"Lock Him Up!": Criminal Psychopath Insurrectionist-in-Chief Donald Trumpscum Against America
David Shasha
Trump Sought to Conceal Plans for March to Capitol, Panel Says
By: Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer
WASHINGTON — President Donald J. Trump attempted to make the Jan. 6, 2021, march on the Capitol appear spontaneous even as he and his team intentionally assembled and galvanized a violence-prone mob to disrupt certification of his electoral defeat, the House committee investigating the attack showed on Tuesday.
“POTUS is going to have us march there/the Capitol,” Kylie Jane Kremer, an organizer of the “Save America” rally on Jan. 6, wrote in a Jan. 4 text shown by the panel on Tuesday as it detailed Mr. Trump’s efforts to gather his backers in Washington for a final, last-ditch effort to overturn his loss. Ms. Kremer added that Mr. Trump was “going to just call for it ‘unexpectedly.’”
Mr. Trump weighed announcing the move, according to documents obtained from the National Archives, which provided the investigators with a draft tweet that said: “I will be making a Big Speech at 10AM on January 6th at the Ellipse (South of the White House). Please arrive early, massive crowds expected. March to the Capitol after. Stop the Steal!!”
The tweet was never sent. But it was the latest evidence presented by the committee of how Mr. Trump undertook a public and private effort to channel angry supporters, including right-wing extremists, toward the Capitol, where Vice President Mike Pence and lawmakers were gathered to confirm Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the president-elect.
For more than a year, Mr. Trump and his defenders have described the violence at the Capitol as a freewheeling peaceful protest gone awry. But the hearing on Tuesday laid out how the former president took a guiding role not only in bringing the mob fueled by his election lies to Washington that day, but also in the plan to direct it up to Capitol Hill, disregarding the advice of his closest aides.
“Donald Trump summoned a mob to Washington, D.C., and ultimately spurred that mob to wage a violent attack on our democracy,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee.
In its seventh hearing to lay out its findings, the committee situated Mr. Trump at the center of the quasi-legal efforts to derail the political process and also at the heart of the unprecedented chaos at the Capitol. Over nearly three hours, it introduced evidence from rally organizers, rioters and aides inside the White House who said the former president had inspired and directed what transpired that day.
While it did not draw any direct link between Mr. Trump and the domestic extremists who orchestrated and stood at the forefront of the Capitol attack, the committee set forth in meticulous detail how Mr. Trump’s words and actions united a disparate set of far-right groups and militias and spurred them to plot a violent effort to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
“The president got everybody riled up and told everybody to head on down,” said one of the witnesses at the hearing, Stephen Ayres, an Ohio man who pleaded guilty last month to disorderly conduct charges connected to the Capitol attack. “We basically were just following what he said.”
Even Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign manager, blamed his former boss for the deadly violence that ensued, according to evidence shown by the committee on Tuesday.
“A sitting president asking for civil war… I have lost faith,” he wrote in text messages on Jan. 6 to Katrina Pierson, Mr. Trump’s former spokeswoman, adding that Mr. Trump’s “rhetoric killed someone.”
Even as it revealed new evidence about Mr. Trump’s bid to cling to power, the committee suggested that Mr. Trump was still trying to protect himself. Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the panel’s vice chairwoman, repeated her concerns that Mr. Trump has been quietly interfering with the committee’s work by discouraging witnesses from cooperating with the inquiry. After the panel’s last presentation, she said, Mr. Trump tried to call one of its witnesses and the witness, through a lawyer, alerted the committee.
“We will take any effort to influence witness testimony very seriously,” Ms. Cheney said, adding that the panel had notified the Justice Department about the matter.
In a statement on Twitter, Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, accused Ms. Cheney of spreading “innuendos and lies,” but did not address whether the former president had tried to contact a witness.
In the hearing room on Tuesday, Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the select committee, sought to draw a road map of Mr. Trump’s multilayered effort to overturn his defeat, unfolding in three concentric rings.
On the inside ring, Mr. Raskin said, was Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign against Mr. Pence to persuade him to unilaterally throw out electoral votes for Mr. Biden as he presided over a joint session of Congress to make the official count.
In the middle ring, Mr. Raskin said, far-right extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers — unleashed by a Dec. 19 tweet from Mr. Trump that promised a “wild” rally in Washington on Jan. 6 — took the lead in invading and occupying the Capitol. And in the outer ring, he added, a large and angry crowd, encouraged by Mr. Trump’s lies about election fraud, became a “political force” that sought to keep the former president in power.
The story the committee told on Tuesday took place over three chaotic weeks at the end of 2020, starting on Dec. 14, when the Electoral College met and declared Mr. Biden the winner of the election. Within a day, leading Republicans, like Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, acknowledged Mr. Biden’s victory, and several aides to Mr. Trump, including Pat A. Cipollone, the top lawyer in the White House, advised the president to concede.
Instead, the committee documented how Mr. Trump ignored top administration officials and turned his hopes and attention to a group of outside advisers who were recommending a dangerous and unprecedented plan to use the country’s national security assets to seize control of voting machines and essentially rerun the election.
Through videotaped testimony, the panel brought to life a heated and often profane meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18, 2020, in which the advisers — among them, the lawyer Sidney Powell and Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser — fought with Mr. Cipollone and other White House advisers about the plan to seize the machines and to appoint a special counsel to investigate election fraud.
Early the next morning, once the meeting ended, Mr. Trump posted the message on Twitter urging his supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6, writing, “Be there, will be wild!”
The response to the message was immediate and electric.
It was quickly amplified by prominent Trump supporters with influential followings, like Alex Jones, the impresario of the conspiracy-laden media outlet Infowars, and the right-wing podcaster Tim Pool.
In the darkest corners of the internet, Trump supporters on websites such as TheDonald.win soon began discussing bringing handcuffs, body armor, shields, bats and pepper spray to Washington. Others talked about committing violence.
“Why don’t we just kill them?” one person wrote on the chat board 4chan. “Every last democrat, down to the last man, woman, and child?”
Mr. Trump’s tweet also had significant effects in the real world.
Within days of it being posted, a pro-Trump organizing group called Women for America First changed its plans to hold a rally in Washington after Mr. Biden’s inauguration, moving the event up to Jan. 6. Around the same time, the committee showed, the prominent Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander registered the website WildProtest.com, which provided information about numerous protests in Washington on Jan. 6 with event times, places, speakers and details on transportation.
Mr. Alexander sent a text to an associate on Jan. 5, 2021, saying that he believed Mr. Trump was going to “order” him and his associates to march to the Capitol, the committee showed.
On Dec. 21, 2020 — two days after Mr. Trump’s tweet about Jan. 6 was posted — a group of far-right members of Congress met with the president at the White House to discuss the conservative lawyer John Eastman’s theories about pressuring Mr. Pence to disrupt the normal workings of the Electoral College and keep Mr. Trump in power. The members of Congress at the meeting included Representatives Andy Biggs of Arizona, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Louie Gohmert of Texas and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the committee said.
The committee heard on Tuesday from another witness, Jason Van Tatenhove, a former spokesman for the Oath Keepers, who described the group as a threat to democracy. The leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, is one of several members of the group who has been charged with seditious conspiracy in connection with the Capitol attack.
And for the first time, the committee heard testimony from a criminal defendant who was at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and is now facing charges. The defendant, Mr. Ayres, told the panel that he had gone to Washington at Mr. Trump’s direction and marched to the Capitol when the president told him to, and would never have gone in the first place had he known that Mr. Trump’s election fraud claims were false. He said that his participation in the riot had ruined his life, and that he felt duped and betrayed by Mr. Trump.
“I felt like I had, you know, like horse blinders on — I was locked in the whole time,” Mr. Ayres said. “The biggest thing for me is, take the blinders off, make sure you step back and see what’s going on before it’s too late.”
From The New York Times, July 12, 2022
Merrick Garland Should Investigate Trump’s 2020 Election Schemes as a ‘Hub and Spoke’ Conspiracy
By: Andrew Weissmann
The tenacious work of the Jan. 6 committee has transformed how we think about the Jan. 6 rebellion. It should also transform the Justice Department’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Before the hearings, federal agents and prosecutors were performing a classic “bottom up” criminal investigation of the Jan. 6 rioters, which means prosecuting the lowest-ranking members of a conspiracy, flipping people as it proceeds and following the evidence as high as it goes. It was what I did at the Justice Department for investigations of the Genovese and Colombo crime families, Enron and Volkswagen as well as for my part in the investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election led by the special counsel Robert Mueller.
But that is actually the wrong approach for investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. That approach sees the attack on the Capitol as a single event — an isolated riot, separate from other efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the election.
The hearings should inspire the Justice Department to rethink its approach: A myopic focus on the Jan. 6 riot is not the way to proceed if you are trying to follow the facts where they lead and to hold people “at any level” criminally accountable, as Attorney General Merrick Garland promised.
The evidence gathered in the hearings describes a multiprong conspiracy — what prosecutors term a hub and spoke conspiracy — in which the Ellipse speech by President Trump and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were just one “spoke” of a grander scheme.
This broader approach would avoid the thorny debate that has emerged as to whether Mr. Trump could be criminally culpable for inciting the riot during his Ellipse speech or if, on the contrary, his speech is protected under the First Amendment and the evidence too ambiguous to justify the extraordinary step of indicting a former president. Building a criminal case that looks solely at the riot itself is far more complex legally and factually for those who weren’t at or in the Capitol. These challenges of the current bottom-up approach have led to criticism of the slow pace of the narrow Justice Department approach.
Instead, what the hearings have revealed is evidence of a plot orchestrated by Mr. Trump and his allies in the White House and elsewhere — including players from the Mueller investigation like Roger Stone, Michael Flynn and Rudy Giuliani as well as new players like Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman. The “spoke” of the Jan. 6 riot should be seen and investigated simultaneously with the other “spokes”: orchestrating fake electors in key states, pressuring state officials like those in Georgia to find new votes, plotting to behead the leadership of the Justice Department to promote a lackey who would further the conspiracy by announcing a spurious investigation into election fraud, and pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to violate the law.
Investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection in the context of the other means by which Mr. Trump appears to have sought to undermine the transfer of power serves to strengthen any future case by presenting the complete evidence of the perpetrators’ actions and intent. And it undermines possible defenses.
For instance, the evidence that Mr. Trump lied in a statement about Mr. Pence’s agreeing that he had the power to reject electors undermines the defense that Mr. Trump was acting in good faith and honestly believed he had won the election. And Mr. Trump’s conduct in the White House after his speech at the Ellipse and during the Jan. 6 attack, which includes remarks, reported from testimony by the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, in which Mr. Trump condoned the chants calling for hanging of the vice president of the United States, is strong evidence of his intent for a plan to upend a democratic election.
There are signs that the department, spurred on by the committee, has begun to look into some of these other “spokes.” Unsurprisingly, the “spoke” involving the Justice Department itself has attracted acute interest. Recently, federal agents conducted a search of the home of Mr. Clark, whom Mr. Trump considered elevating to be acting head of the Justice Department, and seized the phone of Mr. Eastman, a lawyer who advised Mr. Trump on efforts to overturn the election.
But other signs are not so encouraging: Department prosecutors were reportedly surprised by the testimony of Ms. Hutchinson. That is not a sign of a robust investigation into the facts. The department has more tools than Congress does to learn the truth. It could have interviewed Ms. Hutchinson long ago, as well as many others whose evidence is relevant — indeed, Ms. Hutchinson alone provided investigators numerous leads to pursue.
For those who do not voluntarily cooperate with a Justice Department investigation, prosecutors can serve grand jury subpoenas and obtain their testimony under oath, subject to criminal penalties like perjury — just as Georgia state prosecutors are doing. And people can be given immunity to compel their testimony if they validly assert the Fifth Amendment. Obtaining grand-jury testimony is indispensable; it forestalls witnesses from credibly claiming later that they had not made certain statements in an interview or that an interview report is inaccurate (or worse).
I have been involved in numerous high-profile investigations that engendered significant congressional interest, and what I have seen in this inquiry is not typical behavior from the Justice Department. Usually, department prosecutors and agents don’t want Congress jumping ahead of their investigation, and they work hard to make sure that doesn’t happen. The department wants to interview witnesses first, and prosecutors make sure that targets are fully truthful about their own potential wrongdoing and that their testimony is corroborated; use tools to flip recalcitrant witnesses; and build a case without revealing evidence to other prospective witnesses — efforts that can falter if Congress is conducting private and public interviews that may inadvertently undermine the strongest possible criminal case.
Department lawyers and congressional committees usually work collegially to avoid these issues, something that can happen when Congress has faith in the diligence and resolve of the Justice Department. That does not appear to be happening here. We have seen the unusual public filing of a letter from Justice Department leadership seeking access to committee evidence, something largely unnecessary if it had already obtained that evidence. And the fact that the letter was sent is a clear sign of a breakdown in the relationship between the two branches, something I did not see even during high-profile investigations like Enron and the Mueller investigation.
The American public is entitled to a thorough, fearless, competent and fair criminal investigation. That is still possible, and what facts that investigation reveals, and what prosecutorial decisions are made thereafter, will surely be subject to debate. But until we pursue all leads, that debate will be truly academic, to the detriment of our democracy.
Andrew Weissmann (@AWeissmann_), a former Justice Department prosecutor and senior prosecutor in Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation, is a professor of practice at the New York University School of Law and the author of “Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation.”
From The New York Times, July 11, 2022
Capitol Riot Panel Blames Trump for 1/6 'Attempted Coup'
By: Lisa Mascaro, Mary Clare Jalonick, and Farnoush Amiri
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House panel investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol has laid the blame firmly on Donald Trump, saying the assault was not spontaneous but an “attempted coup” and a direct result of the defeated president's effort to overturn the 2020 election.
With a never-before-seen 12-minute video of extremist groups leading the deadly siege and startling testimony from Trump's most inner circle, the 1/6 committee provided gripping detail Thursday night in contending that Trump’s repeated lies about election fraud and his public effort to stop Joe Biden's victory led to the attack and imperiled American democracy
“Democracy remains in danger,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the panel, during the hearing, timed for prime time to reach as many Americans as possible.
"Jan. 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup, a brazen attempt, as one rioter put it shortly after Jan. 6, to overthrow the government,” Thompson said. "The violence was no accident.”
The hearings may not change Americans' views on the Capitol attack, but the panel's investigation is intended to stand as its public record. Before this fall's midterm elections, and with Trump considering another White House run, the committee's final report aims to account for the most violent attack on the Capitol since 1814, and to ensure such an attack never happens again.
Testimony on Thursday showed how Trump desperately clung to his own false claims of election fraud, beckoning supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when Congress would certify the results, despite those around him insisting Biden had won the election.
In a previously unseen video clip, the panel played a remark from former Attorney General Bill Barr, who testified that he told Trump the claims of a rigged election were “bull——.”
In another clip, the former president's daughter, Ivanka Trump, testified to the committee that she respected Barr's view that there was no election fraud. “I accepted what he said.”
Others showed leaders of the extremist Oath Keepers and Proud Boys preparing to storm the Capitol to stand up for Trump. One rioter after another told the committee they came to the Capitol because Trump asked them to.
“President Trump summoned a violent mob,” said Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the panel's vice chair who took the lead for much of the hearing. “When a president fails to take the steps necessary to preserve our union — or worse, causes a constitutional crisis — we're in a moment of maximum danger for our republic.”
There was a gasp in the hearing room when Cheney read an account that said when Trump was told the Capitol mob was chanting for Vice President Mike Pence to be hanged for refusing to block the election results. Trump responded that maybe they were right, that he “deserves it.”
At another point it was disclosed that Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., a leader of efforts to object to the election results, had sought a pardon from Trump, which would protect him from prosecution.
When asked about the White House lawyers threatening to resign over what was happening in the administration, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner scoffed they were “whining.”
Police officers who had fought off the mob consoled one another as they sat in the committee room reliving the violence they faced on Jan. 6. Officer Harry Dunn teared up as bodycam footage showed rioters bludgeoning his colleagues with flagpoles and baseball bats.
In wrenching testimony U.S. Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards told the panel that she slipped in other people’s blood as rioters pushed past her into the Capitol. She suffered brain injuries in the melee.
“It was carnage. It was chaos,” she said.
The riot left more than 100 police officers injured, many beaten and bloodied, as the crowd of pro-Trump rioters, some armed with pipes, bats and bear spray, charged into the Capitol. At least nine people who were there died during and after the rioting, including a woman who was shot and killed by police.
Biden, in Los Angeles for the Summit of the Americas, said many viewers were “going to be seeing for the first time a lot of the detail that occurred.”
Trump, unapologetic, dismissed the investigation anew — and even declared on social media that Jan. 6 “represented the greatest movement in the history of our country.”
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee tweeted: “All. Old. News.”
Emotions are still raw at the Capitol, and security was tight. Law enforcement officials are reporting a spike in violent threats against members of Congress.
Against this backdrop, the committee was speaking to a divided America. Most TV networks carried the hearing live, but Fox News Channel did not.
The committee chairman, civil rights leader Thompson, opened the hearing with the sweep of American history. saying he heard in those denying the stark reality of Jan. 6 his own experience growing up in a time and place “where people justified the action of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and lynching.”
Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, outlined what the committee has learned about the events leading up to that brisk January day when Trump sent his supporters to Congress to “fight like hell” for his presidency.
Among those testifying was documentary maker Nick Quested, who filmed the Proud Boys storming the Capitol — along with a pivotal meeting between the group's then-chairman Henry “Enrique” Tarrio and another extremist group, the Oath Keepers, the night before in nearby parking garage. Quested said the Proud Boys later went to get tacos.
Court documents show that members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were discussing as early as November a need to fight to keep Trump in office. Leaders both groups and some members have since been indicted on rare sedition charges over the military-style attack.
In the weeks ahead, the panel is expected to detail Trump’s public campaign to “Stop the Steal” and the private pressure he put on the Justice Department to reverse his election loss — despite dozens of failed court cases attesting there was no fraud on a scale that could have tipped the results in his favor.
The panel faced obstacles from its start. Republicans blocked the formation of an independent body that could have investigated the Jan. 6 assault the way the 9/11 Commission probed the 2001 terror attack.
Instead, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ushered the creation of the 1/6 panel through Congress and rejected Republican-appointed lawmakers who had voted on Jan. 6 against certifying the election results, eventually naming seven Democrats and two Republicans.
House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, who has been caught up in the probe and has defied the committee's subpoena for an interview, called the panel a “scam.”
In the audience were several lawmakers who were trapped together in the House gallery during the attack.
“We want to remind people, we were there, we saw what happened,” said Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn. ”We know how close we came to the first non-peaceful transition of power in this country.”
The Justice Department has arrested and charged more than 800 people for the violence that day, the biggest dragnet in its history.
Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Michael Balsamo and Alanna Durkin Richer in Boston contributed to this report.
From AP, June 20, 2022