Did the Willard Hotel get memory-holed?
Been watching for mention in the J6 reporting and transcripts of the connection between the Willard Hotel war rooms and the January 6th insurrection. There is still a lot to review in the new transcripts, but so far it has been mighty slim.
The Willard “has been asked to provide information for us,” committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson told Dana Bash in January, but there is precious little so far to indicate what, if anything, his team obtained. There are only two mentions of the Willard Hotel in the J6 final report (pg. 518).
The J6 committeee lacked the power to immunize the players who strategized there on behalf of Donald Trump, as Jennifer Rubin notes:
The House committee lacked the ability to immunize witnesses to obtain cooperation. But special counsel Jack Smith, whom Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed to oversee investigations into Trump, does have that power. He will therefore be able to probe further to answer questions. For example: What communication took place between the White House and the Trump team’s “command center” at the Willard Hotel? How much did Trump know about the violent groups he was inciting?
Clearly, Rep. Liz Cheney went gunning for the president who hijacked her party. The 845-page report has a heavy focus on the godfather behind the insurrection, as Mary Wheeler finds, but leaves out a lot Jack Smith will want to examine:
Some of those blind spots were created by the limits on the Committee’s investigative authorities, some were created by the Committee’s (perhaps resultant) limited understanding of the attack.
To demonstrate those blind spots, I wanted to show what the report includes in the body of the report about December 27 (some of these may be out of order and I need to clean it up, but this will be a useful demonstration). Here are things that happened on December 27, 2020:
- Bernie Kerik publicly attacks Pat Toomey for opposing fraud (the Report ties this attacks to physical threats against officials opposed to Trump’s fraud)
- Mark Meadows continues to pressure Georgia
- Doug Mastriano speaks to Trump and feeds members of Congress bullshit
- Trump attempts to get Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Donoghue to endorse his fraud message and — failing that — threatens to replace Rosen
- With Trump’s blessing, Louie Gohmert files suit against Mike Pence
- Trump pardons Stone and they talk about January 6
- Trump gets more involved in planning January 6, which leads to a plan to have his supporters march on the Capitol and then a plan for him to march
- The FBI creates a system to collect threats related to the “election certification” on January 6 by using a tag, “CERTUNREST
Some of these events (such as the Louie Gohmert lawsuit) were obviously in the work before December 27, but this provides a good read of where the parallel strands of the attack were on that particular day.
But given what we know, the far most important event of the day was the increased involvement by the White House in January 6. This was the moment the plans for January 6 started becoming a plan for a coup.
Without the communications of many of the key players outside the White House and Congress, we still do not know. But the Washington Post in October 2021 had this to report about the team assembled at the Willard to help Trump:
They were led by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. Former chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon was an occasional presence as the effort’s senior political adviser. Former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik was there as an investigator. Also present was John Eastman, the scholar, who outlined scenarios for denying Biden the presidency in an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 4 with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
Also among those present at the Willard were Boris Epshteyn, much mentioned in the report as a member of Giuliani’s legal team; Russell J. Ramsland Jr., who filed a “a grossly inaccurate affidavit” [pg. 228] regarding Dominion voting machines and voting irregularities in Antrim Co., Michigan; Christina Bobb of One America News Network, made more famous for certifying Trump had returned all the stolen federal documents at Mar-a-Lago; and Philip Luelsdorff, reportedly director of Business Development for 1st Amendment Praetorian (1AP), a fascist paramilitary security group.
Luelsdorff’s witness testimony was released on Dec. 21, but he makes no appearance in the final report, having refused under the Fifth Amendment to answer any questions or produce documents.
Jack Smith has his work cut out.
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