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Witness Says Trump Watched DC Riots On TV, Ignored Pleas To Intervene

Witness Says Trump Watched DC Riots On TV, Ignored Pleas To Intervene

House Select Committee vice-chair Liz Cheney publicly disclosed on Sunday that a witness cooperating with the insurrection probe has privately testified that during the January 6 assault on the Capitol, former President Donald Trump sat by and watched it unfold on television as police were viciously beaten and his supporters overran the building.

This bit of information is something that has been widely suspected by those who have followed the committee’s investigation closely—and even by some who have not. Trump’s silence and inaction for 187 minutes on January 6 were palpable as the riot exploded. But precisely what he was doing, who he spoke to, or what he said in that window remains, for now, a subject of some mystery.

The implications are unprecedented.

Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, divulged the firsthand witness testimony on Face the Nation this past weekend as she fielded questions from host Margaret Brennan about the criminal culpability of Trump’s abject failure to act that day.

Cheney said on Sunday:

“The committee is obviously going to follow the facts wherever they lead. We’ve made tremendous progress. If you think about, for example, what we know now about what the former president was doing on the 6th while the attack was underway. The committee has firsthand testimony that President Trump was sitting in the dining room next to the Oval Office, watching on television as the Capitol was assaulted as the violence occurred. We know that that is clearly a supreme dereliction of duty. One of the things that the committee is looking at from the perspective of our legislative purpose is whether we need enhanced penalties for that kind of dereliction of duty. But we’ve certainly never seen anything like that as a nation before.”

During a separate appearance on Sunday with ABC News, Cheney further illuminated the committee’s findings. Cheney said a firsthand witness testified that Ivanka Trump, the former president’s daughter and then senior adviser, pleaded with Trump at least twice to do something to quell the violence.

Ivanka’s pleas have been reported elsewhere before. In Peril, a book on the Trump administration by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, the Washington Post reporters said that Ivanka tried to get Trump to step in no less than three times on January 6.

“Let this thing go. Let it go,” Ivanka reportedly said.

“We know, as he was sitting there in the dining room next to the Oval Office, members of his staff were pleading with him to go on television, to tell people to stop,” Cheney said on ABC. “We know [House GOP] Leader [Kevin] McCarthy was pleading with him to do that.”

McCarthy has admitted openly to calling Trump on January 6. During the former president’s second impeachment—this time for incitement of insurrection— Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington shared McCarthy’s account of his tense phone call with Trump. McCarthy pleaded with the president to issue a statement that could calm the mob, and Trump effectively refused, insisting it wasn’t his supporters responsible for the melee but antifa.

McCarthy has been asked to voluntarily comply with the committee’s requests for his records and testimony. A threat of a formal subpoena looms. So far, just two other Republican lawmakers have been hit with a voluntary compliance request, including Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania. Neither Jordan nor Perry have said they will comply, queuing up a likely bitter legal showdown between Trump crony legislators and the probe. Committee chair Bennie Thompson has indicated uncertainty over the panel’s power to subpoena fellow legislators.

Representatives for Jordan and Perry have not returned multiple requests for comment.

Appearing on Meet the Press Sunday, Thompson also reiterated the committee’s findings—and concerns—about the 187 minutes that Trump went silent.

Just before Christmas, the Mississippi Democrat told The Washington Post that the select committee believes, based on the records, evidence, and testimony it has obtained thus far, that Trump may have recorded several videos on January 6 addressing his supporters before finally releasing a bizarre one-minute clip.

He repeated lies about the election results in the video and told the rioters, “Go home. We love you. You’re very special.”

Thompson has said that Trump’s many reshoots of that clip, or one like it, were necessary because he “wouldn’t say the right thing.”

Thompson told Meet the Press this Sundaythat the committee has already asked the National Archives to provide investigators with any related videos it might have that have yet to be remitted.

The anniversary of the attack falls this week, and with it, plans are underway on Capitol Hill to hold a solemn ceremony marking the day, including a moment of silence for lives lost. Trump has announced plans to hold a press conference at Mar-a-Lago.

“He’s doing this press conference on the sixth,” Cheney said on Sunday. “If he makes those same claims [of election fraud], he’s doing it with the complete understanding of what those claims have caused in the past.”

The committee’s work meanwhile continues unabated, with public hearings imminent. More than 300 witnesses have already testified, and the committee has obtained reams of documents from cooperative probe targets.

Appearing on CNN on Sunday, Thompson said the committee would determine “whether or not what occurred on Jan. 6 was a comedy of errors or a planned effort on the part of certain individuals.”

Adding to the bevy of witnesses already called, the committee also plans to haul in state and local election officials for testimony. They also will take statements from members of the National Guard. Much confusion and uncertainty still reign over why assistance to the Capitol was so long delayed.

Democracy came perilously close to being lost on Jan. 6, Thompson told CNN.

“Before we just run out with a story we can’t defend, we will get to what we believe is the truth, and that’s the charge that we have as a committee,” he added.

Thompson also urged that if, in the course of its probe, committee members unearth evidence that they think “warrants review or recommendation” to the Justice Department, then they will do just that.

“We’re not looking for it, but if we find it, we’ll absolutely make the referral,” Thompson said.

In an appeal to the Supreme Court, Trump has balked at the committee’s position to disclose evidence of criminal wrongdoing to the Justice Department if necessary. The former president alleges the committee is acting outside the scope of its authority by weighing such referrals and thus has no constitutionally protected purpose.

Lower courts, however, have said the “mere prospect that misconduct might be exposed” in the course of an investigation does not alter the committee’s authority.

Whether the committee issues a criminal referral for Trump or not, Cheney emphasized a profound need for legislative review, at the least.

“I think that there are a number, as the chairman said, of potential criminal statutes at issue here. But I think there’s absolutely no question that it was a dereliction of duty. I think one of the things the committee needs to look at as we’re looking at legislative purpose is whether we need enhanced penalties for that dereliction of duty,” she said.

Even though Trump is out of office, his influence in Washington and elsewhere in the U.S. is still being felt and has shown no sign of slowing down. His messaging about voter fraud, for example, has buoyed the Republican argument against the expansion of voting rights in the U.S.

In a letter to Senate colleagues on Monday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer highlighted this dynamic as the anniversary of the attempted overthrow approaches.

“It was attacked in a naked attempt to derail our Republic’s most sacred tradition: the peaceful transfer of power,” Schumer said.

Considering this and in reflection of a year that found Republicans rebuffing every bid by Democrats to expand voting rights legislatively, Schumer announced that the Senate would debate and later vote on changes to its own filibuster rules by Jan. 17 if Republicans don’t get out of the way.

“The Senate must advance systemic democracy reforms to repair our republic, or else the events of that day will not be an aberration— they will be the new norm. We as Senate Democrats must urge the public in a variety of different ways to impress upon their Senators the importance of acting and reforming the Senate rules if that becomes a prerequisite for action to save our democracy," Schumer wrote

Article reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Trump’s One Great Accomplishment? Implicating The Entire GOP In Potentially Impeachable Crimes

Trump’s One Great Accomplishment? Implicating The Entire GOP In Potentially Impeachable Crimes

You don’t have to be a foreign agent to work for Donald Trump.

You don’t need decades of association with a Nazi-allied group.

You don’t even need to be a liar, though that is necessary if you’re going to say that Trump “has given more financial disclosure than anybody else” when he hasn’t even released one tax return, after promising to release them dozens of times, becoming the first president not to make this bare minimum of disclosure in more than 45 years.

The only absolutely necessary qualification to work for or with Trump is a willingness to abet his potentially impeachable crimes. And the good news for Trump is that nearly his entire party is proving that their prime concern is covering up his potential wrongdoing — even from themselves.

Last week, only one Republican in the House voted for a measure that would have required Trump disclose his tax returns and the official visitor logs to the White House. The Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into Russia’s interference with our elections is still being run by Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), a member of Trump’s transition team, who is reportedly slow-walking the entire process, ideally into irrelevance.

But despite their best efforts, the weight of the evidence demanding scrutiny of Trump’s campaign and presidency hasn’t been squelched.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), who led the House investigation until it became obvious even to Republicans that he was more interested in abetting Trump’s abuses of power than examining anything Russia or Trump did, had to recuse himself. As did Attorney General Jeff Sessions. And Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), whose sudden decision to retire from the House and his roost as chairman of the House Oversight Committee this term suggests that his imagined job of inventing Hillary Clinton scandals is nowhere near as much fun as concealing Donald Trump scandals.

Since Chaffetz made that announcement, he is suddenly doing some oversight into Trump’s possible violations of the Emoluments Clause and General Michael Flynn’s lack of disclosures of foreign payments in his background checks. But he’s still echoing the White House’s ridiculous accusation that Flynn’s background check can all be blamed on the Obama administration.

Trump is arguing that he didn’t trust Obama to vet refugees or his own birth certificate, but relied on his earlier endorsement of a general whom Obama later fired?

Abetting this nonsense is one thing. But when Trump repeatedly rejects the consensus opinion that Russia interfered in our elections after parroting Russia propaganda and celebrating the disclosures of Wikileaks, an organization his CIA director now calls “a hostile intelligence agency” — and his party fails to rebuke him en masse — then the choice made by that party is clear.

The GOP as a whole may not have been a part of the (alleged) crimes, but it’s all in on the coverup.

The question isn’t whether there is a case to be made for the impeachment of Donald Trump, but which case is the most compelling.

On Slate’s Trumpcast, Harvard law professor Noah Feldman convincingly argued that there are actually three cases for impeachment: corruption, abuse of power, and the violation of democratic norms, all potentially impeachable crimes.

Corruption is pretty obvious. You’re not supposed to use the presidency as a pop-up ad for the hundreds of businesses you still own and from which you directly benefit.

“In this constitutional sense, using the perks and tools of government to enrich the president personally is an impeachable offense, an offense that would grow out of a pattern of such acts of corruption,” Feldman wrote, noting that the odd advertisement for the president’s Mar-A-Lago resort that showed up on a State Department site this week could fit this pattern.

Is there an honest person alive who doesn’t believe Trump is using this office to enrich himself right now?

Abuse of power comes when you, say, accuse a former president of impeachable crimes with no proof or understanding of the law you suggest he broke. Or it could be from targeting the press as enemies of the people.

The Russia stuff, which has convinced many on the left that treason occurred in the Trump campaign, is the most complicated case to make, given that the alleged wrongdoing took place before the president took office. But the White House’s refusal to participate, for instance, in disclosing Mike Flynn’s entanglements or communication as National Security Advisor suggest that there could be a case for potential high crimes in office. Likewise, any attempt to reward a foreign interest for interfering in the 2016 election would be impeachable, Feldman suggests.

Democrats in Congress will be reluctant to mention the “I” word for fear of turning off “moderates.” This clinging to past propriety lingers on the left, despite America electing a birther who called Mexican immigrants rapists and couldn’t identify his own health care bill with the help of Google.

Yet it’s clear the GOP is rotting from the head. So the “I” word Democrats need to stress is independent investigation.

Two out of three Americans want such to see a commission that seeks the facts about Russia’s involvement in the Trump campaign, without the skew of partisanship. Conceivably, such a process could end in full absolution for Trump, but the public senses that something is amiss and is being hidden from them. And that alone is an indictment of the entire Republican Party.

 

Trump Didn’t Commit Treason—But That Press Conference Was Dangerous

Trump Didn’t Commit Treason—But That Press Conference Was Dangerous

After Donald Trump called on Russian hackers release Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails, the next question was obvious: Did the GOP candidate for president just commit treason?

The answer is no—but that doesn’t mean that his comments aren’t dangerous.

Legal experts told The National Memo that Trump’s comments don’t meet the legal definition of treason.

Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet said in an interview that because the United States is not engaged in a war with the Kremlin, Russia cannot be considered an enemy—and thus, giving “aid and comfort” to Putin remains in line with the Constitution.

“As a legal term, it [treason] means that there’s actually something like a state of war,” Tushnet said. “There isn’t between us and Russia. It can’t be done.”

Even during the Cold War, for instance, the Soviet Union was not considered a legal enemy—and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted under charges of espionage, not treason. (Coincidentally, the McCarthyite lawyer who prosecuted them, Roy Cohn, was a longtime adviser to Trump until his death in 1986.)

It’s also not the first time that Donald Trump has called on hackers to investigate a major Democratic politician: He encouraged them to find President Barack Obama’s college records just last fall, on Twitter.

While some have speculated that either one of Trump’s challenges to hackers could count as solicitation of a crime—in this case, disclosing private information—such a charge would be a shaky one, because current legal language on disclosure of private information does not account for the internet.

In a Vox article, journalist Dylan Matthews compared Trump’s dare to Russian hackers to Nixon’s role in encouraging wire-tapping at the DNC headquarters as part of the Watergate scandal. But Tushnet said it’s not so simple.

“It’s not obvious that hacking a private email server is a crime,” Tushnet said.

And regardless of the crime, Tushnet said that the Republican nominee would be able to defend his statements under free-speech law.

“Almost certainly, for any crime that he might thought to be charged with, he would have a defense under the First Amendment,” Tushnet said, adding that a Supreme Court case, Watts v. United States, distinguishes between “genuine threat” and “political hyperbole.”

Just as the statement considered in Watts—”If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.”—was considered to be hyperbolic, Trump’s challenge to Russian hackers would be ruled as a similar sort of political exaggeration, Tushnet said.

Still, Kimberley Marten, a political science professor at Barnard College of Columbia University, says that Trump’s “shocking” comments have publicly aligned himself with the two major Russian state intelligence agencies.

“It is particularly shocking because as the official candidate of the Republican Party, he will soon be getting classified briefings,” Marten, who specializes in Russian affairs and cyberwarfare, said in an interview with The National Memo.  “The logical conclusion is that Trump is expressing hope that Russian intelligence can even undercut the serving president of the United States,” she said.

Marten added that to her knowledge, no other American politician has called upon a foreign government to spy on or undermine a political campaign, noting that Russia would technically be hacking Clinton as former secretary of state and not as a presidential candidate.

A hack of Clinton’s emails wouldn’t be new for Russia, though: Marten said that the Kremlin has been known to influence radical nationalist campaigns that oppose NATO in countries such as France and Finland, as well as encourage bombers to intentionally attack a U.S. base in Syria.

 

Photo: Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S., July 5, 2016.      REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

 

Release Of Jonathan Pollard Once Again Appears Under Debate

Release Of Jonathan Pollard Once Again Appears Under Debate

By Christi Parsons and Timothy M. Phelps, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration appears to have begun considering the early release of Jonathan Pollard, an American serving a life sentence for spying for Israel, as it tries to nudge the Middle East peace process forward.

On Monday, U.S. officials conspicuously declined to comment on reports that Pollard’s release might be under consideration. Just days earlier, the State Department had issued flat denials after Israeli press reports that the idea was under discussion.

The shift in the official response suggested that — once again — the government might be looking at the early release of Pollard as a way to advance Mideast negotiations.

Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have repeatedly sought Pollard’s early release. Some U.S. officials believe that releasing him could ease the way for Netanyahu to accept negotiating steps the administration wants him to take, particularly the release of Palestinians convicted of terrorist acts.

But U.S. defense and intelligence officials have fought the idea for years, with the CIA leading the way. In 1998, when President Bill Clinton agreed to review the case with an eye toward moving along a Mideast peace accord, CIA Director George Tenet threatened to resign if Pollard were released.

Pollard, 59, a former intelligence analyst for the Navy, pleaded guilty to selling U.S. secrets, including satellite photos and data on Soviet weapons and ship movements, to Israel in the early 1980s. He was sentenced to life in prison in 1987 and is being held at the federal prison in Butner, N.C.

Under federal sentencing rules, Pollard will be eligible for parole in November 2015. As that date draws near, the long-standing opposition to releasing him early might wane, some analysts suggest.

Like his predecessors, Obama has opposed Pollard’s release. Last week, State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki made the possibility sound out of the question.

“Jonathan Pollard was convicted of espionage against the United States, a very serious crime, was sentenced to life in prison and is serving his sentence,” Psaki said in a statement. “There are currently no plans to release Jonathan Pollard.”

On Monday, White House press secretary Jay Carney emphasized only the first part of that statement.

“I have nothing new about Jonathan Pollard that I haven’t said in the past, which is that he was convicted of espionage and he is serving his sentence,” Carney said.

“I have nothing to add to that,” Carney said, before adding, “When it comes to the Middle East peace process and the work being done with both parties to try to move that process forward, there’s a lot of complicated moving parts.”

Seymour D. Reich, an influential New York lawyer who has been campaigning for Pollard’s release, said he thinks the situation is moving in Pollard’s favor.

“I think it’s going to happen, and it’s overdue,” said Reich, a former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP