According to the always unreliable Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), former First Lady Melania Trump is “just sick” that some of the January 6 defendants remain behind bars.
Speaking with former Trump administration adviser and convicted felon Steve Bannon, Greene noted that she had seen postings on Twitter where people were angry that disgraced, one-term, twice-impeached former president Donald Trump didn’t pardon those arrested for the Capitol insurrection.
“I thought, this is ridiculous; they’re lying about him. People are lying about him. The very idea that he could have pardoned all the Jan. 6 defendants before he left the White House on Jan. 20 is impossible because the high majority of those people weren’t even arrested until after he left office!”
Greene added:
“And he didn’t even know them! He had no idea who they are. He doesn’t know who they are still. He had nothing to do with what they did on Jan. 6, um, so it would have been impossible for him to magically know how to find these people and pardon them.”
Not to worry, Greene continued, because the last time she was at Mar-a-Lago she gave Donald and Melania a full report on those who are incarcerated for trying to overthrow the U.S. government, making them guilty of sedition and domestic terrorism.
“President Trump and Melania were both just sick over what they learned. And he said over and over that he will — he will pardon the Jan. 6 defendants.”
The congresswoman ended her fact-free rant by remarking:
“This is real political persecution. And it shouldn’t be happening in America and so the criticism on President Trump is ridiculous!”
Trump will never again be elected president, so how exactly is he going to pardon anyone? He could have easily issued a blanket pardon for anyone who had been arrested in connection with Jan. 6, but he didn’t. Why? Because he doesn’t give a diddly damn about anyone but himself. And neither does Melania.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is making it clear that she doesn’t think failed former president Donald Trump isn’t much of a man and has “no courage” at all.
Speaking with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Tuesday, Pelosi referenced her threat to punch Trump if he dared to show up at the Capitol on January 6, 2021:
“He wouldn’t have had to courage to come to the Hill, He’s all talk.”
Footage from the Jan. 6 House Select Committee revealed Pelosi’s anger at Trump on the day the Capitol was under siege, HuffPost notes:
“I hope he comes. I’m going to punch him out. I’ve been waiting for this. For trespassing on the Capitol grounds. I’m going to punch him out. And I’m going to go to jail and I’m going to be happy.”
In response, Trump labeled Pelosi a “despicable person.”
The Speaker also told Mitchell that while she isn’t fond of having to talk about Trump, she feels a need to let the American people know what the GOP has planned if they retake control of Congress and Trump runs again in 2024:
“Our democracy is at stake when you define democracy as integrity of the vote. They want to suppress the vote. They’ve been doing that for a long time. They want to nullify the results of an election. They’re even proposing that after an election, if they don’t like the results, they will change the rules that would have governed that election retroactively. So you have to recognize that they are undermining our democracy.”
Will Trump run in 2024? Not everyone is convinced he will.
The disgraced ex-president’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, says the Donald can’t stand the thought of being a two-time loser and is making too much money from not running:
“Trump has a real problem with being called a loser. There’s something inside of him possibly because he knows that he is cannot stomach being a two-time loser. He has an incredibly fragile ego. To become a two-time loser would just destroy him. So, I do not, and I’ve always stated the same, I do not believe he’s going to run.”
While failed, one-term, twice-impeached former president Donald Trump was desperate to stay in office long beyond January 20, 2022, could it be that he was also an accessory to murder so he could accomplish that goal?
A former Trump staffer said Thursday after the House Select Committee ended its hearings by subpoenaing the ex-president that he believes he knows exactly how Donald expected to carry out his plan of remaining president.
Miles Taylor, who served in the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration, said during an appearance on MSNBC that the latest hearing made an impact:
“It made my heart race to watch today’s hearing, really, because they brought up Trump’s mindset, and the question was, what was his mindset? I’m going to demystify that for America right now. I’ve spent time with the guy in the Oval Office, the White House situation room, and Air Force One. I’ll tell you what his mindset was on January 6th.”
Taylor continued:
“I believe Donald Trump wanted people to die. He wanted people to die who were elected officials, en masse, so he could call out the military, so he could invoke the Insurrection Act, so he could prevent the peaceful transfer of power. That’s not a conspiracy theory. In fact, in hindsight, it’s pretty damn clear to me this is what he had in mind from day one in office.”
Taylor then explained that he once wondered why Trump steadfastly refused to condemn right-wing domestic extremist groups, and it finally hit him one day:
“Why did he make excuses for domestic terrorist groups? Because he was on their side.”
The former DHS official added:
“We saw in testimony the other week in courts that the January 6th plotters knew they were engaging in an insurrection, an armed insurrection. That’s what they intended. And we have people, extremists … two hops away from the president of the United States who were planning on making that happen. He wanted people to die on January 6th so that he could use those presidential powers to prevent our democracy from transitioning to a new president. And I think the committee presented that in extremely powerful passion.”
A senior adviser to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol has revealed that on the day of the riots, the White House switchboard called a rioter as the attack was taking place.
Denver Riggleman, who served as a senior technical adviser to the Jan. 6 panel, told 60 Minutes correspondent Bill Whitaker:
“You get a real ‘a-ha’ moment when you see that the White House switchboard had connected to a rioter’s phone while it’s happening. That’s a big, pretty big ‘a-ha’ moment.”
Riggleman, a former GOP congressman from the state of Virginia who also served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force, added:
“I only know one end of that call. I don’t know the White House end, which I believe is more important. But the thing is the American people need to know that there are link connections that need to be explored more.”
What remains to be seen, Riggleman noted, is who exactly in the White House reached out to a rioter right as the Capitol was under violent attack, and what that individual was trying to communicate:
“From my perspective…being in counterterrorism. If the White House, even if it’s a short call, and it’s a connected call, who is actually making that phone call?”
That led Whitaker to inquire:
“Is there a simple, innocent explanation for that?”
Riggleman:
“Was it an accidental call? When the White House just happened to call numbers that somebody misdialed a rioter that day, on January 6th? Probably not.”
The White House switchboard connected a call to a rioter while the Capitol was under siege on January 6, 2021, according to former January 6 committee staffer Denver Riggleman.
CBS News also notes that the House Select Committee has done extensive research on communications during the fateful events of Jan. 6 which resulted in the deaths of five people, including a member of the U.S. Capitol Police:
The call was uncovered after Riggleman assembled a small team of data miners and analysts for the committee to comb through 20 million lines of data: emails, social media posts, phone records, and texts, to learn who did what leading up to and on January 6th.
“We were able to do things, I think, in a way that had never been done before with millions of lines of data,” Riggleman said. “And to actually create a graph that shows how these groups actually intermingled.”
Among those groups, Riggleman explained, were “Trump team, Trump family, rally goers, unaffiliated DOJ-charged defendants, Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and others, which are state legislators, alternate electors, things like that.”
The House Select Committee resumes its hearings on September 28.
On Tuesday, FBI agents reportedly seized the cell phone of Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow while he was at a Hardee’s restaurant as part of the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation of efforts by former president Donald and some of his supporters to overturn the results of the 2020 election, CNN reported.
Lindell shared on social media and conservative media copies of a subpoena he said was served by the FBI.
In an interview with CNN, Lindell said agents asked him questions about Tina Peters, the Mesa County, Colorado, clerk who is facing state charges connected to a scheme that allegedly allowed an unauthorized person to access voting machines. Peters has pleaded not guilty.
Lindell then went on his podcast, “The Lindell Report,” and remarked:
“Cars pulled up in front of us, to the side of us and behind us and I said, ‘These are either bad guys or the FBI.’ Well, it turns out they were the FBI.”
On Wednesday morning, Hardee’s decided to have a bit of fun with Lindell while also doing a bit of free advertising for its food with this Twitter posting:
Now that you know we exist… you should really try our pillowy biscuits.