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Tag: louie gohmert
Select Committee Depicts Meadows As Point Man

Select Committee Depicts Meadows As Point Man In Trump Coup

The House Select Committee on January 6 filed a motion in court arguing that Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows should be compelled to testify about his role in the plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The filing uses Meadows’ text messages and witness testimony to paint a detailed picture of Meadows as Trump’s insurrection point man.

Meadows was subpoenaed to testify before the committee in December, but at the last minute he announced that he’d had a change of heart. In true Trumpian fashion, rather than showing up to testify, Meadows sued the committee.

There are no facts in dispute.

Either Meadows has to testify or he doesn’t. Therefore, the committee asked the judge to dispense with the formality of a trial and simply rule on that question.


In their motion, the committee had to explain why Meadows’ claims of executive privilege are worthless. In order to make that case, the committee painted a detailed picture of what Meadows was up to in the weeks before the insurrection.

The record shows that Meadows coordinated with a clique of far-right members of Congress and outside operatives to hype election fraud lies and pressure the Department of Justice to validate those lies.

The affirmation of the nation’s top law enforcement agency would then be used to pressure legislatures in states that Biden won into calling themselves back into session to send fake Trump electors in place of the real Biden delegates.

The committee argues in effect that Meadows doesn’t have executive privilege because he was operating either as a campaign staffer or as a criminal, since his attempts to influence the election would constitute blatant violations of the Hatch Act if he acted as a federal official.

The 26 exhibits attached to the motion include some of the 2,319 text messages from Meadows’ personal phone that the former chief of staff had already handed over, plus excerpts from the testimony of various J6 witnesses, including Trump aide Jason Miller and Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchison.

Indeed, the exhibits are so voluminous that one suspects the committee is taking advantage of the filing to get some shocking details into the public record.

And not a moment too soon.

Hutchison told committee investigators that Meadows schemed with a clique of far-right representatives that included US Reps. Scott Perry, Jim Jordan and Louie Gohmert. The group’s role was to identify and amplify election fraud conspiracy theories.

Armed with these baseless allegations, the clique badgered Justice Department officials to investigate and validate the claims so that they could be used to pressure state legislatures into overriding the will of the people and sending Trump electors in place of those duly pledged to Biden.

The officials found no evidence of significant fraud in any state, but Trump and his allies kept pushing. “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen,” Trump said, according to notes taken by former senior Justice Department official Richard Donoghue and shared with the Times for a story that ran last December.

Donoghue later told the committee that he and his colleagues narrowly talked Trump out of firing the acting attorney general and replacing him with Jeff Clark, a toady who had never tried a criminal case, but who promised to throw the agency’s credibility behind the lies.

Meadows and Clark allegedly planned to use the fraud allegations to pressure the GOP-controlled legislatures of the Biden swing states to call themselves back into session to pick Republican electors.

The exhibits show that Meadows and his merry band of insurrectionists were big promoters of a John Eastman-esque pseudo-legal theory whereby Mike Pence could somehow send the election back to the states.

Gohmert even tried and failed to sue Pence in federal court to force him to act on a version of the Eastman plan to steal the election during the certification ceremony.

This filing sheds light on what the J6 committee has learned.

The good news is that they are getting closer to Trump, uncovering the machinations of high-level elected officials.

The bad news is that compelling members of Congress to testify will be time-consuming and difficult.

The clock is ticking for the committee.

Printed with permission from Alternet.

Louie Gohmert

Louie Gohmert Wanted Coup So Badly He Sued Mike Pence

Article reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

In the last days of December 2020,Politico noted a decidedly odd story. That’s when Rep. Louie Gohmert, along with a group of would-be Donald Trump electors from Arizona, filed suit against Mike Pence—not for violating the 1887 Electoral Count Act, but for following it. And if that doesn’t sound strange enough already, Gohmert was likely acting as a stand-in for Trump.

In an update, Politico ponders why this story has gotten so little attention. And it’s a good question.

The suit against Pence seems to have been a proxy fight in two ways: First, the suit from Gohmert put more pressure on Pence to go along with the coup plan that was being circulated around the White House and briefed to Republicans in Congress. Second, it was a direct attempt to get the Department of Justice to weigh in on the constitutionality of the Electoral Count Act. Scoring points on either of those fronts might seriously advance the hopes of running through Trump’s plan to overthrow the election while giving it a patina of legality.

Despite claims that the plan presented to Republicans by Phil Waldron was not the same as the “official” plan that Mark Meadows, Trump, and attorney John Eastman pressed on Pence in the Oval Office, it’s clear that the critical points of the plan are the same. The details of Gohmert’s suit show that it follows the same basic themes. There was only one coup plan: Have Pence refuse to count enough electoral votes for Joe Biden so he could either claim that Trump was the outright victor or make a case that the election was “in dispute,” giving Trump the pretense to call for a do-over election under military supervision.

Well before January 6, Republicans were out there in public, explaining that scheme in court. It’s just that no one in the media took them seriously.

In that December 2020 lawsuit, Gohmert and company explicitly make the claim that would be repeated in the memos from Eastman and the PowerPoint from Waldron.

"Under the Twelfth Amendment, Defendant Pence alone has the exclusive authority and sole discretion to open and permit the counting of the electoral votes for a given state, and where there are competing slates of electors, or where there is an objection to any single slate of electors, to determine which electors’ votes, or whether none, shall be counted," claims the suit.

In other words, Pence, with no other authority or evidence, could determine which states got counted, and which states did not. The 1887 Electoral Count Act, according to the suit, is unconstitutional because it puts limits on that unlimited authority to decide what’s in, and what’s out.

It seems clear at this point that Gohmert was only acting as a stalking horse for Trump. It also seems clear that the real intent of the suit wasn’t to generate any kind of legal precedent but simply to force Pence to act. Opposing the suit would also mean opposing Trump, and would send an early signal of Pence’s intentions on January 6.

The signal on how all this would play out came just one day later when the Department of Justice stepped in to defend Pence. That came after Gohmert’s attorneys had a chat with Pence’s attorneys, offering what Gohmert’s team described as “a meaningful attempt to resolve the underlying legal issues by agreement, including advising the Vice President's counsel that Plaintiffs intended to seek immediate injunctive relief in the event the parties did not agree.” In other words, Gohmert offered to drop the suit if Pence would just commit to the scheme to overturn the election results. Pence did not sign on.

Gohmert’s suit was rejected by the federal district court in Texas. This was followed by a thumbs down in the circuit court of appeals. In both cases, judges ruled that decorating the suit with the names of people who would have been electors had Trump won did not give Gohmert standing to sue Pence for following the law.

At the time, it was easy to lose Gohmert’s suit in the sea of lawsuits that Trump’s legal team was launching against election results across seven states. The same team of attorneys who sued Pence for Gohmert were also responsible for some of the suits against the election outcome in Arizona—which is a pretty good clue to who was really calling the shots.

But a year later, it’s now clear that this suit was another piece of the plan represented by Eastman’s memo, Waldron’s PowerPoint, and the texts that were delivered to Meadows up to and during the assault on the Capitol. There was just one coup plot. And they were all in on it.

Article reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

From left, Reps. Matt Gaetz, Louie Gohmert and Marjorie Taylor Greene

Greene, Gohmert, And Gaetz Stopped In Trespass At D.C. Jail

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) staged a press conference immediately after being denied entry to a District of Columbia corrections facility allegedly holding defendants who face charges related to the January 6 insurrection.

"We're in totalitarian, Marxist territory here. This is the way third-world people get treated," Congressman Gohmert declared for the cameras.

The three far-right Republicans delivered their remarks after a guard told them they were "trespassing" and "obstructing entrance into this facility."

The videos above come from the far-right website Right Side Broadcasting Network, which falsely deems the defendants "political prisoners" in its chyrons.

As the members of Congress spoke, two protestors held up signs reading: "Where is due process" and "Free Biden's political prisoners," which is rhetoric similar to that uttered by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Reps. Matt Gaetz, left, and Marjorie Taylor Greene

GOP Extremists Plot Stunt For Jan. 6 ‘Political Prisoners’

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

The Department of Justice arrested and charged over 500 people who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, many in a coordinated effort to overturn a free and fair election. DOJ expects to charge about 100 others as well.

"The investigation and prosecution of the Capitol Attack will likely be one of the largest in American history, both in terms of the number of defendants prosecuted and the nature and volume of the evidence," the U.S. attorney's office in D.C. wrote in March, when the list of people to be charged was estimated at about 400, The Washington Post reported at the time.

On Tuesday, as the newly-minted U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack launches, holding its first day of events, four far right wing House Republicans – some of whom has been linked to white nationalists – will be holding a different type of event.

Instead of working to uncover and piece together all the information about what happened on Jan. 6, including what led up to the attempted coup, four GOP representatives – Matt Gaetz, Louie Gohmert, Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene – will hold a press conference on the "treatment" of the January 6 "prisoners," suggesting they are "political prisoners," which is false.

The four extremists will hold that press conference Tuesday at 1 PM, "demanding answers on the treatment of January 6 prisoners" from Attorney General Merrick Garland, per a press release.

"This is taking place on the same day as the January 6 select committee's first hearing," Forbes' Andrew Solender reports. House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy "is also holding a presser ahead of that to counter-program."

"The lawmakers have all pushed a baseless conspiracy theory that federal agents were behind the attack, with Gosar also casting slain rioter Ashli Babbitt – who was shot by law enforcement while trying to breach the House chamber – as a martyr," Solender says in a Forbes article.