More subpoenas went out this week from the January 6th Committee, including some members of the Trump team who are very close to the president. (I wrote about one of them yesterday — the very scary Trumpenjugen Johnny McEntee.) The list is now quite long and includes well-known names like Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Miller as well as lesser known factotums and henchmen.
The NY Times ran down the details on what the Committee is looking at so far:
In recent weeks, the committee has hired new investigators, pored over thousands of documents and heard privately from a stream of voluntary witnesses, from rally planners and former Trump officials to the rioters themselves.
More than 150 witnesses have been interviewed, some of whom surprised investigators by proactively contacting the committee to testify, according to two people familiar with the investigation who described the confidential inquiry on the condition of anonymity.
The panel has learned details about how “Stop the Steal” rally organizers used deception to obtain permits from the Capitol Police to hold rallies near the Capitol; how Mr. Trump and White House officials coordinated with organizers of the rally whose attendees would later storm the Capitol; and how deeply Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was involved in pushing false claims of widespread election fraud.
Working out of a nondescript office building at the bottom of Capitol Hill, the committee’s investigators have divided themselves into color-coded teams to pursue several avenues of inquiry. They are looking into:
The money trail. Investigators are scrutinizing the groups that funded the protests that preceded the violence, which involved rioters from at least 44 states, and promoted and spread lies online that helped radicalize the crowd.
Planning meetings. The panel is pressing for answers about gatherings at the Willard and other Washington hotels where Mr. Trump’s allies who were involved in the effort to overturn the election, including Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Eastman, met in the hours before the riot.
Foreknowledge of violence. The most difficult piece of the investigation involves unearthing evidence that Mr. Trump or anyone in his inner circle had foreknowledge that violence was a possibility on Jan. 6, and whether they took any steps to either encourage or discourage the storming of the Capitol. Mr. Bannon, whom the House voted to hold in criminal contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the committee, predicted on his podcast a day before the riot that “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow.”
The committee wants to question Mr. Bannon about his presence at a meeting at the Willard on Jan. 5, when plans were discussed to try to block Congress’s formalization of the election the next day.
“Mr. Bannon was in the war room at the Willard on Jan. 6,” Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the vice chairwoman of the committee, said during a recent hearing.
Mr. Stone, who was photographed with Mr. Flynn on Jan. 5, has claimed that he had departed his room at the Willard to leave town as rioters stormed the Capitol, after he decided against a plan to “lead a march” from the White House Ellipse to the Capitol, according to video posted to social media.
But the Willard was only one hub of Trump activity before the Jan. 6 riot, when members of the former president’s inner circle also congregated at the nearby Trump International and other hotels to plan their bid to invalidate the election results.
Mr. Flynn was also present at the Trump International Hotel on Jan. 5 for a meeting that included about 15 people, where the discussion centered on “how to put pressure on more members of Congress to object to the Electoral College results,” according to one attendee, Charles Herbster, a Republican candidate for governor of Nebraska.
Hmmm.
Remember this?
They wouldn’t really blackmail public officials would they?
Of course they would.