Category: January 6

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Capitol Insurrection Congress Elections January 6 Supreme Court

January 6 Committee Focused On Ginni Thomas’ ‘Extensive’ Role In Attempted Election Coup: Report

The January 6 House Select Committee now believes that Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, played an “extensive” role in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and is now preparing to focus their attention on her, according to The Washington Post.

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol has obtained email correspondence between Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and lawyer John Eastman, who played a key role in efforts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, according to three people involved in the committee’s investigation.

The emails show that Thomas’s efforts to overturn the election were more extensive than previously known, two of the people said. The three declined to provide details and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The committee’s members and staffers are now discussing whether to spend time during their public hearings exploring Ginni Thomas’s role in the attempt to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, the three people said. The Washington Post previously reported that the committee had not sought an interview with Thomas and was leaning against pursuing her cooperation with its investigation.

Justice Thomas, it should be noted, was the only member of the high court who voted to block the release of White House records to the House Select Committee, writing a dissent in which he sided with the Trump administration. Since then, there have been calls for him to recuse himself from any decisions regarding the election that come before the court. So far, he has refused to do so and Chief Justice John Roberts has not insisted on such a move.

The Jan. 6 panel will meet in public session again this afternoon at 1:00 p.m. ET and is expected to focus on the pressure applied to former Vice President Mike Pence by failed, one-term former President Donald Trump and other White House officials to delay certification of the 2020 electoral votes.

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GOP January 6

Steve Bannon Gets Masterfully Trolled To His Face During Wednesday Court Appearance

Former Trump administration chief strategist Steve Bannon had to make another court appearance today in the matter of the two contempt of Congress charges that were filed against him by the Justice Department for his refusal to obey a lawful subpoena from the January 6 House Select Committee.

Bannon was trying to get a judge to dismiss those contempt charges, and he spoke with reporters while he was preparing to enter the court, telling them:

“We believe in free and fair and transparent elections! And we’re winning everywhere! This is going to be a massive blowout like 1932. You’re witnessing, right now, a political realignment like 1932. And we will govern for 100 years after we win 100 seats.”

A reporter asked:

“Do you want to govern as a one-party kind of total government? Do you want to destroy the Democratic Party?”

Bannon replied:

“Well, I believe that we will destroy the Democratic Party as a national political institution. A populist uprising of Hispanics, African-Americans and working-class people is before us!”

Yeah, sure thing, traitor.

But the best part of Bannon’s impromptu presser was the man who stood behind him holding a sign that read “FAILED COUP.”

Bannon is under the delusion that he’s still got power and relevance. He doesn’t, and when he’s found guilty and sentenced to federal prison, he’ll have even less.

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Donald Trump Elections January 6 Justice Department

AG Garland: Yes, I’m Watching The Jan. 6 Hearings And ‘So Are January 6 Prosecutors’ At DOJ

Even though today’s hearing of the January 6 House Select Committee wasn’t held in primetime, it still yielded some very big headlines, including a former White House aide confirming that Rudy Giuliani is a bit too fond of booze.

Here are some of the other highlights, courtesy of CNN:

  • During Monday’s hearing, (former Attorney General William) Barr dismantled specific Trump-backed claims about illegal “vote dumps” in Detroit, nationwide vote-rigging by Dominion with its election machines, and other conspiracy theories.
  • The committee made the argument that Trump was repeatedly told by his own top officials, including Barr and Stepien, that the myriad of fraud claims he was pushing were groundless and were certainly not evidence that the election was stolen.

Many have been wondering, however, if the hearings will prompt criminal prosecutions of Trump and others connected to him by the U.S. Department of Justice, and Attorney General Merrick Garland made it clear Monday that the committee does indeed have his attention as well as that of prosecutors at the Justice Department.

What Garland had to say was far from your typical boilerplate response, NPR reports:

“I’m watching and I will be watching all the hearings, although I may not be able to watch all of it live. But I’ll be sure that I’ll be watching all that. And I can assure you that the January 6 prosecutors are watching all the hearings as well,” Garland said at a press conference about a separate enforcement action.

Garland said he was not going to be able to give “my own personal responses to this kind of evidence that is coming out” of this month’s committee hearings, as he does not comment on pending investigations.

Read into that whatever you will, but it’s certainly not what most AGs say when asked such a direct question about congressional hearings.

There have been plenty of questions about whether or not Garland will take a stand and let the DOJ go after Trump and his cronies. Though he has yet to tip his hand, what the attorney general said today offered a bit of insight into a man we rarely hear from and should at least reassure us that he is indeed paying close attention. And that’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative.

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Capitol Insurrection Fox News January 6

Devin Nunes Gets Slammed By Fox Host For Saying Fox ‘Destroyed’ MSNBC By Refusing To Air Jan. 6 Hearings

Former GOP congressman and current Truth Social CEO Devin Nunes got a lot more than he bargained for when he suggested on Fox News that the conservative network had “destroyed” MSNBC with its decision not to air any of the January 6 committee’s public hearing on Thursday evening.

Nunes was a guest Sunday on “Media Buzz,” and he immediately told host Howard Kurtz that the recent hearings were biased and worthless because there are no supporters of failed former president Donald Trump on the Jan. 6 committee.

Kurtz countered by asking:

“Does that mean the media shouldn’t cover it much? Does it mean they should dismiss videotaped deposition from the likes of Bill Barr, Jason Miller, Jared Kushner?”

Nunes then tried to suggest that ratings for the hearing were a bust:

“To put this in primetime, the numbers were way down. So I don’t understand how these big corporations — I know it was spread across some 20 different networks — when you compare Fox News which didn’t which did not air that live, it just destroyed CNN and MSNBC in the ratings, right?”

But Kurtz wasn’t about to let Nunes blatantly lie about the ratings, countering him by noting:

“Networks like MSNBC did very well covering this hearing. Obviously, it would appeal to the liberal viewers of that network.”

As a matter of fact, 20 million people watched Thursday’s broadcast of the hearings. Fox, on the other hand, only drew about 3 million viewers:

According to the New York Times, at least 20 million viewers tuned in to watch the hearings. Only 3 million opted for Fox, which deliberately avoided televising the historic event.

An audience of at least 20 million people watched the first prime-time hearing of the House Select Committee’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on Thursday night, according to Nielsen.

ABC attracted the biggest audience, with 5.2 million viewers. NBC and CBS each had an audience of more than three million. MSNBC averaged more than four million, and CNN drew 2.7 million. (The 20 million figure did not yet include PBS, so the total audience was most likely a bit bigger.)

As usual, Nunes and the other pro-Trump Republicans would rather lie than face facts.

Categories
Capitol Insurrection Donald Trump Elections January 6

Trump’s January 6 Coup Only Failed Because He Was Unable To Get To The Capitol: Report

Despite having been a failure at almost everything he’s attempted during his life, one-term, twice-impeached former president Donald Trump came incredibly close to pulling off something that had never been attempted in the history of the United States: A coup that would have allowed him to remain in office even though he had lost the 2020 election.

So what went wrong? As it turns out, a last-minute limo ride to the U.S. Capitol was all that stood in the way of Trump being installed as dictator for life.

Thanks to the superb investigative work of the January 6 House Select Committee, we learned this week that the Secret Service was unable to get adequate police protection for Trump to travel to the Capitol and complete his illegal takeover.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on fascism and the author of Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present explained Saturday on CNN just how close the United States came to being an absolute dictatorship, with host Jim Acosta asking her:

“(Liz) Cheney also said Trump had a sophisticated seven-point plan to overturn the election and the chair of the committee, Bennie Thompson, called this a coup attempt. Ruth, you’re an expert on coups. What’s the significance of that?”

Ben-Ghiat responded:

“I was really pleased to see Chairman Thompson use that word because it’s the right word for something that’s the result of a process that started — in a sense it started before November 2020… because Trump had been trying to discredit elections for several years and forming his personality cult so the faithful would rally when he summoned them.”

She then added:

“But coups can take months or years to plan and this was a multi-pronged attempt to overthrow our democracy. It’s worth reviewing that he tried so many things simultaneously. He had General Michael Flynn trying to have martial law or military intervention and he tried the trickery that happened with the Georgia Secretary of State. And when none of that worked, he went nuclear and did what autocrats have done in the past and used violence, summoned the people there to right this monstrous wrong on his behalf.”

But it was what the author said next that stunned Acosta:

“It’s interesting, what came out recently, is Trump was trying to get to the Capitol on Jan. 6. He couldn’t get there. This is consistent, if you’re having a coup and summoned everybody and you expect to be anointed as the head of a new illegitimate government, you have to be there. There’s a phase in coups. They’re violent, quick, and then you have the pronouncement of the new order. That’s why he was trying to get there.”

Acosta could only respond:

“Wow! That’s a great point.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqwJKh_fjoo&feature=emb_logo

If Trump had made it to the Capitol, we would now be living in a totalitarian state. We just barely avoided what the Founding Fathers most feared.