Eliana Willis

Republican leader Kevin McCarthy failed for the sixth time in two days to capture the speaker’s gavel. After the House adjourned for a few hours, McCarthy and his allies went into negotiations with the Republican holdouts without a clear path forward to end the standoff, then pushed back a seventh vote on the House leadership until Thursday

House adjourns as speakership evades McCarthy even after sixth vote More

In a historic delay, the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, was on Tuesday facing a protracted battle to secure the speaker’s gavel after failing to win the first three votes on the opening day of the new Congress. McCarthy is the first nominee for speaker in 100 years to fail to win the first vote for the gavel. The House will reconvene tomorrow for a fourth vote – and perhaps more

McCarthy faces long battle for House speaker after he falls short on third vote More

Trump aide Hope Hicks texted ‘we look like domestic terrorists’ on January 6Text exchange between then communications chief and fellow White House aide reportedly reveals exasperation at Capitol riot Hope Hicks, a former key ally of Donald Trump, texted another White House aide “we all look like domestic terrorists now” as the then president’s supporters overran the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.The fear was expressed in a message sent by Trump’s former communications director to Julie Radford, chief of staff to his daughter and senior adviser, Ivanka Trump, on the afternoon of the deadly Capitol riot.Republican says he ‘fears for the future’ if Trump is not charged over Jan 6 riotRead moreIt is part of revelatory exchange between the pair released as supporting evidence by the January 6 House committee that investigated Trump’s efforts to remain in office following his defeat by Joe Biden.The panel published its final report last month accusing the single-term president of a “multi-part conspiracy” to thwart the will of the people and subvert democracy.According to reporting on Monday by the Hill, Hicks and Radford engaged in an increasingly resigned conversation as the Trump-incited mob overwhelmed security and invaded the Capitol, while Trump himself chose to watch on television and ignore pleas from aides, including Hicks, to call an end to the violence.“In one day he ended every future opportunity that doesn’t include speaking engagements at the local proud boys chapter,” Hicks texted to Radford, in an apparent reference to Trump and the violent rightwing group the Proud Boys.“Yup,” Radford replied.In a further message, Hicks wrote: “And all of us that didn’t have jobs lined up will be perpetually unemployed,” adding that “I’m so mad and upset.”“We all look like domestic terrorists now,” she wrote.“Oh yes I’ve been crying for an hour,” Radford responded.The exchange went on to discuss Alyssa Farah Griffin, Trump’s director of strategic communications who resigned several weeks before the riot after the November 2020 election. Griffin, now a political commentator for CNN and co-host of ABC’s The View, later told reporters she stood down because she “saw where this was heading”.Hicks wrote to Radford: “Not being dramatic, but we are all fucked. Alyssa looks like a genius.”Radford was less complimentary about Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary who became chief of staff to then first lady Melania Trump before resigning abruptly on the day of the riot.Grisham’s resignation was “self-serving”, Radford opined, according to the Hill.TopicsUS Capitol attackTrump administrationDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

January 6: judge hints Trump wanted supporters to ‘do more’ than protestOpinion comes in ruling barring man charged with role in Capitol attack from arguing former president authorized his actions Donald Trump may have been telling his supporters he wanted them “to do something more” than simply protest his defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race when he told a mob of them to “fight like hell” on the day of the deadly Capitol attack on 6 January 2021, according to findings from a federal judge on Wednesday.The opinion from judge John Bates came in the form of a ruling barring one man charged with having a hand in staging the Capitol assault that day – Alexander Sheppard – from arguing that Trump, as president at the time, had authorized his actions.Will the January 6 report bring a second Christmas for US publishers?Read moreBates’s judgment recounted how Trump’s speech near the White House on 6 January, the day that Congress certified his loss to Biden, urged his supporters to march to the Capitol without saying that it was illegal to enter the area where lawmakers would be voting.“These words only encourage those at the rally to march to the Capitol … and do not address legality at all,” wrote Bates, who was appointed to Washington DC’s federal courthouse bench by former president George W Bush. “But, although his express words only mention walking down … to the Capitol, one might conclude that the context implies that he was urging protesters to do something more – perhaps to enter the Capitol building and stop the certification.”Bates made it a point to note that his reasoning was not out of line with the final report recently issued by a congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack, which has been linked to nine deaths, including suicides of traumatized law enforcement officers who defended the building that day. That committee’s report found Trump acted “corruptly” on the day of the attack because he knew it was illegal to stop the certification of Biden’s victory over him, and the panel issued a non-binding recommendation for federal prosecutors to file criminal charges against the former president.Bates added that he believed Trump’s use of the phrase “fight like hell” in his speech on 6 January – two weeks before Biden assumed control of the Oval Office – potentially served as “a signal to protesters that entering the Capitol and stopping the certification would be unlawful”.“Even if protesters believed they were following orders, they were not misled about the legality of their actions and thus fall outside the scope of any public authority defense,” Bates wrote.“The conclusions reached here … [are] consistent with the [January 6] committee’s findings.”Sheppard is one of several Capitol attack defendants to try to argue that they were carrying out a president’s bidding that day, though that strategy hasn’t been a winning one in court. For example, after telling a jury that he went to the building on the day of the attack because he wanted Trump’s “approval” and because he believed he was obeying “presidential orders”, Capitol rioter Dustin Thompson was convicted and later sentenced to three years in prison.It hasn’t been clear whether Trump might be charged with a role in the Capitol attack. Prosecutors have charged more than 900 other people, many of whom have already been convicted and sentenced to prison.Bates’s judgment appears to be the first court ruling to cite the January 6 committee’s 800-page report since its publication last week.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

Jamie Raskin: electoral college is a ‘danger to the American people’Democratic congressman says recent changes to electoral college laws are unlikely to stop another January 6 Recent reforms to the laws governing the counting of electoral college votes for presidential races are “not remotely sufficient” to prevent another attack like the one carried out by Donald Trump supporters at the Capitol on January 6, a member of the congressional committee which investigated the uprising has warned.January 6 report review: 845 pages, countless crimes, one simple truth – Trump did itRead moreIn an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, the Maryland House representative Jamie Raskin on Sunday renewed calls echoed by others – especially in the Democratic party to which he belongs – to let a popular vote determine the holder of the Oval Office.“We should elect the president the way we elect governors, senators, mayors, representatives, everybody else – whoever gets the most votes wins,” Raskin said. “We spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year exporting American democracy to other countries, and the one thing they never come back to us with is the idea that, ‘Oh, that electoral college that you have, that’s so great, we think we will adopt that too’.”After Trump served one term and lost the Oval Office to Joe Biden in 2020, he pressured his vice-president Mike Pence to use his ceremonial role as president of the session where both the Senate and House of Representatives met to certify the outcome of the race and interfere with the counting of the electoral college votes.Pence refused, as supporters of the defeated Trump stormed the Capitol and threatened to hang the vice-president on the day of that joint congressional session in early 2021. The unsuccessful attack was linked to nine deaths, including the suicides of traumatized law enforcement officers who ultimately restored order.Raskin was one of nine House representatives – including seven Democrats – who served on a panel investigating the January 6 uprising.The committee recently released an 845-page report drawing from more than 1,000 interviews and 10 public hearings that, among other findings, concluded Trump provoked the Capitol attack by purposely disseminating false allegations of fraud pertaining to his defeat as part of a plot to overturn his loss. Committee members also recommended that federal prosecutors file criminal charges against Trump and certain associates of his.Hundreds of Trump’s supporters who participated in the Capitol attack have been charged, with many already convicted.Raskin said the US insistence on determining presidential winners through the electoral college facilitated the attempt by Trump supporters to keep him in power.“There are so many curving byways and nooks and crannies in the electoral college that there are opportunities for a lot of strategic mischief,” Raskin told Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, adding that the institutions which prevented the Trump-fueled Capitol attack “just barely” did so.As part of a government spending package passed Friday, Congress updated existing federal election laws to clarify that the vice-president’s role in the proceedings to certify the results of a race is just ceremonial and merely to count electoral votes. It also introduced a requirement for 20% of the members of both the House and Senate to object to a state’s electoral college vote outcome when it had previously taken just one legislator from each congressional chamber to do so.Raskin on Sunday said those corrective measures are “necessary” yet “not remotely sufficient” because they don’t solve “the fundamental problem” of the electoral college vote, which in 2000 and 2016 allowed both George W Bush and Trump to win the presidency despite clear defeats in the popular vote.Another House Democrat – Dan Goldman of New York – went on MSNBC’s the Sunday show and made a similar point, saying that US lawmakers “need to be thinking about ways that we can preserve and protect our democracy that lasts generations”.Many Americans are taught in their high school civics classes that the electoral college prevents the handful of most populated areas in the US from determining the presidential winner because more voters live there than in the rest of the country combined.‘Hatred has a great grip on the heart’: election denialism lives on in US battlegroundRead moreStates generally determine their presidential electoral vote winner by the popular vote.But most give 100% of their electoral vote allotment to the winner of the popular vote even if the outcome is razor-thin. Critics say that, as a result, votes for the losing candidate end up not counting in any meaningful way, allowing for situations where the president is supported only by a minority of the populace.Meanwhile, such scenarios are preceded by a convoluted process that most people don’t understand and whose integrity can be assailed in the court of public opinion by partisans with agendas. That happened ahead of the Capitol attack even though Trump lost both the popular and electoral college votes to Biden handily.“I think,” Raskin said, “that the electoral college … has become a danger not just to democracy, but to the American people.”TopicsUS politicsElectoral reformUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpDemocratsRepublicansUS voting rightsnewsReuse this content More

January 6 panel’s body of work boosts DoJ case against Trump, experts sayFormer prosecutors say exhaustive report from Capitol attack committee ‘amounts to a detailed prosecution memo’ After 18 months of investigating Donald Trump’s drive to overturn his 2020 election loss, the House committee on the January 6 insurrection has provided the Department of Justice with an exhaustive legal roadmap as it pursues potential criminal charges against the former US president.Amid reports the committee is already co-operating with DoJ by sharing evidence garnered from 1,000 witness interviews and thousands of documents, former federal prosecutors say the panel’s work offers a trove of evidence to strengthen the formidable task of DoJ prosecutors investigating the former US president and his top loyalists.The wealth of evidence against Trump compiled by the panel spurred its unprecedented decision to send the DoJ four criminal referrals for Trump and some top allies about their multi-track planning and false claims of fraud to block Joe Biden from taking office.Although the referrals do not compel the justice department to file charges against Trump or others, the enormous evidence the panel amassed should boost its investigations, say ex-federal prosecutors.The massive evidence assembled by the panel was the basis for accusing Trump of obstruction of an act of Congress, inciting insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the US and making false statements“The central cause of January 6 was one man, former president Donald Trump, who many others followed,” the committee wrote in a detailed summary of its findings a few days before the release of its final 800-plus-page report on Thursday.The panel’s blockbuster report concluded that Trump criminally plotted to nullify his defeat in 2020 and “provoked his supporters to violence” at the Capitol with baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.Former prosecutors say the committee’s detailed factual presentation should boost some overlapping inquiries by DoJ including a months-long investigation into a fake electors scheme that Trump helped spearhead in tandem with John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who was also referred to the justice department for prosecution.“The January 6 committee’s final hearing and lengthy executive summary make out a powerful case to support its criminal referrals as to Trump, Eastman, and unnamed others,” former DoJ inspector general Michael Bromwich told the Guardian.“Although the referrals carry no legal weight, they provide an unusual preview of potential charges that may well be effective in swaying public opinion,” Bromwich said.Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at Columbia Law School, also said the panel’s work should have a positive impact on the DoJ’s investigations.“Although the committee’s hearings gave a good preview of the criminal liability theories it has now laid out in its summary, the new [executive summary] document does an extraordinary job of pulling together the evidentiary materials the committee assembled,” Richman told the Guardian.“The committee’s presentation goes far beyond a call for heads to roll, and amounts to a detailed prosecution memo that the DoJ will have to reckon with.”Other former prosecutors said they agreed. “It is difficult to imagine that the DoJ could look at this body of facts and reach a different conclusion,” said Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney for eastern Michigan.“Although the committee’s referral to the justice department is not binding in any way, and the DoJ will make its own independent assessment of whether charges are appropriate, the most important parts of the report are the facts it documents.”That factual gold mine has caught the eye of special counsel Jack Smith, who attorney general Merrick Garland tapped last month to oversee the DoJ’s sprawling criminal inquiries into the January 6 insurrection.Smith, on 5 December, in a letter, asked for all of the committee’s materials related to its 18-month inquiry, as Punchbowl News first reported.After receiving the letter, the panel sent Smith’s team transcripts and documents, much of it concerning Eastman’s key role in promoting a fake electors scheme in tandem with Trump and others to block Biden’s certification by Congress.The House panel has also provided the DoJ all of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ text messages and other relevant evidence.The committee has also shared transcripts of several witness interviews related to the fake electors ploy, plus the efforts by Trump and his loyalists to prod Georgia and some other states that Biden won to nullify their results.According to a Politico report, the transcripts the panel sent to the special counsel included interviews with several top Trump-linked lawyers such as former vice-president Mike Pence’s top legal counsel Greg Jacob, former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, former attorney general Bill Barr, Jeffrey Rosen, who succeeded Barr as AG, and Rosen’s deputy Richard Donoghue.Still, there are potential downsides to some of the evidence that the panel has made public in its extensive inquiries, say former prosecutors.“The enormous cache of evidence developed by the January 6 committee is a mixed blessing for the DoJ,” Bromwich said. “Although it undoubtedly provides evidence that the DoJ had not yet collected or developed, it will require time and resources to master and fully grasp its significance.”“More importantly, it may contain landmines of various kinds – for example, witnesses whose public testimony was powerful and unequivocal, but whose initial testimony was incomplete, misleading or false. That doesn’t matter in the context of a Congressional investigation; it matters a lot when a prosecutor needs to decide whether a witness will be vulnerable to attack on cross-examination based on the full body of their testimony.”Other former prosecutors say the panel’s exhaustive documentation and witness transcripts should on balance benefit the special counsel.“The committee report gives the special counsel not only the benefit of knowing what certain witnesses will say, it also lets him know what other witnesses won’t say,” Michael Moore, a former US attorney in Georgia, told the Guardian. “That type of intel gives him the ability to put together a stronger case with fewer surprises. More information is never a bad thing to a good lawyer.”On the broader legal challenges facing the DoJ, ex-prosecutors say the panel’s work should goad the department to work diligently to investigate and charge Trump and others the panel has referred for prosecution.“Normally, the department quietly exercises enormous discretion by hiding behind the mantra that it will pursue cases whenever the facts and law support doing so,” Richman said. “The public usually has to take its word for that, as it lacks the granular knowledge to make its own assessment.“Here, though it may disagree with the committee’s handling of the law and the evidence, there will be considerable pressure on the DoJ to either bring the specified cases or find a way to explain why it will not.”TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

Republican senator called Giuliani ‘walking malpractice’, January 6 report saysMike Lee of Utah made comment in text message to Trump aide on evening after the Capitol attack A senator who received a voice message meant for another Republican on January 6 described the caller, Rudy Giuliani, as “walking malpractice”.January 6 report review: 845 pages, countless crimes, one simple truth – Trump did itRead moreThe piquant characterisation of the former New York mayor, then Donald Trump’s attorney and a leading proponent of his election fraud lie, was made in a text message sent by Mike Lee of Utah.The text was included in the final report of the House January 6 committee, which was released late on Thursday. Reporters immediately scoured its 845 pages for new details of Trump’s attempt to overturn his election defeat, leading to the attack on the Capitol.Lee’s comment is contained in a footnote to page 631. It says: “6 January 2021, text message from Senator Mike Lee to [national security adviser] Robert O’Brien at 10.55pm EST reading, ‘You can’t make this up. I just got this voice message [from] Rudy Giuliani, who apparently thought he was calling Senator Tuberville.“‘You’ve got to listen to that message. Rudy is walking malpractice.’”Giuliani was trying to contact Tommy Tuberville, from Alabama, before Congress reconvened to certify Joe Biden’s election victory, the process the rioters tried to stop.Biden’s win was certified, though not before 147 Republicans in the House and Senate objected to results in key states, shortly after rioters sought lawmakers to capture and perhaps kill, some chanting that they wanted to hang the vice-president, Mike Pence.The attack is now linked to nine deaths, including law enforcement suicides.Giuliani’s message was reported at the time. Referring to the Trump team’s efforts in key states, he said: “I’m calling you because I want to discuss with you how they’re trying to rush this hearing and how we need you, our Republican friends, to try to just slow it down so we can get these legislatures to get more information to you.“And I know they’re reconvening at eight tonight, but … the only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow – ideally until the end of tomorrow.“I know [Senate Republican leader Mitch] McConnell is doing everything he can to rush it, which is kind of a kick in the head because it’s one thing to oppose us, it’s another thing not to give us a fair opportunity to contest it.”McConnell would later vote to acquit Trump, in an impeachment trial arising from the Capitol attack, when conviction would have barred the former president from holding federal office again.In contrast, legal authorities now seem inclined to agree with Lee’s assessment of Giuliani’s unsuitability to practice as an attorney.Earlier this month, a preliminary disciplinary hearing of the Washington DC bar saw counsel argue that Giuliani, 78, should lose his license because of his attempt to undermine the election.Defending himself, Giuliani said: “I believe that I’ve been persecuted for three or four years, including false charges brought against me by the federal government.”Giuliani review: Andrew Kirtzman’s definitive life of Trump’s last lackeyRead moreThough his activities in support of Trump’s election subversion are the subject of numerous investigations, Giuliani has not been charged with any crime.His license to practise law in New York, the city he once led, was however suspended in June last year.Numerous reports and books have described Giuliani’s increasingly bizarre behaviour in his role as Trump’s attorney.His biographer, Andrew Kirtzman, concluded that while Trump remains a political player, running for the Republican nomination in 2024, “Giuliani … [is] finished in every conceivable way.”TopicsRudy GiulianiJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackUS politicsRepublicansDonald TrumpTrump administrationnewsReuse this content More

Transcripts reveal Cassidy Hutchinson was pressured to protect Trump: ‘I was scared’According to transcripts, Cassidy was conflicted ahead of the hearing: ‘I felt like Trump was looking over my shoulder’ “I’m about to be fucking nuked,” former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson reportedly told a January 6 committee staff member after meeting with investigators before her bombshell testimony to the committee in June. Her prediction turned out to be accurate.Within hours of Hutchinson’s surprise appearance, where she testified about a furious president who encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol, tried to grab the steering wheel of a presidential SUV and hurled his lunch against an Oval Office wall, the backlash began.Hutchinson had instantly become one of the star witnesses of the panel. Her testimony had been devastating to her former boss. But she was attacked by Donald Trump as a “total phony”. The Secret Service, through media back-channels, rejected her second-hand account of an altercation. Indiana Republican Jim Banks accused Hutchinson of being a “sham” star witness who had offered “hearsay” to the committee. “This is the Russia hoax playbook,” he said.According to additional transcripts of her closed-door testimony released last week, Cassidy had been conflicted ahead of the hearing and how much she had wrestled with the concept of effectively becoming a whistleblower. She’d already given two depositions in the months earlier, in which she’s played along with the Trumpworld narrative.They also reveal how much pressure Hutchinson was placed under to remain “loyal” and “in the family” ahead of testimony that established to many that the hearings were a telling and horrific examination of the events on or around January 6.Her lawyer had told her, “we just want to focus on protecting the president” and she was told, she informed the panel in testimony in September – two months after her public appearance – that she would be “taken care of” if only she followed their desired script.“I was scared,” she told investigators. “I almost felt like at points Donald Trump was looking over my shoulder.”Out-of-work, Hutchinson said she’d been unable to afford counsel. She’d asked for, and been refused, money from her estranged biological father. A request to her aunt and uncle also fell through.In her testimony, she said she’d accepted the help of former Trump White House ethics counsel Stefan Passantino who, Hutchinson claims, encouraged her to fail to recall some events during the interviews. That claim, made under oath, could provide federal investigators with evidence of witness tampering.“The less you remember, the better,” Hutchinson recalled Passantino telling her. “Don’t read anything to try to jog your memory. Don’t try to put together timelines … Especially if you put together timelines, we have to give those over to the committee.”In a statement to the Washington Post this week, Passantino denied any wrongdoing. “As with all my clients during my 30 years of practice, I represented Ms Hutchinson honorably, ethically, and fully consistent with her sole interests as she communicated them to me,” he said.Hutchinson also testified that an array of Trump officials, including her former boss and then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, had promised that loyalty would be beneficial to her. “We’re gonna get you a really good job in Trump world,” Passantino told her, Cassidy testified. “We’re gonna get you taken care of. We want to keep you in the family”.““Look, we want to get you in, get you out,” Hutchinson said Passantino told her. “We’re going to downplay your role. You were a secretary. You had an administrative role.”According to transcripts, Hutchinson has felt uneasy about Passantino’s advice to downplay what she knew and that she had struggled between repeating testimony she had offered in February and March, replete with “I cannot recall” statements.Without telling Passantino, Hutchinson contacted former White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin to ask to act as a backchannel to the committee so they could call her back in a third time and know what questions to ask her. “If I’m going to pass the mirror test for the rest of my life, I need to try to fix some of this,” she testified in September, referring to wanting to be able to look at her own reflection without feeing shame.But, she said, she “knew in some fashion it would get back to him if I said anything he would find disloyal,” she testified. “And the prospect of that genuinely scared me. You know, I’d seen this world ruin people’s lives or try to ruin people’s careers.”She drove home to New Jersey where she read up on Nixon White House whistleblowers, including former Counsel John Dean and Alex Butterfield, who co-authored The Last of the President’s Men with journalist Bob Woodward.“I read it once. Then I read it again, underlined. And then I read it a third time, and I went through and tabbed it,” she said. “He talked about a lot of the same things that I felt like I was experiencing … but he ended up doing the right thing.”After the second session, Hutchinson said her testimony was shared with others in the Trump orbit. It was, she said, “the first clear indicator for me of he doesn’t care about what I want, he doesn’t care about what I think is best for me, he’s doing what he thinks is best for Trump and the people in Trump’s orbit”.When the panel indicated it might want to recall her a third time, Passadino told her: “We really think this is what’s best for you, Cass. Like, this needs to end at some point, and I think it just needs to end now”.Hutchinson later testified that she became unwilling “to let this moment completely destroy my reputation, my character, and my integrity for a cause that I was starkly opposed to”.Hutchinson changed attorneys to Jody Hunt, a longtime confidant of Jeff Sessions, the former Republican senator from Alabama who had served as Trump’s first attorney general.Speaking with CNN on Thursday, Griffin described Hutchinson as “a patriot who bravely upheld the oath she swore when she took a job in the White House. I’m grateful for her willingness to share the unvarnished truth with the American public”.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackUS politicsDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More