Tag: Secret Service

1/6 Panel Subpoenas Trump

By Todd Lassa

(PICTURED: Still from a video Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio shot before the January 6 Capitol insurrection, as presented by the Select Committee.)

Donald J. Trump has been subpoenaed by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, which in its ninth public hearing (formally, a business meeting) Thursday showed that the former president began his scheme to deny peaceful transfer of power at least as early as July 2020, more than half a year before he lost re-election. Trump also acknowledged privately to White House aides and officials that he had indeed lost the election. 

Among nearly 1 million electronic messages retrieved from the Secret Service are two reports from the “rally” site that agents should wear protective gear to prepare for Trump riding the “Beast” limo to the Capitol after he had been driven back to the White House against his will, and another at 1:25 p.m. that the president “is planning on holding at the White House for the next approximate two hours, then moving to the Capitol.”

Based on the former president’s reputation, Trump’s attorneys will do all they can to fight and at least delay any appearance before the 1/6 panel, which will publish its report by the end of the year. Vice Chair Liz Cheney’s (R-WY) resolution, passed 9-0, subpoenas Donald J. Trump for documents and testimony under oath in connection with the attack. It will not take much legal maneuvering to delay such testimony to next year and the 118th Congress, when Cheney and fellow panel member Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) will no longer be members of the House of Representatives. 

As for Trump’s documents required in the subpoena, during Thursday’s hearing the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the former president’s request to overturn the 11th Circuit District Court’s ruling allowing the Justice Department to review confidential papers that the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago last August 8.

It is both a testimony to the depth of evidence and material, which the panel has continued to collect as additional witnesses have come forth, and the lengths to which the former president was willing to go to subvert our democracy to avoid having to leave the White House that made Thursday’s hearing as news-infested as it was. There were no new live witnesses. But the panel does have those Secret Service emails and other electronic communications that were requested at the last hearing, July 21, after it was revealed most of them from January 5 and 6, 2021, were said to be lost after the agency updated its devices.

Secret Service emails on Trump supporters planning to come to the Capitol on January 6, from December 26, 2020:

•“They think that they will have a large enough group to march into DC armed and will outnumber the police so they can’t be stopped.”

•“Their plan is to literally kill people. Please, please take this tip seriously and investigate further.”

•“The proud boys have detailed their plans on multiple websites such as [Donald Trump-“wins” website].

Brad Parscale, advisor in the 2020 Trump campaign said in video testimony that “Trump planned as early as July he would say he won.”

Panel member Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) told of how campaign advisor Bill Stepien and White House advisor/son-in-law Jared Kushner wanted Trump to encourage Republicans to vote by mail-in ballot, “but the president’s mind was made up” to claim that mail-in ballots are a key contributor to voter fraud, according to Stepien’s video testimony. On election night, Trump declared victory early and then called on the vote-counting to stop, as ballots came in well into the morning from Democrat-heavy urban areas. 

Trump planned to “declare victory no matter the results,” Lofgren concluded. The panel also produced evidence that Trump did not believe his own Big Lie, even as he was doing all he could to prove his case. 

In another piece of video testimony, Cassidy Hutchinson, aide to ex-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, said Trump told Meadows “I don’t want people to know we lost.”

FRI 10/14/22
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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news

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