Tag: marc short
Former Pence Chief Of Staff Testifies In January 6

Former Pence Chief Of Staff Testifies In January 6 Grand Jury

Just when you thought the House Select committee investigating Jan. 6 wasn’t getting testimony from the A++ players in the White House… think again.

ABC News reports that Marc Short, former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, was caught by an ABC News camera leaving the D.C. District Court Friday with his attorney, Emmet Flood, beside him. He had reportedly appeared before a federal grand jury investigating the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Sources told ABC News that Short appeared under subpoena.

Short would be the highest-ranking official from the White House under former President Donald Trump to appear before the grand jury.

During the last public hearings from the House Select committee on July 21, an unnamed White House security official testified that during the Jan. 6 attack, Pence’s security detail was calling their families to “say goodbye.”

“The members of the VP detail at this time were starting to fear for their own lives,” the security official testified. “There was a lot of yelling. There was a lot of very personal calls over the radio. It was disturbing. I don’t like talking about it. There were calls to say goodbye to family members.”

The public hearing additionally revealed that while Pence’s security team was planning his escape, Trump was tweeting about Pence’s lack of “courage” to follow the former president’s request and stop the electoral count.

As Daily Kos’ Brandi Buchman reports, in the days and hours leading up to and during the insurrection, Trump badgered, berated, and bullied Pence to get him to stop the electoral count.

The vice president did not follow Trump’s edicts, and while the president did nothing to quell the violence on Jan. 6., Pence ordered deployments to help quash it.

As the public hearings revealed, at the end of a day that left countless law enforcement and others injured or dead, the nation bruised and scared, Congress running for their lives, and a gallows erected for his vice president, all Trump could muster were the words: "Mike Pence let me down.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

'Constitutional Patriot' Pence Is Central To Select Panel Probe

'Constitutional Patriot' Pence Is Central To Select Panel Probe

Former Vice President Mike Pence is not expected to appear when the House Select Committee holds its prime-time hearing — the first of its scheduled public hearings — on Thursday. Yet Pence’s key role in presiding over the counting of the Electoral College votes is expected to take center stage in the select committee’s presentation.

Pence didn’t cooperate directly with the select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, but people close to the former vice president received invitations to appear for the public hearings.

The Washington Postreported that J. Micheal Luttig, a former federal judge who publicly rejected the notion that Pence had the authority to deny electoral votes, was invited by the select committee to testify at the public hearings. Pence aides Marc Short and Greg Jacob also received outreach from the select committee and are expected to testify.

Short, who served as Pence’s closest aides and vice presidential chief of staff, was with him the entire day on January 6, per CNN. He’s also a firsthand witness to the pressure campaign engineered by former President Trump and his top allies to get Pence to withhold certification of the 2020 election results.

New details have emerged in recent months about Pence’s actions on January 6, when he rebuffed overwhelming Republican pressure to reject electoral votes from states Joe Biden won while a pro-Trump mob breached the Capitol and threatened his life.

“I anticipate that we will hear about Mike Pence on Thursday night. You can’t tell the story without him," said Norm Eisen, a special counsel to Democrats during Trump’s first impeachment, who has co-authored a guide to the select committee hearings.

Eisen also noted that elucidating how Pence rejected the false suggestions proposed by top Trump allies would rebut GOP attempts to paint the committee and its findings as partisan.

“So, the other way that Pence comes in is as a dose of reality in response to these lunatic legal theories that were circulating. So that’s an important part of the narrative,” Eisen said.

To outline for viewers the GOP’s “coordinated, multi-step effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and prevent the transfer of power,” the select committee will stress the significance of Pence’s refusal to leave the Capitol after the rioters entered the building — a move that denied Trump supporters an opportunity to enact their plans.

"I think something that stood out to me is that there were certain people who were in the right place and did the right thing. They followed the law. They were courageous. They stood up to pressure, like the former vice president, for example," said Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA), a member of the select committee. "It was a tragic event for our country, and there were villains that day, of course. But there were people who were heroic, who through their actions really prevented a much worse outcome."

Despite incurring widespread conservative wrath for refusing to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Trump’s favor, Pence has continued to insist he did the right thing. In February, the former vice president insisted that Trump had been wrong to suggest Pence could change the outcome of the 2020 election.

“Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election,” Pence said in a public statement.

Pence has distanced himself from the bipartisan House Select Committee, and his representatives have refused to confirm or deny whether the former president was invited to testify.

How Top Pence Aide Made Masking Political -- And Doomed Thousands

How Top Pence Aide Made Masking Political -- And Doomed Thousands

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet

In 2020Marc Short, the chief of staff to then-Vice President Mike Pence, made a fateful decision that paved the way for the politicization of wearing masks. Had he chosen differently there's no question countless lives could have been saved.

Short, who once served as the executive director of the far right Young America's Foundation, "focused on the political and economic implications of the coronavirus response and approached many public health decisions by considering how they would be perceived," The Washington Post reveals. That report comes from a deep-dive into the Trump pandemic response detailed in the new book, Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration's Response to the Pandemic That Changed History, by Post journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta.

In possibly the most damaging of those decisions, Short nixed a plan, which was far along enough to have a PR campaign already created, to send face masks to every household in America. The Dept. of Health and Human Services was backing the program, while other reports have revealed the U.S. Postal Service was also working on it.

If it had been executed, "some public health experts think [it] would have depoliticized mask-wearing," The Post reports, but Short believed it "would unnecessarily alarm people."

Previous Post reporting revealed the program would have flooded the nation with 650 million face masks, five for every U.S. household.

Short has a long history of focusing on optics instead of fact-based communication to the public. As far back as the 1990's he labeled efforts to educate the public that HIV and AIDS do not only affect gay people a "propaganda campaign," a "distortion campaign," and "intentional deception."

And he called gay people "sodomites," while attacking "the perverted lifestyles homosexuals pursue," and delivered a warning to not "glorify homosexuals' repugnant practices."

Short tested positive for coronavirus in October.

Americans were already alarmed, but Short's and the White House's focus on optics and pretending the coronavirus was not as dangerous and deadly as it in fact is, according to Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, led to hundreds of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided.

Mike Pence, coronavirus

Watchdog Group: Top Pence Aide Has ‘Conflicting Financial Interests’

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

As Vice President Mike Pence's chief of staff, Marc Short — according to analysis by the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) — appears to be playing a prominent role in the federal government's response to the coronavirus pandemic. And CREW reports that Short might be doing so "while holding significant conflicting financial interests."

In an article posted on CREW's website on Thursday, Walter Shaub, former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics), and researcher Meredith Lerner explain: "The financial disclosure report [Short] filed when he entered government in March 2019 shows he may own stocks in companies directly affected by the pandemic response that the vice president's office is leading. The companies whose stocks he listed in his disclosure include manufacturers of drugs, medical tests, medical devices, medical instruments, personal protective equipment, cleaning supplies, antiseptics, airplanes and airplane parts. They also include a major consumer goods retailer, the parent company of Google, and for-profit managed healthcare companies."

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