339 search results for "certification"

Trump edition

In case you aren’t fully aware of the details of the fake elector scheme, the NY Times has published a good explainer. It starts off with a discussion of what took place in Hawaii in 1960 when there was a 100 vote difference in the presidential election and the recount was not expected to be made before the deadline on December 14th. The Kennedy campaign drafted a slate of electors to reflect its win in case it went their way, which it eventually did. The results would not have affected the outcome of the election either way.

The Trump forces used this as their template for the scheme to overturn legal elections in various states on the basis of alleged voter irregularities (not a close election as in 1960):

The Trump plan began with an effort to persuade Republican officials in the targeted states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — to help draft, or to put their names on, documents that declared Mr. Trump to be the victor.

That effort was largely led by lawyers close to Mr. Trump, like Rudolph W. Giuliani and John Eastman, who sometimes communicated directly with local points of contact in the state, or by lawyers who worked in the states themselves and dealt with Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Eastman or with Mr. Trump’s campaign aides.

Their stated rationale was that Mr. Biden’s victories in those states would be overturned once they could establish their claims of widespread voting fraud and other irregularities, and that it was only prudent to have the “alternate” slates of electors in place for that eventuality.

But, as Mr. Trump had been told by his campaign aides and eventually even his attorney general, there were no legitimate claims of fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the race, and the seven states all certified Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory on Dec. 14, 2020. Mr. Trump and his allies barreled ahead with the electors plan nonetheless, with an increasing focus on using the ceremonial congressional certification process on Jan. 6 to derail the transfer of power.

Ultimately, several dozen of Mr. Trump’s allies in the states signed false slates of electors, and most were unequivocal in their contention that Mr. Trump had won. But in Pennsylvania and New Mexico, local officials who drafted the documents included a caveat, saying that they should only be considered if Mr. Trump prevailed in the many lawsuits he and his allies had filed challenging the election, and was legally the winner.

Once the false pro-Trump slates had been created, Mr. Trump and his allies turned to the second part of the plan: strong-arming Mr. Pence into considering them during the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6. The point was to persuade Mr. Pence to say that the election was somehow flawed or in doubt.

“We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted,” Jack Wilenchik, a pro-Trump lawyer based in Arizona, wrote in an email to his colleagues.

Any number of outcomes could have worked in Mr. Trump’s favor.

Most simply, Mr. Trump and his allies sought to convince Mr. Pence to count the pro-Trump slates, reject those saying Mr. Biden had won and thus unilaterally keep the former president in office.

Alternatively, the Trump team hoped that Mr. Pence might declare the election to be irreparably defective and, under the Electoral Count Act of 1887, let state delegations in the House of Representatives decide the election themselves, a process that would also have given Mr. Trump his victory.

In yet a third option, Mr. Trump and his allies thought Mr. Pence could choose to delay the certification of the electors count, providing the former president with more time to prove his claims of fraud or mount a last-ditch challenge in a Supreme Court case.

At Least 3 Investigations Involve the Fake Electors

In Georgia, the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, has notified 16 people who identified themselves as the state’s pro-Trump electors that they are targets in an ongoing criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia.

In Washington, the Justice Department’s inspector general obtained a warrant to search the home of a former department official, Jeffrey Clark, as part of its 18-month long investigation into attempts by Justice Department employees to undo the election.

Mr. Clark pressured the nation’s top prosecutors to send a letter to Georgia state officials falsely stating, among other things, that the legislature should create an alternative slate of electors that supported Mr. Trump.

The warrant indicated that Mr. Clark is being investigated for conspiracy to obstruct the certification of the presidential election, according to a person familiar with the matter. In a related action, the inspector general and the F.B.I. seized the phone of Mr. Eastman.

A federal grand jury this spring issued subpoenas to some pro-Trump electors and Republican officials requesting information about several lawyers closely allied with Mr. Trump and the electors scheme, including Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Eastman, Jenna Ellis, who worked with Mr. Giuliani, and Mr. Chesebro. The subpoenas also sought information about any employees of Mr. Trump or his campaign who knew about the plan.

Some pro-Trump elector slates were filed with the National Archives. It is a federal crime to knowingly submit false statements or documentation to a federal agency for an undue end.

Trump’s Ties Come Into View

While no prosecutor has criminally charged anyone for their participation in the scheme to submit false slates of electors to Congress, possible ties between Mr. Trump and the plan have come into view over the past few months.

In a lawsuit that Mr. Eastman filed hoping to keep scores of documents from reaching the House committee investigating Jan. 6, court filings established that he and Mr. Trump had worked together on several efforts to undo the election results, including the fake electors plan.

In a ruling against Mr. Eastman, Judge David O. Carter of the Central District of California said that Mr. Trump had facilitated two meetings “explicitly tied” to persuading Mr. Pence to either reject electors or delay the count. Judge Carter said that “the illegality of the plan was obvious.”

The Jan. 6 committee has also pinned the effort to assemble slates of electors in key battleground states squarely on the Trump campaign, saying that Mr. Trump’s allies “created phony certificates associated with these fake electors and then transmitted these certificates to Washington.”

Rusty Bowers, the Republican speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, told the committee that he refused Mr. Trump’s directive to create a false slate of pro-Trump electors. “You are asking me to do something against my oath, and I will not break my oath,” he testified saying to Mr. Trump.

Last week, Mr. Pence’s two top White House aides testified before the federal grand jury investigating the electors scheme. The two aides — Marc Short, Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, and Greg Jacob, his counsel — were present in the Oval Office on Jan. 4, 2021, when Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman tried unsuccessfully to convince Mr. Pence that he could invoke the competing elector slates to derail the congressional certification two days later.

As part of its criminal investigation, the Justice Department has begun asking witnesses in the case about Mr. Trump’s involvement.

Trump was certainly involved. He would not have pressured Pence to do what he did if he wasn’t. The whole plot depended upon it.

Oh my…

Two top aides to former Vice President Mike Pence testified last week to a federal grand jury in Washington investigating the events surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the highest-ranking officials of the Trump administration so far known to have cooperated with the Justice Department’s widening inquiry into the events leading up to the assault.

The appearances before the grand jury of the men — Marc Short, who was Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, and Greg Jacob, who was his counsel — were the latest indication that the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into the events surrounding and preceding the riot is intensifying after weeks of growing questions about the urgency the department has put on examining former President Donald J. Trump’s potential criminal liability.

The testimony of the two Pence aides marked the first time it has become publicly known that figures with firsthand knowledge of what took place inside the White House in the tumultuous days before the attack have cooperated with federal prosecutors.

Both Mr. Short and Mr. Jacob played important roles in describing to a House select committee conducting a parallel investigation of the Capitol attack how Mr. Trump, working with allies like the lawyer John Eastman, mounted a campaign to pressure Mr. Pence into disrupting the normal counting of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, 2021, as part of an effort to keep Mr. Trump in office.

Mr. Short’s testimony was confirmed by two people familiar with it, as was Mr. Jacob’s.

The Justice Department has at times appeared to be lagging behind the House select committee, which has spoken to more than 1,000 witnesses, including some from inside the Trump White House. Much of that testimony has been highlighted at a series of public hearings over the past two months.

It remains unclear precisely what Mr. Short and Mr. Jacob told the grand jury or what questions prosecutors may have asked them. But both previously gave recorded and transcribed interviews to the House committee, and Mr. Jacob served as a live witness at one of the panel’s public hearings that focused on the effort to strong-arm Mr. Pence.

Mr. Short and Mr. Jacob were present in the Oval Office for a meeting on Jan. 4, 2021, at which Mr. Trump had Mr. Eastman try to persuade Mr. Pence that he could delay or block congressional certification of Mr. Trump’s Electoral College defeat.

Mr. Eastman’s plan relied on Mr. Pence being willing to accept, as he presided over a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, that there were disputes over the validity of electors whose votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. had already been certified by the states — a baseless assertion that had been promoted by a number of Trump allies in the previous weeks as a last-ditch way to help keep Mr. Trump in office.

Mr. Pence ultimately rejected Mr. Trump’s pressure on him to go along. But the so-called fake electors proposal has been one of the primary lines of inquiry to have become public in the Justice Department’s sprawling investigation.

Mr. Short also provided the House committee with testimony that highlighted the sense of threat that built from Mr. Trump’s efforts to derail the congressional proceedings on Jan. 6.

Update:

Why is this so big? Jeffrey Toobin: "It's a really big deal … This suggests that the Justice Department is now criminally investigating the White House." pic.twitter.com/9ipqwktTss

— The Recount (@therecount) July 26, 2022

Well,well well…

The Committee homes in on Trump’s January 6th

If Donald Trump knew any history — which he most certainly does not — you might think that he based his January 6 rally and march to the Capitol on the infamous March on Rome, a 1923 coup d’etat orchestrated by Benito Mussolini. That is when Mussolini’s blackshirts staged a dramatic march to the Italian capitol and took over the government. (Like Donald Trump, Mussolini didn’t actually accompany his followers on their march but did have his picture taken with them.) The existing Italian government didn’t put up any resistance and Mussolini easily assumed power the next day without any blood being shed. Everyone had already known the mob violence the blackshirts were capable of, they’d been wreaking havoc on the population for some time.

Of course, Trump knew nothing of this when he called for his mob to assemble in the nation’s Capitol on the day the congress certified the election for Joe Biden. He just has the same fascistic instincts as Benito Mussolini and thought he could use his crowd to intimidate Congress into going along with his crackpot plans to overturn the election with fake electors. If that didn’t work, he even had members of his party, such as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tx., prepared to demand that the count be delayed for 10 days so he could continue his pressure on Republican officials.

As it turned out, his crowd staged a violent assault on the Capitol injuring hundreds of police officers. Trump had incited them to not only stop the count but got them to hunt down his allegedly disloyal vice president by tweeting in the middle of the violence, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands truth!”

Like Mussolini, the president may not have been with them in person but he was leading them just the same.

Thursday’s primetime hearing, the last in this first summer series, looked at Trump’s behavior during the time he returned to the White House after giving his incendiary speech in which he told the crowd to march to the Capitol up until the morning after the insurrection when he was coerced into giving an insincere speech condemning the rioters. We had learned in earlier hearings and from news reports that Trump sat in the dining room off the Oval Office watching the big TV on the wall, rebuffing everyone’s entreaties to stop the violence.

He did manage to call GOP senators, however, to try to get them to go along with his daft plan even as his people were storming the building. He also spoke to his lawyer and co-conspirator Rudy Giuliani a couple of times, although we can only speculate about what they discussed. But after sending that inflammatory tweet targeting Mike Pence, Trump refused to do anything more than belatedly release another tweet saying not to harm the Capitol police. It is then that one rioter is heard on tape laughing and saying, “he didn’t say anything about not hurting the congressmen!”

They got the message: He didn’t say anything about not hurting Mike Pence, either.

The committee revealed some harrowing testimony from an anonymous national security employee who apparently had access to radio traffic from that period and he testified to how very close the Pence came to being confronted by that rabid mob:

“Members of the VP detail at this time were starting to fear for their own lives. There was a lot of yelling, um a lot of — a lot of very personal calls over the radio. So, it was disturbing. I don’t like talking about it. But there were calls to say goodbye to family members, so on and so forth. It was getting — for whatever the reason was on the ground, the VP detail thought that this was about to be very ugly.”

They also played audio of Pence’s Secret Service detail as they decided to evacuate the VP to a safer space and you could hear the frantic concern in their voices.

The committee asked former White House counsel Pat Cipollone to comment on what the people in the White House were thinking and saying as this unfolded:

https://twitter.com/amandacarpenter/status/1550292859546488832?s=20&t=FVs7fZu_rAC0ffO06UJXSQ

When asked about the president, Cipollone said he couldn’t reveal communications “but obviously I think you know … yeah.”

Yes, we do.

The committee also showed outtakes from two speeches Trump made, the first on Jan. 6 in which he told the mob to go home and that he loved them, after which he sent his final tweet which said: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

They also showed the outtakes from a “conciliatory” speech that Trump clearly didn’t want to give the next day. That blooper reel shows just how insincere Trump was — and how angry he remained:

"I don't want to say the election is over." https://t.co/PocYjfCsJS

— Victoria Brownworth (@VABVOX) July 22, 2022

It is an astonishing 24-hour period in American history, meticulously detailed by the January 6 Committee in all its hideous glory.

Most of the TV lawyers opined later that what Trump did that day — incite the rioters with his speech and then lead the insurrection with his inflammatory tweets and verbal silence from the Oval Office — probably doesn’t rise to the level of a criminal violation. (Other aspects of his coup-plotting almost certainly do.) But his behavior on that day is a perfect example of a president violating his oath of office so completely that to even consider allowing him to become president again should be unthinkable. 

Yet from Donald Trump’s perspective, his crusade to overturn the election isn’t over yet.

Just this week, we learned that he is still calling up state officials to strong-arm them into “decertifying” the 2020 election. And while many of the punditocracy suggest that his day is done and his voters are getting tired of him, Trump remains the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2024.

The committee showed some previously unheard audio and still pictures of the congressional leadership on the evening of Jan. 6 speaking to acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., are heard insisting they want to go back that night to certify the election to prove that the insurrection failed and asking when the building will be cleared for that purpose. We all know that Pence refused to leave the Capitol largely because knew he would be necessary to preside when (if) the violence was controlled. Remarkably, they all did their duty that night.

But before we get too enraptured with the notion that the Republicans rallied to the defense of the Constitution and saved our republic, consider that later that night 139 GOP House members and 8 senators still objected to the certification. The Senate had the chance two weeks later to ensure that Trump could never run again when the House impeached him and they couldn’t even get the 16 Republican senators necessary to do it. After all that Trump had put them and the country through they could not summon the will to do anything about it. Just like Trump on Jan. 6, they are leading the GOP’s authoritarian take-over by the simple act of letting it happen. 

Salon

Nothing. Obviously.

Nobody cheated. They are secure:

The expanded use of drop boxes for mailed ballots during the 2020 election did not lead to any widespread problems, according to an Associated Press survey of state election officials across the U.S. that revealed no cases of fraud, vandalism or theft that could have affected the results.

The findings from both Republican- and Democratic-controlled states run contrary to claims made by former President Donald Trump and his allies who have intensely criticized their use and falsely claimed they were a target for fraud.

Drop boxes are considered by many election officials to be safe and secure, and have been used to varying degrees by states across the political spectrum. Yet conspiracy theories and efforts by Republicans to eliminate or restrict them since the 2020 election persist. This month, the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that drop boxes are not allowed under state law and can no longer be widely used.

Drop boxes also are a focal point of the film “2,000 Mules,” which used a flawed analysis of cellphone location data and ballot drop box surveillance footage to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 presidential election.

In response to the legislation and conspiracy theories surrounding drop boxes, the AP sent a survey in May to the top elections office in each state seeking information about whether the boxes were tied to fraudulent votes or stolen ballots, or whether the boxes and the ballots they contained were damaged.

All but five states responded to the questions.

None of the election offices in states that allowed the use of drop boxes in 2020 reported any instances in which the boxes were connected to voter fraud or stolen ballots. Likewise, none reported incidents in which the boxes or ballots were damaged to the extent that election results would have been affected.

A previous AP investigation found far too few cases of potential voter fraud in the six battleground states where Trump disputed his loss to President Joe Biden to affect the outcome.

A number of states — including Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas — said they do not allow the use of drop boxes. Some had not allowed them before the 2020 election, when the coronavirus pandemic prompted wider use of mailed ballots. In states where they are used, secretaries of state or election commissioners may not be aware of every incident involving a drop box if it was not reported to their office by a county or other local jurisdiction.

Drop boxes have been a mainstay in states with extensive mail voting for years and had not raised any alarms. They were used widely in 2020 as election officials sought to provide alternative ways to cast ballots with the COVID-19 outbreak creating concerns about in-person voting. The boxes also gave voters a direct method for submitting their ballots, rather than sending them through the U.S. Postal Service and worrying about delivery delays.

Starting months before the 2020 presidential election, Trump and his allies have made a series of unfounded claims suggesting that drop boxes open the door to voter fraud. Republican state lawmakers, as part of their push to add new voting restrictions, have in turn placed rules around when and where the boxes could be accessed.

Arizona Assistant Secretary of State Allie Bones said drop boxes are “safe and secure” and might even be considered more secure than Postal Service mailboxes. She said bipartisan teams in the state collect ballots from the drop boxes and take them directly to secure election facilities, following so-called chain-of-custody protocols.

“Not to say that there’s anything wrong with USPS, and I think they do a great job as well, but the hysteria around ballot drop boxes I think is just a made-up thing to create doubt and fear,” Bones said.

Arizona has had robust mail-in voting for years that includes the use of drop boxes, and in the AP survey, the state reported no damage, stolen ballots or fraud associated with them in 2020. Nevertheless, Trump-aligned lawmakers in the state pushed for legislation that would ban drop boxes, but were stymied by Democrats and several Republicans who disagreed with the strategy.

Utah is a state controlled by Republicans that also has widespread use of mailed ballots and no limits on the number of drop boxes a county can deploy. Jackson Murphy, spokesman for Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who is the state’s top election official, said in the AP survey that Henderson encourages counties to make secure drop boxes accessible to voters.

Of the states responding to the survey, 15 indicated that drop boxes were in use before 2020 and 22 have no limits on how many can be used in this fall’s election. At least five states take the extra step of setting a minimum number of drop boxes required.

Republican-led Florida and North Dakota and Democratic-led New York did not respond. Montana and Virginia did, but did not answer the survey questions related to the 2020 election.

Last year, five states added new restrictions to ballot drop boxes, according to research by the Voting Rights Lab. That included Georgia, where President Joe Biden won a narrow victory and where drop boxes were allowed under an emergency rule prompted by the pandemic.

Georgia Republicans say their changes have resulted in drop boxes being a permanent option for voters, requiring all counties to have at least one. But the legislation, which includes a formula of one box per 100,000 registered voters, means fewer will be available in the state’s most populous communities compared with 2020.

Iowa lawmakers last year approved legislation to limit drop boxes to one per county. Previously, state law did not say how many drop boxes counties could use. This year, Louisiana, Missouri and South Carolina have passed laws effectively prohibiting drop boxes, according to the Voting Rights Lab, which researches state election law changes.

Along with incidents recorded in news reports, the AP survey found a handful of cases in 2020 in which drop boxes were damaged.

Officials in Washington state said there were instances when drop boxes were hit by vehicles, but that no ballot tampering had been reported. Massachusetts election officials said one box was damaged by arson in October 2020 but that most of the ballots inside were still legible enough for voters to be identified, notified and sent replacements.

A drop box also was set on fire in Los Angeles County in 2020, but a local election official said the vast majority of the ballots that were damaged were able to be recovered and voters provided new ballots. Another drop box in California was temporarily closed because of a wildfire.

“The irony is they were put in place to respond to a problem with the post office and make sure people had a secure way of returning their ballots,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat. “And so there’s no actual legitimate concern except for, again, potential external threats or people who have been radicalized through misinformation to try to tamper with drop boxes to make a point.”

North Carolina provides an example of how deep-seated the misinformation has become. The state does not allow drop boxes and did not use them during the 2020 election.

“And despite that fact, people are still claiming drop box fraud must have occurred in North Carolina,” said Patrick Gannon, public information director for the State Board of Elections. “You can’t make this up. Oh wait. Yes, you can.”

In Wisconsin, Republicans had supported the use of drop boxes before Trump seized on mailed ballots as part of his unsubstantiated claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling that found ballot drop boxes were not allowed under state law also said no one other than the voter can return their ballot in person to a local clerk’s office or alternate site.

Some voters said they were frustrated by the ruling.

Kelly O’Keefe Boettcher of Milwaukee said she cast her ballot in a drop box in 2020 because of safety concerns during the pandemic and is upset that they’ll no longer be an option for her or for voters who are less able to get to the polls.

“Drop boxes are accessible; they are egalitarian,” she said. “To watch them go, I feel, people can say it’s not voter suppression. But it is.”

Wisconsin state Rep. Tim Ramthun, a Republican candidate for governor, reintroduced a resolution this past week for the GOP-controlled Legislature to decertify Biden’s victory there, adding the state Supreme Court ruling on drop boxes as one reason to do so. Trump also renewed his calls for decertification in Wisconsin, citing the ruling.

According to the AP survey, the Wisconsin Elections Commission said it is not aware of any cases in 2020 in which drop boxes were damaged, had submitted ballots stolen or destroyed, or were used for fraudulent ballots.

“Isn’t a mailbox a secure place to put a letter?” asked Dave Wanninger, who with his wife used a ballot drop box in a Milwaukee public library in 2020. “Why would a drop box be any different?”

This is just painfully stupid. It’s not even that it will particularly help Republicans, although it might on the margins. The truth is that people in both parties use drop boxes. This is just another way of calling the voting system into question so they can whine like a bunch of 3 year olds whenever they lose an election, soothing themselves with the fantasy that most people really agree with them and the only way they can lose is if Democrats cheat. Naturally, they are the ones cheating.

This is intensely frustrating but par for the course. We are a very dumb culture and we’re getting dumber by the day.

No please, not again

I’m glad David Corn brought this up because I’ve become worried about the same thing. Trump and his minions have a way of framing his bad acts that seem to exonerate him. Corn compares the current obsession with finding a specific link between Trump and the Proud Boys to the “collusion” narrative that overwhelmed all of Trump’s dirty deeds in the Russia investigation. He successfully misdirected the public away from the fact that his campaign had been infiltrated by Russian interests, including his campaign chairman, and that he had openly encouraged them to sabotage his opponent. And he persuaded much of the public that unless changed with “collusion” (not a legal concept) he was innocent of wrongdoing.

Anyway, it may be happening again:

In much the same way, Trump need not be nailed as a colluder with the Oath Keepers or Proud Boys to merit widespread condemnation and possible criminal investigation. It’s been proven that the Trump White House via then-chief of staff Mark Meadows was in communication on January 5 with longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone and disgraced former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, who themselves were in contact with the allegedly seditious Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. So it remains a possibility that the White House was in cahoots with the extremists, perhaps egging them on to cause chaos on January 6 that would impede the certification of the electoral vote count—which, at that time, was what Trump desired. (The Proud Boys, at the very least, believed Trump sent them an encouraging message during the 2020 campaign when he told them, “Stand back and stand by.” And in 2016, Trump publicly asked Russian hackers to target Hillary Clinton—and they did.) Yet if these two dots—Trump and the insurrectionist paramiltarists—are not connected, that does not absolve Trump.

So much of Trump’s post-election misconduct is now out in the open. His Big Lie crusade and his incitement of the January 6 mob occurred in full public view. And his behind-the-scenes efforts to overturn the election have been revealed: leaning on state Republican legislators; pressuring election officials in Georgia (“I just want [you] to find 11,780 votes”); scheming to create fake elector slates; pressing the Justice Department to declare the election results corrupt; and muscling Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of electoral votes. Moreover, the January 6 committee has been revealing evidence showing what was already known about that awful day: While the pro-Trump marauders attacked the Capitol and assaulted law enforcement officers, Trump took no steps to end the riot. The raid proceeded for hours before Trump called on his supporters to leave the Capitol. (The committee has teased that it will provide more testimony regarding what Trump did and did not do on the afternoon of January 6 in a hearing next week.)

Some of Trump’s actions may have been illegal—and there’s much discussion these days as to whether Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department is fully investigating them and whether Trump and his henchmen could be indicted. (The Fulton County district attorney is on the case.) But there is no question that Trump committed serious wrongdoing and that on January 6 he abandoned his duties as president, as he watched the riot and did nothing. 

All this ought to be enough to brand Trump a villain and a danger to American democracy. Conspiring with the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys would be merely one more offense on a tall pile. It could expand his legal liability. But it’s a subplot in a tale already fully established: Trump attempted to subvert the constitutional order to retain power. 

Trump has often escaped accountability by committing transgression upon transgression. Each dirty deed distracts from the other. Any one of his plots to steal the 2020 election would be a major scandal in itself. (Pushing the Justice Department to falsely declare the results were fraudulent!) Yet all of his dishonest conniving creates a gigantic blur that can be hard to absorb or follow. The January 6 committee has done a good job of breaking down Trump’s myriad skullduggery. This will certainly not convince the Trump cultists and denialists; they cannot be reached. But for the rest of the nation, there’s no need for a smoking gun—or to get hung up on a particular allegation or possible criminal violation. The question is no longer Trump’s guilt but how best to counter the threat he continues to pose to the republic. 

He’s right, of course. The man is a danger to our democracy, a pathological liar who has betrayed the country over and over again for his own narcissistic needs. He is a monster. It shouldn’t take a criminal indictment for him to be disqualified from ever stepping foot in the White House again.

But I’m honestly not sure that’s something we can count on. Look at all he did right out in the open and more than 70 million people voted for him. Counting on “Merrick Time” to deliver the goods as we did with Mueller is a bad idea and we certainly shouldn’t let the press allow that frame to take hold.

You should be watching

‘Member this? “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

If you reading this, the latest , live January 6 hearing in the House is already underway. It started at 10 a.m. ET. The focus today is (or is reportedly) the a) extremists who planned and materially advanced the assault on the U.S. Capitol, and b) their ties to President Trump and the White House.

CNN has a preview of coming defendents whose names may come up today:

Joe Biggs, a Proud Boys leader from Florida and former InfoWars correspondent, assumed a top leadership role within the Proud Boys after the January 4 arrest of Proud Boys Chairman Enrique Tarrio, according to the Justice Department. Biggs allegedly led the Proud Boys in a march to and around the Capitol building, and was present at the initial breach of Capitol grounds.

Biggs faces nine federal charges including seditious conspiracy and has pleaded not guilty.

---

Kelly Meggs is a leader of the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers and is one of several members charged with seditious conspiracy. He has pleaded not guilty. Text messages from around January 6 show that Meggs discussed the possibility of using the Proud Boys as a “force multiplier” on January 6 with other Oath Keepers, and that he was in touch with former Trump adviser Roger Stone about providing security during the Stop the Steal rally.

Meggs allegedly led the infamous first “stack” of Oath Keepers up the steps and into the Capitol building on January 6, according to the Justice Department. Once inside, Meggs allegedly went searching for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

---

Rochester Proud Boys member Dominic Pezzola is accused of smashing a window with a stolen police officer’s riot shield, precipitating the first breach of the Capitol building.

He was allegedly one of the first rioters inside, and was at the front of the group who chased Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman up the stairs.

Pezzola faces 10 federal charges including seditious conspiracy and has pleaded not guilty.

---

Stewart Rhodes, an Army veteran and graduate of Yale law school, founded the Oath Keepers in 2009 and has led the far-right organization ever since. Rhodes was at the Capitol on January 6 but is not alleged to have entered the building, though phone records show he allegedly communicated with members who did go inside the Capitol and with members staged at an armed “quick reaction force” just outside Washington, DC.

Rhodes was also a member of a “VIP” Signal chat alongside Roger Stone, Ali Alexander, Alex Jones and other key Trump allies, according to people familiar with Signal messages that prosecutors have obtained.

Rhodes, along with nine other members of the Oath Keepers, is set to go to trial in September on charges of seditious conspiracy. He is currently being held in a federal detention facility near Washington, DC. Rhodes has pleaded not guilty to all criminal charges stemming from January 6.

There are more.

Having lost over 60 court cases challenging his 2020 election loss, Trump turned to promoting/encouraging/suggesting violence on Jan. 6 to stop certification of Joe Biden’s win.

A committee aide told reporters Monday night:

“We will show how some of these right-wing extremist groups who came to D.C. and led the attack on the Capitol had ties to Trump associates, including Roger Stone and Gen. Mike Flynn,” said the committee aide.

You should be watching. Now.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.

Heroes and yes-men in the Trump White House

Carol Leonnig wrote the book on the Secret Service and she weighs in on the latest brouhaha, here:

A drumbeat of revelations from the House Jan. 6 committee has revealed two dueling identities of the Secret Service under former president Donald Trump — gutsy heroes who blocked the president from a dangerous plan to accompany rioters at the Capitol and political yes-men who were willing to enable his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The new depiction of the Secret Service — which has endured a decade of controversy from a prostitution scandal and White House security missteps during the Obama years to allegations of politicization under Trump — has cast new doubt on the independence and credibility of the legendary presidential protective agency.

On one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump unsuccessfully cajoled his agents to drive him to Capitol Hill, where he would have joined a mob of his supporters descending violently on the grand symbol of democracy. Some 45 minutes later on the other end, former vice president Mike Pence refused a request of his security detail to get into an armored car — concerned, according to testimony, that his protectors would take him away from the Capitol and prevent him from carrying out his duty to oversee the final count of electoral college votes.

Earlier that day, according to former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, Trump had complained that the Secret Service’s “mags,” used to screen people for weapons, were preventing armed supporters from entering his “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse.

“Here you have the Service thrown into a day that was crazy Banana Republic stuff,” said Bill Gage, a former counterassault agent in the Secret Service who protected presidents George W. Bush and Obama. “My God. What would have happened if the agents had let Trump go to the Capitol?”

At the center of the current storm is one key agent — Tony Ornato — who held a highly unusual role in Trump’s orbit. The onetime head of the president’s security detail temporarily left his Secret Service job to work as deputy White House chief of staff. The political assignment was unprecedented in the Secret Service, as Ornato effectively crossed over from civil servant to become a key part of Trump’s effort to get reelected.

Through an agency spokesperson, Ornato has denied Hutchinson’s blockbuster claims given under oath Tuesday that he told her that Trump had lunged at the steering wheel of the Secret Service vehicle carrying the president away from his Jan. 6 rally and that he had reached toward the head of his detail, Robert Engel, in a fit of rage over not being taken to the Capitol.

Ornato and Engel were previously questioned by the committee about that day, and both had confirmed that Trump demanded to be taken to the Capitol and was furious about being told they would not do so, according to people familiar with their testimony. Neither had been asked about Trump’s alleged physical altercation in the car, according to two people briefed on their testimony.

But the aftershocks of Hutchinson’s appearance have continued.

Lawmakers on the committee said Ornato had said in his initial testimony that he was unable to recall other actions and statements by Trump on Jan. 6 that other witnesses had described in great detail. Both have told their superiors they would be willing to deliver sworn testimony to the committee, and people with knowledge of the committee’s deliberations said they expect the agents to be called soon.

As Ornato and Engel watched Hutchinson’s testimony Tuesday, they immediately disputed to agency officials that Trump had lunged at the steering wheel and Engel, and Ornato insisted he had not told Hutchinson this, according to two law enforcement officials. The Secret Service prepared a line-by-line public statement that afternoon to counter specific points, the officials said, and also note that the committee never asked Ornato and Engel about this allegation.

Hutchinson says Trump lunged at Secret Service

But on Tuesday evening, officials at the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of the Secret Service, instructed the Service not to issue a public statement and to instead offer the agents as witnesses to give testimony under oath, according to three people familiar with the decision.

DHS officials did not respond Friday to a request for comment.

Ornato and Engel did not respond to requests for comment. Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said agents performed their job on a day under unprecedented challenges, and yet none of the nation’s leaders were harmed.

“The sworn and professional men and women of the Secret Service execute our mission in an exceptional manner with the highest levels of distinction,” Guglielmi said. “This was no exception on Jan. 6, 2021.”

Former Secret Service agents and national security officials emphasized the even more horrible events that could have unfolded on Jan. 6 if either Pence’s or Trump’s detail leaders had made different choices. They described the unimaginable scenario in which the president and vice president set out on a violent collision course at the Capitol, two leaders with opposing goals meeting up, accompanied by their dueling security guards and Trump’s chaotic army of protesters. Trump, after all, had been pressuring Pence to refuse to go along with the final count of electors, and some rioters were chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!”

Agents who had sworn to protect the president’s and vice president’s lives with their own made choices on the fly that day — refusing a direct order from Trump and acceding to the vice president’s wishes. Together, the agents’ game-day decisions helped keep democracy on the rails, several former agents said.

“Bobby Engel did the right thing and says, `No sir, this is a dangerous situation, we’re not taking you to the Capitol’,” said Jim Helminski, a retired Secret Service official and former head of Biden’s security detail when he was vice president. “If they had [taken him], there would have undoubtedly been a potentially dangerous confrontation between the vice president and the president.”

“If the president finds Pence and they get into an argument — it really is scary,” Helminski added. “Does the vice president’s detail now protect the vice president from the presidential detail?”

People briefed on the two detail leaders’ accounts of Jan. 6 to the congressional committee said both Trump’s and Pence’s detail leaders were making decisions in a myopic vacuum: They were solely focused on the immediate security risks to the national leader they were charged with protecting, and yet their choices aided a peaceful transfer of power.

“Our history would be so changed if things had happened differently,” Gage said. “What if Engel said, `We can make this happen for you Mr. President?’”

Yet the Secret Service’s claim of being politically independent — illustrated by the familiar agents’ maxim “the people elect ‘em, we protect ‘em” — was tested by Trump’s tenure in the White House.

Trump had relied on Ornato to carry out plans that many agents complained put them, the public and the president in danger, according to interviews with more than a dozen Secret Service employees and administration officials and internal records. That included using the Secret Service staff to travel to massive campaign rallies as deadly coronavirus cases surged in the summer of 2020, and to forcibly clear peaceful crowds from Lafayette Square in June 2020 so Trump could appear tough on Black Lives Matter protesters for a photo op.

On Jan. 6, Trump’s ability to make Secret Service leadership bend to his will had created significant doubt for several Trump administration officials about the motives of senior Secret Service agents, according to committee testimony and Washington Post interviews with officials.

With an hour-long speech on the Ellipse that ended just after 1 p.m., Trump had fomented a mob-like march to the Capitol that he hoped would help him block the certification of Biden’s victory. Before he had finished speaking, a small band of protesters had already begun breaking down outer barricades at the Capitol and marching up the steps toward the halls of Congress.

Pence and his team worried his own Secret Service agents might block him from his goals. Despite an armed mob breaking through the windows of the Capitol, the vice president insisted on remaining in the Capitol so he could finish the job of formally approving the results of the presidential election. As rioters stormed through the hallways, Pence’s detail leader insisted on taking a reluctant Pence from a hidden office to the Capitol basement. But Pence refused his top agent’s recommendation to climb into his armored limousine, for fear agents might drive him away from the building.

Keith Kellogg, a Trump aide who then was working as Pence’s national security adviser, had stressed to Ornato that the vice president intended on staying inside the Capitol to finish the job, according to the book “I Alone Can Fix It.” He told Ornato the Secret Service detail had better not try to forcibly remove Pence from the building.

“I know you guys too well,” Kellogg said. “You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it.”

Ornato, through a Secret Service spokesperson, has previously denied that this conversation took place.

If Ornato and Engel testify before the Jan. 6 committee, theycould face a wide range of questions not only about Trump’s behavior that day but more broadly concerning the extent to which they served the interests of the presidency— or the man who was president.

Two former Trump White House aides took to Twitter Wednesday to say Ornato has a pattern of denying conversations that they know took place.

“Tony Ornato lied about me too,” tweeted Alyssa Farah, former White House communications director. She said that she spoke with Ornato and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows before the forcible clearing of Lafayette Square in June 2020, in which they refused to warn reporters who were staged at the park that they needed to move.

“Tony later lied & said the exchange never happened,” Farah wrote.

Olivia Troye, a former senior national security aide to Pence, took to Twitter as well to express her views of Ornato.

“Those of us who worked w/ Tony know where his loyalties lie,” she wrote. “He should testify under oath.”

If he’s a true Trumper he’ll have no trouble lying under oath. Why is he still in the agency? Shouldn’t he be down in Mar-a-lago giving Trump a pedicure?

I wonder how many like him are around Biden and Harris?

That time when Trump tried to choke his Secret Service agent

Video of Trump leaving in his Chevy Suburban.https://t.co/C1FvzxsT30

— Andy Kaczynski (@KFILE) June 28, 2022

In case you were wondering, the committee has spoken with the Secret Service agent Trump tried to choke in the presidential SUV on January 6th. I have a sneaking suspicion that they would not have featured Hutchinson’t story today if he had not corroborated it:

The Jan. 6 select committee has interviewed the top Secret Service agent on then-President Donald Trump’s protective detail during the Capitol attack, according to three people familiar with the probe.

Robert Engel was the special agent in charge on Jan. 6, 2021, meaning he was responsible for protecting the president from “socks on to socks off” — the whole work day. In that role, he rode from the White House to that day’s “Stop the Steal” rally with Trump in the presidential armored car called “The Beast.”

Engel was also backstage at the rally and close to the then-president throughout the day as violence unfolded when thousands of pro-Trump rally participants marched to the Capitol to try to disrupt congressional certification of the 2020 election.

Because of that work, Engel has detailed insight on a key select committee focus: how the Secret Service handled the day’s chaos.

A Secret Service spokesperson said the agency has cooperated fully with the committee probe.

“Every single member of the Secret Service who was requested by the committee has been provided to them,” said Anthony Guglielmi, the agency’s communications chief. “We fully support and are cooperating with the committee’s work. Employees, documentation, whatever is requested by the committee, we have cooperated with.”

A Jan. 6 select panel spokesperson declined to comment.

Secret Service agents generally feel deep discomfort when fielding investigators’ questions about their protectees. That’s because they can’t protect those people without significant trust in the relationship. And the prospect of investigators demanding closely held details about those protectees can generate concerns.

Jeffrey Robinson, who co-authored a book with a former Secret Service agent about that agent’s work, said in an interview that investigators’ interviews with Secret Service agents can potentially create “a violation of the trust that has to be built up between the protectors and the protectee.” But, he added, the committee’s move still makes sense.

“It would be negligent if they didn’t, and also Pence’s detail,” Robinson said. “They have to. These are direct witnesses.”

Engel was closely involved in talks about whether or not Trump himself could go to the Capitol after the rally. In the days leading up to the “Stop the Steal” rally, according to a Secret Service official, White House staff asked Tony Ornato — then temporarily working as White House deputy chief of staff — if it would be feasible for the president to travel from the Ellipse to the Capitol building. Ornato referred the staff to Engel, who was one of the top Secret Service agents responsible for Trump’s safety.

Ultimately, Trump famously said during the Jan. 6 rally that he planned to go to the Capitol. “[W]e are going to — we are going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we are going to the Capitol.”

After making that remark, Secret Service personnel reached out to other law enforcement partners to figure out if this move was feasible, a detail first reported by the Washington Post. Engel himself, meanwhile, conveyed to the relevant parties that transporting Trump to the Capitol would be unfeasible.

Guglielmi, the Secret Service spokesperson, said agency personnel inquired into the feasibility of transporting Trump to the Capitol after he made his rally remarks. But the agency never made “an operational plan” to do so, he added.

Trump himself told The Washington Post in April that his Secret Service detail blocked him from going to the Capitol.

“Secret Service said I couldn’t go,” he told the paper. “I would have gone there in a minute.”

Engel isn’t the only Secret Service employee to speak with committee investigators. Two people who spoke with POLITICO about Engel’s interview said the panel has interviewed multiple agency personnel, in sessions that have taken hours. Some of those interviewed have been called back in for repeat questioning.

It’s possible that the committee didn’t know about Hutchinson’s testimony when they spoke with Engel but again, I doubt they would have thrown that explosive testimony out there if it wasn’t corroborated. I suspect we’re going to find out.

By the way, he was in the SUV not the limousine:

It appears there’s more there there

To be honest, I didn’t think this would add up to much but perhaps I’m wrong:

The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack is closely focused on phone calls and conversations among Donald Trump’s children and top aides captured by a documentary film-maker weeks before the 2020 election, say sources familiar with the matter.

The calls among Trump’s children and top aides took place at an invitation-only event at the Trump International hotel in Washington that took place the night of the first presidential debate on 29 September 2020, the sources said.

The select committee is interested in the calls, the sources said, since the footage is understood to show the former president’s children, including Donald Jr and Eric Trump, privately discussing strategies about the election at a crucial time in the presidential campaign.

House investigators first learned about the event, hosted by the Trump campaign, and the existence of the footage through British film-maker Alex Holder, who testified about what he and his crew recorded during a two-hour interview last week, the sources said.

The film-maker testified that he had recorded around seven hours of one-to-one interviews with Trump, then-vice president Mike Pence, Trump’s adult children and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the sources said, as well as around 110 hours of footage from the campaign.

But one part of Holder’s testimony that particularly piqued the interest of the members of the select committee and chief investigative counsel Tim Heaphy was when he disclosed that he had managed to record discussions at the 29 September event.

The select committee is closely focused on the footage of the event – in addition to the content of the one-on-one interviews with Trump and Ivanka – because the discussions about strategies mirror similar conversations at that time by top Trump advisors.

On the night of the first presidential debate, Trump’s top former strategist Steve Bannon said in an interview with The Circus on Showtime that the outcome of the election would be decided at the state level and eventually at the congressional certification on January 6.

“They’re going to try and overturn this election with uncertified votes,” Bannon said. Asked how he expects the election to end, Bannon said: “Right before noon on the 20th, in a vote in the House, Trump will win the presidency.”

The select committee believes that ideas such as Bannon’s were communicated to advisers to Donald Jr and his fiancee, Kimberly Guilfoyle, even before the 2020 election had taken place, the sources said – leading House investigators to want to review the Trump hotel footage.

What appears to interest the panel is whether Trump and his children had planned to somehow stop the certification of the election on January 6 – a potential violation of federal law – and to force a contingent election if Trump lost as early as September.

The event was not open to the public, Holder is said to have testified, and the documentary film-maker was waved into the Trump hotel by Eric Trump. At some point after Holder caught the calls on tape, he is said to have been asked to leave by Donald Jr.

Among the conversations captured on film was Eric Trump on the phone to an unidentified person saying, according to one source familiar: “Hopefully you’re voting in Florida as opposed to the other state you’ve mentioned.”

The phone call – a clip of which was reviewed by the Guardian – was one of several by some of the people closest to Trump that Holder memorialized in his film, titled Unprecedented, which is due to be released in a three-part series later this year on Discovery+.

Holder also testified to the select committee, the sources said, about the content of the interviews. Holder interviewed Trump in early December 2020 at the White House, and then twice a few months after the Capitol attack both at Mar-a-Lago and his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey.

The select committee found Holder’s testimony and material more explosive than they had expected, the sources said. 

I wonder if they have footage of the family plotting to contest the election regardless of the facts? I think it’s obvious that was Trump’s plan all along. He telegraphed his intentions back in 2016 when he said he would only accept the results of the election if he won.

It could be nothing but I’m intrigued.

And it’s not just the fake elector scheme

We knew they were investigating the fake electors scheme and that’s very serious. (Some even call it “election fraud.”) But this suggests there’s more to it. To the best of my knowledge Clark was not involved in that:

Federal investigators descended on the home of Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, on Wednesday in connection with the department’s sprawling inquiry into efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to people familiar with the matter.

It remained unclear exactly what the investigators may have been looking for, but Mr. Clark was central to President Donald J. Trump’s unsuccessful effort in late 2020 to strong-arm the nation’s top prosecutors into supporting his claims of election fraud.

The law enforcement action at Mr. Clark’s home in suburban Virginia came just one day before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was poised to hold a hearing examining Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department after his election defeat.

The hearing was expected to explore Mr. Clark’s role in helping Mr. Trump bend the department to his will and ultimately help in a bid to persuade officials in several key swing states to change the outcome of their election results.

Mr. Trump considered and then abandoned a plan in the days just before the Jan. 6 attack to put Mr. Clark in charge of the Justice Department as acting attorney general. At the time, Mr. Clark was proposing to send a letter to state officials in Georgia falsely stating that the department had evidence that could lead Georgia to rescind its certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in that key swing state.

We’re going to hear much more about Clark in the hearing today. We know he took the 5th in his testimony before the committee. I don’t know specifically what crimes he is suspected of committing but apparently he isn’t the only one who thinks he’s culpable.

Here’s the story on Clark if you’re unfamiliar with the details.

Update—

Katie Benner of the NY Times knows this story inside and out. Here’s her twitter thread from this morning:

There’s a misconception that Jeffrey Clark was a low-level DOJ guy when he sought to become AG & undo the election. He was an environmental lawyer, but one who ran the ENRD, a Senate confirmed leadership role. He also ran Civil, the division that defends the admin in court.

In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary committee, Rich Donoghue, DOJ’s former #2 official, says that in the heat of the fight over who would lead DOJ, he disparages Clark by telling him he’s an environmental lawyer who should wait in his office for an oil spill.

It’s an incredible moment and one that tells us a lot about Donoghue and his regard for Clark. But Clark’s own position at DOJ shouldn’t be underplayed. He was in an important leadership role, which makes his work to undermine the electoral college all the more noteworthy

He had access to top DOJ officials, who explicitly told him that there was no voter fraud. He secretly arranged for briefings from intel officials, who also told him that there was not voter fraud. A low level guy prob wouldn’t have that access to intelligence.

Despite his position and access to information, Clark still wanted DOJ to send a letter to Georgia officials falsely stating that the dept had concerns about the results. One open question: did Clark truly believed that Trump won, and no amount of true information mattered

If that’s the case, I find it very striking that Clark was a high level DOJ official — who had served under Bush and was not thought to be radical in any way — and not some low level guy who was brought into the DOJ with no vetting.

Clark is in keeping with candidates in the upcoming election – at all levels of state govt – who also believe that Trump won. Clark failed to ultimately operate the levers of govt that could undo an election. His allies running for office in local races could win.

(@reidepstein has written well about election deniers on the ballot)
So yes, Clark may now seem like a buffoon bc he was humiliated. But he could be the first of many officials willing to ignore evidence as they vie for power over our election outcomes

Originally tweeted by Katie Benner (@ktbenner) on June 23, 2022.

Update: I was wrong. Clark was involved in the fake elector scheme and seems to have been conspiring with Eastman with his proposed letter to the states saying that the DOJ was investigating the election.