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2022-06-22 at 3:39 PM UTC in THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty'sLANNY'S A CUCK
LOCK HIM UP...LOCK HIM UP...
The Guardian
‘A dangerous cancer’: fourth hearing revealed the human cost of Trump’s delusion
David Smith in Washington
Donald Trump was the most powerful man in the world. But he was also a paranoid fantasist who did not care how his lies destroyed people’s lives.
That was the picture of the former US president that came into focus with startling clarity at Tuesday’s hearing of the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
Dead people, shredded ballots and a USB drive that was in fact a ginger mint were all part of the delusional narrative of election fraud peddled by Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani. They would have been as comical as flat-earthers but for the way they posed a danger to both individual citizens and American democracy.
“The president’s lie was and is a dangerous cancer on the body politic,” committee member Adam Schiff said at the hearing into how Trump pressured state officials to overturn overturn results.
It was worth remembering that Trump once boasted that he had passed a cognitive test by reciting the words, “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV,” in the right order. And that, according to the Washington Post, he made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his four-year presidency.
Even on Tuesday, he was repeating the biggest lie of all. Just before the hearing he issued a statement claiming that witness Rusty Bowers, the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, told him “the election was rigged and I won Arizona”.
Bowers, a Republican who had wanted Trump to win the election, told the committee that this was false: “Anyone, anywhere, anytime I said the election was rigged, that would not be true.”
Bowers also recalled a conversation with Giuliani and lawyer Jenna Ellis about allegations of voter fraud in Arizona. In a phrase that captured the president’s own mindset, Giuliani allegedly said: “We’ve got lots of theories but we just don’t have the evidence.”
It’s turned my life upside down. I no longer give out my business card. I don’t transfer calls ... I just don’t do nothing anymore. I don’t want to go anywhere. I second-guess everything that I do
But the centerpiece of the big lie is Georgia, which Trump narrowly lost and which became his all-consuming obsession for wild conspiracy theories.
The committee heard testimony from its secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and his deputy Gabe Sterling, who observed that competing against Trump’s false statements was like a “shovel trying to empty the ocean. I even had family members I had to argue with about some of these things.”
The Cannon Caucus Room resounded with Trump’s own voice from a 67-minute phone call with Raffensperger in which the president claimed the people of Georgia “know” he won the state by hundreds of thousands of voters.
Not true, Raffensperger told the committee definitively, explaining that Trump had “come up short”.
One by one, Trump could be heard making ludicrous assertions without foundation. One by one, Raffensperger and Sterling calmly demolished them.
The president was heard claiming that votes were “in what looked to be suitcases or trunks, suitcases but they weren’t in voter boxes”. Schiff asked: “Were they just the ordinary containers that are used by election workers?” Sterling testified: “They’re standard ballot carriers that allow for seals to be put on them so they’re tamper proof.”
Trump went on during the call: “But they dropped a lot of votes in there late at night. You know that, Brad.” Raffensperger told the committee: “There were no additional ballots accepted after 7pm.”
The president insisted: “The other thing, dead people. So dead people voted and I think the number is close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number and a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters.”
Raffensperger observed: “No, it’s not accurate … We found two dead people when I wrote my letter to Congress that’s dated January 6 and subsequent to that we found two more. That’s one, two, three, four people, not 4,000.”
More sinister yet, Trump claimed that election workers had been shredding ballots, “a criminal offense” that could put Raffensperger at risk. “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.”
Raffensperger told the hearing: “What I knew is we didn’t have any votes to find.”
Tuesday’s hearing spelled out how the big lie has caused hurt way beyond Washington on 6 January 2021. Trump told Raffensperger on the call: “When you talk about no criminality, I think it’s very dangerous for you to say that.”
The Georgia secretary of state took this as a threat. And sure enough, his family was targeted by Trump supporters.
“My email, my cell phone was doxxed and I was getting texts all over the country and then eventually my wife started getting texts. Hers typically came in as sexualized texts which were disgusting ... They started going after her I think just to probably put pressure on me: ‘Why don’t you quit and walk away.’”
He was far from alone.
In a deposition, Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson talked about how her “stomach sunk” when she heard the sounds of protesters outside her home one night when she was putting her child to bed. She wondered if they had guns or were going to attack her house. “That was the scariest moment,” Benson said.
But no story better illustrated the callousness of Trump’s assault than Georgia election workers Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, two African American women described by committee chairman Bennie Thompson as “unsung heroes” of democracy.
Giuliani accused the pair of passing a USB drive to each other; Moss told the committee that her mother had actually been handing her a ginger mint. With astonishing cruelty, Trump was heard in a phone call describing Freeman as “a professional vote scammer and hustler”.
It was false but it was the cue for an onslaught of racist hatred from Trump supporters. Moss, nervous and at times shaking, recalled: “A lot of threats wishing death upon me. Telling me that, you know, I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like, ‘Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.”
Moss, who left her position, added in wrenching testimony: “It’s turned my life upside down. I no longer give out my business card. I don’t transfer calls. I don’t want anyone knowing my name. I’ve gained about 60 pounds. I just don’t do nothing anymore. I don’t want to go anywhere. I second-guess everything that I do.”
Her mother Ruby Freeman said in a deposition: “I’ve lost my name, and I’ve lost my reputation. I’ve lost my sense of security – all because a group of people ... scapegoat[ed] me and my daughter, Shaye, to push their own lies about how the presidential election was stolen.”
At the end of his call to Raffensperger, Trump could be heard saying: “It takes a little while but let the truth comes out.”
Now, finally, the truth is coming out, but not the one that occupies his fantasies. -
2022-06-21 at 11:33 PM UTC in THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty'sLANNY'S A CUCK
LOCK HIM UP...LOCK HIM UP...
Intelligencer
January 6 Committee Explores Trump’s Reign of Terror in Georgia
Ed Kilgore
The House Select Committee investigating the events of January 6 has already richly documented the emptiness of former President Trump’s election fraud claims; exposed the length and depth of his plan to overthrow the election results anyway; and shown again and again the central role of Trump and a small group of cronies in a criminal conspiracy to steal the presidency. On Tuesday, the Committee zeroed in on one specific arena where Trump concentrated much of his crusade of lies: my own home state of Georgia.
Tuesday’s hearing, the fourth, was billed as an examination of Trump’s efforts to pressure state and local elected officials to join his insurrectionary plot. The first witness, Arizona House Speaker Russell Bowers, was a Trump voter who came across as a deeply religious conservative Republican shocked to his core by the demands the ex-president and his cronies were placing on him in an effort to discredit Biden’s victory.
Anticipating the damage Bowers might do to his reputation, Trump went after him in a statement just before the hearing began, calling him (unconvincingly) a RINO and claiming that the legislator had earlier told him the election had been “rigged” in Arizona. The very dignified Bowers indignantly denied this claim when asked about it by the committee’s chief questioner at the hearing, Adam Schiff.
But the bulk of the hearing was a detailed look at Trump’s personal effort to stage an electoral coup in Georgia — another 2020 battleground state where the election machinery was firmly in the hands of Republicans who publicly refuted Trump’s lies. GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his chief operating officer (during the 2020 elections) Gabriel Sterling were led carefully by Schiff through a detailed and even redundant exposure of Team Trump’s false assertions about what happened in their state. Most of the lies involved a completely exploded claim that election workers in Democratic-controlled Fulton County (Atlanta) brought out “suitcases” of fake ballots — at least 13,000, Trump and Rudy Giuliani kept asserting — and had them counted late on election night.
Despite being told directly and indirectly by Georgia officials and by his own Attorney General that the claims were bunk, Trump made them the foundation of the famous January 2, 2021 phone call to Raffensperger, in which he demanded that the Secretary of State “find” him enough ballots to overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia. Schiff played excerpts from the call to allow terse commentary from Raffensperger about its outrageous nature. A local prosecutor has convened a grand jury to determine if Trump’s demands were criminal in nature.
The House Select Committee also spent some time documenting the direct and indirect threats Trump, his associates and his followers made to Georgia election officials as part of their pressure campaign. Sterling explained the background of his own sensational public plea to Trump on December 1, 2020 to call off the dogs, after he realized the extent of threats local election officials in Georgia were receiving from MAGA folk. (“Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone is going to get hurt, someone is going to get shot, someone is going to get killed. And it’s not right.”) And in an emphatic conclusion to the hearing, the committee heard testimony from Shaye Moss, the innocent Fulton County election official who was at the heart of the MAGA Georgia conspiracy theory, and from her mother, Ruby Freeman, another election worker that Trump himself named as a villain 18 times in his conversation with Raffensperger. Both women were threatened extensively after being singled out by Trump and Giuliani. Moss regretted ever serving the public as an election worker, while Freeman was driven out of her home by threats. After being groundlessly called a “professional vote scammer and hustler” by Trump, Freeman said in searing taped testimony:
[Do]o you know how it feels to have the President of the United States target you? The president is supposed to represent every American, not to target one. But he targeted me, Lady Ruby, a small business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen who stood up to help Fulton County run an election in the middle of a pandemic.
So this particular hearing filled out our picture of Trump and his enablers as not simply liars and insurrectionists, but as bullies who went after anyone who got into his way. Raffensperger has already had his moment of vindication from Republican primary voters in Georgia who on May 24 spurned a Trump-generated effort to purge him. For other witnesses, the January 6 committee provided quite a megaphone. -
2022-06-21 at 3:35 PM UTC in THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty'sLANNY'S A CUCK
LOCK HIM UP!
LOCK HIM UP!
LOCK HIM UP!
LOCK HIM UP!
LOCK HIM UP!
LOCK HIM UP!
LOCK HIM UP!
LOCK HIM UP!
Legal expert anticipates the next Jan. 6 hearing evidence — and predicts nothing can save Trump
Raw Story
By Sarah K. Burris
The House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on Congress and the plot to overthrow the 2020 election is set to meet again on Tuesday for a public hearing at 1 p.m. EST.
Speaking about the issues the committee will deal with, CNN legal expert Elie Honig noted that thus far, Americans have seen the way in which former President Donald Trump pressured Mike Pence and "weaponized the Justice Department." On Tuesday, Honig noted that the committee will show, among other things, how Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to magically "find" 11,780 votes so he could win the 2020 election.
"I think what we will see on Tuesday, the most audacious of all those efforts to get state officials to hand him their electoral votes," said Honig. "The Constitution tells us state legislatures do have the right to decide how they'll award their electoral votes, but the problem is they decided that many, many years ago, whoever wins the popular vote in the state gets all the electoral votes and Donald Trump quite aggressively thinks he can pick up the phone, call state officials and get them to flip that and hand him the electoral votes. And to the credit of those state-level officials, many Republicans, they said, no, that would violate the Constitution, violate our oaths. It would violate the law. Ultimately, this scheme really backfired and self-destructed in remarkable fashion."
Host Pamela Brown cited an ABC/Ipsos poll showing that 58 percent of Americans support charges against Trump after seeing just two hearings from the committee. That doesn't necessarily mean that prosecutors will form a decision based on that.
"DOJ and prosecutors are supposed to be separate from politics and from whatever the public thinks, but I do think the poll is interesting," Honig said. "I think it reflects the fact the committee has made a powerful evidentiary showing. The committee has given us new facts and re-established things we knew. Donald Trump tried to steal this election and most importantly, they've shown us inside Donald Trump's mind what prosecutors called intent. I think they've made a really powerful argument that he knew he had lost the election, that he knew there was no evidence of widespread election fraud, that he knew his legal schemes were completely unconstitutional and invalid. I think the committee has shown us a really strong foundation that prosecutors ought to be working off of."
Trump's defense has been that he believed legal experts who told him that the election was fraudulent. While many of his legal experts had advised him that the election couldn't be changed, even John Eastman confessed on Jan. 4, 2021, that the attempt to stop the certification on Jan. 6 wouldn't work. Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell were among the few maintaining that Trump could change the results.
"I think you've hit on what Donald Trump's defense will be. 'I'm entitled to believe who I want to believe,'" suggested Honig. "The comeback from prosecutors here is going to be something called willful blindness. As a prosecutor, you can prove intent in two ways: the person actually knew the truth, or the person was what we call willfully blind. Judges describe it as like an ostrich burying his head in the sand. I think the argument would be Donald Trump knew the truth. He understood what the real truth was, but he chose to shut out those people, the people Bill Stepien called 'Team Normal', and only listened to those who would tell him what he wanted to hear. There is an out route to get around the difficult question of how do you prove what someone knew. It's enough to say, okay, but he shut out certain input and only heard what he wanted to hear." -
2022-06-21 at 4:51 AM UTC in THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty'sLANNY'S A CUCK
LOCK HIM UP...LOCK HIM UP...
The Guardian
Donald Trump plotted fake electors scheme, January 6 panel set to show
Hugo Lowell
The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack is expected to show at its fourth hearing on Tuesday that Donald Trump and top advisers coordinated the scheme to send fake slates of electors as part of an effort to return him to the White House.
The panel is expected to also examine Trump’s campaign to pressure top officials in seven crucial battleground states to corruptly reverse his defeat to Joe Biden in the weeks and months after the 2020 election.
At the afternoon hearing, the select committee is expected to focus heavily on the fake electors scheme, which has played a large part in its nearly year-long investigation into Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the election at the state level.
The panel will show how the fake electors scheme – which may have been illegal – was the underlying basis for Trump’s unlawful strategy to have his vice-president, Mike Pence, refuse to certify Biden’s win in certain states and grant him a second term.
If the 2020 election cycle had been like any other when the electoral college convened on 14 December 2020 and Democratic electors attested to Biden’s victory over Trump, that would have marked the end of any post-election period conflict.
But that year, after the authorized Democratic electors met at statehouses to formally name Biden as president, in seven battleground states, illegitimate Republican electors arrived too, saying they had come to instead name Trump as president.
The Trump electors were turned away. However, they nonetheless proceeded to sign fake election certificates that declared they were the “duly elected and qualified” electors certifying Trump as the winner of the presidential election in their state.
The fake electors scheme was conceived in an effort to create “dueling” slates of electors that Pence could use to pretend the election was in doubt and refuse to formalize Biden’s win at the congressional certification on 6 January.
And, the select committee will show, the fake election certificates were in part manufactured by the Trump White House, and that the entire fake electors scheme was coordinated by Trump and his top advisers, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows.
“We will show evidence of the president’s involvement in this scheme,” congressman Adam Schiff, the select committee member leading the hearing alongside the panel’s chairman, Bennie Thompson, and vice-chair, Liz Cheney, said on CNN on Sunday.
Members of Trump’s legal team insist this is a distorted characterization of the scheme, saying the so-called alternate slates were put together and signed in case that states did re-certify their election results for Trump and they needed to be sent right away to Congress.
But that explanation is difficult to reconcile given Trump lawyer John Eastman admitted in a 19 December 2020 the Trump slates were “dead on arrival” if they were not certified, and yet still pushed Pence to reject Biden’s slates even though Trump slates were still not certified.
The fake electors scheme is important because it could be a crime. The justice department is investigating whether the Republicans who signed as electors for Trump could be charged with falsifying voting documents, mail fraud or conspiracy to defraud the United States.
If Trump was involved in the scheme, and the justice department pursues a case, then the former US president may also have criminal exposure. At least one federal grand jury in Washington is investigating the scheme and the involvement of top Trump election lawyers, including Rudy Giuliani.
The select committee is also set to closely focus on Trump’s pressure campaign on leading Republican state officials in the weeks and months after the election, according to a committee aide who previewed the hearing on a briefing call with reporters.
Among other key flash points that the panel intends to examine include Trump’s now-infamous 2 January 2021 call with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger – who will testify live at the hearing – when Trump asked him to “find” votes to make him win the election.
“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump said during the conversation, a tape of which was obtained by the Washington Post and House investigators working for the select committee.
The select committee will describe Trump pressuring other state officials to investigate election fraud claims his own White House and campaign lawyers knew were false, relying on testimony from Arizona House speaker Rusty Bowers.
And the panel will additionally hear testimony from Shaye Moss, a Georgia election worker in Fulton County, who was falsely accused by Giuliani and others of sneaking in “suitcases” of ballots for Biden – a conspiracy debunked by election officials. -
2022-06-19 at 3:36 PM UTC in THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty'sLANNY IS A CUCK
JAIL DONALD TRUMP...JAIL DONALD TRUMP...
Georgia election investigation 'will send Donald Trump to jail': former Watergate prosecutor
Raw Story
By Tom Boggioni
According to former Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman, he has no doubt that there is an ironclad case brewing in Georgia that will lead to an indictment and conviction of Donald Trump.
Speaking with MSNBC host Katie Phang, Akerman said the evidence is overwhelming that the former president tried to steal the election in the Peachtree state as evidenced by the phone call made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger demanding he find enough votes to secure the state's 16 Electoral College votes.
'You mentioned that you guys had tapes in the Nixon Watergate situation," host Phang pointed out. "We have a tape, though. We have that tape of Donald Trump pressuring Brad Raffensperger. In your opinion, you don't think that is going to be enough?"
"Oh I think that is enough," Akerman replied. "If you are asking which of the cases right now, which one is going to send Donald Trump to prison, that is the case. There is a really neat three-year felony in Georgia, that Donald Trump has violated. Prosecutors love tape-recorded evidence because you cannot cross-examine it"
"What is significant though, with those cases, is that when you put in the context of all of the evidence that's the January six committee has uncovered. When you put that together, Donald Trump has zero defense in Georgia," he added. "If I had to put my money on one prosecution that is going to go forward here, that one will send Donald Trump to jail, it is Georgia -- no question about it."
"The only defense that he has got here is trying to somehow pick up on some ambiguity in the tape, that he did not really mean what he said," he elaborated. "But once you look at what he said, trying to get Brad Raffensperger to come up with extra votes to make him a winner in Georgia, and put in the context about the January 6th committee has found, I think they have gotten a case beyond a reasonable doubt." -
2022-06-19 at 3:13 PM UTC in THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty'sLANNY IS A CUCK
JAIL DONALD TRUMP...JAIL DONALD TRUMP...
The Guardian
Searing testimony increases odds of charges against Trump, experts say
Peter Stone
The searing testimony and growing evidence about Donald Trump’s central role in a multi-pronged conspiracy to overturn Joe Biden’s election in 2020 presented at the House January 6 committee’s first three hearings, has increased the odds that Trump will face criminal charges, say former DoJ prosecutors and officials.
The panel’s initial hearings provided a kind of legal roadmap about Trump’s multi-faceted drives – in tandem with some top lawyers and loyalists – to thwart Biden from taking office, that should benefit justice department prosecutors in their sprawling investigations into the January 6 assault on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.
Ex-justice department lawyers say new revelations at the hearings increase the likelihood that Trump will be charged with crimes involving conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding or defrauding the United States, as he took desperate and seemingly illegal steps to undermine Biden’s election.
Trump could also potentially face fraud charges over his role in an apparently extraordinary fundraising scam – described by House panel members as the “big rip-off” – that netted some $250m for an “election defense fund” that did not exist but funneled huge sums to Trump’s Save America political action committee and Trump properties.
The panel hopes to hold six hearings on different parts of what its vice-chair, Liz Cheney, called Trump’s “sophisticated seven-part plan” to overturn the election.
Trump was told repeatedly, for instance, by top aides and cabinet officials – including ex-attorney general Bill Barr – that the election was not stolen, and that his fraud claims were “completely bullshit” and “crazy stuff” as Barr put it in a video of his scathing deposition. But Trump persisted in pushing baseless fraud claims with the backing of key allies including his ex-personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and lawyer John Eastman.
“The January 6 committee’s investigation has developed substantial, compelling evidence that Trump committed crimes, including but not limited to conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruct official proceedings,” Michael Bromwich, a former inspector general at the DoJ told the Guardian.
Donald Ayer, a former deputy attorney general in the George HW Bush administration, told the Guardian that “the committee hearings have bolstered the need to seriously consider filing criminal charges against Trump”.
The crux of any prosecution of Trump would hinge heavily on convincing a jury that Trump knew he lost the election and acted with criminal intent to overturn the valid election results. The hearings have focused heavily on testimony that Trump fully knew he had lost and went full steam ahead to concoct schemes to stay in power.
New revelations damaging to Trump emerged on Thursday when Greg Jacob, the ex-counsel to former vice-president Mike Pence, recounted in detail how Eastman and Trump waged a high-pressure drive, publicly and privately, even as the Capitol was under attack, to prod Pence to unlawfully block Biden’s certification by Congress on January 6.
The Eastman pressure included a scheme to substitute pro-Trump fake electors from states that Biden won for electors rightfully pledged to Biden – a scheme the DoJ has been investigating for months and that now involves a grand jury focused on Eastman, Giuliani and several other lawyers and operatives.
Eastman at one point acknowledged to Jacob that he knew his push to get Pence on January 6 to reject Biden’s winning electoral college count would violate the Electoral Count Act, and that Trump, too, was told it would be illegal for Pence to block Biden’s certification.
Paul Pelletier, a former acting chief of the DoJ’s fraud section, said: “It is a target-rich environment, with many accessories both before and after the fact to be investigated.”
But experts caution any decision to charge Trump will be up to the current attorney general, Merrick Garland, who has been careful not to discuss details of his department’s January 6 investigations, which so far have led to charges against more than 800 individuals, including some Proud Boys and Oath Keepers charged with seditious conspiracy.
After the first two hearings, Garland told reporters, “I’m watching and I will be watching all the hearings,” adding that DoJ prosecutors are doing likewise.
Garland remarked in reference to possibly investigating Trump: “We’re just going to follow the facts wherever they lead … to hold all perpetrators who are criminally responsible for January 6 accountable, regardless of their level, their position, and regardless of whether they were present at the events on January 6.”
But Garland has not yet tipped his hand if Trump himself is under investigation. Despite that reticence, justice department veterans say the wealth of testimony from one-time Trump insiders and new revelations at the House hearings should spur the department to investigate and charge Trump.
Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney for eastern Michigan, said the panel’s early evidence was strong, including “video testimony of Trump insiders who told Trump that he was going to lose badly, and that with regard to claims of election fraud, there was ‘no there there’,” as Trump’s ex-chief of staff Mark Meadows acknowledged in one exchange made public at the hearings.
McQuade added that Barr’s testimony was “devastating for Trump. He and other Trump insiders who testified about their conversations with Trump established that Trump knew he had lost the election and continued to make public claims of fraud anyway. That knowledge can help establish the fraudulent intent necessary to prove criminal offenses against Trump.”
In a novel legal twist that could emerge if Trump is charged, Bromwich said: “Bizarrely, Trump’s best defense to the mountain of evidence that proves these crimes seems to be that he was incapable of forming the criminal intent necessary to convict. That he was detached from reality, in Barr’s words. But there is strong evidence that he is not crazy – but instead is crazy like a fox.
“How else to explain his attempts to pressure the Georgia secretary of state to ‘find the votes’ necessary to change the result? Or his telling DoJ officials to simply declare the election ‘corrupt’ and leave ‘the rest to me’ and Republican House allies?”
Bromwich added: “All of this shows not someone incapable of forming criminal intent, but someone who understood what the facts were and was determined not to accept them. Because he couldn’t stand to lose. That was far more important to him than honoring our institutions or the constitution.”
Former federal prosecutor Michael Zeldin said Trump could face charges over what Cheney called the “big rip-off”, which centers on the allegation that “Trump raised money from small-dollar donors after the election under false pretenses”.
Zeldin said: “Specifically, he asked for money to fight election fraud when, in fact, the money was used for other purposes. This type of conduct could violate the wire fraud statute.”
Ayer cited the importance of a justice department regulation identifying factors to consider in deciding whether to charge, and noted three of particular relevance to Trump – the nature and severity of the offence, the important deterrent effect of prosecutions, and the culpability of the individual being charged.
But it might not be all plain sailing.
Simmering tensions between the panel and the justice department have escalated over DoJ requests – rebuffed so far – to obtain 1,000 witness transcripts of committee interviews, which prosecutors say are needed for upcoming trials of Proud Boys and other cases. However, the New York Times has reported some witness transcripts could be shared next month.
Nonetheless, as Garland weighs whether to move forward with investigating and charging Trump, experts caution a prosecution of Trump would require enormous resources, given the unprecedented nature of such a high-stakes case, and the risks that a jury could end up acquitting Trump – which might only enhance his appeal to the Republican base. Yet at the same time ,the stakes for the country of not aggressively investigating Trump are also extremely high.
“No one should underestimate the gravity of deciding to criminally charge an ex-president,” said former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut.
For Aftergut, though, charging Trump seems imperative.
“Ultimately, the avalanche of documents and sworn testimony proving a multi-faceted criminal conspiracy to overturn the will of the people means one thing: if no one is above the law, even an ex-president who led that conspiracy must be indicted.” -
2022-06-18 at 5:22 PM UTC in 🍬🍬Candy~Land🍬🍬
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2022-06-18 at 5:19 PM UTC in THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty'sLANNY IS A CUCK
Trump attempted to destroy democracy.
GET ON TOP OF IT BEFORE WE LOSE OUR COUNTRY TO FASCISM AND AN INSANE TYRANT -
2022-06-18 at 5:11 PM UTC in 🍬🍬Candy~Land🍬🍬LANNY IS A CUCK
I want to see Trump's fat ass on a bike swallowing the poor defenseless, smothered seat. -
2022-06-18 at 5:04 PM UTC in THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty'sLANNY IS A CUCK
REPUBLICANS STILL DENYING REALITY
MarketWatch
Jan. 6 witnesses push Trump stalwarts back to rabbit hole
Associated Press
One by one, several of Donald Trump’s former top advisers have told a special House committee investigating his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection that they didn’t believe his lies about the 2020 election, and that the former president knew he lost to Joe Biden.
But instead of convincing Trump’s most stalwart supporters, testimony from former attorney general Bill Barr and Trump’s daughter Ivanka about the election and the attack on the U.S. Capitol is prompting many of them to simply reassert their views that the former president was correct in his false claim of victory.
Barr’s testimony that Trump was repeatedly told there was no election fraud? He was paid off by a voting machine company, according to one false claim that went viral this week. Ivanka Trump saying she didn’t believe Trump either? It’s all part of Trump’s grand plan to confuse his enemies and save America.
The claims again demonstrate how deeply rooted Trump’s false narrative about the election has become.
“It’s cognitive dissonance,” said Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a Syracuse University professor who has studied how Trump used social media and advertising to mobilize his base.
“If you believe what Trump says, and now Bill Barr and Trump’s own daughter are saying these other things, it creates a crack, and people have to fill it.”
The lawmakers leading the hearings into the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol said one of their goals is to show how Trump repeatedly lied to his supporters in an effort to hold onto power and subvert American democracy.
“President Trump invested millions of dollars of campaign funds purposely spreading false information, running ads he knew were false, and convincing millions of Americans that the election was corrupt and he was the true president,” said Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the panel’s vice chair. “As you will see, this misinformation campaign provoked the violence on January 6th.”
For those who accept Trump’s baseless claims, Barr’s testimony was especially jarring. In his interview with investigators, he detailed Trump’s many absurd allegations about the election 2020, calling them “bogus” and “idiotic.”
Barr told the committee when he talked with Trump, “there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.”
“He’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” Barr said.
Following his testimony, many Trump supporters using sites like Reddit, GETTR and Telegram blasted Barr as a turncoat and noted that he’s disputed Trump’s election claims before.
But many others began grasping for alternative explanations for this testimony.
“I’m still hoping Barr is playing a role,” one poster said on a Telegram channel popular with Trump supporters.
One post that spread widely this week suggested Barr was paid by Dominion Voting Systems, a company targeted by Trump and his supporters with baseless claims of vote rigging.
“From 2009 to 2018, DOMINION PAID BARR $1.2 million in cash and granted him another $1.1 million in stock awards, according to SEC filings. (No wonder Barr can’t find any voter fraud!),” the post read.
Wrong “Dominion”. Barr was paid by Dominion Energy, a publicly traded company headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, that provides power and heat to customers in several mid-Atlantic states.
Unlike Barr, Ivanka Trump has remained intensely popular with many Trump supporters and is seen by many as her father’s potential successor. That may be why so many had to find an an alternative explanation for why she told Congress she didn’t accept her father’s claims.
Jordan Sather, a leading proponent of the QAnon theory, claims both Barr and Ivanka Trump lied during their testimony on Trump’s orders, part of an elaborate scheme to defeat Trump’s enemies by confusing Congress and the American public.
“I can just imagine Donald Trump telling Ivanka: ‘Hey, go to this hearing, say these things. Screw with their heads,'” Sather said last week on his online show.
Some Trump supporters dismissed Ivanka Trump’s testimony entirely by questioning whether any of it was real. That’s another common refrain seen on far-right message boards. Many posters say they don’t even believe the hearings are happening, but are a Hollywood production starring stand-ins for the former president’s daughter and others.
“She looks different in a big way,” one poster asked on Telegram. “CGI?”
MAYBE IT'S JUST THE LOOK YOU GET WHEN YOU REALIZE THAT YOU AND YOUR WHOLE DAMN FAMILY IS GOING TO END UP IN THE GRAY BAR HOTEL -
2022-06-17 at 2:54 PM UTC in THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty'sLANNY'S A CUCK
The Boston Globe
Trump lawyer who pushed plan to overturn election sought presidential pardon, committee shows
Martin Finucane
John Eastman, who pushed the theory that former vice president Mike Pence could block the electoral count, asked former president Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani days after the insurrection if he could receive a pardon, according to evidence obtained by the committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
“I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works,” he wrote in an e-mail displayed during the hearing by the committee.
The committee also played video of Eastman invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to testify multiple times during questioning. Eastman invoked the Fifth 100 times, Representative Pete Aguilar, a committee member, said.
Eastman made the request to be put on the list of potential pardon recipients a few days after a Jan. 7 conversation with White House lawyer Eric Herschmann.
In a video released in advance by the committee, Herschmann said that in the call Eastman appeared to still have overturning the election on his mind.
“I said to him, ‘Are you out of your effing mind?’” Herschmann recounts in the testimony, adding that he demanded Eastman say the words “orderly transition.”
Herschmann also said that he advised Eastman, “Get a great effing criminal defense lawyer. You’re going to need it,” before hanging up on him.
I HOPE TRUMP KEEPS THIS LEVEL OF LEGAL EXPERTISE WHEN THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT COMES FOR HIM! -
2022-06-17 at 5:20 AM UTC in THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty'sLANNY'S A CUCK
The Washington Post
Trump aides told him that using Pence to overturn election was illegal
Amy Gardner, Jacqueline Alemany
President Donald Trump and his aides knew that it was not legal for his vice president, Mike Pence, to attempt to thwart Joe Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021, but they nonetheless mounted an unrelenting pressure campaign that did not abate even after rioters stormed the Capitol and threatened Pence’s life, according to new evidence presented Thursday by the House committee investigating the attack.
Leading the campaign was Trump lawyer John Eastman, who over the two days before Jan. 6 spoke repeatedly with top Pence aides about whether the vice president would either reject outright Biden’s winning electoral college count or suspend the day’s proceedings to allow seven contested states to reexamine their popular votes, witnesses said.
Pence never considered it, former vice-presidential counsel Greg Jacob testified — and even Eastman acknowledged that the gambit was not legal, Jacob said. In addition to that apparent admission, several former White House aides testified that they — and Pence — told Trump the same.
“I said, ‘John, if the vice president did what you were asking him to do, we would lose nine to nothing in the Supreme Court, wouldn’t we?' " Jacob recalled. “And after some further discussion, he acknowledged, ‘Well, yeah, you’re right, we would lose nine to nothing.’ ”
The committee also displayed a Jan. 11, 2021, email from Eastman to Trump’s lead campaign lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, seeking a pardon from the outgoing president, though Eastman did not ultimately receive one. A member of the committee, Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), said that in his deposition with the committee, the lawyer asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination “a hundred times.”
The House committee, which has spent a year investigating the Jan. 6 attack, continued making its case at Thursday’s three-hour afternoon hearing that the assault was the violent culmination of an attempted coup led by Trump.
With new details and never-before-seen video and photos, the proceeding focused on Pence and his largely ceremonial role presiding over the final step in the quadrennial process of declaring the winner of a presidential election: counting the electoral college vote in a joint session of Congress.
Committee members made the case not only that Trump and his advisers knew that Pence did not have the power to block Biden’s victory, but that their public statements to the contrary incited the rioters who invaded the Capitol that day, some of them chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” as they walked past a mock gallows erected outside the building.
“Donald Trump wanted Mike Pence to do something no other vice president has ever done,” said Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the committee chairman. “The former president wanted Pence to reject the votes and either declare Trump the winner or send the votes back to the states to be counted again. Mike Pence said no. He resisted the pressure. He knew it was illegal. He knew it was wrong.”
The committee presented new evidence of how close the rioters came to confronting Pence — within 40 feet — as his Secret Service detail escorted him to a secure location within the Capitol complex.
“Does it surprise you to see how close the mob was to the evacuation route that you took?” Aguilar asked Jacob, who was with Pence that day. “Forty feet is the distance from me to you, roughly.”
Jacob replied: “I could hear the din of the rioters in the building while we moved, but I don’t think I was aware that they were as close as that.”
The attack: The Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol was neither a spontaneous act nor an isolated event
Several witnesses said there was never any question that Pence would not interfere with the count that day. The Constitution calls for states to establish how their presidential electors are chosen; all states follow the popular vote. As far as the counting of those electoral votes, the Constitution’s 12th Amendment instructs only that the president of the Senate — Pence at the time — “open all the certificates” and that “the votes will be counted.”
Jacob said Pence began inquiring about his powers and duties to oversee the count in early December.
“There was no way that our framers, who abhorred concentrated power, who had broken away from the tyranny of George III, would ever have put one person, particularly not a person who had a direct interest in the outcome because they were on the ticket for the election, in a role to have a decisive impact on the outcome of the election,” Jacob said.
J. Michael Luttig, a retired federal appeals judge and renowned conservative who advised Pence during the crisis, testified that what Trump was asking Pence to do amounted to “constitutional mischief” and posed a grave threat to American democracy.
“I would have laid my body across the road before I would have let the vice president overturn the 2020 election,” Luttig testified.
None of that stopped Trump from ratcheting up the pressure as the Jan. 6 congressional proceedings approached. On that day, the effort began in the morning, when Trump called Pence at his official residence. Both Jacob and Pence’s former chief of staff, Marc Short, recalled being with the vice president when the call came in, and watching Pence step out of the room.
Several Trump aides — including his daughter, Ivanka — were in the Oval Office at the time and could hear the president’s side of the conversation. In video testimony played at the hearing, Ivanka Trump described her father taking a “different tone” than she had heard him take with the vice president before.
Ivanka Trump also told others in the West Wing that her father had called the vice president “the p-word” and talked about Pence’s lack of courage, her former chief of staff, Julie Radford, testified Thursday. During the conversation, Pence made it clear to Trump that he did not have the authority to do what Trump asked.
The committee also detailed how Trump’s pressuring of Pence during his rally appearance on the Ellipse that day was not part of his original speech, and was instead ad-libbed.
Trump told those gathered that he talked to Pence before the rally about needing to have the “courage” to help him stay in office for four more years.
“I hope Mike is going to do the right thing,” Trump told his supporters. “I hope so. I hope so, because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.”
Later, with the attack at the Capitol underway, Trump “poured gasoline on the fire” by tweeting an angry message directed at Pence, Sarah Matthews, a former Trump press aide, said in a videotaped interview with investigators that was aired Thursday.
“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,” Trump tweeted at 2:24 p.m. “USA demands truth!”
The committee showed footage of rioters reading the tweet aloud, and of others angrily demanding Pence’s head. Moments later, rioters inside the Capitol reached the eastern side of the Rotunda.
Several Pence aides testified that they were shocked and disappointed when Trump issued a statement the day before the riot that Pence and Trump were “in total agreement that the Vice President has the power to act” in overturning the results of the 2020 election.
Short, Pence’s chief of staff, said the information in the statement was “incorrect” and he recalled an angry conversation with Trump aide Jason Miller, who separately testified that he wrote the statement with Trump’s input.
“I was irritated and expressed displeasure that a statement could have gone out that misrepresented the vice president’s viewpoint without consultation,” Short said he told Miller.
More than any other figure in the days leading to and including Jan. 6, Thursday’s hearing showcased Eastman, a Trump attorney who outlined scenarios for denying Biden the presidency in legal memos and in an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 4 with Pence and Trump.
Eastman repeatedly sought to convince Pence and his lawyers that the vice president could unilaterally overturn the results of the election. A prolific emailer, Eastman fought for months to withhold emails the committee requested and only last week did a federal judge order that Eastman hand over an additional 400 documents to the committee.
Thursday was likely only the first hearing to feature Eastman as the committee continues its investigation behind closed doors, shaping the proceedings as new information rolls in.
Thompson said the panel plans to invite Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to be interviewed. The Post reported Wednesday that the committee has obtained email correspondence between Thomas and Eastman. The emails show that Thomas’s efforts to overturn the election were more extensive than previously known, according to two people with knowledge of the correspondence who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
Jacob, along with former Trump White House lawyer Eric Hershmann, made clear in testimony Thursday they believe Eastman’s plan was ridiculous and illegal. Jacob recalled emailing Eastman after Pence had been evacuated to a secure location: “Thanks to your bull---t, we are now under siege.”
Eastman was unrepentant in reply, blaming Pence for not having gone along with the plot, and encouraging Pence’s team to consider a “relatively minor violation” of the law, by adjourning Congress for 10 days so state legislatures could reconsider their electoral college votes. Jacob said Pence described Eastman’s response as “rubber room stuff.”
Hershmann recounted speaking to Eastman the next day, when Eastman brought up a new idea to contest the result in Georgia, “And I said to him, ‘Are you out of your effing mind?’ I said, ‘I only want to hear two words coming out of your mouth from now on: Orderly transition,' " Herschmann said.
“Now I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life,'” Herschmann said he added. "'Get a great effing criminal defense lawyer. You’re going to need it.”
Separately Thursday, tensions ratcheted up between the Jan. 6 committee and the Justice Department, with prosecutors complaining their lack of access to committee interview transcripts is hampering their ability to complete criminal cases, as evidence is aired in widely watched public hearings ahead of key trials.
In a letter to the committee Wednesday, the heads of the Justice Department’s national security and criminal divisions wrote that not granting the department access to transcripts complicates the “ability to investigate and prosecute those who engaged in criminal conduct.”
The letter is the strongest salvo in the months-long back-and-forth between the committee and the department, whose parallel investigations have generally tried to steer clear of each other but now seem to be on a collision course.
The committee has repeatedly turned to Trump’s own aides, and Republicans generally, to make its case against the former president. Thursday’s hearing at times had the feel of a meeting of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group.
Jacob and Luttig are conservative lawyers. One of Thursday’s questioners was John Wood, a Republican lawyer who noted that he and Eastman clerked for Luttig. Eastman, Jacob and the vice chairwoman of the committee, Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), received their law degrees from the University of Chicago, which is known for producing conservative lawyers.
Luttig on Thursday was unsparing in describing the harm that his fellow conservatives who have cast their lot with Trump could have done to the U.S. government — and still could do.
“Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy,” Luttig said. -
2022-06-16 at 11:06 PM UTC in THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty'sLANNY IS A CUCK
Five key takeaways from third January 6 US Capitol riot hearing
Al Jazeera
The United States House committee investigating the attack on the US Capitol last year has turned its attention to former President Donald Trump’s pressure on his vice president to overturn the 2020 elections result.
As the tiebreaker and president of the Senate, Mike Pence ceremoniously presided over the certification of the vote on January 6, 2021.
Witnesses, including many Pence aides and advisers, testified in detail before the panel on Thursday about Trump’s push to convince the then-vice president to overturn the election results.
Here is a look at five key takeaways from the third public hearing this month:
Pence had no constitutional authority to overturn election: Witnesses
Several witnesses testified on Thursday that Pence had no legal power to interfere with the election results, stressing that there is no precedent in US history for what Trump was asking his vice president to do.
J Michael Luttig, a retired federal appeals judge, who also previously served as an informal adviser to Pence, drove that point home in his opening remarks. Luttig said if the ex-vice president had obeyed Trump’s orders, it would have caused the first constitutional crisis in US history.
Declaring that Trump won the 2020 election over Joe Biden “would have plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis in America”, he told the panel.
Luttig later added that the notion that the vice president had a substantive – not merely ceremonial – role in the counting of electoral votes is “constitutional mischief”.
“I would have laid my body across the road before I would have let the vice president overturn the 2020 election,” Luttig said.
Trump’s team knew campaign was illegal: Panel
Witnesses suggested on Thursday that Trump and his aides, who were pushing for Pence to overturn the vote, knew that their plan would violate the US Constitution.
“Donald Trump knew he lost the 2020 election, but he could not bring himself to participate in the peaceful transfer of power, so he latched on to a scheme that – once again – he knew was illegal,” said Democratic Congressman Pete Aguilar, who played a leading role at Thursday’s hearing.
Greg Jacob, former counsel to Pence, testified that John Eastman, a Trump lawyer who was pushing for the vice president to overturn election results, acknowledged that the Supreme Court would unanimously rule against such interference.
“Wouldn’t we lose nine to nothing in the Supreme Court?” Jacob recalled asking Eastman.
“And again, he initially started: ‘Well, maybe we’d only lose seven to two.’ But ultimately [Eastman] acknowledged that no, we would lose nine-zero. No judge would support his argument.”
Pence’s life was in danger, panel says
The panel said the Capitol rioters came within 12m (40 feet) from where Pence was sheltering inside the building on January 6.
“Make no mistake about the fact that the vice president’s life was in danger,” Aguilar said. “A recent court filing by the Department of Justice explains that a confidential informant from the Proud Boys told the FBI the Proud Boys would have killed Mike Pence if given a chance.”
For his part, Jacob said Pence refused to leave the Capitol building even as it became apparent that rioters were inside.
“The vice president did not want to take any chance that the world would see the vice president of the United States fleeing the United States Capitol,” Jacob testified.
He said Pence “was determined” to finish his constitutional duty of presiding over the electoral count.
Jacob added that the former vice president wanted to ensure that rioters “would not have the satisfaction of disrupting proceedings beyond the day on which they were supposed to be held”.
In tense call before riots, Trump hurled insults at Pence
Witnesses described a tense call between Trump and Pence on the morning of January 6, before the riots broke out. The then-president hurled insults at his vice president for refusing to overturn election results, according to the testimonies.
Nicholas Luna, a former Trump aide, said in a recording that he remembered Trump calling Pence a “wimp”.
Ivanka Trump, the former president’s daughter, recalled that the conversation was “heated”.
“It was a different tone than I’d heard him take with the vice president before,” she said in a video.
Julie Radford, Ivanka Trump’s former chief of staff, said the former presidential adviser told her that Trump had called Pence “the P-word”.
The committee highlighted how Trump focused his ire on his vice president once Pence refused to disrupt the certification of Biden’s presidential victory.
“We are fortunate for Mr Pence’s courage,” panel chair Bennie Thompson said in his opening testimony.
“On January 6, our democracy came dangerously close to catastrophe. That courage put him in tremendous danger. When Mike Pence made it clear that he wouldn’t give in to Donald Trump’s scheme, Donald Trump turned the mob on him.”
Ex-judge says Trump still ‘clear’ danger to US democracy
Luttig, the retired federal judge, said Trump and his allies remain a “clear and present danger to American democracy”.
A conservative legal scholar who was appointed to the federal judiciary by former Republican President George W Bush, Luttig said Trump and his allies are already pledging that they “would attempt to overturn” the 2024 elections if the results do not go their way.
“I don’t speak those words lightly,” Luttig told the committee, delivering his remarks slowly. “I would have never spoken those words ever in my life – except that that’s what the former president and his allies are telling us.” -
2022-06-16 at 8:56 PM UTC in Jiggaboo Johnson is severely ill-versed in guns despite living in Tex Jas.LANNY IS A CUCK
Shlomo got his nose blown off by explosive errant cum he was licking. -
2022-06-16 at 8:39 PM UTC in Jiggaboo Johnson is severely ill-versed in guns despite living in Tex Jas.LANNY IS A CUCK
But, Shlomo has one really clean nostril. -
2022-06-16 at 8:31 PM UTC in THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty'sLANNY IS A CUCK
ORANGE MAN BAD
SHLOMO IS A MORON
Trump lawyer who pressured Pence to reject electors asked for pardon after Jan. 6
Bart Jansen, Chelsey Cox, Erin Mansfield, David Jackson, Kenneth Tran, Katherine Swartz, Dylan Wells and Joey Garrison, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON – Former Vice President Mike Pence's refusal to single-handedly reject electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021, as former President Donald Trump pressured him to do, will be the subject of the Thursday House hearing investigating the Capitol attack.
The latest:
Federal judge: Trump's order would have been 'tantamount to revolution': Federal Judge J. Michael Luttig told the Jan. 6 Committee that had Pence obeyed orders from Trump on Jan. 6, declaring Trump the presidential election winner, it would have "plunged America" into what he says would've been "tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis."
The vice president 'cannot possibly' choose the president: Greg Jacob, counsel to Pence, said that while the Electoral Count Act includes "ambiguous" text, "common sense and structure would tell you" that it "cannot possibly be" that a vice president would have the authority to choose the U.S. president under the Constitution.
Hannity 'very worried: 'Fox News' Sean Hannity told White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in text messages of his concerns around Jan. 6. On Dec. 31, he wrote, "I do NOT see January 6 happening the way he is being told." And on Jan. 5, he texted that he was "very worried about the next 48 hours."
An intense effort to lean on Pence: Rep. Pete Aguilar said the Jan. 6 committee found that by Jan. 4, Trump had "engaged in a quote multi-week campaign to pressure the Vice President to decide the outcome of the election." It involved private conversations, a meeting with Congress and tweets from the president.
Trump lawyer John Eastman's strategy: Eastman "acknowledged" that his proposals would violate provisions of the Electoral Count Act, Pence's former legal counsel Greg Jacob said, adding that Eastman thought this was OK because he viewed the act as unconstitutional.
'Jump-ball situation': Jacob, in describing the standoff that could arise under Eastman's plans for rejecting electors - assuming courts did not get involved - said result could been an "unprecedented constitutional jump-ball situation" that "might well then have to be decided in the streets."
Pence refused to be seen fleeing Capitol: After being taken to a secure location, Secret Service asked Pence to get in a car. The vice president refused. Jacob said Pence did not want to take any chance that "the world would see the vice president of the United States fleeing the United States Capitol. He was determined that we would complete the work" of certifying the election.
Start the day smarter. Get all the news you need in your inbox each morning.
Eastman sought presidential pardon
A few days after White House lawyer Eric Herschman advised Trump lawyer John Eastman to “get a great f— criminal defense lawyer” because “you’re going to need it,” Eastman appealed to the president for a pardon.
“I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works,” Eastman wrote in an email the committee shared. Trump did not pardon Eastman.
- Erin Mansfield
In deposition to the Jan. 6 Committee, Eastman “plead the fifth 100 times.”
Ater Trump did not fulfill Eastman’s request of being on the presidential pardon list, Eastman “plead the fifth 100 times,” while being deposed by the Jan. 6 Committee.
In response to numerous questions about Eastman’s actions surrounding his plan to have Pence overturn the election, he constantly replied “fifth.”
Questions included whether or not he advised Trump that Pence could reject electors, if it was true seven states sent dual slates of electors, and if he could discuss his direct conversations with Trump to the committee. All of which Eastman replied “fifth.”
- Kenneth Tran
One Trump lawyer to another: Get a great criminal defense lawyer
In a promotional tweet Tuesday for the hearing, the committee released video of Eric Hershmann, one of Trump’s lawyers, who described warning Eastman the day after the riot he should find a "great" defense lawyer.
Eastman had contacted Hershmann to chat about Georgia election results because he couldn’t reach other Trump aides. Hershmann questioned Eastman's sanity and told him the only phrase he wanted to hear from Eastman from then on was "orderly transition" to the Biden administration.
"Eventually he said, ‘Orderly transition,'" Hershmann said. "I said, ‘Good, John. Now I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life. Get a great f-ing criminal defense lawyer. You’re going to need it.’ Then I hung up on him.” -
2022-06-16 at 8:27 PM UTC in THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty'sLANNY IS A CUCK
-
2022-06-14 at 9:30 PM UTC in THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty'sLANNY IS A TEENAGE CUCK AND FRALA'S OLD ASS IS A CHILD MOLESTER JUST LIKE WARIAT
SKUNK NEEDS TO SEND TRUMP MORE MONEY BECAUSE HE IS SO POOR
Salon
Yes, Trump supporters are victims of the Big Lie scam. No, you don't have to feel sorry for them
Amanda Marcotte
One of the bigger revelations during the Monday House hearing about the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol is that the scope of the House committee's investigation had grown beyond Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the election. We learned on Monday that they also have evidence that Trump used his coup as a means for financial fraud.
During the entire two and a half months between Election Day and Jan. 6, Trump was shaking down his gullible supporters for cash that he claimed would help fight "election fraud." Those funds, however, largely appeared to go into the pockets of Trump and his allies.
"The big lie was also a big ripoff," declared Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., during her opening remarks on Monday. She argued that the campaign used "false claims of election fraud to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters who were told their donations were for the legal fight in the courts." In reality, however, most the money — which is estimated to be a cool $250 million — went into a super PAC. From there, it was redirected into the coffers of Trump himself and towards various friends and family members.
In response to these revelations, there's been a standard response from the anti-Trump majority: Couldn't have happened to nicer people.
Salon started covering the way Trump uses the Big Lie to grift his followers mere days after the 2020 election, so I was used to seeing this reaction. And they will get no argument from me. One really can't deny that Trump's supporters had bad motives and that no one should feel sorry for them. The problem is that the vast majority of Trump's supporters will never admit that they've been had. So it's up to the rest of us to insist that this large-scale cash grab be taken seriously and investigated as a potential crime.
"The big lie was also a big ripoff."
The good news is this: Demanding justice doesn't require sympathizing with victims. Fraud is fraud, no matter how repulsive the victims may be.
There's one way to view Trump's "fundraising" schemes during his coup effort, which is that he snookered gullible people who sincerely believed that the election was "stolen." And that may even be true in some cases. The larger — and uglier — truth, however, is this: Trump separated fools from their money by exploiting their worst instincts.
He made racist appeals about voters in Detroit and Philadelphia being "frauds." Trump's lawyer Sidney Powell promised to "release the Kraken" and excited the "let's go Brandon" crowd because they wanted to swindle Joe Biden's voters out of their victory. A lot of wallets opened up because Trump supporters got caught up in Trump's self-mythologizing about how he knows how to cheat the system, and that he would be able to leverage that talent toward stealing an election. Implicit in Trump's many appeals to his followers was that he would, with enough money, be able to overwhelm the courts with lawsuits until they just gave in and let him keep the White House. And it's no wonder they believed that, as Trump has a long history of abusing the courts with frivolous lawsuits and other resource-wasting tactics to get his way. Trump loves a frivolous lawsuit so much he's been the plaintiff in thousands of cases. But the presidency is too big a prize to obtain through legal harassment, which is why Trump ended up resorting to siccing a violent mob when his court abuse strategy failed.
The adage that "you can't cheat an honest man" has never been truer than when it comes to the GOP base. Indeed, Trump is far from the first to figure out that Republican voters are easy to grift. Historian Rick Perlstein wrote the classic "The Long Con" for the Baffler in 2012, which documented how GOP voters have long been targeted with things like mail order scams. People like Alex Jones make most of their money off hawking snake oil marketed with false promises of vitality and, uh, "enhanced" masculinity. Now you can add cryptocurrency to the pile, as well as the industry of "alternative" COVID-19 treatments like ivermectin.
Trump separated fools from their money by exploiting their worst instincts
Defrauding odious people is just being a smart criminal, precisely because it's so hard to see the marks as victims. There was a great deal of concern over this during the fraud trial for Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos since Holmes tended to steal from absolute monsters. She absconded with money from Rupert Murdoch and the DeVos family and snookered people like Henry Kissinger, all of which is so funny that you almost want to root for her. That's why the prosecution focused so heavily on the patients who got bad test results from the faulty Theranos devices, even though the trial was about investment fraud and not medical malpractice. They understood that securing a conviction is a lot harder when people see the victims as people who had it coming in the first place.
Charges for fraud are appealing from a potential prosecution angle since it's about money, which creates a paper trail to present in court. The problem, which the Jan. 6 committee members seem aware of, is that "Trump steals from people who deserve it" isn't the most politically scintillating pitch. That's likely why they're focusing on outrages like Kimberly Guilfoyle getting $60,000 to speak for two minutes at the Jan. 6 rally/riot incitement.
The people Trump pumped for cash aren't exactly innocent, but it's important to remember he and his buddies are even worse.
The main thing is keeping an eye on the prize: Saving democracy from Trump's continuing machinations. Voting rights can't get past the filibuster and voter enthusiasm for Democrats is going to be hard to drum up in the current economic situation. So it's increasingly clear that the most viable path — perhaps the only path — to preventing another coup is for the Justice Department to start imposing legal consequences on Trump and his allies. If fraud prosecutions are the way to make that happen, then so be it. We don't need to pity Trump's marks in order to believe he should still see the inside of a jail cell for defrauding them. -
2022-06-14 at 7:10 PM UTC in THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty'sLANNY IS A CUCK
Not so funny when the tables are turned, bitch?
It's not my fault nobody would fuck you to make a kid. -
2022-06-14 at 4:29 PM UTC in THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty'sContinued...
LANNY IS STILL A CUCK AND TRUMP IS STILL "ORANGE MAN BAD"
Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, told Trump that Clark’s proposed letter was “a murder-suicide pact,” according to Donoghue’s deposition. “It’s going to damage everyone who touches it. And we should have nothing to do with that letter. I don’t ever want to see that letter again.” Cipollone declined to comment.
Trump made his decision and turned to Clark.
“I appreciate your willingness to do it,” Trump said, according to Donoghue. “I appreciate you being willing to suffer the abuse. But the reality is, you’re not going to get anything done. These guys are going to quit. Everyone else is going to resign. It’s going to be a disaster. The bureaucracy will eat you alive. And no matter how much you want to get things done in the next few weeks, you won’t be able to get it done, and it’s not going to be worth the breakage.”
Clark had yet another idea. He asked whether Engel could provide a formal opinion about what authority Vice President Mike Pence had “when it comes to opening the votes” of the electoral college result on Jan. 6, according to an excerpt of Engel’s deposition in a recent court filing.
“That’s an absurd idea,” Engel said he responded, asserting it wasn’t the job of the Justice Department and noting only three days remained before Pence would perform his role. Trump interjected that he didn’t want anyone attending the meeting to talk to Pence about what to do on Jan. 6.
“Nobody should be talking to the vice president here,” Trump said, according to Engel. Instead, Trump would soon do that himself in an attempt to convince the vice president not to certify Biden’s election.
As the Justice Department officials filed out of the White House that night, one grave threat to American democracy had passed.
Three days later, after the president falsely said at a rally that “we won this election, and we won it by a landslide,” a pro-Trump mob broke into the Capitol.
