New Report Shows Why Ivanka Trump's January 6 Testimony Is So Important
Ivanka Trump, right
As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s select committee on the January 6, 2021 insurrection moves along, it is examining Ivanka Trump’s actions that day — especially the former White House senior adviser urging her father, then- President Donald Trump, to call off his supporters when the U.S. Capitol Building was under attack. This week, Ivanka Trump’s importance to the committee is examined in a column by liberal Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent and an article by blogger Marcy Wheeler.
Sargent notes that the committee’s “new focus on Ivanka Trump” shows that it “is developing an unexpectedly comprehensive picture of how inextricably linked the violence was to a genuine plot to thwart a legitimately elected government from taking power.”
“The importance of the role of the former president’s daughter emerges from the committee’s letter inviting her to testify,” Sargent explains. “As the violence raged, President Donald Trump sent a tweet attacking Vice President Mike Pence for refusing to subvert the congressional count of electors. This tweet energized many in the mob to break into the Capitol and try to disrupt the count themselves, according to federal indictments cited in the letter. Importantly, as all this happened, Ivanka Trump was in the middle of efforts to persuade her father to call off the rioters, the letter notes. Instead, he incited them by attacking Pence.”
On January 6, 2021, pro-Donald Trump rioters were furious with Pence for saying that he could not prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory during a joint session of Congress. Feeling betrayed, some of the insurrectionists were chanting, “Hang Mike Pence, hang Mike Pence” — and they even set up a hangman’s gallows outside the U.S. Capitol Building.
“The committee is focused on what Donald Trump’s advisers and family members — in this case, Ivanka Trump — can say about his state of mind as he tweeted his attack on Pence,” Sargent observes. “Remember, he did this instead of calling off the rioters, as they all urged him to do. Before the riot, Donald Trump had riled up the mob by attacking Pence for announcing he wouldn’t subvert the election. So, when Trump sent the tweet, did he understand the violence as something that could be weaponized to intimidate Pence into carrying that out?”
Sargent interviewed one of the Democrats on the select committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, for his column. Raskin told Sargent, “Reasonably understood, the tweet reads as micro-incitement of the mob to target its fury against Vice President Pence. I do believe that stands alone. But it will help to eliminate any suggestion that this was just accidental or inartful wording if we learn from contemporaneous witnesses what Trump’s state of mind was.”
Meanwhile, in her Empty Wheel blog, Wheeler also weighs in on Ivanka Trump’s importance to the January 6 committee. "Ivanka, of course, is not just the former president’s daughter,” Wheeler writes. “She’s also someone legally obliged to share all the communications conducted while performing whatever role it is she played in the White House — up to and including begging her daddy to call off a violent mob — with the National Archives…. Thompson would not have mentioned this if the committee had been able to obtain Ivanka’s side of many of these communications from the Archives, or at least seen them in documents Trump was attempting to claim privilege over. Thompson seems to know that Ivanka is not in compliance with the Presidential Records Act, specifically as it pertains to her role on January 6.”
Wheeler continues, “Here’s the thing about conspiracies. Once you join them, you’re in them — you’re on the hook for what all other co-conspirators do, from acquiring weapons to bring to D.C., to assaulting cops, to planning to overthrow the government — unless you make an affirmative effort to leave the conspiracy. Ivanka might well point to that comment in her statement — the violence must stop immediately — as an effort to leave a conspiracy. Except if she is covering up some of the things she knows by withholding records from the Archives, she’s going to have a hard time arguing that she didn’t remain in the conspiracy with all those people plotting violence by helping to cover it up.”
Reprinted with permission from Alternet
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Attorney General Merrick Garland Issues Charges Against Texas Man Who Threatened Georgia Election Officials
By Linda So and Sarah N. Lynch
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Justice Department on Friday announced it has charged a Texas man with making violent threats against Georgia election and government officials. The indictment marked the first case brought by a federal task force formed in response to a wave of intimidation that has engulfed election administrators since the 2020 presidential vote.
The matter is one of “dozens” of such cases under federal investigation, said Kenneth A. Polite Jr., the assistant attorney general for the department’s criminal division.
The election threats task force was announced last June, shortly after Reuters published the first in a series of investigative reports that have documented more than 850 threats and menacing messages to U.S. election workers. This campaign of fear has been carried out by supporters of former President Donald Trump who embrace his false claims that he lost the election because of widespread voter fraud.
Polite said the Justice Department had also analyzed more than 850 reports of threats to local election officials.
The indictment alleges that Chad Christopher Stark of Leander, Texas, posted a Craigslist message on January 5, 2021 entitled, “Georgia Patriots it’s time to kill.”
"It's time for us to take back our state from these Lawless treasonous traitors," he wrote, calling one of the Georgia officials a “Chinese agent.” "It's time to invoke our Second Amendment right” and “put a bullet in the treasonous Chinese” official.
Stark could not immediately be reached for comment on Friday. He was scheduled to make his initial appearance at the federal courthouse in Austin, Texas, at 1:30 p.m. CST in front of U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Hightower.
The indictment said Stark threatened at least three Georgia officials but did not identify them. A source familiar with the investigation into Stark told Reuters that two of the officials were Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp.
Both Raffensperger and Kemp are Republicans who defended the integrity of the Georgia election despite intense pressure from Trump, who in January 2021 called Raffensperger and told him to “find” enough votes to overturn his loss.
“I strongly condemn threats against election workers and those who volunteer in elections,” Raffensperger said in a statement to Reuters on Friday. “We need to support and protect our local election officials and volunteers now more than ever.”
Raffensperger’s wife Tricia also received a wave of death threats that Reuters documented in its June report. Election workers in Georgia faced an onslaught of menacing messages following the 2020 vote as Trump and his allies sought to overturn election results in the state.
Reuters also spotlighted threats of lynching and racist taunts against Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss. Both received a deluge of hate after they were falsely accused of fraud by Trump himself. A senior member of the Trump campaign confirmed to Reuters that he participated in a bizarre attempt to pressure Freeman to falsely admit voting fraud, Reuters reported.
Trump is facing a criminal investigation by the district attorney in Fulton County, which includes part of Atlanta, into alleged election interference in Georgia.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday emphasized the importance of protecting election officials from threats during a speech before the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
"An important part of keeping the American people safe is protecting those who serve the public from violence and unlawful threats of violence," he said. "There is no First Amendment right to unlawfully threaten to harm or kill someone.”
Polite, the assistant attorney general, called the officials being threatened “the backbone of our electoral system,” made up of “ordinary people from across the political spectrum.”
Federal officials declined to elaborate on Polite’s statement about “dozens” of open investigations into election threats. Sources familiar with two such investigations have told Reuters that the FBI is probing the cases in response to the news organization’s reports about them. One involves Gjurgi Juncaj, who threatened a Nevada election official whose ordeal was highlighted in a Reuters report in September. Another targets an anonymous man who threatened Vermont officials and was featured in a November Reuters investigation.
In a previous interview with Reuters, Juncaj said he had done nothing wrong and “didn’t threaten anybody.” He could not immediately be reached for comment on Friday.
The indictment by the task force is only the second known federal charge for threatening election workers since the 2020 vote. In December 2020, federal prosecutors charged a New Hampshire woman with threatening a Michigan official.
The task force’s indictment of Stark “sends a critical message that threatening an election official or worker will be treated as a threat to our democracy,” said Matt Masterson, a Republican who ran election security at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security between 2018 to 2020.
Luis Quesada, an assistant director with the criminal division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said “the right to vote is a cornerstone of American democracy.”
“Threats targeting the officials and frontline workers who do the critical work of administering free and fair elections in the United States undermines this vital right," he said.
(Reporting by Linda So and Sarah N. Lynch; editing by Andy Sullivan and Brian Thevenot)
Tucker Carlson
When it comes to the face of smug and punchable white privilege, no bigger one comes to mind than that of Fox News' white nationalist propagandist Tucker Carlson. The far-right rabble-rouser was born into vast privilege and wealth, with a father who served as a United States ambassador and a mother who was a wealthy heiress. Carlson also attended elite private schools and most likely never worked an honest, middle-class job in his entire life. But that certainly hasn't stopped the fake news host from smearing the working poor and homeless so as to manipulate his audience into ignoring the larger (and REAL) problem: billionaires, unchecked corporations, and professionlai liars like Carlson.
During a recent segment on his Fox News program, the pompous twit whined about the homeless issue in America.
“Everywhere, at every intersection, there are beggars. This is what we used to imagine India was like. But this is not Calcutta. This is New York, San Francisco and Austin, Texas. So the question is, what happened? And the short answer is our leaders did this," said Carlson. Adding, "Politicians are making it much easier to be a homeless drug addict in the United States, and much harder to be a law-abiding member of the middle class. What’s the effect? Well, let’s see. The middle class is dying, and we now have record numbers of drug-addicted vagrants.”
And since he simply can't stop being a dick, as former Daily Show host Jon Stewart famously said to his face, Carlson said that the homeless should have their "tents hauled to landfills and told to get a job or leave."
Carlson might want to heed his own words and get an actual job.
