Tag: bennie thompson
House Select Panel Now 'Extensively Cooperating' With Special Counsel

House Select Panel Now 'Extensively Cooperating' With Special Counsel

The House Select Committee is sharing more of its records and transcripts freely with the Justice Department after it received a letter from Special Counsel Jack Smith requesting the committee’s documents,Punchbowl News reports.

According to the Washington, D.C.-based news outlet, Smith issued the request on December 5. A committee spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.

The select committee began the handoff last week.

The decision shouldn’t come as a surprise for watchers of the probe; committee chairman Bennie Thompson has said repeatedly in recent months that when the probe completed its investigation in full, it would comply with requests for copies of its records and transcripts—but not before.

The final committee report will be made public today. An executive summary of the report was released Monday during the panel’s final meeting, where members voted unanimously to criminally refer former President Donald Trump and attorney John Eastman to the Justice Department.

It has been reported in recent days that transcripts and other supporting materials underpinning the final report could be released separately before the end of the year.

Per Punchbowl’s reporting, the committee “plans to share additional transcripts and documents with the special counsel’s office in the coming days.”

This would seem to suggest that the committee will delay publishing all of its transcripts in full.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

January 6 Committee Warns 'Hiding' Trump On 'Defiance' Of Its Subpoena

January 6 Committee Warns 'Hiding' Trump On 'Defiance' Of Its Subpoena

The House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack Monday evening issued a warning on Donald Trump‘s “defiance” of its subpoena, which he has ignored even after they granted him an extension. Trump was due to appear before the Committee to testify today.

“Former President Trump has failed to comply with the Select Committee’s subpoena requiring him to appear for a deposition today. Even though the former President initially suggested that he would testify before the committee, he has since filed a lawsuit asking the courts to protect him from giving testimony,” the Committee’s Chair and Vice Chair, Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney, said in a statement.

Trump’s “attorneys have made no attempt to negotiate an appearance of any sort, and his lawsuit parades out many of the same arguments that courts have rejected repeatedly over the last year.”

“The truth is that Donald Trump, like several of his closest allies, is hiding from the Select Committee’s investigation and refusing to do what more than a thousand other witnesses have done,” they charge.

“Donald Trump orchestrated a scheme to overturn a presidential election and block the transfer of power,” the statement concludes. “He is obligated to provide answers to the American people. In the days ahead, the committee will evaluate next steps in the litigation and regarding the former President’s noncompliance.”

The statement comes just 24 hours before Donald Trump is expected to announce his third run for the White House.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Select Committee Subpoena Seeks Trump Testimony And Specific Documents

Select Committee Subpoena Seeks Trump Testimony And Specific Documents

The House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters issued a subpoena to former president Donald J. Trump on Friday afternoon, demanding documents and testimony.

The committee asked Trump to provide requested documents by November 4 and to appear on or about November 14.

The Trump subpoena follows the unanimous vote by the committee on October 13 at the conclusion of its last public hearing. Like its eight previous hearings, that one presented new evidence and testimony showing that the January 6 insurrectionary violence resulted from Trump's words and actions during the weeks following his defeat in the November 2020 election.

“As demonstrated in our hearings, we have assembled overwhelming evidence, including from dozens of your former appointees and staff, that you personally orchestrated and oversaw a multipart effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and to obstruct the peaceful transition of power,” Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and vice chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said in a ten-page letter to Trump.

The letter also outlined 19 document requests, including Trump’s exchanges with Roger Stone, former Secret Service agent and Trump White House aide Tony Ornato, coup-plotting attorneys John Eastman and Sidney Powell, and various other Trump associates as well as leaders of extremist groups involved in his coup attempt.

The committee also asked for “information sufficient to identify every telephone or other communications device” that Trump used from November 3, 2020, to January 20, 2021, as well as any messaging conducted via Signal, an encrypted online messaging application, on any personal devices, or communication by any other means.

Cynical Trump Knew He Lost in 2020 But Used The 'Big Lie' To Seize Power

Cynical Trump Knew He Lost in 2020 But Used The 'Big Lie' To Seize Power

Donald Trump knew within days of voting that he lost the 2020 presidential election. But he deliberately chose to incessantly lie about a stolen election as he pushed top federal and state Republican officials to subvert the vote – which they would not do. And then Trump turned to an armed mob that he cultivated to violently storm the U.S. Capitol in an attempted coup on January 6, 2021.

The fact that Trump was repeatedly told by his campaign managers, White House counsel, the U.S. Attorney General, family members, and others that he had lost the election – but chose to lie about the results and mislead millions of voters, including insurrectionists now being prosecuted – were among the many details in the latest session by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The committee dramatically ended its October 13 meeting by unanimously voting to subpoena Trump to appear, an unexpected development as hundreds of 2020 election-denying GOP candidates are seeking state and federal office in 2022’s general election on November 8.

The committee session, which also highlighted previously unreleased Secret Service records and texts showing that White House security, and other police and intelligence agencies were aware that an insurrection was planned and likely, underscores the extent to which Trump was not merely power-hungry, but knew from the immediate aftermath of voting that he had lost and was still willing to lie about it – and later prevented police agencies from stopping the rioters.

“First, as you will see, President Trump had a premeditated plan to declare that the election was fraudulent and stolen before Election Day – before he knew the Election results,” said Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), the committee’s co-chair. “Second, please recognize that Donald Trump was in a unique position – better informed about the absence of widespread election fraud than almost any other American.”

[The hearing also examined Trump adviser Roger Stone's role in preparing the Trump "Big Lie" strategy and advocating violence with his allies in the proto-fascist Proud Boys and Oath Keepers organizations. The committee's scrutiny of his conduct led to Stone's meltdown in real time.]

“President Trump’s own campaign experts told him that there was no evidence to support his claims,” Cheney continued. “His own Justice Department appointees investigated the election fraud claims and told him, point blank, they were false. In mid-December 2020, President Trump’s senior advisors told him the time had come to concede the election. Donald Trump knew the courts had ruled against him. He had all of this information but still he made the conscious choice to claim, fraudulently, that the election was stolen; to pressure state officials to change election results; to manufacture fake Electoral [College] slates; to attempt to corrupt our Department of Justice; to summon tens of thousands of supporters to Washington, knowing that they were angry, knowing that some of them were armed, he sent them to the Capitol.”

Thursday’s committee meeting, coming after a two-month break, was described by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the committee chair, as a summation of their investigation’s findings to date, and also as an exploration of “President Trump’s state of mind,”

“What did President Trump know? What was he told? What was his personal and substantial role in a multi-part plan to overturn the election?” Thompson asked.

As numerous polls have shown in the 21 months since the insurrection, tens of millions of pro-Trump Republican voters believed Trump’s lie that the election was stolen – taking the former president at his word. But all along, top White House staffers and a handful of others said that Trump occasionally said in private that he knew he had lost, those individuals testified under oath.

On December 11, 2020, after Trump’s allies lost a lawsuit in the U.S. Supreme Court “that he regarded as his last chance of success in the courts,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) said, the president was fuming.

Texts by Secret Service officers confirmed Trump’s anger and were projected on large screen behind the dais.

The panel then played a videotape excerpt of its interview with Cassidy Hutchinson, the top aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who was with Trump and Meadows shortly afterward.

“The president was fired up about the Supreme Court decision,” she testified. “The president is raging about the decision and how it’s wrong… The president said something to the effect of, ‘I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out. I don’t want people to know that we lost.”

There were other signs that Trump knew he lost – even if he would not say so publicly, Kinzinger said, saying these were the actions of a commander in chief who knew that that he would be departing. Trump gave the military signed orders to withdraw all troops from Somalia and Afghanistan, which Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the committee would be “catastrophic” and a “debacle.” (The order was not followed.)

However, in speeches, including at a rally on the Washington mall before Congress convened to ratify Joe Biden’s victory in the Electoral College, Trump cited debunked conspiracy theories to claim that he had been cheated in his bid for a second term.

“It happened over and over again, and our committee’s report will document it,” said Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA). “Purposeful lies, made in public, directly at odds with what Donald Trump knew from unassailable sources: the Justice Department’s own investigations and his own campaign. Donald Trump maliciously repeated this nonsense to a wide audience over and over again. His intent was to deceive.”

Millions of Republican voters were deceived and still believe that President Biden’s victory was illegitimate. More than 900 far-right militia members and radical Republicans who also believed Trump’s lies and followed his orders to storm the Capitol have faced federal prosecution.

While it is an open question whether Trump will ever sit before the House Select Committee, nearly 300 copycat 2020 election-denying GOP candidates are seeking top state and federal offices on this fall’s ballots.

They, privately, may not believe Trump’s lies. But they have parroted his election denying claims in the campaign – lies that the committee has shown that Trump knew all along were false. They want voters to believe that they are fit for office and will uphold the same constitutional oath that Trump knowingly and intentionally violated.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.