was concerned that the new plan to try to count the fake electors on January 6 “would make the Vice President’s life harder, and I didn’t want to be a part of that.”

“Mr. Morgan stands by his congressional testimony,” his defense attorneys told CNN in response to his emails and Chesebro’s statements to investigators.

Ultimately, on the eve of the joint session of Congress, Morgan helped get the ballots in place, according to the emails and according to Chesebro, who blamed his legal troubles squarely on the Trump campaign’s legal team.

“I could have avoided all this,” Chesebro vented to Michigan prosecutors. “It’s been a real lesson in not working with people that you don’t know and are not sure you can trust, because it really went south on me.”

45 notes · View notes

madamspeaker · 9 months

Text

If you were going to draw up a list of the people most responsible for the latest indictment of Donald Trump, the former president himself would be at the top, followed by the prosecutors who have brought the case. Republicans in Congress perversely deserve a great deal of credit, too, since they could have exiled Trump from political life and perhaps spared him more intense legal scrutiny if they had voted to convict him in the impeachment trial over his role in the siege of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Ultimately, however, you cannot tell the story of Trump’s historic indictment without Nancy Pelosi. It was the then-Speaker of the House who insisted that there be a congressional inquiry following January 6. And it was the work of the select committee she fashioned that finally appears to have spurred a reluctant Justice Department to action, setting in motion a more intense phase of criminal scrutiny focused on Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.The resulting indictment closely tracks the select committee’s work and findings, presenting a factual narrative that traces — almost identically — the evidence presented by the committee of a sophisticated, multipronged effort by Trump to remain in power that culminated in the mayhem at the U.S. Capitol.

“I knew on January 6 that he had committed a crime,” Pelosi told me late Friday afternoon, squeezing me in for a roughly 30-minute interview at the tail end of a remarkable week in Washington.

I wondered what was going through her head as someone who had played an essential role in bringing about the most important criminal prosecution in the history of our country, and I was curious, in particular, when it had occurred to her that Trump’s conduct following the 2020 election had not merely been politically destructive or outrageous but may have crossed the line into actual criminality.

During the Trump administration, Pelosi emerged as one of Trump’s most persistent and effective political antagonists, and the personal rancor between the two was often on public display. She went toe to toe with him in the Oval Office. She authorized the third-ever impeachment of an American president after Trump’s effort to shake down Ukraine’s president to get dirt on Joe Biden. She famously tore up Trump’s 2020 State of the Union speech while standing behind him. As Trump’s supporters began to approach the Capitol on January 6, Pelosi said that if Trump joined them, “I’m going to punch him out. I’ve been waiting for this. For trespassing on the Capitol grounds, I’m going to punch him out. And I’m going to go to jail, and I’m going to be happy.”

The rioters proceeded to ransack her office, and instead of punching Trump, who was prevented from going to the Capitol by the Secret Service, Pelosi impeached him again. To this day, Pelosi seems to get under Trump’s skin like no one else. Early Sunday morning, Trump called her “a sick & demented psycho who will someday live in HELL!”

Long before January 6 itself, Pelosi had been preparing for Trump to try to disrupt the transfer of power. “During the election, I thought, ‘He’s going to try to pull a stunt and we have to try to have as many states in the Democratic column as possible,’” she told me, contemplating the possibility that Biden’s victory might not be certified and that the House would have to move to an obscure procedure in which each state’s congressional delegation would cast a single vote to determine the next president.

Trump promptly proceeded to validate that concern, undertaking an extraordinary effort to remain in power after Election Day by falsely claiming that he had won and by trying to work various levers of official power to stay in office. “As we got closer to January 6, I knew he was cooking up all these things, but what was he going to do about it?” Pelosi recalled. “It was clear that he knew he did not win the election,” she explained. “It was clear, and he had to disrupt” the joint session of Congress to certify the election. As the indictment alleges, Trump did this not only by pressuring Vice-President Mike Pence to illegally cast aside Biden’s electoral votes but also by watching with apparent pleasure as a mob tore through the Capitol and by exploiting the violence fed by his lies.

“When we saw what he did on January 6, I knew that was a crime,” Pelosi added. She acknowledged that it is not possible to predict “what can be proven” successfully in court, “but I know he committed a crime that day.”

After Biden’s inauguration, Pelosi set about to organize a bipartisan 9/11 Commission–type investigation into the events that led up to January 6, but she was repeatedly stymied by congressional Republicans. “We yielded on every point,” Pelosi recalled of the negotiations with her Republican counterparts at the time. “We gave them an equal number of commission members, which we always would have done — equal member staff, equal member funding for everything — and equal subpoena power, which the majority never gives away, but nonetheless, we did it because this was so awful for our country, so necessary to have this.”

In what turned out to have been a historic miscalculation, Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell blocked the initiative in the Senate. “He went around to members and said, ‘Do me a personal favor and do not vote for this,’” Pelosi told me. “Even though he knew that night — and said — that the Republican president was responsible, they didn’t even want to have an investigation.”

Pelosi has earned a reputation as one of the most tactically savvy leaders in the history of the Congress, and she chuckled as she recalled McConnell’s maneuvering. “People said to Mitch, ‘You think Nancy is going to let this go?’ What could he have been thinking?”

Pelosi then shifted gears to negotiating over a select committee in the House with Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, who took the project about as seriously as McConnell had by proposing to name, among other people, bomb-thrower Jim Jordan to the panel. Pelosi quickly decided the negotiations were not going anywhere, explaining that McCarthy wanted to appoint members who would “totally undermine” the committee. “Okay,” she recalled thinking. “That’s really nice. So you get consultation as to who will serve [on the committee], and I have consulted with you, and I’ve said ‘no’ to who you want. That’s the power of the Speaker.”

Pelosi then assembled a group led by Democratic chair Bennie Thompson and Republican vice-chair Liz Cheney, along with six other Democrats and Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger. It did not take long for observers to conclude that McCarthy may have monumentally misplayed his hand, particularly after the committee produced a riveting series of hearings last summer that were mercifully free of the clownish and disruptive antics of the House GOP’s right flank.

In the course of our discussion, Pelosi was reluctant to take any sort of credit for the committee’s work or Trump’s indictment with the exception of taking “credit for the appointees” on the committee, whom she described as providing a “beautiful balance” in their approaches and a crucial “seriousness of purpose.”

Pelosi said she knew from the beginning that, in order for the committee to succeed, it could not operate in the way of typical committee hearings, and she worked to ensure that the members shared that perspective. “When people were accepting the offer to be on the committee, they knew that it wasn’t going to be every five minutes that they’d be speaking,” she said. “It would be part of the plan [to present] a narrative for the public to understand.”

In the end, Pelosi told me, “the quality of the membership, the effectiveness of the staff, and the excellence of the presentation made it one of the best presentations in the history of our country.”

Meanwhile, there were questions about what the Justice Department was doing to address the potential criminal culpability of Trump and those in his orbit. The committee’s members and staff were uncovering — and presenting to the public — damaging evidence that they had obtained from Trump administration officials, but the DOJ was not pursuing those same threads — despite public frustration among some observers — seemingly content with focusing on the people who had stormed the Capitol or who played a role in organizing the violence that day.

I asked Pelosi whether during this period she had ever tried to speak with Attorney General Merrick Garland, President Biden, or anyone in the White House about making sure the Justice Department was properly investigating Trump’s conduct. “No,” she quickly responded, telling me that she did not think it was appropriate for her to try to influence the department’s work behind closed doors.

“I did want them to pay attention, and I hope that we got their attention,” Pelosi told me. “That’s why the presentation — the narrative — had to be the way it was,” she explained, so that the public record could be as clear and credible as possible. “We couldn’t have people, like the Republicans wanted to put on, who would be disruptive, disruptive, disruptive. Too much was at stake.”

Still, there was palpable anxiety among House Democrats about the Justice Department’s progress — or lack thereof — investigating Trump directly. That anxiety may have reached a high point this June, when the Washington Post published a remarkable 8,000-word story providing the most comprehensive account to date of the department’s investigation into Trump’s conduct.

According to the Post, it took “more than a year” after January 6 “before prosecutors and FBI agents jointly embarked on a formal probe of actions directed from the White House to try to steal the election,” and “even then, the FBI stopped short of identifying the former president as a focus of that investigation.” One source told the paper that “it felt as though the department was reacting to the House committee’s work as well as heightened media coverage and commentary” as the department’s investigation finally gathered steam last year.

“When the Washington Post article came out,” Pelosi told me, “not that it was a complete shock or surprise to our members, but they were very concerned about it.”

Now that Trump has been indicted over his effort to steal the election, we are in the midst of a singular moment in American history — one that will have dramatic long-term implications for our country and one that will likely be covered in history books for generations to come. The difference, of course, is that as we live through this period, we have no idea how it will end — with Trump in prison or with Trump in the White House again.

I asked Pelosi how she thought this would all end, and she struck a tentative but cautiously optimistic tone. “As we always say, it all depends on what happens at the end of the day, but you have to determine what the end of the day is. Yesterday was the end of a day. The former president of the United States was arraigned, and that was a triumph for the truth.”

“The indictments against the president are exquisite,” Pelosi added, referring to both the latest set of charges and the earlier federal indictment over Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and his subsequent efforts to obstruct investigators. “They’re beautiful and intricate, and they probably have a better chance of conviction than anything that I would come up with.”

As for the prospect of a second Trump term, Pelosi immediately recoiled when I brought it up. “Don’t even think of that,” she told me. “Don’t think of the world being on fire. It cannot happen, or we will not be the United States of America.”

“If he were to be president,” she continued, “it would be a criminal enterprise in the White House.”

There was a time in American life, not that long ago, when that would have been clear hyperbole. These are categorically different times.

#nancy pelosi #madam speaker #interview

65 notes · View notes