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Coup Lawyer Surrenders Documents But Implores Select Committee Not To Read Them

Coup Lawyer Surrenders Documents But Implores Select Committee Not To Read Them

Spoiler alert: The committee went right ahead and read them.

Last week, a federal judge ordered former Trump attorney John Eastman to turn over a series of documents in response to a subpoena from the House select committee investigating Jan. 6. Eastman did so, coming in just under the wire on Sunday afternoon. But at the same time, he filed a motion that included a pack of complaints about how a judge for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had not gotten back to Eastman, despite repeated efforts (in a series of calls documented down to the minute, that came so close together that it’s easy to imagine that judge hitting the “spam” button).

Meanwhile, even as Eastman was pounding on the door of the Ninth Circuit asking for a stay, he was also desperately calling District Court Judge David Carter and begging him to hold off until someone from the appeals court got back to him. Carter refused to give more time. The appeals court didn’t call back. So Eastman reluctantly turned over the documents, but with a twist.

Eastman filed an official supplement complaining that, after he turned in the documents, members of the select committee had the audacity to read them.

From Eastman’s complaint...

In order to comply fully with the district court’s production order, counsel for Dr. Eastman provided to the Select Committee at 2:04 pm PDT a link to a drop box folder containing the remaining eight documents that were the subject of the Motion to Stay that was at the time (and is still) pending before the Ninth Circuit. In the email transmitting that link, counsel for Dr. Eastman requested that the documents not be accessed until the Ninth Circuit had had a chance to rule on the Motion for Stay pending appeal. Instead of honoring that request, counsel for the Select Committee notified Dr. Eastman’s counsel at 6:26 pm PDT and 6:40 pm PDT that the Select Committee had “downloaded and examined” the disputed documents, falsely asserting that there was no motion for stay pending before the Ninth Circuit at the time.

The motion to stay actually didn’t appear on the docket until 6:08 p.m.. The committee notified Eastman that the documents had been examined at 6:26 p.m.. And somehow, Eastman concluded that the documents were read in the 18 minutes after that stay actually appeared on the docket, not in the four hours before it made it there. Oh, and Eastman was four minutes late filing those documents. Nice of him to 'fess up.

Of course, says Eastman, this means that if the appeals court rules in his favor, and it turns out that any of these documents described crimes, he’s now immune from being prosecuted on those crimes because the committee looked at the documents just as they were entirely legally entitled to at the time. This would be another lesson from the John Eastman School of How the Law Does Not Work.

Eastman isn’t just staying busy in court this week. As Politico reported on Friday, the attorney who laid out the plan for how Donald Trump could break the electoral system, isn’t letting his failure in that coup stop him from couping again.

In a speech to GOP poll workers in New Mexico, Eastman encouraged them to file complaints that would provide justification for challenging any Democratic victories in court.

Eastman advised his audience to “politely” and “gingerly,” and even with “a smile” create paper trails, suggesting altogether different end goals. These include giving losing GOP candidates ammunition to argue in court—and to the public—against the integrity of the voting and to pressure local commissions not to certify elections.

To that end, Eastman also told the attendees to a speech on “election integrity” to take down the names of judges who ruled against them or refused to hear these made-up challenges. He also provided instructions on poll watchers and challengers on how to make voting as irritating as possible for those they suspected of being Democratic voters (how they would make that guess is left up to not-much-imagination-required). The attendees were told to challenge people’s signatures, make them restate their birth years, even challenge them when they “didn’t speak loudly enough” so that they had to say their name and other information loudly, in front of everyone present. Eastman encouraged challengers to be confrontational, telling them that anyone who refused to give them anything they asked for was “committing a crime.”

The group that obtained the copy of Eastman’s speech suggested that all this — along with Eastman’s advice on how to put more Republicans on county election commissions — was intended to provide justification for counties refusing to certify election results when Democrats win.

Eastman may not be good at actually dealing with the law in court, but he’s excellent at giving Republicans what they want — instructions on destroying democracy.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

U.S. Democrats To Participate In Benghazi Probe

U.S. Democrats To Participate In Benghazi Probe

Washington (AFP) – Democratic lawmakers will join their Republican colleagues on a special committee to investigate the deadly Benghazi attacks of 2012, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday.

After slamming the probe as a political stunt by House Speaker John Boehner and his Republicans earlier this month, Pelosi went back on a threat to boycott the proceedings and appointed five Democrats to the 12-seat panel.

Pelosi named senior congressman Elijah Cummings to lead the delegation. As top Democrat on the House’s main government oversight panel, Cummings has clashed publicly and repeatedly with chairman Darrell Issa on the issue of Benghazi.

The Republican-led House had voted along party lines to establish the select committee to learn once and for all what happened during militant attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012 that left four Americans dead, including ambassador Chris Stevens.

Republican Trey Gowdy, a former prosecutor, is the committee’s chairman.

President Barack Obama’s Democrats have expressed outrage over Republican insistence on re-investigating the terror strike, saying opponents are intent on sullying the administration and Democratic lawmakers in an election year.

Eight investigations were conducted in the year after the attacks, including an exhaustive internal review that found the State Department’s security measures were “grossly inadequate” to deal with such an attack.

Several Republicans including Boehner say the White House has been “stonewalling” and refusing to turn over all Benghazi-related material.

Pelosi staffers met twice Wednesday with members of Boehner’s office to discuss ways “to ensure fairness, transparency and balance with respect to the committee’s proceedings and operations,” a Democratic aide said.

Democrats had been split on whether to participate, with some saying a boycott would create favorable optics during an election year: Republicans on their own, hammering away at adminstration officials who had already cooperated in previous investigations.

But others insisted it would be crucial to have Democratic representation, particularly when former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and National Security Advisor Susan Rice are called to testify.

Boehner’s office appeared pleased with Pelosi’s announcement.

“The American people deserve the truth, and we are glad House Democrats have chosen to participate in this serious, substantive investigation into the circumstances surrounding the tragic events of September 11, 2012,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said.

AFP Photo/Win Mcnamee

Federal Prosecutor-Turned-Lawmaker To Head GOP’s Benghazi Probe

Federal Prosecutor-Turned-Lawmaker To Head GOP’s Benghazi Probe

By James Rosen and Nancy Youssef, McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — House Speaker John Boehner on Monday chose Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican and former federal prosecutor, to head a special committee that will investigate the deadly September 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, and the Obama administration’s response.

Gowdy has been an outspoken critic of how President Barack Obama and his top aides handled the fallout from the assault, which resulted in the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

During one of several congressional hearings since the attack, Gowdy ticked off a series of alleged misrepresentations by the Obama administration before yelling, “I want to know why we were lied to!”

On Monday, Gowdy praised Boehner for setting up the panel and said he was honored to lead it.

“Twenty months after the Benghazi attacks, there remain unresolved questions about why the security was inadequate, our response during the siege itself and our government’s interaction with the public after the attack,” Gowdy said in a statement. “All of those lines of inquiry are legitimate and should be apolitical. Facts are neither red nor blue.”

Democrats criticized the inquiry as a partisan stunt.

“We think this is a political, not a substantive, effort,” House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland told reporters Monday.

Many Democratic leaders have said the Republicans’ relentless focus on the Benghazi tragedy is aimed at weakening Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state when the attack occurred and is leading in early presidential polls for the 2016 election. The former senator and first lady has not said whether she will be a candidate.

Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said he was compelled to set up the special committee because of last week’s “revelation that the Obama administration had withheld (certain) documents from a congressional subpoena” in an earlier Republican probe.

At issue is a Sept. 14, 2012, email — three days after the attack — obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by a conservative watchdog group, Judicial Watch, from Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes to then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice.

Rhodes advised Rice, who was slated to appear on several nationally televised news show, to “underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader policy statement.” Rice, now the White House national security adviser, said the attacks resulted from a spontaneous protest ignited by a demonstration at the American Embassy in Cairo against an anti-Islam video on YouTube.

“With four of our countrymen killed at the hands of terrorists, the American people want answers,” Boehner said in a statement. “Trey Gowdy is as dogged, focused and serious-minded as they come. His background as a federal prosecutor and his zeal for the truth make him the ideal person to lead this panel.”

As recently as four weeks ago, however, Boehner said a special committee was not needed because four House of Representatives panels already were investigating the Benghazi affair.

“At this point in time, I see no reason to break up all the work that’s been done and to take months and months and months to create some select committee,” Boehner told Fox News on April 7.

At the White House, press secretary Jay Carney declined to say whether the administration would cooperate with the new probe. Carney said the administration has “always cooperated with legitimate oversight,” but he wouldn’t say whether the White House considers the new inquiry appropriate.

Carney said Congress has launched seven Benghazi investigations that have produced 13 hearings, 15 briefings of lawmakers or their aides and over 25,000 pages of documents.

“The facts of yesterday are the facts today, and they will be the facts no matter how often or for how long Republicans engage in highly partisan efforts to politicize what was a tragedy,” Carney told reporters.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a fellow South Carolina Republican who has accused Obama of covering up the truth in Benghazi, praised Gowdy’s selection to head the special panel.

“Trey Gowdy is the most capable person in the entire Congress to lead the select committee,” Graham said in a statement. “He’s a former prosecutor who is well-respected by his colleagues, tenacious in his approach to his duties, and fair-minded about his responsibilities.”

Gowdy, 49, first attracted national attention in July 2011 when, six months into office, he was among a small number of House Republicans who voted against every compromise Boehner negotiated with Obama to raise the federal debt ceiling.

Gowdy cast several contradictory votes on Libya during his first year in the House.

In a June 24, 2011, House vote, he broke with most other Republicans and joined a majority of Democrats in defeating a bill that would have blocked funding of U.S. military action in Libya.

In a separate 2011 vote, Gowdy supported a congressional resolution that authorized U.S. and NATO forces to launch airstrikes in Libya during the uprising against dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Subsequent U.S.-led NATO bombing helped rebels depose Gadhafi, who was captured and killed Oct. 20, 2011, by his opponents.

Yet four months earlier, in June 2011, Gowdy voted to block sending to Libya any U.S. ground troops, which could have helped secure the country after Gadhafi fell. Before the assault in Benghazi, House Republicans had passed a series of budgets that slashed funding for security at U.S. embassies around the globe.

In the nearly three years since Gadhafi’s death, Libya has been wracked by increased instability as radical Islamists, secularists and violent insurgents battle for control of the country.

In the weeks leading up to the attack on the U.S. special mission and CIA annex in Benghazi, a Libyan-based Islamist terror group, Ansar al Shariah, expanded its hold on eastern Libya. Many Libyans blamed Ansar al Shariah for the attack that led to the death of Stevens, who spoke Arabic, had deep experience in the Middle East and engaged with Benghazi residents while walking the city’s streets before his death.

On the day after the deadly assault, Ansar al Shariah suggested that some of its members had participated but denied having ordered the attack.

Within days of Stevens’ murder, enraged Libyans forced Ansar al Shariah militants to flee the region. But members and supporters, emboldened that they have escaped U.S. arrest over the Benghazi attack, have trickled back in. The group now controls huge swaths of eastern Libya, including Benghazi, making it unwelcome terrain for the U.S.-backed government in the capital of Tripoli.

Many of the 70 people suspected of having participated in the consulate attack operate freely in Libya, with the central government police and military forces too weak to take on insurgent groups that protect them.

AFP Photo