The January 6 House panel investigating the Capitol attack, and Donald Trump’s insurrection, is set to meet in private on Friday as it prepares to mull criminal charges against the former president.
The “walls closing in on Trump” headline has been written often, but this time with an elevated degree of peril for a man who recently announced his third run at the White House as a Republican.
A subcommittee formed in October to make recommendations will present its report to the full panel today, according to NPR, and a determination on recommending any particular action will follow in short order.
“We’ll just accept the report, and probably one day next week, make a decision one way or another,” Mississippi Democratic Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chair, told the network.
The committee is expected to release its final report around the middle of this month, and it is expected to focus heavily on Trump’s involvement in the Capitol attack and his potential culpability.
The Guardian reported last week that it has provoked something of a rift between panel members, with some believing it concentrates too much on Trump himself, and not enough of alleged intelligence failures by the FBI that resulted in the Capitol being overrun by supporters he incited.
New: Jan. 6 committee chair Bennie Thompson tells me the full committee will receive the subcommittee’s recommendations tomorrow at 8:30a but likely wont make a decision on referrals and what to do about subpoenaed GOP members until next week.
— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) December 1, 2022
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New: Jan. 6 committee chair Bennie Thompson tells me the full committee will receive the subcommittee’s recommendations tomorrow at 8:30a but likely wont make a decision on referrals and what to do about subpoenaed GOP members until next week.
— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) December 1, 2022
Members of the subcommittee, which is chaired by Democrat Jamie Raskin, and includes Republican Liz Cheney alongside other Democrats Adam Schiff and Zoe Lofgren, all have a legal background, or, in Schiff’s case, prosecutorial experience.
As well as making recommendations on criminal charges, the subcommittee was also tasked with resolving how to respond to Trump’s lawsuit against his subpoena.
Read more:
Late on Thursday, a federal appeals court delivered a major blow to Donald Trump by knocking down the appointment of a special master to look at documents seized by the FBI from the former president’s Florida resort.
The court also sternly rebuked Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed judge who assigned the special master, for meddling in a justice department investigation. Here’s my colleague Hugo Lowell’s report:
A federal appeals court on Thursday terminated the special master review of documents seized from Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago property, paving the way for the justice department to regain access to the entirety of the materials for use in the criminal investigation surrounding the former president.
The decision by the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit marked a decisive defeat for Trump in a ruling that said a lower-court judge should never have granted his request for an independent arbiter in the first place and is unlikely to be overturned in the event of appeal.
“The law is clear,” the appeals court wrote in an unanimous 23-page opinion. “We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.”
The ruling removed the lower-court judge’s order, allowing federal prosecutors to use the unclassified documents – in addition to the documents marked classified they previously regained in an earlier appeal – in the criminal investigation examining Trump’s mishandling of national security materials.
Trump can only appeal to the US supreme court, according to local rules in the 11th circuit, though it was not immediately clear whether he would do so. The former president has lost multiple cases before the supreme court, most recently including whether Congress can get access to his tax returns.
In a statement, a Trump spokesman said: “The decision does not address the merits that clearly demonstrate the impropriety of the unprecedented, illegal and unwarranted raid on Mar-a-Lago. President Donald J Trump will continue to fight against the weaponized Department of ‘Justice.’”
Read the full story:
While we’re looking at the machinations of the January 6 House committee, we’re certainly not the only ones. Republicans, already committed to shutting down the panel when they assume control of the House next month (assuming it hasn’t done so itself by then) appear dead set on investigating the investigators.
MSNBC’s MaddowBlog, from the Rachel Maddow show, takes a closer look at would-be Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s role in the plan, in an article published Friday.
The House minority leader, if he wins enough party support to get the gavel of course, appears eager not to find answers about the 6 January Capitol attacks, or Donald Trump’s desperate efforts to retain the presidency despite his defeat by Joe Biden.
Instead, he wants to cast shade on the integrity of the bipartisan panel. In a letter last week, reported by the New York Times, he wrote to the committee chair Bennie Thompson, ordering him to preserve all documents, including transcripts of more than 1,000 interviews. It’s being seen purely as a political display, as it’s something the panel would have to do anyway.
This from a man who resolutely refused to cooperate with the panel last year when he received a subpoena.
According to MSNBC, the tactics of McCarthy and the Republicans are “intended to discredit probes they consider politically inconvenient”.
You can read the MSNBC report here.
The January 6 House panel investigating the Capitol attack, and Donald Trump’s insurrection, is set to meet in private on Friday as it prepares to mull criminal charges against the former president.
The “walls closing in on Trump” headline has been written often, but this time with an elevated degree of peril for a man who recently announced his third run at the White House as a Republican.
A subcommittee formed in October to make recommendations will present its report to the full panel today, according to NPR, and a determination on recommending any particular action will follow in short order.
“We’ll just accept the report, and probably one day next week, make a decision one way or another,” Mississippi Democratic Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chair, told the network.
The committee is expected to release its final report around the middle of this month, and it is expected to focus heavily on Trump’s involvement in the Capitol attack and his potential culpability.
The Guardian reported last week that it has provoked something of a rift between panel members, with some believing it concentrates too much on Trump himself, and not enough of alleged intelligence failures by the FBI that resulted in the Capitol being overrun by supporters he incited.
New: Jan. 6 committee chair Bennie Thompson tells me the full committee will receive the subcommittee’s recommendations tomorrow at 8:30a but likely wont make a decision on referrals and what to do about subpoenaed GOP members until next week.
— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) December 1, 2022
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New: Jan. 6 committee chair Bennie Thompson tells me the full committee will receive the subcommittee’s recommendations tomorrow at 8:30a but likely wont make a decision on referrals and what to do about subpoenaed GOP members until next week.
— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) December 1, 2022
Members of the subcommittee, which is chaired by Democrat Jamie Raskin, and includes Republican Liz Cheney alongside other Democrats Adam Schiff and Zoe Lofgren, all have a legal background, or, in Schiff’s case, prosecutorial experience.
As well as making recommendations on criminal charges, the subcommittee was also tasked with resolving how to respond to Trump’s lawsuit against his subpoena.
Read more:
The White House has announced that Joe Biden will deliver live remarks at 10.15am as he signs legislation averting a national rail strike.
The Senate voted 80-15 on Thursday to progress an imposed settlement on rail workers, one day after the House did the same.
Biden, who became known as Amtrak Joe for his days riding the railroad to and from the Capitol when he was a senator, is likely to praise the speed at which Congress moved to avoid the planned 9 December shutdown.
Biden’s pushing of the settlement, however, is not without controversy. Read more here:
Good morning politics blog readers, and happy Friday. It’s a big day for the January 6 House committee investigating Donald Trump’s insurrection as it meets to mull potential criminal referrals for the former president, and those in his inner circle.
The bipartisan panel’s closed-doors meeting follows a massive setback late on Thursday for Trump’s tactics of obstructing a parallel justice department inquiry into his improper handling of classified documents at his Florida resort.
A federal appeals court struck down the assignment of an independent special master reviewing the documents, and delivered a direct rebuke for the Trump-appointed judge who engaged him.
We’ll have plenty more about those developments coming up.
Here’s what else we’re watching Friday on what promises to be a busy day:
Joe Biden has picked up an unexpected fan in the form of Republican firebrand Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker who says the president is getting things right and enjoyed one of the best first-term midterm elections in history.
Biden will meet the Prince and Princess of Wales later today at the John F Kennedy presidential library in Boston.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief reporters at lunchtime aboard Air Force One en route to Boston.
It’s the last day of early voting ahead of next Tuesday’s crucial Senate run-off in Gerogia. Latest polls give Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock a 3-4% lead over Republican challenger Herschel Walker.
Source: Elections - theguardian.com
