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Senator Claire McCaskill

WATCH Former Senator Offers Roadmap To Indicting Trump

As more information becomes available about the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, questions are surfacing beyond President Donald Trump's role, including what he was doing for hours while even his political allies were begging him to intervene.

Speaking to MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace on Monday, former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), who is also a former state prosecutor, explained what she would encourage Attorney General Merrick Garland to do in terms of persuading members of a grand jury to indict Trump criminally. She encouraged prosecutors to walk jurors through what it looked like in those moments when Trump was watching television coverage of the riots.

According to those who were there in the White House on Jan. 6, Trump was glued to the TV, excited over what his supporters were doing for him. What McCaskill explained is that the text messages, emails, phone calls and desperate requests for help he and his staff were getting are all evidence of Trump's malicious intent.

"We can go through and we can put the images at a specific time," she explained. "And we can then fill in the text messages, the phone calls that were flooding the White House saying, get him to call them off. Now, what was he watching on TV at those moments? He was watching windows being broken. He was watching police officers being stabbed with flag poles. He was watching people hang from the balcony in the Senate. He was watching people carry around government property proudly like trophies in the capital. And, frankly, he was watching a confrontation at the door of the House where someone was killed."

According to the accounts of those present, Trump loved it.

"Give me those facts. Give me those timelines, and give me a jury," McCaskill said. "I'm just telling you, any responsible leader would want to end the violence, not provoke it. That's what he did that day, and that's what this committee is going to layout. And that's where Merrick Garland is either going to rise to the occasion or go down in infamy as one of the worst attorney generals in this country's history."

Watch the entire interview below:

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Giuliani Says Trump Tower Moscow Talks Went On Until November 2016

Giuliani Says Trump Tower Moscow Talks Went On Until November 2016

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.
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President Donald Trump told his lawyer Rudy Giuliani that he “may” have spoken to Michael Cohen before his congressional testimony, but doesn’t recall what was said. Phone logs or records could probably jog the president’s memory, but it doesn’t seem the White House has yet consulted those.

Cohen lied to Congress about whether there was a Trump Tower, Moscow deal. Giuliani denied that there was a deal. When he acknowledged there were talks about it, Giuliani said that there was never a signed letter of intent or anything official. When the signed letter of intent was revealed, Giuliani pivoted to change Trump’s story again.

Trump and Giuliani are now both denying that Trump told Cohen to lie to Congress, though the president has no idea what all was discussed, because he was too busy, according to Giuliani.

“The best he could do is, ‘We talked about it, I knew he was running with it, I honestly didn’t pay much attention to it,’” Giuliani said of Trump’s recollection. Giuliani added that Trump recalled, “‘It was all going from the day I announced to the day I won.’”

Trump previously said that there was no deal. His take then evolved to say that there was a deal and everyone knew about it.

“The president couldn’t tell you the exact day it started and the exact day it ended; he remembers it started and he remembers it ended,” Giuliani told the New York Times. “It never got to anything concrete.”

Giuliani alleged to CNN’s Jake Tapper Sunday that Cohen was trying to get a reduced sentence. Cohen was convicted of lying to Congress, however. He’s also previously received a sentence for his guilty pleas, so it’s unclear what sentence Giulian is talking about.

The lawyer also said that Trump would never have directly told Cohen to lie. It’s unclear if there were unspoken instructions to do so, however. Giuliani refused to answer a question about it when Tapper asked.

The special counsel’s office reported that the initial BuzzFeed report claiming Trump told Cohen to lie is not accurate according to their records.