Category: January 6

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Capitol Insurrection Fox News January 6

Hillary Shreds Fox For Refusing To Air Jan. 6 Hearings: ‘They Prefer Their Sedition Made Fresh On-Site’

Just hours after Fox News announced they would refuse to cover any of the televised public hearings from the House Select Committee on the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has gone viral with a tweet she sent out suggesting that the network is actively engaged in sedition.

For those unfamiliar with exactly what the word sedition means, here’s a definition:

“Incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.”

 

According to the New York Times, Fox’s decision to ignore the hearings clearly makes them an outlier:

“(Fox) anchors have held a dim view of the committee. Mr. Carlson called the committee ‘grotesque’ on his program on Monday night, and Mr. Hannity has called the group of five Democrats and two Republicans ‘fake’ on his 9 p.m. show.”

Sounds like classic psychological projection on the part of the Fox hosts, doesn’t it?

The move by the right-wing “news” network prompted Clinton to eviscerate them on Twitter, with a posting that quickly went viral:

Others then joined the debate and also pilloried Fox.

Keep in mind that Fox (and it’s prime time hosts) had absolutely no compunction about repeating lies about how the 2020 presidential election had been “stolen” from Donald Trump, even going to far as to suggest that voting machines had been manipulated to guarantee that Joe Biden was the victor.

Fox has backed off the election conspiracy theories since a massive $2.7 billion lawsuit was filed by Smartmatic, an election technology company which claims it was defamed by the lies told on the network. A judge ruled in March that the lawsuit will move forward, despite Fox’s asking for it be dismissed, according to Vanity Fair:

A New York judge said much of Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation case against the network can proceed. There is “substantial basis” for the claim “that, at a minimum, Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims about [Smartmatic], unprecedented in the history of American elections, so inherently improbable that it evinced a reckless disregard for the truth,” Judge David Cohen wrote in a 61-page ruling.

Sedition and defamation. Sounds like that’s what Fox needs to have as part of their on-screen graphics. It’d be the first time they’ve ever told the truth about anything.

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Capitol Insurrection Congress Donald Trump January 6

Jamie Raskin: 1/6 Committee Has Evidence Of A ‘Lot More Than Incitement’ Against Trump

In a little more than 48 hours, the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol will hold its first public hearing, and one of the key members of the panel, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), is making it clear that the evidence will show former President Donald Trump did a great deal more than just incite the insurrection that left five people dead.

Speaking to the Washington Post on Monday, Raskin noted:

“The select committee has found evidence about a lot more than incitement here.”

Raskin added that what transpired on Jan. 6 had been carefully planned and coordinated, and that the committee has found evidence of concerted planning and premeditated activity.”

“The idea that all of this was just a rowdy demonstration that spontaneously got a little bit out of control is absurd. You don’t almost knock over the U.S. government by accident.”

The committee will explain, Raskin told The Post, all of the details regarding the larger conspiracy to “overturn the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of power.”

“This is an extraordinary and unprecedented event in our history. You really have to go back to the Civil War to understand anything like it.”

According to HuffPost, Raskin believes the facts support indictments against everyone who played a role in the attack:

Following the committee’s lengthy investigation involving some 1,000 witnesses and the examination of 125,000 documents, “we think that there is overwhelming evidence of this plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election in coordination with a violent assault on our body,” Raskin noted.

“We’re going to lay it all out there, but the prosecutors are going to have to sort it out with respect to individual defendants … I have confidence in the ability of the Department of Justice to do their job.”

The first hearing begins at 8:00 p.m. ET on Thursday, June 9 and can be viewed on most of the major news networks.

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Crime Donald Trump January 6

Former Impeachment Attorney: Donald Trump Will Be Indicted By The DOJ For His Role In Jan. 6

An attorney who served as co-counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment and trial of President Donald Trump in 2020 says he’s convinced that the Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland will indeed indict failed, one-term former President Donald Trump for the role he played in the January 6 attack on the Capitol and attempt to overturn the results of the last presidential election.

Norm Eisen appeared on Michael Cohen’s “Mea Culpa” podcast, and discussed the upcoming public hearings of the House Select Committee on the January 6 attack, noting that the panel is clearly ready to lay out what they’ve found as a result of their investigation.

With the indictment of former Trump administration trade adviser Peter Navarro having taken place late last week, Eisen told Cohen:

“I do think that Merrick Garland is going to — well there’s already signs that they’re working their way up the ladder.”

What good did it do to indict Navarro for contempt of Congress, Cohen asked Eisen, adding:

“What more do you need? I don’t think the DOJ is any better now than under Trump.”

But Eisen wasn’t buying into Cohen’s cynicism, making a bold prediction about what he sees happening:

“Garland is a man of integrity. I believe that the career prosecutors are investigating these cases are going to take a hard look because the evidence substantiates the existence of federal crimes against Trump or those around him. And if it does, they’re going to make a recommendation. He’s not going to play politics.”

Garland is indeed a man of integrity, and that’s why he’s exactly the sort of attorney general this country needed after the stench left behind at the DOJ by Jeff Sessions and William Barr, both of whom were little more than lapdogs for Trump.

The Jan. 6 committee’s first public hearing — which will be held this Thursday and televised on every network in prime time — should tell us exactly what to expect from Garland and the DOJ, and based on early reporting, the opening night will feature videotaped testimony from Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, both of who could sink the twice-impeached ex-president, according to the Washington Post:

The committee also has video recordings of interviews with Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, that some inside the process believe will make for gripping television. Although the committee has not made a final decision, people familiar with the investigation believe the panel will screen footage of testimony from Ivanka Trump and Kushner — including Trump’s account of her father’s actions in the West Wing on Jan. 6.

A source close to the committee told The Post:

“Everybody will pay attention when Jared and Ivanka talk on video.”

Everybody will include the DOJ and the attorney general.

 

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Capitol Insurrection January 6

Meet The Former Trump Aide Some Are Calling ‘The Next John Dean’ For The January 6 Hearings

When the House Select Committee on January 6, 2021 begins their public hearings next Thursday evening, June 9, one of the names you’ll probably hear quite often is Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as a top aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

Hutchinson is being billed as “the next John Dean,” a reference to the former Nixon administration White House counsel who blew the whistle on Watergate and the cover-up that eventually led to Richard Nixon’s resignation on August 4, 1974.

Dean, you may recall, famously told the Watergate committee that he had informed Nixon:

“I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed the president himself would be killed by it.”

What Cassidy Hutchinson knows could well prove to be just as explosive as what Dean said nearly 50 years ago, the Washington Post reports:

Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, has sat for multiple depositions with investigators — more than 20 hours — and is expected to play a starring role in the hearings, according to people familiar with the matter. Hutchinson, people familiar with the committee said, has provided extensive information about Meadows’s activities in trying to overturn the election.

Meadows, through his lawyer, declined to provide comment.

The Washington Post reported late last month that Hutchinson had told the committee that Meadows remarked to others that Trump indicated support for hanging his vice president after rioters who stormed the Capitol on that day started chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!”

How important is Hutchinson’s testimony? So much so that Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who also served as counsel to House Democrats for Trump’s first impeachment trial, notes:

“Cassidy Hutchinson might turn out to be the next John Dean.”

Hutchinson also took extensive notes of what happened inside the White House on the day the Capitol was stormed by thousands of pro-Trump supporters, and those documents could prove incredibly damaging to Meadows and Trump, both of whom are facing indictment by the Justice Department for their role in Jan. 6:

Hutchinson has recalled for the committee various episodes in the chaotic scramble to sustain Trump’s election-fraud falsehood.A former mid-level aide,she kept detailed schedules of movements in the West Wingand had extensive conversations with Meadows.

Court filings show Hutchinson detailinga meeting in the lead-up to Jan. 6 between Meadows and House Republican lawmakers in which they discussed delaying the Joint Session of Congress — or altogether preventing the counting of electoral votes — so that state legislatures could select different electors.

The Jan. 6 committee will hold six public hearings, with the first and last ones being in primetime, which is certain to make for riveting television and sleepless nights for the Donald and many of his former advisers.

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Capitol Insurrection Donald Trump January 6 Mike Pence The Trump Adminstration

Trump Complained About Pence Being Taken To Safety On 1/6 – Said VP Should Be Hung: Report

As rioters were storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, then-President Donald Trump saw crowds of people chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” and said he agreed with them, getting upset when it became clear that the vice president had been whisked to safety by the U.S. Secret Service.

According to The New York Times:

Shortly after hundreds of rioters at the Capitol started chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” on Jan. 6, 2021, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, left the dining room off the Oval Office, walked into his own office and told colleagues that President Donald J. Trump was complaining that the vice president was being whisked to safety.

Mr. Meadows, according to an account provided to the House committee investigating Jan. 6, then told the colleagues that Mr. Trump had said something to the effect of, maybe Mr. Pence should be hung.

It is not clear what tone Mr. Trump was said to have used. But the reported remark was further evidence of how extreme the rupture between the president and his vice president had become, and of how Mr. Trump not only failed to take action to call off the rioters but appeared to identify with their sentiments about Mr. Pence — whom he had unsuccessfully pressured to block certification of the Electoral College results that day — as a reflection of his own frustration at being unable to reverse his loss.

Of course, this shouldn’t surprise anyone who actually knows what the failed, one-term, twice-impeached former president is capable of.

For example, Trump reportedly made fun of his own father, Fred Trump, as he faded into the darkness of Alzheimer’s disease, as first reported back in 2017 in the book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary Trump, the ex-president’s niece:

“Among the family drama that Trump is set to spill in the book is how the current US president ‘dismissed and derided’ his father ‘when he began to succumb to Alzheimer’s,’ which he was diagnosed with in 1993, according to Simon & Schuster.”

Donald Trump is a complete asshole. He always has been, even as a child:

Dennis Burnham was four years younger and lived around the corner from Donald. He inherited his own impression of his neighbor from his mother, who warned that he should “stay away from the Trumps.”

“Donald was known to be a bully, I was a little kid, and my parents didn’t want me beaten up,” said Burnham, 65, a business consultant in Texas.

Once when she left Dennis in a playpen in a back yard adjoining the Trumps’ property, Martha Burnham returned to find Donald throwing rocks at her son. “She saw Donald standing at the fence,” Dennis Burnham said, “using the playpen for target ­practice.”

Should it surprise anyone that Donald was willing to see his own VP hang from a scaffold if it would allow him to remain as president indefinitely? If it does, then you simply haven’t been paying attention.