Tag: dc riot
White House Logs Show Bombshell Seven-Hour Gap In Trump Calls

White House Logs Show Bombshell Seven-Hour Gap In Trump Calls

The White House has released a log from January 6 that included a seven-hour gap in calls made by former President Donald Trump as a mob of supporters descended on the U.S. Capitol Building.

According to documents obtained both The Washington Post and CBS News, the House Select Committee has obtained internal phone records that show a gap of seven hours and 37 minutes between Trump's officially notated phone calls "including the period when the building was being violently assaulted."

The Post highlighted a breakdown of the exact time window between the former president's White House notations noting:

"The lack of an official White House notation of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 minutes on January 6, 2021 – from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m. – means the committee has no record of his phone conversations as his supporters descended on the Capitol, battled overwhelmed police and forcibly entered the building, prompting lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence to flee for safety."

The documents reportedly consist of 11 pages of phone records that also included Trump's official daily diary and White House switchboard log. The U.S. National Archives turned over the official notations to the Select Committee as part of the Jan. 6 investigation.

Per The Post:

"The records show that Trump was active on the phone for part of the day, documenting conversations that he had with at least eight people in the morning and 11 people that evening. The seven-hour gap also stands in stark contrast to the extensive public reporting about phone conversations he had with allies during the attack, such as a call Trump made to Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) — seeking to talk to Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) — and a phone conversation he had with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

School Board Member At Jan 6 attack

Busted: School Board Member Found To Have Joined In January 6 Attack

Jefferson Parish, the largest school district in Louisiana, must be desperate for board members.

Why in God’s name would they swear in a contractor from Metairie who has openly bragged about being at the “Stop the Steal” rally in D.C. on January 6, called those who opposed the insurrection that followed—and pointed to former President Donald Trump as the inciter-in-chief—as “traitors,” and blamed teachers for “the fall of our young people in this country”?

Rafael Rafidi, who was sworn in during a special meeting on Wednesday, was obviously not very well-vetted for his new role.

According to Nola.com, seven of the nine board members voted for Rafidi, while board member Ricky Johnson voted against him and Simeon Dickerson abstained; the next day, Dickerson voted for Rafidi’s removal and wants Rafidi to resign.

“I actually watched this guy take an oath to the Constitution, the very Constitution that he tried to overthrow just a year ago—the irony of it,” Dickerson told The Daily Beast. “He attended the insurrection and he marched on the Capitol.”

All it would have taken was a quick look into Rafidi’s social media to see what a complete and utter dumpster fire he was.

In February 2021, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu tweeted his praise for Sen. Bill Cassidy for voting to impeach Trump. Rafidi replied, calling Sen. John Kennedy "an embarrassment" for voting against impeachment.

“Go f--k yourselves," Rafidi tweeted. And in another tweet, he called Cassidy a "piece of s—t" and Landrieu a "f-----g traitor.”

Although it isn’t clear from any of his social media whether Rafidi entered the Capitol on January 6, on January 13, he did tweet-brag about his time at the rally.

"I was there, heard the entire speech, and walked peacefully with thousands singing God bless America and praying on the way to the capital [sic]. What's true now for sure is the FIX IS IN! And it's all of you in the media and government. What a shame!"

And long before the pandemic forced teachers into a virtual and unwieldy position of teaching from home, in 2018, Rafidi was attacking them on social media.

"Teachers are the fall of our young people in this country. No values, no work ethic, and just suck as much as you can from those that work hard. Good job,” he tweeted.

“I know some hard-working teachers in Jefferson Parish that bust their tills every day,” Dickerson told The Daily Beast. “It’s a direct slap in the face and he’s unfit to serve as a school board member. This is not what Jefferson Parish represents and this is not what a school board member represents.”

If all that isn’t enough, Rafidi has a serious racist streak. He recently tweeted his criticism about the NFL playing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as the Black National Anthem.

Take note: the school district he’s been sworn into, according to its website, serves roughly 50,000 students—about 38 percent of its student population is Black.

“This guy can do more damage in six months than all of us can do in eight years,” Dickerson told The Daily Beast. “He’s bad for the progression of race relations in Jefferson Parish.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Jan 6th riots

Select Committee Prepping For Most Public Phase Of Probe Yet

If you liked the January 6 headlines generated by Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming in the final month of 2021, buckle up for more to come as Congress returns to work in 2022.

The House Select oCmmittee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol is revving up for a more public phase of its probe, according to the Washington Post. The effort will include a series of public hearings at the outset of 2022 as the panel assembles a preliminary report of its findings for summer and a finalized version to be released before next year's midterms. The panel is also exploring the possibility of recommending the Justice Department bring charges against Donald Trump or anyone else who had a hand in trying to overturn the rightful results of the 2020 election. At the same time, they are weighing potential legislative fixes that could help safeguard future elections.

Expect surprises. Earlier this month, Cheney managed to captivate the D.C. press corps with a series of sensational day-of-riot texts between Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and certain unnamed GOP lawmakers, along with high-profile Fox News hosts. The committee is sure to have more previously unreleased information at the ready as it connects the dots between those who plotted to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power and the deadly insurrection that unfolded on January 6.

According to the Post, the panel has loads of data to work from after "interviewing more than 300 witnesses, announcing more than 50 subpoenas, obtaining more than 35,000 pages of records and receiving hundreds of telephone leads through the Jan. 6 tip line."

The resulting narrative promises to be the most comprehensive to date. The select committee split investigative responsibilities into five separate working groups, with some that have pursued previously unmined territory. That includes how the "Stop the Steal" rallies were funded and by whom; the propaganda campaign to seed and spread misinformation about the election; the pre-insurrection preparations undertaken within certain governmental agencies; the concerted effort by Trump and his cronies to pressure election officials, lawmakers and other officeholders to delay certification of the results; and those who played key organizing roles in rallies and events intended to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

“We want to tell it from start to finish over a series of weeks, where we can bring out the best witnesses in a way that makes the most sense,” a senior committee aide told the Post. “Our legacy piece and final product will be the select committee’s report.”

A second committee aide added that Team Trump did "a pretty masterful job" of manipulating millions of Americans into doing his bidding.

“How do you get that many people screwed up that deeply? And continue to screw them up? Right? And what do we do about that? So there are some big, big-picture items that go well beyond the events of [January 6] that the committee is also grappling with,” said the aide.

The committee is also trying to determine what might have unfolded following Jan. 6 if Congress had failed to reconvene and certify the election. As the first committee aide put it, what would have taken place if "we ended up in a constitutional gray zone"?

Any legislative recommendations from the panel would presumably attempt to establish a set of procedures to be followed in the absence of circumstances that fell outside of definitive constitutional text. Those recommendations would likely be aimed at updating the Electoral Count Act, the outdated 19th-century statute that established congressional procedures for finalizing the electoral votes in a post-election joint session of Congress. The panel is also revisiting how to keep a sitting president from abusing the emergency powers currently afforded to them in the event of a contested election.

But arguably, none of the panel's considerations will amount to a hill of beans unless those who plotted, planned, and inspired the violence on Jan. 6 are held accountable for the assault they unleashed on the U.S. seat of government.

“This is the next progression—to see whether or not some of the things that we have uncovered or discovered rises to the level of a criminal referral,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, chair of the select committee.

Legally speaking, such a referral is not binding on the Justice Department. But if the panel succeeds in laying out a damning throughline from the plotters and planners to the attack itself, Justice Department officials will be hard-pressed to entirely ignore the committee's findings.

That's where the stepped-up public information campaign comes in.

“We’re not a law enforcement investigation," the second committee aide told the Post, "but we are finding facts, and we expect to make our findings public at the appropriate time for everyone to see.”

What's clear is that the same plotters and planners of the coup attempt have now orchestrated a legal effort to block as much information as possible from flowing to the January 6 panel. Basically, everyone involved at the highest levels of the misinformation and pressure campaign to steal the election is now refusing to cooperate with the committee, along with filing legal challenges intended to delay and ultimately thwart the committee’s efforts. That includes Meadows, Trump lackey Steve Bannon, attorney John Eastman, and four organizers of the January 6 rally.

Next year, any number of GOP lawmakers might also punctuate that list. The select committee has already sought information from Republican Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania. Both have indicated an unwillingness to cooperate—tensions that will surely escalate next year as the panel makes its case to the public. Cheney will likely be at the forefront of that messaging campaign, skewering Jordan and all her GOP colleagues who “fucking did this,” as she reportedly rebuked Jordan amid the insurrection tumult on January 6.

The bigger the GOP rift, the better.

Article reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

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