Tag: Capitol attack

The Biden Bubble

THURSDAY July 4, 2024

THE LATEST -- Donald J. Trump has extended his lead to six points over President Biden, the widest margin since late 2021, in a poll by The Wall Street Journal begun two days after the presidential debate. That's a bump from a two-point Trump lead in February. Also, 80% told the WSJ poll they consider Biden too old to run for a second term as president.

Meanwhile... President Biden has told key allies he understands the coming days of campaigning are "crucial" and that he may not be able to salvage his bid for a second term if he can't convince the voting public he is up to the task, The New York Times reports. Biden is scheduled for a Friday interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC News, plus campaign stops in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

"He knows if he has two more events like that , we're in a different place," one of the allies told the NYT.

But in a call to his campaign staff, Biden said, "No one's pushing me out. I'm not leaving."

And White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the president told her directly he had not spoken with allies about dropping out of the race.

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WEDNESDAY 7/3/24

A clear divide is bubbling to the surface between rank & file Democrats and the president's close advisors, friends and family, after his disastrous performance in last Thursday’s debate with Donald J. Trump. 

“In private, Democrats panic. For the Biden campaign, everything is fine,” reads a Wednesday headline in The Washington Post.

Veteran Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) became the first, and so far only, Congress member to call on Biden to step down from his campaign, telling NPR’s Morning Edition “we have a criminal and a gang who are about to take over our government.” 

The issue is not with Biden’s first three-and-a-half years, which most mainstream Dems heartily applaud. It’s about the next half-year, which Biden simply cannot win as far as they’re concerned.

“I think he’s behind and we need to put our best people forward,” Doggett told NPR. “I think the concerns I’m voicing are widespread.”

The Biden camp, consisting of his family and long-time advisors including Jennifer O’Malley, Anita Dunn, Mike Donilon, Bruce Reed, White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients and his chief of staff while vice president, Steve Richetti, should be conferring with him at Camp David this long July 4 weekend. If any single one of them can pop Biden’s bubble and convince him it will take a younger Democrat to keep Trump out of office, the Democratic campaign for president will change very quickly.

We would say this will turn the 2024 presidential election on its head, but that happened nearly a year ago, when Donald J. Trump announced he would run for the Republican nomination. If Biden refuses to end his re-election campaign, “down-ballot” Democrats including House candidates, who until now were confident their party would flip the Republican Party’s wafer-thin margin in the lower chamber fear they will lose seats and not have the majority necessary to slow a second Trump administration’s radical agenda. 

To that point, Biden Wednesday morning issued a memo to his House allies that shows still-tight internal polling and greater fundraising than the Trump campaign in June. The Biden campaign “significantly outraised” the Trump campaign, $127 million to $112 million, according to the memo, revealed to Politico.

--Todd Lassa

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SCOTUS' 6-3 ruling Monday granting ex-President Trump immunity from official acts in connection with the January 6thattack on the US Capitol remains the topic of political discussion leading into the nation’s 248th birthday Thursday.  Should we consider 248 years without a king a pretty good run?

End of Democracy? -- TUESDAY 7/2/24

Trump Gets Another Court Delay -- Sentencing of Donald J. Trump on his conviction in a Manhattan court for falsifying business records in connection with a hush-money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels has been rescheduled from next Thursday, July 11 -- four days before the Republican National Convention begins -- to Wednesday, September 18, according to The Wall Street Journal. How did Trump manage yet another court delay? Two extra months gives Judge Juan Merchan time to consider whether the Supreme Court's ruling on presidential immunity affects Trump's conviction.

More from Sotomayor – Monday we repeated Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s (pictured) minority opinion in which she was joined by justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson in concluding; “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

Sotomayor began her dissent thusly: “Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law. Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for ‘bold and unhesitating action’ by the President … the Court gives President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more.”

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TRUMP WINS IMMUNITY -- MONDAY 7/1/24

UPDATE: SCOTUS Hands Trump ‘A Major Victory’ – A US president has “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” the Supreme Court said in a 6-3 ruling, which Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign calls “a major victory.” But the ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, sends the issue back to Tanya Chutkan, US district court judge for the District of Columbia, for the question of which acts Trump allegedly committed in conjunction with the January 6th attack on the Capitol are “official” and which are not (per NPR and the AP). 

Delay is a win… Punting back “official” versus “unofficial” acts to Chutkan gives Trump the big win, as there is no chance special counsel Jack Smith’s case will come back to the district court before November 5. If Trump wins the presidential race, the case will die under his Justice Department. 

Opinions… Roberts’ majority opinion says the district and appeals courts did not take sufficient time to consider the questions of immunity and official v. unofficial acts. Writing for the minority, which included fellow liberals Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes that the majority opinion “reshapes the institution of the presidency,” and concludes: “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

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Post-Presidential Immunity? – The Supreme Court Monday will issue its ruling on whether Donald J. Trump has immunity as an ex-president, in special counsel Jack Smith’s case charging him for his alleged efforts to block Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. SCOTUS also will issue its ruling on whether states, specifically Florida and Texas, can restrict social media companies from removing certain political posts or accounts, The Washington Post reports. Then SCOTUS goes on vacation until the first Monday in October.

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France Turns Right – As Democrats wring their hands over whether it has a better chance of not losing to Donald J. Trump this November with a new presidential candidate brokered at its Chicago convention this August, the far-right National Rally party led by Marine Le Pen was leading France’s parliamentary elections after the first round of votes Sunday. The Wall Street Journal quotes a Harris Interactive poll that says National Rally and its allies took 34% of the first-round votes to 30% for a coalition of leftist parties. 

President Emmanuel Macron, who surprised and upset his supporters when he called for snap elections last month, clearly has lost – his pro-business party and its allies were in third place with just 22% of the votes. 

“I have never seen France more divided,” remarked NPR’s veteran Paris correspondent, Eleanor Beardsley.

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Britain to Turn Left? – The UK’s parliamentary elections are Thursday, July 4, where the Labour Party, led by former public prosecutor and human rights attorney Keir Starmer, has led the Conservative Party by double-digits for 18 months, according to The New York Times. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, of the Conservative Party, called for the elections in May, the first full parliamentary elections since December 2019, when Boris Johnson won in a landslide victory for the Conservatives, who have led since 2010.

--Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa

THURSDAY July 4, 2024 THE LATEST — Donald J. Trump has extended his lead to six points over […]

Like Beating a Dead Election Results Challenge

By Todd Lassa

If you think you’ve heard everything from the eighth hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6thAttack on the United States Capitol before, it’s because you watched it in horror that day, and maybe watched most, or all seven, previous hearings. 

Thursday night, the panel filled in Donald J. Trump’s 187 minutes of public “absence” that day with loyal Republican White House aides testifying he ignored their pleas to call off the mob as he tried to disrupt the ceremonial Electoral College count. 

D.C. Metro Police Sgt. Mark Robinson testified on video that Trump wanted to return to the Capitol after Secret Service drove him back to the White House and put the motorcade on standby for 45 minutes. Trump knew within 15 minutes of returning to the White House that the Capitol had been breached, he said. 

Trump then spent the next two-and-a-half hours watching Fox News from the White House dining room. From 11:06 a.m. to 6:45 p.m., the committee said, no calls to the president were entered into the White House logs.

But the president’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, called Trump for about four minutes beginning at 1:39 p.m., Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA), of the panel said, and at 1:49 p.m. the D.C. police called the attack a riot. Trump responded by tweeting a video of his speech at the Ellipse from that morning. 

In his video testimony, Trump administration counsel Pat Cipollone testified that he and everyone else in the White House except the president wanted the president to call off the riot from the moment its intensity was apparent on TV.

Former Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews, who testified live with former Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger (both pictured above) said Thursday she supported a move to get Trump to record a video from the press briefing room, less than a 60-second walk from the dining room, telling his followers to leave the Capitol. 

Trump did not budge, and instead took an eight-minute call from Giuliani at 2:03 p.m. At 2:13 p.m., the Capitol building was breached and rioters entered. An anonymous White House security official testified on an audio recording that members from the vice president’s security detail, holed up with Mike Pence in his Capitol office, were beginning to fear for their own lives. The security detail were “close to pressing to use lethal weapons, or worse,” and were calling family with goodbyes.

Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet said that Mike Pence “did not have the courage to do what should have been done to defend our country and the Constitution,” and that prompted the mob to turn on the vice president and call for his hanging. 

Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser who, in his opening remarks, praised Trump’s foreign policy on China trade and the Middle East Abraham Accord “decided to resign after that tweet. … I simply did not want to be associated with the events that were unfolding at the Capitol.”

Matthews, the former deputy press secretary, called it a “bad tweet” that “essentially gave the green light to these people.” Supporters “truly latch on to every word and every tweet” from Trump. The president called one of his minions, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), who had to end the call so he could evacuate himself from the Capitol. The 1/6 committee showed the infamous photo of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) raising his fist in support of the insurrectionists, then moments later running away from the rioters inside the Capitol. 

Trump tweeted at 2:38 p.m. and 3:13 p.m., calling on his supporters to “stay peaceful,” but Trump “already knew the mob was attacking the police,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) said. One rioter’s two-way radio broadcast said that Trump had told them to support the police, but said nothing about the safety of members of Congress. 

Fox News personalities joined the White House staff in urging Trump to call off his supporters and to condemn their actions. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) tweeted a video asking Trump to call it off and President-elect Biden told him to “demand an end to this siege.”

Finally, at 4:17 p.m., Trump tweeted a video from the Rose Garden telling rioters to go home, that they were “special” and he “loved” them. By now, the National Guard and FBI began to deploy on the Capitol. 

Trump had rejected a Rose Garden script that asked his supporters to “leave the Capitol in a peaceful way. He instead began the message by repeating “fraudulent election” claims. 

“I was shocked by the fact that he chose to begin the video by repeating the lie that the election was stolen,” Matthews said. She found it heinous that she may have to defend Trump’s words. “I knew I was leaving (the White House job) that evening.”

Kinzinger showed Trump’s last tweet of the day, from 6:01 p.m., in which he begins, “These are the things that happen when a sacred landslide victory is so unceremoniously and viciously stripped away … remember the day forever.”

“He showed absolutely no remorse,” Kinzinger said.

Testimony bled into January 7, when both Pottinger and Cipollone officially resigned. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley said White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows described to him that Trump was “very emotional and in a very bad place.”

January 6 panel vice chair Liz Cheney (R-WY), standing in for COVID-stricken chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who briefly appeared via video, concluded the hearings saying Trump should not “be even trusted with another position of authority again.”

The committee continues its investigative work in August, when its first report is due, and its next set of hearings are scheduled to begin in September.

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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news