Ex-Trump adviser Peter Navarro pleads not guilty to contempt charges in January 6 case – as it happened

Thanks for joining the US politics blog for another day of news from Washington and across the United States. The ongoing January 6 hearings were a major story this week as were the Senate negotiations over gun control, both of which will continue next week.

Here’s a recap of what happened today:

• Ex-Trump advisor Peter Navarro pled not guilty to two charges of contempt of Congress in relation to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by extremist supporters of the former president who were trying, in vain, to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory.
• Trump told his own version of his interactions with vice-president Mike Pence in the run-up to January 6, denying that he’d insulted his running mate or pressured him to overturn the 2020 election.
• Speaking of Pence, he gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal and hinted he was considering a run for president in 2024 — which Trump has said he’s thinking of doing as well.
• John Cornyn, the Republican senator trying to reach a gun control compromise with Democrats, was booed when he went back home to Texas to speak at a state party convention. Many in the state are apparently not a fan of his negotiations on firearms legislation.
• The Food and Drug administration approved Covid-19 vaccines for the youngest Americans, a development Biden cheered.

Monday is the Juneteenth federal holiday and thus, the blog will return on Tuesday, with the supreme court set to release another batch of decisions at 10 am eastern time, and the January 6 committee meeting later in the day.

Legendary journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reunited today to mark the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, the event that came to define their careers and resulted in President Richard Nixon’s eventual resignation.

But much of today’s discussion at the DC headquarters of The Washington Post, the newspaper that published Woodward and Bernstein’s history-making scoops 50 years ago, focused on more recent events.

Bernstein drew a direct comparison between Nixon and Donald Trump, who he described as “a seditious, criminal president”.

Pointing to the January 6 insurrection, Bernstein said Trump “staged an attempted coup, such as you would see in a junta [or] in a banana republic”.

“But one of the things that’s developing that’s very different than in Watergate is that the wife of a supreme court justice is now part of the story,” Bernstein said, referring to Ginni Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Justice Clarence Thomas.

The January 6 committee has obtained messages showing Thomas communicated with former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and conservative lawyer John Eastman about efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

“It looks very much like — and certainly is the opinion of a number of people on that committee — that she is caught up in the conspiracy and very likely is a co-conspirator,” Bernstein said.

Noting that Thomas has indicated she will cooperate with the committee’s requests for information, Woodward said of the committee members, “They’re treading very carefully, and I think wisely.”

Texas senator John Cornyn has the attention of Democrats in Washington for being willing to negotiate over a gun control compromise, but those efforts have apparently earned him the ire of some of his fellow Republicans back home.

Here’s a clip of how his speech went at the state party’s convention:

Cornyn is the lead Republican negotiator on the gun control compromise, which Democrats have acknowledged is nowhere near as strong as they would like it to be, but better than nothing when it comes to responding to the mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo New York.

The Houston Chronicle has a look at the stakes for Cornyn back home, where his detractors accuse him of violating their “God given rights.”

In the telling of the January 6 committee’s witnesses, Trump reasoned with, pressured and finally berated Mike Pence in the lead-up to the certification of the 2020 election, all in a failed effort to stop Joe Biden from taking the White House.

Speaking in Nashville, the former president has offered his take on what happened between him and Pence in the closing weeks of their term:

Trump has long insisted, with no evidence, that he won the electoral college in 2020, but here he is now claiming that he also won the popular vote. In reality, he was defeated by an even bigger margin than in 2016.

The committee aired testimony yesterday that on the morning of January 6, Trump called Pence and used harsh language — including what one witness said was the “p word” — to get him to go along with his plot to prevent the certification of the 2020 vote. Trump has a different take:

On stage now at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s event in Nashville, Trump has condemned the January 6 committee in language that’s familiar to anyone who remembers his time in the White House.

The Guardian’s David Smith is there:

Republican Cheney’s opposition to Trump has particularly high stakes for her continued career as the lone House representative for Wyoming. She faces a primary challenger endorsed by the former president who appears to be beating her in opinion polls.

The Wall Street Journal has secured an interview with Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence, the star of yesterday’s January 6 hearing, though he himself didn’t attend.

The interview contains a bit of news: Pence is thinking about running for the Republican nomination in 2024 — which would likely put him up against Trump, whom he hasn’t spoken to in “about a year”:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Mr. Pence said his own decision on whether to mount another campaign, likely to come in early 2023, will be based on prayer with his wife and conversations with friends, not on whether Mr. Trump decides to run.

“We’ll go where we’re called,” Mr. Pence said. “But I won’t let anybody else make that decision for me.”

The article shows Pence is otherwise returning to his mainstream Republican roots, stumping for candidates such as Ohio governor Mike DeWine, Georgia governor Brian Kemp and Arizona governor Doug Ducey — all of whom clashed with Trump. On Monday, Pence will be in Chicago for a speech on economic policy, a potent attack line against president Joe Biden, given how high inflation is in the United States.

As we await Trump’s speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s event in Nashville, take a look at this report from Hugo Lowell on tension between the January 6 committee and federal prosecutors, who would like to take a look at what the congressional probe has found:

Tensions between the US justice department and the House of Representatives January 6 select committee have escalated after federal prosecutors complained that their inability to access witness transcripts was hampering criminal investigations into rioters who stormed the Capitol.

The complaint that came from the heads of the justice department’s national security and criminal divisions and the US attorney for Washington Matthew Graves showed a likely collision course for the parallel congressional and criminal probes into the Capitol attack.

“The interviews the select committee conducted are not just potentially relevant to our overall criminal investigations, but are likely relevant to specific prosecutions,” Graves wrote, alongside assistant attorneys general Kenneth Polite and Matthew Olsen.

“The select committee’s failure to grant the department access to these transcripts complicates the department’s ability to investigate and prosecute those who engaged in criminal conduct in relation to the January 6 attack on the Capitol.”

It looks like the gun control negotiations aren’t going as smoothly as expected in the Senate.

Recall that the week began with news of a compromise reached between Democrats and Republicans to pass legislation in response to the mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York.

It appeared to have momentum. The Senate’s Democratic leader said he would put the legislation up for a vote as soon as it was written, while the chamber’s top Republican Mitch McConnell said he would support it, boosting its chances of passage since it will need the support of at least 10 of his party’s lawmakers to pass. But now it’s Friday, and here we are.

The January 6 committee has announced it will hold its fourth hearing next Tuesday at 1 pm eastern time.

At the third hearing held on Thursday, committee members detailed the efforts by Trump to pressure his vice-president Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election at the joint sitting of Congress set for January 6, 2021.

As communities across the state grapple with a historic bout of flooding that has imperiled the water supply of its largest city, many in Montana are wondering: where is the governor?

State officials have only said that Greg Gianforte was on a planned trip abroad, but wouldn’t mention the location. The answer appears to be Italy’s Tuscany region, according to Newsy:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;} Newsy obtained a photo of Gianforte and the first lady at a restaurant in Casole d’Elsa, which is a small village in the Tuscany region of Italy. The photo is time-stamped at 9:31 p.m. local time Wednesday.

A source that wishes to remain anonymous sent us a photo of the couple dining with multiple other people. The governor’s office confirmed Gianforte was out of the country when it was noticed his lieutenant governor signed a statewide emergency declaration as acting governor.

A spokesperson said he and the first lady left late last week on a long-planned personal trip, but details about the timeline and the destination were left out.

The Montana Free Press reports on how cagey the state has been about the whereabouts of Gianforte, a Republican elected in 2020:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;} A spokesperson for the governor’s office has said only that Gianforte left the country last week, before the Yellowstone River rose to take out massive chunks of infrastructure and isolate entire communities in Park, Carbon and Stillwater counties, on a “long-scheduled personal trip” with his wife, Susan Gianforte. But the office has declined to say what country Gianforte is visiting and specifically when the governor will be back in Montana.

“The governor is returning early and as quickly as possible,” gubernatorial spokesperson Brooke Strokye said in a statement Wednesday afternoon in response to repeated questions from the media.

The governor’s whereabouts have been an increasing topic of speculation on social media after Lt. Gov. Kristen Juras signed a declaration of disaster Tuesday in response to the flooding in southern Montana.

“The fact that [the flooding] is so extreme and his office has just been pretty recalcitrant about where he is and what’s going on is not great,” said Eric Austin, a public administration professor at Montana State University who teaches a class on government leadership and ethics.

There are legitimate reasons why a public official would not share their location during international travel, Austin said, but during a natural disaster, “perceptually, that doesn’t really help.”

According to NBC Montana, Gianforte was supposed to return to the state on Thursday.

Our David Smith is at the Faith and Freedom Road to Majority conference in Nashville, Tennessee, a fascinating gathering of parts of the Republican party.

Donald Trump is speaking there a day after he was accused on Capitol Hill of endangering his own vice president’s life, calling Mike Pence the p-word (about which Stephen Colbert cogitates) and “setting the mob” on him, per the House select committee.

Senator Rick Scott, formerly Florida governor, is there and speaking. here’s Smith on the spot reporting via Twitter. He’ll have a dispatch later.

That’s mild.

Rick Scott earlier this week.

Smith on Pence:

And Colbert:

It’s been a busy morning in US political news, though not as frenzied as some. There’s more to come and Donald Trump is due to speak at the top of the hour at the extraordinarily-named Faith & Freedom Road to Majority conference in Nashville, Tennessee. A day after he was repeatedly accused of breaking the law from both right and left at the third January 6 hearing into the 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol.

Here’s where things stand:

• Joe Biden has cheered the Food and Drug Administration’s decision today to authorize Covid-19 vaccines for children younger than five years old, the last group of Americans that didn’t have access to the jabs.
• The Iowa supreme court issued a ruling that would make it easier for the state to curtail or ban abortion procedures outright, days before the US Supreme Court is set to rule in a pivotal abortion case out of Mississippi that includes a request to overturn Roe v Wade.
• Ex-Trump advisor Peter Navarro pleads not guilty to two charges of contempt of Congress in relation to the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by extremist supporters of Donald Trump trying, in vain, to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory.
• The US president gives a rare one-on-one interview, to the Associated Press and talks about the climate crisis, Americans’ low morale in a sea of coronavirus and division, says a recession is not inevitable and, essentially, stakes his presidency on continued support for Ukraine’s against-the-odds resistance to the Russian invasion, warning: “If we let Russia roll and Putin roll, he wouldn’t stop.”