Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.
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Mark Meadows
Reprinted with permission from Alternet
Legal experts including a Harvard professor and a top election and voting rights attorney are weighing in on Sunday night's bombshell report from Rolling Stone naming members of Congress and the Trump administration who were involved in the planning and organizing of the January 6 rally and/or "Trump's efforts to overturn his election loss," according to two of the planners of the "Stop the Steal" rally.
Rolling Stone reports "planners of the pro-Trump rallies that took place in Washington, D.C., have begun communicating with congressional investigators and sharing new information about what happened when the former president's supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Two of these people have spoken to Rolling Stone extensively in recent weeks and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump's efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent."
Those named in the Rolling Stone report as allegedly being involved include Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), and these members of Congress or their staffers: Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX).
Harvard professor, CNN Analyst, and former Obama Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem says clearly: "Mark Meadows, just three words: call your lawyer."
Marc Elias, a top election law attorney who oversaw the 50-state response to the Trump campaign's attempts contesting the 2020 election for the DNC calls for every member of Congress involved to be "expelled."
Elie Mystal, the Justice Correspondent for The Nation says this is a matter for the DOJ:
"The potential that Members of Congress were deeply involved in the failed Trump Coup is another reason AG Garland must appoint a Special Counsel to investigate Jan. 6th," says former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean, who also makes clear this is a matter for DOJ. "There are Congressional staff who can testify to the involvement of Members."
Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor for 30 years, is calling it the "mother of all cover-ups."
Attorney Maya Wiley, an MSNBC and NBC News Legal Analyst and senior vice president for social justice at The New School says it "Certainly explains how hard GOP tried to derail" the January 6 committee.
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What January 6 Rally Organizers Are Telling Congressional Investigators
October 26 | 2021
Reps. Lauren Boebert, Louie Gohmert and Andy Biggs
Reprinted with permission from DailyKos
Several House Republicans—exactly the ones you would guess—were involved in planning meetings for protests on January 6 as Trump supporters tried to block the certification of the 2020 election and with it, Donald Trump's loss, two sources have detailed to Rolling Stone.Both sources are in contact with the House select committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol, and both, let's be clear, are motivated to paint their own involvement in the most innocent and patriotic light possible. But they can still have valuable testimony, whatever the motivations.
The sources, identified as an organizer and a planner, say they participated in "dozens" of planning meetings, including some with the personal participation of or top staffers from the offices of Reps. Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Andy Biggs, Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorn, Mo Brooks, and Louie Gohmert. (See, I told you you could guess.) "We would talk to Boebert's team, Cawthorn's team, Gosar's team like back to back to back to back," the organizer told Rolling Stone. Both were in contact with Boebert and Gosar on January 6 itself.
The meetings weren't purely informational: At least one member of Congress was urging them to put on a protest. The two sources are subjects of an unrelated investigation that Gosar used as incentive to get them to plan the Ellipse protest, telling them that Trump would give them "blanket pardons."
"Our impression was that it was a done deal," the organizer said, "that he'd spoken to the president about it in the Oval … in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support."
The sources insist that they were involved only in planning the rally at the Ellipse, with the intention of pressuring Congress from that relatively safe distance to overturn the election. They wanted to overturn the election—they just insist they didn't think it would be violent.
"The breaking point for me [on January 6 was when] Trump starts talking about walking to the Capitol," said the organizer. "I was like, 'Let's get the fuck out of here.'"
The planner, too, pointed a finger at Trump, saying, "I do kind of feel abandoned by Trump."
And both pointed to the role of Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander, who previously bragged about planning January 6 events with the help of Biggs, Brooks, and Gosar. Alexander, the sources told Rolling Stone, had agreed to not hold his "Wild Protest" at the Capitol, leaving the Ellipse event as the major draw of the day. But then he went ahead with it anyway. "We ended up escalating that to everybody we could, including [then White House chief of staff Mark] Meadows," the organizer said. But Meadows—who they say was more broadly involved in planning January 6 events—apparently didn't intervene to stop Alexander's event.
A spokesman for Greene said her involvement was only in planning to object to the electoral certification in Congress, despite the fact that she was billed as a speaker at Alexander's Wild Protest, as were Gosar and Boebert. Presumably all of the congressional Republicans will claim that they were only expecting a peaceful if spirited protest while they tried to overturn the results of a presidential election based entirely on conspiracy theories and sore loserdom. But despite the refusal of some on Team Trump, like Steve Bannon, to respond to the House select committee's subpoenas, it sounds like the committee will be getting some valuable information about the planning process and the involvement of key Republicans.
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