Category Archives: January 6 hearings

House select panel asks Newt Gingrich to testify in effort to overturn election

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The former Republican House speaker is believed to have repeatedly contacted White House aides about fake electors

The House January 6 select committee on Thursday asked former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich to testify about his repeated contacts with White House aides in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, even in the evening after the Capitol attack had taken place.

The request to Gingrich was for voluntary cooperation – though the select committee showed it now appears to believe he was involved in a potential conspiracy planned ahead of time to lay the groundwork that would lead to reversing Trump’s defeat on January 6.

Congressman Bennie Thompson, the committee chair, said in a letter to Gingrich that investigators were interested in him counseling Trump aides to make TV ads about debunked election fraud conspiracies to pressure state legislators into decertifying Biden electors.

The letter detailed that it had communications that showed he tried to liaise with former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone about the fake elector scheme, asking whether anyone was coordinating Trump slates to Congress so that he could be declared the winner.

The select committee noted that Gingrich then furthered that effort as he emailed Meadows at 10.42pm on January 6 – hours after the Capitol attack had already largely concluded and Congress was preparing to confirm Biden’s win – asking whether there were “letters from state legislators about decertifying electors”.

“Surprisingly, the attack on Congress and the activities prescribed by the Constitution did not even pause your relentless pursuit. On the evening of January 6, you continued to push efforts to overturn the election results,” the letter said.

The select committee stopped short of issuing a subpoena to Gingrich, but also asked him to preserve his communications with Trump, the White House and the Trump legal team led by Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, as well as anyone else connected to January 6.

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Top Secret Service official at heart of January 6 Trump row steps down

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Tony Ornato, who reportedly told aide Trump lunged for steering wheel as Capitol attack was starting, was key figure to committee

Top US Secret Service official Tony Ornato, who has become a figure of intense interest to the congressional committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack, has retired from the agency.

Ornato was thrust into the center of the January 6 furor as an eyewitness to some of the most critical incidents involving Donald Trump in the hours leading up to the deadly assault on the US Capitol.

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Liz Cheney loses Wyoming Republican primary to Trump-endorsed rival

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The vice-chair of the House January 6 panel faced retribution from state voters for going against the former president

Liz Cheney has paid the price for her staunch opposition to Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy by losing her seat in Congress to a challenger backed by the former president.

The vice-chair of the January 6 committee was beaten by a conservative lawyer, Harriet Hageman – who has echoed Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud – in a Republican primary election to decide Wyoming’s lone member in the House of Representatives.

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DoJ reportedly preparing court fight to get Trump insiders to testify – live

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Prosectors expect former president to try to invoke executive privilege to prevent his ex-officials from speaking

An impassioned plea from a 12-year-old girl has gone viral after she spoke to West Virginia Republican lawmakers during a public hearing for an abortion bill that would prohibit the procedure in nearly all cases.

On Wednesday, Addison Gardner of Buffalo middle school in Kenova, West Virginia, was among several people who spoke out against a bill that would not only ban abortions in most cases but also allow for physicians who perform abortions to be prosecuted.

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Garland promises ‘justice without fear or favor’ as DoJ digs into Trump’s January 6 role

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Investigators have specifically questioned witnesses about ex-president’s involvement in the insurrection, reports say

The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said he would “pursue justice without fear or favor” in his decision on whether to charge Donald Trump with crimes related to the Capitol attack and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, as news reports indicate the justice department’s investigation is heating up.

The department is conducting a criminal investigation into the events surrounding and preceding the January 6 insurrection, an effort that Garland – speaking to NBC’s Lester Holt on Tuesday – called “the most wide-ranging investigation in its history”.

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Cheney and Kinzinger tee up possible January 6 subpoena for Ginni Thomas

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Republicans on House committee suggest wife of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas could be compelled to testify

The House January 6 committee could subpoena Ginni Thomas, the wife of the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, if she will not testify voluntarily about her involvement in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

The news, from panel member Liz Cheney, came two days after Trump’s former strategist, Steve Bannon, was convicted of criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the committee. He faces time in jail.

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Josh Hawley, senator who ran from Capitol mob, mocked by home paper

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Kansas City Star editorial excoriates Republican as ‘laughingstock’ as memes based on January 6 video proliferate

Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator shown running from the mob he incited on January 6, is “a laughingstock” who should be afraid of what the Capitol attack committee might disclose next, a leading newspaper in his home state said.

Hawley was widely criticised for raising a fist to protesters outside Congress on 6 January 2021, then after the mob sent by Donald Trump failed to stop certification of Joe Biden’s election win, voting to object to results anyway.

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Trump and Pence duel in Arizona in fight for Republican future

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Former president and his one-time wingman appear at rival events – and it’s all to play for as the US midterms approach

Eddie Palazuelos drove 200 miles and lined up for five hours under the baking sun to to see Donald Trump at a campaign event for candidates he is backing in the forthcoming Arizona Republican primaries.

It’s the fifth Trump rally the 27-year-old has attended since the former president lost the White House in 2020 – because Palazuelos vehemently believes the election was stolen. Any judge or lawmaker who concludes otherwise is “willfully ignorant”, he said, referring to the dozens of lawsuits and recounts nationwide which ruled out fraud.

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Steve Bannon convicted of contempt of Congress for defying Capitol attack subpoena

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Jury finds former Trump adviser guilty on two counts of criminal contempt for refusing to appear before House committee

Steve Bannon, the former top strategist to Donald Trump, was convicted on Friday in his contempt of Congress trial - a victory for the House January 6 select committee that referred him for prosecution as it continues to investigate the former president’s role in the Capitol attack.

The jury in federal court took less than three hours to return its verdict and found Bannon guilty on two contempt charges stemming from his refusal to comply last year with a subpoena in the congressional investigation seeking documents and testimony.

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January 6 panel says Bannon conviction is a ‘victory for the rule of law’ – as it happened

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The former Trump adviser was charged with two counts of criminal contempt for refusing to appear before the House committee

If voters were to elect Donald Trump to another term in the 2024 presidential election, he is considering using bureaucratic maneuvers to remove potentially tens of thousands of civil servants across the US government and replace them with people who adhere to his ideology, according to a report from Axios.

That Trump expects his deputies to be unfailingly loyal to him is no secret, but during his time in the White House, they didn’t always do what he wanted. He intends to change that dramatically in a second term, according to the report, appointing staunch cabinet members and changing civil service regulations to allow him to dismiss up to 50,000 employees. He would replace these bureaucrats, who typically hold onto their jobs through presidential administrations, with people handpicked to support his “America first” ideology.

Trump signed an executive order, “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” in October 2020, which established a new employment category for federal employees. It received wide media coverage for a short period, then was largely forgotten in the mayhem and aftermath of Jan. 6 — and quickly was rescinded by President Biden.

Sources close to Trump say that if he were elected to a second term, he would immediately reimpose it.

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House panel showed Trump conspired to seize the election – but was it illegal?

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Panel lays out its case that the 45th president orchestrated a plot to keep himself in office, but its work is not done

During the course of its landmark summer of hearings, the House select committee investigating the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol has sought to show that Donald Trump was at the center of a multi-layer conspiracy to seize a second term in office, accusing him of having “summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack”.

In a dramatic capstone on Thursday, the panel argued that Trump betrayed his oath of office and was derelict in his duty when he refused to act for 187 minutes on 6 January as rioters carrying poles, bear spray and the banners of his campaign, led a bloody assault on the US Capitol.

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Secret Service turned over just one text message to January 6 panel, sources say

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House committee wants all communications from day before and day of Capitol attack but agency indicates such messages are lost

The Secret Service turned over just one text message to the House January 6 committee on Tuesday, in response to a subpoena compelling the production of all communications from the day before and the day of the US Capitol attack, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

The Secret Service told the panel the single text was the only message responsive to the subpoena, the sources said, and while the agency vowed to conduct a forensic search for any other text or phone records, it indicated such messages were likely to prove irrecoverable.

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Ex-Trump aides expected to testify at primetime January 6 hearing

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Matthew Pottinger and Sarah Matthews, deputy national security adviser and press aide respectively, to give evidence, source says

Two former White House aides are expected to testify at the House January 6 committee’s primetime hearing on Thursday as the panel examines what Donald Trump was doing as his supporters stormed the US Capitol, according to a person familiar with the plans.

Matthew Pottinger, former deputy national security adviser, and Sarah Matthews, a former press aide, are expected to testify, according to the person, who was not authorized to publicly to discuss the matter and requested anonymity.

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Steve Bannon appears in court as contempt-of-Congress trial begins

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Far-right Trump ally seeks to claim in federal court that he did not willfully fail to comply with subpoena

With jury selection nearly complete, opening arguments are expected to take place on Tuesday in the federal trial against Steve Bannon, the top former Trump strategist charged with contempt of Congress after he failed to comply with a subpoena from the House January 6 committee.

Bannon appeared in federal court on Monday as his trial formally opened in Washington. The far-right provocateur – one of the principal architects of Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election – is attempting to argue that he did not willfully fail to comply with the subpoena, which sought documents and testimony.

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West Virginia to resume abortions after judge blocks enforcement of ban – as it happened

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Jody Hice, a Georgia congressman who believes the baseless theory that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, has been subpoenaed by a grand jury investigating efforts to disrupt the results of the polls in the state, Politico reports:

In May, Hice lost his bid for the Republican nomination for Georgia secretary of state to Brad Raffensperger, who famously rejected Trump’s appeals to swing the state’s election results in his direction.

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Trump won’t blunt January 6 inquiry by entering 2024 race, panel member says

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‘No one is above the law,’ says Elaine Luria in response to whether Trump could shield himself from threat of prosecution by simply announcing run

Donald Trump won’t blunt the investigation by the congressional committee investigating the deadly January 6th attack on the Capitol by announcing that he’s running for the Oval Office again, a member of the panel said Sunday.

Elaine Luria, a Virginia congresswoman and one of seven Democrats on the committee, told CNN’s Dana Bash, “The bottom line is that no one is above the law – whether he’s a president, former president or a potential future presidential candidate, we are going to pursue the facts.”

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Federal judge supports seizure of John Eastman’s cell phone for January 6 inquiry

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The US Justice Department seized the phone of Donald Trump’s former lawyer in June; Eastman filed a motion to get it back

The US Justice Department was justified when it seized the cell phone of John Eastman, a former lawyer for Donald Trump, a federal judge in New Mexico ruled on Friday.

In its investigation into a scheme by the ex-president and his lawyers to overturn the 2020 election using “fake electors”, the justice department took Eastman’s phone on 22 June as he was leaving a restaurant in New Mexico. Eastman, in turn, filed a court motion in an attempt to get his phone back, arguing that the justice department violated his constitutional rights.

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January 6 panel examines whether erased Secret Service texts can be revived

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Sources say committee investigating whether watchdog can use forensic tools to reconstruct messages from 5 and 6 January

The House committee investigating the Capitol attack is examining whether Secret Service text messages from 5 and 6 January 2021 that were erased around the time of an internal review can be reconstructed, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The panel was perturbed that texts between agents on perhaps two of the most important days in the history of the Secret Service – the day before the Capitol attack and the day itself – could be lost in such an abrupt manner, the sources said.

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Trouble for Trump as committee makes case Capitol attack was premeditated

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Criminal prosecution appears increasingly likely as January 6 committee strengthens case against former president

Donald Trump is facing growing legal peril as the House January 6 committee lays out a case that appears increasingly geared to making a criminal prosecution all but inevitable.

The panel’s seventh hearing on Tuesday argued that Trump instigated an attack on the US Capitol that was premeditated rather than spontaneous and that he cannot hide behind a defence of being “willfully blind”.

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John Bolton says he ‘helped plan coups d’etat’ in other countries

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Former national security adviser to Donald Trump says US Capitol attack was not a coup because it was not carefully planned

John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Donald Trump and before that ambassador to the United Nations under George W Bush, said on Tuesday he helped plan coup attempts in other countries.

Speaking to CNN after the day’s January 6 committee hearing, Bolton said it was wrong to describe Trump’s attempt to stay in power after the 2020 election as a coup.

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