Eliana Willis

Oath Keepers to stand trial on charges of seditious conspiracyGroup allegedly discussed paramilitary training and ‘quick reaction force’ to get weapons to Capitol quickly on January 6 The highest-profile prosecution to stem from the January 6 attack on the US Capitol gets under way on Monday in Washington DC, where the founder and four members of the far-right Oath Keepers group will stand trial in federal court on civil war-era charges of seditious conspiracy.It’s a high-stakes trial for the US government, which will attempt to prove that Stewart Rhodes and his associates spent weeks marshaling members of the group to prepare to use violence to deny the certification of the 2016 election and keep Donald Trump in the White House.The five charged with seditious conspiracy – Rhodes, Kelly Meggs, Jessica Watkins, Kenneth Harrelson and Thomas Caldwell – face 20 years in prison if convicted. Two of the 11 people indicted in the case – Brian Ulrich and Joshua James – have pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy. The remaining four will be tried separately.Court documents show that the Oath Keepers – described by the government as “a large but loosely organized collection of individuals, some of whom are associated with militias” that “explicitly focus on recruiting current and former military, law enforcement and first-responder personnel” – were among the individuals and groups who forcibly entered the Capitol.Before the rally, the group had allegedly discussed paramilitary training and setting up a “quick reaction force” at a Virginia hotel that could get weapons into Washington quickly if required and had equipped themselves with thousands of dollars’ worth of guns and tactical gear, including a shotgun, scope, sights and night-vision devices.But while Rhodes, who established the Oath Keepers in 2009, is not accused of entering the Capitol, cellphone records allegedly show he was communicating with Oath Keepers who had and was seen with members of the group afterwards.The trial, which is expected to last about five weeks, comes as at least 919 people have been arrested and charged with crimes relating to what many, before and after the events of January 6, have called an attempted coup d’etat. More than 400 have pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial.But the trial comes with risks for the government, which has not invoked seditious conspiracy laws since failing to successfully prosecute members of the far-right Hutaree militia in Michigan in 2010 in a case that was ultimately dismissed for insufficient evidence.“Americans should be wary of government’s stretching ‘sedition’ charges in ways that might set troubling precedents for a US administration,” said Jim Sleeper, former professor of political science at Yale University.At the same time, he says, “the Oath Keepers’ and their leadership’s well-documented record of excess – and Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice record of discretion and indeed of caution – incline me to trust this use of the act.”According to attorney Bill Swor, who defended the Hutaree group, the circumstances are observably different. In that case, he says, there was no plan and no action was taken. In this, there appears to be evidence that several of the alleged conspirators broke into the Capitol and delayed Congress’s certification of the electoral college count.“Taking the government at their claim that these individuals were acting to disrupt or prevent Congress from discharging its constitutional duty is a significant difference,” he said.“In our case there was a vague assertion that our clients were planning a hostile, violent attack. But government witnesses testified that there was no specific plan and this was just talk and preparation, not against the government but against the forces of the antichrist who would be expressed in … an invading force of United Nations blue helmets.“There was no suggestion that our clients had undertaken any steps to do anything beyond ‘training’ in their immediate geographical area,” Swor adds.In the government’s case against the Oath Keepers, members traveled from across the US with a specific plan, accumulated firearms and brought them to suburban Washington and would have transported them to the seat of government if necessary. “Not only do you have the express purpose but acts taken in preparation to execute a plan,” Swor added.Rhodes’s attorneys have said their defense will focus on their client’s belief that Trump was going to invoke the Insurrection Act and call up a militia to support his attempt to stay in power. His actions, then, were not seditious because they were only designed in anticipation of what they believed would soon become lawful.“What the government contends was a conspiracy to oppose United States laws was actually lobbying and preparation for the President to utilize a United States law to take lawful action,” Rhodes’s attorneys, James Lee Bright and Phillip Linder, said in a court filing.Other defendants have argued that they traveled to Washington to provide security for VIPs or rally-goers from anti-fascist protesters, or antifa.According to the government, Rhodes sent a message to an Oath Keepers chat two days after the presidential election to reject the election results. “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war,” Rhodes allegedly wrote. “Too late for that. Prepare your mind, body, spirit.”Court documents further allege that Rhodes spearheaded an online meeting with members of the group in which he outlined a plan to stop the transfer of power to Joe Biden. After that, prosecutors say, members of the alleged conspiracy began recruiting, training and coordinating their activities.A month later, on 11 December, Rhodes allegedly posted on a group chat that if Biden were to take office, “it will be a bloody and desperate fight. We are going to have a fight. That can’t be avoided.”The day before certification on 5 January, the alleged conspirators transported their weapons to Washington. The following morning, Rhodes messaged: “We will have several well equipped QRFs outside DC. And there are many, many others, from other groups, who will be watching and waiting on the outside in case of worst case scenarios.”However the Oath Keepers trial is resolved, Swor says, the case may serve to set standards around where the individual rights to speak out and protest contravene laws protecting the functioning of government. In the case of the Sedition Act, the law was passed to curb the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, which opposed laws protecting African Americans and Catholics after the US civil war.If nothing else, the contrast between the Hutaree and Oath Keeper cases could establish “clear, bright lines and what is, and what is not, sedition,” Swor says. “In the Hutaree case, the goal was to be prepared to respond to an invasion or defend the government. In the Oath Keepers case, the government’s theory is that these people planned and took action, and that the purpose of their activity was to prevent the government from acting.”TopicsUS Capitol attackThe far rightnewsReuse this content More

On January 6, “Republican tempers were running so hot against Trump that forcing them to choose sides in the Senate that week could easily have resulted in his impeachment, conviction, and disqualification from any future run for the White House,” The Intercept reported, based on the forthcoming book “Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump.”It would have been a massive break if it happened. GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate had generally grinned and beared it through the four years Trump had been in the White House, even when he said or did things that went against their stated beliefs. But the up-close violence of the insurrection changed things, according to the book written by two reporters from The Washington Post and Politico. Had the House gone through with impeaching Trump that very evening, a vote to convict may have won the two-thirds majority in the Senate needed to succeed, removing Trump from office and barring him from running again.Reality was much more tepid. The Democrat-controlled House did vote to impeach Trump a week after January 6, and a month later, when he had already left the White House, the Republican-held Senate took a vote on whether to convict him. While 57 senators, including seven Republicans and all Democrats, voted to do so, that was 10 votes short of the supermajority needed, meaning Trump escaped punishment for the insurrection – at least for now.The newest supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had a star-studded investiture ceremony today, featuring president Joe Biden, who appointed her to the bench, vice-president Kamala Harris, attorney general Merrick Garland and the rest of the supreme court.The event was ceremonial, since Jackson had already been sworn in by Harris. It feature brief remarks from chief justice John Roberts, who administered an oath to Jackson. While cameras were not allowed inside the court during the ceremony, the pair later strolled down its front steps, where Jackson was greeted by her husband: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson photo following U.S. Supreme Court investiture ceremony. #SCOTUS pic.twitter.com/bAlmg6omgg— CSPAN (@cspan) September 30, 2022
Jackson is expected to join the court’s three-member liberal bloc, which often ends up in the minority in decisions written by the six-member conservative majority.The White House has strongly condemned Russian president Vladimir Putin’s annexation of four regions of Ukraine, saying the move is “phony” and illegal under international law.Here’s the full statement from president Joe Biden:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The United States condemns Russia’s fraudulent attempt today to annex sovereign Ukrainian territory. Russia is violating international law, trampling on the United Nations Charter, and showing its contempt for peaceful nations everywhere. Make no mistake: these actions have no legitimacy. The United States will always honor Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders. We will continue to support Ukraine’s efforts to regain control of its territory by strengthening its hand militarily and diplomatically, including through the $1.1 billion in additional security assistance the United States announced this week. In response to Russia’s phony claims of annexation, the United States, together with our Allies and partners, are announcing new sanctions today. These sanctions will impose costs on individuals and entities — inside and outside of Russia — that provide political or economic support to illegal attempts to change the status of Ukrainian territory. We will rally the international community to both denounce these moves and to hold Russia accountable. We will continue to provide Ukraine with the equipment it needs to defend itself, undeterred by Russia’s brazen effort to redraw the borders of its neighbor. And I look forward to signing legislation from Congress that will provide an additional $12 billion to support Ukraine. I urge all members of the international community to reject Russia’s illegal attempts at annexation and to stand with the people of Ukraine for as long as it takes.Washington responded to the move with a fresh battery of sanctions targeting hundreds of people and companies. The Guardian’s live blog has the latest on Russia’s decision, and the ongoing war in Ukraine:Russia-Ukraine war live: Kyiv applies for Nato membership after Putin annexes Ukrainian regionsRead moreIf you paid even a slight amount of attention to American politics over the past two years or so, you probably heard one name come up repeatedly: Joe Manchin. The Democratic senator representing West Virginia has become a one-man chokepoint for much of the legislation proposed by his party, whose control of the Senate is so slim they can’t afford a single defection on bills that Republicans refused to support. One of the party’s most conservative senators, Manchin is known for his opposition to changing the filibuster to make it easier to pass legislation in the chamber – a stand on which he was joined by Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema – and for opposing several proposals to fight climate change, which earned him the ire of activists who said he was beholden to the fossil fuel industry.Democrats also control the House, but it is the even 50-50 split in the Senate that gives Manchin so much power. One might think he enjoys it, but NBC News reports today that is apparently not the case. “I’m just praying to God it’s not 50-50 again,” he told the network when they spoke to him in the run-up to the 8 November midterms, where voters could widen Democrats’ majority in the chamber, or return it to Republican control. “I’d like for Democrats to be 51-49. But whatever happens, I hope it’s not a 50-50.”Manchin didn’t open up much about why he felt this way, saying only, “It is what it is. You’ve got to do your job.”U-turn as Manchin agrees deal with Democrats on major tax and climate billRead moreSpeaking of the midterms, The Cook Political Report has a good summary of where things stand in the race for control of the House, which Republicans are generally seen as having a good chance of retaking:New @CookPolitical ratings (after #OH09 move): 212 seats at least Lean R, 193 at least Lean D and 30 Toss Ups. That means Rs only need to win 20% of Toss Ups to win control, Ds need to win 83% to hold the majority. pic.twitter.com/O85ruNfYxD— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) September 30, 2022
The aftershocks from the January 6 insurrection extend far beyond Trump.In Arizona, Mark Finchem, a Republican running for the post of secretary of state overseeing elections, was on the defensive last night when his Democratic opponent accused him in a debate of being an insurrectionist for attending the rally preceding the January 6 attack on the Capitol.“The last time I checked, being at a place where something’s happening is not illegal,’’ replied Finchem, The East Valley Tribune reports. Finchem attended Trump’s speech before the crowd attacked the building, but there’s no proof he entered the Capitol itself. The Tribune reports that Finchem had earlier said he “went to Washington to deliver a ‘book of evidence’ to federal lawmakers about claimed irregularities in the 2020 vote in Arizona – material that came out of a hearing in Phoenix involving attorney Rudy Giuliani and other Trump supporters.” He also posted a photo of the Capitol rioters, writing, this is “what happens when people feel they have been ignored, and Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud.’’His Democratic opponent Adrian Fontes rejected Finchem’s explanation, saying, “What he did is engage in a violent insurrection and try to overturn the very Constitution that holds this nation together.”Arizona voters will decide the race in the 8 November midterm elections.A judge appointed by Donald Trump delivered a ruling in his favor yesterday amid the ongoing investigation of government secrets found at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Hugo Lowell reports:A federal judge ruled on Thursday that Donald Trump would not have to provide a sworn declaration that the FBI supposedly “planted” some of the highly-sensitive documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago resort, as he has suggested, until his lawyers have reviewed the seized materials.The order from US district court judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the special master case and is a Trump appointee, also pushed back several key interim deadlines that consequently extends the review’s final date of completion from the end of November to mid-December.Cannon’s ruling means Trump does not have to confirm under oath his insinuations that the FBI manufactured evidence – one of several assertions he has made, without evidence, in recent weeks that could be used against him should he be charged over illegal retention of government documents.Trump not required to provide sworn declaration that FBI ‘planted’ evidenceRead moreHere’s a revelation from “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America”, another forthcoming book on his presidency, about how Trump came up with his reason for keeping his tax returns secret. Martin Pengelly reports:According to a new book, Donald Trump came up with his famous excuse for not releasing his tax returns on the fly – literally, while riding his campaign plane during the 2016 Republican primary.Every American president or nominee since Richard Nixon had released his or her tax returns. Trump refused to do so.In her eagerly awaited book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman describes the scene on Trump’s plane just before Super Tuesday, 1 March 2016.Trump, she says, was discussing the issue with aides including Corey Lewandowski, then his campaign manager, and his press secretary, Hope Hicks. The aides, Haberman says, pointed out that as Trump was about to be confirmed as the favourite for the Republican nomination, the problem needed to be addressed.Trump made up audit excuse for not releasing tax returns on the fly, new book saysRead moreOn January 6, “Republican tempers were running so hot against Trump that forcing them to choose sides in the Senate that week could easily have resulted in his impeachment, conviction, and disqualification from any future run for the White House,” The Intercept reported, based on the forthcoming book “Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump.”It would have been a massive break if it happened. GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate had generally grinned and beared it through the four years Trump had been in the White House, even when he said or did things that went against their stated beliefs. But the up-close violence of the insurrection changed things, according to the book written by two reporters from The Washington Post and Politico. Had the House gone through with impeaching Trump that very evening, a vote to convict may have won the two-thirds majority in the Senate needed to succeed, removing Trump from office and barring him from running again.Reality was much more tepid. The Democrat-controlled House did vote to impeach Trump a week after January 6, and a month later, when he had already left the White House, the Republican-held Senate took a vote on whether to convict him. While 57 senators, including seven Republicans and all Democrats, voted to do so, that was 10 votes short of the supermajority needed, meaning Trump escaped punishment for the insurrection – at least for now.Good morning, US politics blog readers.Things could have gone very differently on January 6, a forthcoming book by journalists from Politico and the Washington Post reports. Enraged at Donald Trump’s apparent incitement of the mob that attacked the Capitol, a group of House Democrats moved to impeach him that very evening at a moment when enough Republicans in the Senate may have voted to convict and remove him from office.But according to a report in the Intercept, which obtained Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump before its release, House speaker Nancy Pelosi vetoed moving immediately against the then president, and the push to convict ultimately failed.The anecdote is the latest from the many books released since Trump left the White House exploring what went on behind closed doors during his presidency, but stands out for bringing to light a true turning point in American history, when one consequential course of action won out over another.Anyway, here’s what’s going on in politics today:
Nancy Pelosi will hold her weekly press conference at 11am eastern time today in the Capitol, and you can bet she’ll be asked to comment on the Intercept’s report.
Hurricane Ian is moving towards South Carolina after ravaging Florida. Follow the Guardian’s live blog for the latest on the storm.
President Joe Biden is attending the investiture ceremony for supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson at 10 am eastern time, then will make a White House speech about the response to Hurricane Ian at 11.30am. More

When its most recent term concluded in June, the supreme court’s conservative majority had flexed its muscles in a big way.They overturned a nearly half-century old precedent to allow states to ban abortion nationwide, expanded the ability to carry a concealed weapon, limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate power plants and expanded prayer in public schools. Thus, much of the drop in the court’s public trust Gallup found in a poll released today comes from Democrats, for which confidence halved in the past year. Overall, only 47% of respondents have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the court, which isn’t bad compared to, say, Congress, but nonetheless represents a 20-percentage-point drop from two years ago and a sharp decline from its usual two-thirds level in Gallup’s surveys.But it’s not just the public itself that has issues with how the court is behaving. The justices, or at least one justice, appear to think it’s gone too far. The White House-appointed jurors usually go to great lengths to appear impartial and stay out of Washington’s daily fray, but something appears to be going on behind the scenes. “If, over time, the court loses all connection with the public and with public sentiment, that is a dangerous thing for democracy,” warned Elena Kagan in a July speech, one of the justices comprising the court’s three-member liberal minority. More unusual was the fact that Samuel Alito, the conservative who wrote the opinion overturning abortion rights established by Roe v Wade, appeared to respond to her comments with a remark delivered not in a speech – the typical venue when justices feel like opening up on a topic – but directly to the Wall Street Journal, as many other players in Washington often do.“It goes without saying that everyone is free to express disagreement with our decisions and to criticize our reasoning as they see fit. But saying or implying that the court is becoming an illegitimate institution or questioning our integrity crosses an important line,” Alito said.“While it is not a crime to lie to Fox News viewers or on social media, there are consequences to lying to a court.” That’s a line from a New York Times piece published today analyzing the decision by Donald Trump’s lawyers to seek the appointment of a special master in the Mar-a-Lago case – and concluding the strategy hasn’t quite paid off the way the ex-president may have hoped.First of all, a reminder of what a special master is: it’s a neutral party that a federal judge assigned to the lawsuit that followed the FBI’s seizure of documents from Trump’s Florida resort. Senior federal judge Raymond J. Dearie was appointed to sift through the documents for those covered by attorney-client and executive privilege. While the ruling temporarily halted the justice department’s investigation into whether Trump unlawfully retained government secrets, an appeals court reversed part of the lower court’s decision earlier this month, allowing the government to continue reviewing the seized documents.Nonetheless, the special master will continue his work, but the article notes that it will be expensive for Trump, who will have to foot the cost for a firm to scan all the documents, the judge to hire an assistant that bills at $500 an hour, plus all the legal fees the former president will incur.Then there’s Dearie’s demands for how the review will be conducted, which the Times reports don’t seem to favor Trump:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}And far from indulging Mr. Trump, as his lawyers likely hoped in suggesting his appointment, Judge Dearie appears to be organizing the document review in ways that threaten to swiftly puncture the former president’s defenses.
For example, the judge has ordered Mr. Trump to submit by Friday a declaration or affidavit verifying the inventory or listing any items on it “that plaintiff asserts were not seized” in the search.
But if Mr. Trump acknowledges that the F.B.I. took any documents marked as classified from his personal office and a storage room at Mar-a-Lago, as the inventory says, that would become evidence that could be used against him if he were later charged with defying a subpoena.
Requiring Mr. Trump’s lawyers to verify or object to the inventory also effectively means making them either affirm in court or disavow a claim Mr. Trump has made in public: his accusation that the F.B.I. planted fake evidence. While it is not a crime to lie to Fox News viewers or on social media, there are consequences to lying to a court.There’s even a Britain angle to the Trump book, Martin Pengelly reports. Meanwhile, the country’s mini-economic crisis continues:In his first White House meeting with a major foreign leader, Donald Trump asked Theresa May: “Why isn’t Boris Johnson the prime minister? Didn’t he want the job?”At the time, the notoriously ambitious Johnson was foreign secretary. He became prime minister two years later, in 2019, after May was forced to resign.May’s response to the undiplomatic question is not recorded in Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, a new book by the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman which will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Trump asked May at debut meeting why Boris Johnson was not PM, book saysRead moreThe Guardian’s Martin Pengelly obtained a copy of “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America” ahead of its release next week. As you might expect, it contained no shortage of troubling anecdotes about what was going on in the White House during his presidency:In a meeting supposedly about campaign strategy in the 2020 election, Donald Trump implied his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, might be brutally attacked, even raped, should he ever go camping.“Ivanka wants to rent one of those big RVs,” Trump told bemused aides, according to a new book by Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, before gesturing to his daughter’s husband.“This skinny guy wants to do it. Can you imagine Jared and his skinny ass camping? It’d be like something out of Deliverance.”According to Haberman, Trump then “made noises mimicking the banjo theme song from the 1972 movie about four men vacationing in rural Georgia who are attacked, pursued and in one case brutally raped by a local resident”.The bizarre scene is just one of many in Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, which will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Kushner camping tale one of many bizarre scenes in latest Trump bookRead morePresident Joe Biden has spoken with Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican who has been critical of the White House and is thought to be mulling a bid for president in 2024, but whose state is now being battered by Hurricane Ian.The pair committed to working together to help the state recover from the storm, according to a readout of the call provided by the White House:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The President spoke this morning with Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida to discuss the steps the Biden-Harris Administration is taking to support Florida in response to Hurricane Ian, including the issuance of a Disaster Declaration this morning. The President told the Governor he is sending his FEMA Administrator to Florida tomorrow to check in on response efforts and see where additional support is needed. The President and Governor committed to continued close coordination.The Guardian has a separate live blog following the latest news on Hurricane Ian:Hurricane Ian: DeSantis says ‘we’ve never seen a flood like this’ as Biden declares disaster – liveRead moreThe Washington Post has a preview of the upcoming supreme court term that indicates new ways the conservative majority could change American law.Here are a few of the issues raised in cases the court will consider, and potentially render consequential decisions on:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Justices have agreed to revisit whether universities can use race in a limited way when making admission decisions, a practice the court has endorsed since 1978. Two major cases involve voting rights. The court again will consider whether laws forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation must give way to business owners who do not want to provide wedding services to same-sex couples. And after limiting the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority in air pollution cases last term, the court will hear a challenge regarding the Clean Water Act.The court’s liberal minority, in particular justice Sonia Sotomayor, last term wrote lengthy dissents to some of the court’s most controversial decisions, which were viewed as ways of signaling just how split the panel was internally. In the Post’s piece, executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at the Georgetown Law Center Irv Gornstein warned that a continued trend of divisive decisions that broke along the court’s ideological lines could further widen the ideological divisions between justices. “I do think there is a potential for ill will carrying over into this term and into future terms,” he said. What the liberal justices’ scorching dissent reveals about the US supreme courtRead moreA CNN reporter managed to find Ginni Thomas somewhere in Washington, presumably near where the January 6 committee does its business, and reports that she spoke to the lawmakers in person:NEW: Ginni Thomas met with Jan 6 committee IN PERSON. She did not answer my questions pic.twitter.com/5z6pypr0S9— Annie Grayer (@AnnieGrayerCNN) September 29, 2022
The January 6 committee will today take testimony from Ginni Thomas, wife of conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas and herself a promoter of baseless claims that fraud decided the outcome of the 2020 election, Politico reports.NEWS: Ginni Thomas is testifying virtually to Jan. 6 committee *today,* two sources tell me and @nicholaswu12— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) September 29, 2022
Reports in recent months have found Ginni Thomas lobbied Republican legislators around the country to take steps that could have delayed or prevented Joe Biden from entering the White House, as well as communicated with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff during Donald Trump’s last days in office. While she has said she doesn’t discuss her work with her husband, Clarence Thomas was the lone dissent earlier this year in a supreme court decision that turned down a petition from Trump and allowed access to records concerning the January 6 attack from his time in the White House.Ginni Thomas lobbied Wisconsin lawmakers to overturn 2020 election Read moreWhen its most recent term concluded in June, the supreme court’s conservative majority had flexed its muscles in a big way.They overturned a nearly half-century old precedent to allow states to ban abortion nationwide, expanded the ability to carry a concealed weapon, limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate power plants and expanded prayer in public schools. Thus, much of the drop in the court’s public trust Gallup found in a poll released today comes from Democrats, for which confidence halved in the past year. Overall, only 47% of respondents have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the court, which isn’t bad compared to, say, Congress, but nonetheless represents a 20-percentage-point drop from two years ago and a sharp decline from its usual two-thirds level in Gallup’s surveys.But it’s not just the public itself that has issues with how the court is behaving. The justices, or at least one justice, appear to think it’s gone too far. The White House-appointed jurors usually go to great lengths to appear impartial and stay out of Washington’s daily fray, but something appears to be going on behind the scenes. “If, over time, the court loses all connection with the public and with public sentiment, that is a dangerous thing for democracy,” warned Elena Kagan in a July speech, one of the justices comprising the court’s three-member liberal minority. More unusual was the fact that Samuel Alito, the conservative who wrote the opinion overturning abortion rights established by Roe v Wade, appeared to respond to her comments with a remark delivered not in a speech – the typical venue when justices feel like opening up on a topic – but directly to the Wall Street Journal, as many other players in Washington often do.“It goes without saying that everyone is free to express disagreement with our decisions and to criticize our reasoning as they see fit. But saying or implying that the court is becoming an illegitimate institution or questioning our integrity crosses an important line,” Alito said.Good morning, US politics readers. The supreme court’s descent into being just another politicized government branch – at least to the public – continued apace, with a new poll showing its approval falling in the wake of a term that saw a series of sharply conservative decisions, including the end to nationwide abortion rights. As if those decisions weren’t enough, liberal justice Elena Kagan twice recently warned of the perils of the court losing its impartiality – prompting an unusual public response from Samuel Alito, the conservative justice who wrote the decision ending Roe v Wade. The court’s new term begins on Monday.Here’s what else is happening today:
President Joe Biden has declared an official disaster in Florida after Hurricane Ian trapped residents in their homes and knocked out power to millions. He will visit the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency at noon eastern time to assess the response.
Top House Republicans have a 10am eastern time press conference scheduled to “discuss firing Nancy Pelosi” as the party looks set to reclaim the majority in the chamber.
The chair of the January 6 committee said it will this week hear testimony from Ginni Thomas, a 2020 election denier and wife of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas. More

House January 6 committee postpones public hearing, citing Hurricane IanStorm bearing down on Florida nixes session that had been expected to feature footage of Trump ally Roger Stone The House January 6 select committee announced that it would postpone what was expected to be its final investigative hearing scheduled for Wednesday over concerns about a hurricane and as it considers how best to present a number of unresolved questions surrounding the US Capitol attack.McConnell endorses bipartisan bill to prevent efforts to overturn US elections Read more“In light of Hurricane Ian bearing down on parts of Florida, we have decided to postpone tomorrow’s proceedings,” the panel’s chairman Bennie Thompson and the vice-chair Liz Cheney said in a joint statement. “We’re praying for the safety of all those in the storm’s path.”The hurricane is forecast to reach category 4 and make landfall on Florida’s gulf coast around the time the hearing is scheduled to begin in Washington, bringing hurricane-force winds and major flooding around the Tampa area, which has not suffered a direct hit from a major storm since 1921.That was not the optimal time to be holding the hearing, sources close to the investigation said: members felt it was insensitive to have a hearing during a potential natural disaster, while television coverage of the findings surrounding Donald Trump would probably be diminished.And at least one of the select committee’s members, Stephanie Murphy, had communicated that she was unable and unwilling to leave her Florida district at a time of a statewide crisis to make a rehearsal the night before the hearing, the sources said.The panel had not disclosed the topics it intended to cover in the hearing – expected to be the final “investigative” hearing, though the select committee could hold another around the time it releases its final report and makes recommendations to prevent future repeats of the 6 January 2021 events.But the select committee was expected to focus at least in part on how Trump political operatives planned to declare victory in the 2020 election regardless of the actual outcome, through court battles and other extrajudicial means to secure Trump a second term, the sources said.The select committee was also expected at the hearing to play several short clips from a documentary by Danish film-makers who captured on camera Trump operative Roger Stone predicting violent clashes over the election results months before it took place.It was not immediately clear what date the hearing, which was originally slated for Wednesday at 1pm, would be rescheduled for, though one of the sources suggested sometime in October. The panel said in the statement: “We will soon announce a date for the postponed proceedings.”The hearing is supposed to mark the winding down of the investigative phase of the select committee’s work, though several pressing issues remain unresolved since the panel last convened in July and made the case that Trump violated the law in refusing to call off the Capitol attack.Among them is whether there existed an indubitable through-line from the former president to operatives such as Stone and Michael Flynn, who were in close contact with the far-right extremist groups – including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers – since indicted for seditious conspiracy over the insurrection.The select committee has found some circumstantial evidence about such ties and previously revealed that Trump directed his then White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to call Stone and Flynn the night before as the extremist groups finalized their plans for the day.Another issue for House investigators is whether Trump’s ouster of former defense secretary Mark Esper was an effort to install a loyalist in his place, one who might have had no objection to using the national guard to seize voting machines or delay their deployment to stop the Capitol attack.Republican ex-congressman suggests colleagues ‘had serious cognitive issues’Read moreThe panel has viewed the plot to seize voting machines – suggested by Flynn during a contentious White House meeting in December 2020, hours before Trump sent a tweet urging his supporters to attend a “wild protest” on 6 January 2021 – as a crucial moment in the timeline.House investigators have also spent time in recent weeks examining Microsoft Teams chats and emails sent between Secret Service agents on security details for Trump and former vice-president Mike Pence that day, as well as discussions about invoking martial law even after the riot.The select committee has also debated in private about how best to highlight other information that it has uncovered, with the members differing on what to present in made-for-television hearings that might reach a broader audience than the contents of a report published later this year.The final stages of its investigation is also playing out against a shifting political situation that could impact how the select committee moves next, including on the question of whether to subpoena Trump himself, as Democrats contemplate potentially losing the House in the midterms in November.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsExtreme weatherLiz CheneyDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

Five members of the Oath Keepers including founder Stewart Rhodes are facing charges of seditious conspiracy, a dire allegation that the justice department hasn’t pursued since 2010.Federal investigators have alleged that the group spent months planning the attack on the Capitol, with Rhodes spending $20,000 on weapons and equipment in the weeks leading up to the attack. The group also planned to have armed “quick reaction forces” positioned to storm the Capitol, with Rhodes texting an encrypted group chat on January 6, “We will have several well equipped QRF’s outside DC.”A conviction on seditious conspiracy charges could attract a prison sentence of up to 20 years, but keep in mind, the last time the justice department brought the charges in 2010, a judge ultimately threw them out. Elsewhere today, Kyle Young will be sentenced after pleading guilty to one charge of assaulting a police officer. Prosecutors say the Iowa resident restrained Washington, DC police officer Michael Fanone as another rioter shocked him with a taser Young provided. Fanone, who has since left the force but testified before the January 6 committee, wrote for CNN of his hopes for Young’s sentencing:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}On Tuesday, Young’s attorney will ask a judge to sentence him to two years – a laughably short sentence. Prosecutors have asked for a seven-year term – not quite a joke but also not nearly long enough. By comparison, a former New York police officer with no criminal record received 10 years for attacking officers during the riot.
What do I think Young deserves? Not less than 10 years in prison. And an assigned cell in maximum security with his co-conspirator: Donald Trump.When it holds its next public hearing on Wednesday, the January 6 committee will likely show footage of Trump ally Roger Stone discussing violence against left-wing protesters, and predicting that the 2020 election would be overturned by force, The Washington Post reports.The video was obtained from Danish filmmakers who followed Stone around from 2019 through 2021, and decided to cooperate with a subpoena from a congressional panel. “Being with Roger Stone and people around him for nearly three years, we realized what we saw after the 2020 election and Jan. 6 was not the culmination but the beginning of an antidemocratic movement in the United States,” Christoffer Guldbrandsen, director of the documentary titled “A Storm Foretold,” told the Post.Footage reported earlier this year shows Stone advocating for Trump to reject the official results and use federal judges allied with him to ensure his victory. In July 2020, he predicted that Democrats would try to steal the election, and said, “It’s going to be really nasty… If the electors show up at the electoral college, armed guards will throw them out.”“‘I’m the president. F— you… You’re not stealing Florida, you’re not stealing Ohio. I’m challenging all of it, and the judges we’re going to are judges I appointed.’ ” Stone says, mimicking what Trump would say.He also advocates for violence against antifascist protesters and other left-wing groups, saying “F— the voting, let’s get right to the violence. Shoot to kill, see an antifa, shoot to kill. F— ’em. Done with this bulls—.”Stone later added a caveat: “I am of course only kidding. We renounce violence completely. We totally renounce violence. The left is the only ones who engage in violence.”Roger Stone raged at ‘disgrace’ Trump over failure to overturn election – reportRead moreCongress is up against an end-of-the-month deadline to pass a short-term funding measure, or risk shutting down the government – which neither party wants. But as the Senate convenes today, it is also considering legislation that would tweak America’s election laws to stop the sort of plot attempted on January 6.The legislation, a version of which has also been introduced in the House of Representatives, needs the votes of all Democrats and at least 10 Republicans to pass. Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar told MSNBC today she believes it has that support:Senate Rules Committee Chairwoman Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) says the bipartisan Electoral Count Reform Act already has “ten Republicans” and thinks it will have enough votes to pass:”We keep adding senators to this bill, Democrats and Republicans.” pic.twitter.com/yrRaGl2J5i— The Recount (@therecount) September 27, 2022
Liz Cheney and Zoe Lofgren to propose bill to stop another January 6 attackRead moreThe Oath Keepers trial is kicking off today with jury selection, as well as some last-minute moves by the group’s attorneys to delay the proceedings, which Politico reports have not panned out.Both sides have also given estimates of how long the trial will take:UPDATE from the Oath Keepers trial:Judge Mehta rejected another attempt by defendants to change venue. He noted that of initial 150 jury candidates, 40% had never even heard of the Oath Keepers, and vast majority expressed no prejudgment bias.— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) September 27, 2022
Those numbers get even smaller, Mehta noted, after a round of jurors were struck by both parties, including one who was a Capitol Police officer and another who worked on the hill on Jan. 6He also said all prospective jurors will be told not to watch Jan. 6 hearing tomorrow.— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) September 27, 2022
A masked Stewart RHODES was seated in the courtroom as the proceedings got underway. DOJ says it has prepped 40 potential witnesses for trial throughout August/Sept and is providing 302s of prep sessions to defense.— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) September 27, 2022
Latest trial timing estimates:DOJ: 3-4 weeksDefense: 2-3 weeksIf trial gets underway next week, we’re looking at a mid- to late-November verdict— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) September 27, 2022
When a process server turned up at his house with a subpoena related to a case filed by abortion rights groups, Texas’s top law enforcement officer did what any reasonable person would do: fled the scene in a truck driven by his wife.The Texas Tribune reports that process server Ernesto Martin Herrera had a hard time getting legal documents to the state’s attorney general Ken Paxton, which would have compelled his testimony today in a lawsuit from abortion groups aimed at blocking Texas’s efforts to retaliate against them for facilitating access to the procedure out of state. Here’s how the encounter played out, according to the Tribune:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}When Herrera arrived at Paxton’s home in McKinney on Monday morning, he told a woman who identified herself as Angela that he was trying to deliver legal documents to the attorney general. She told him that Paxton was on the phone and unable to come to the door. Herrera said he would wait.
Nearly an hour later, a black Chevrolet Tahoe pulled into the driveway, and 20 minutes after that, Ken Paxton exited the house.
“I walked up the driveway approaching Mr. Paxton and called him by his name. As soon as he saw me and heard me call his name out, he turned around and RAN back inside the house through the same door in the garage,” Herrera wrote in the sworn affidavit.
Angela Paxton then exited the house, got inside a Chevrolet truck in the driveway, started it and opened the doors.
“A few minutes later I saw Mr. Paxton RAN from the door inside the garage towards the rear door behind the driver side,” Herrera wrote. “I approached the truck, and loudly called him by his name and stated that I had court documents for him. Mr. Paxton ignored me and kept heading for the truck.”
Herrera eventually placed the subpoenas on the ground near the truck and told him he was serving him with a subpoena. Both cars drove away, leaving the documents on the ground.Paxton attacked the report on Twitter, saying he worried he was in danger:This is a ridiculous waste of time and the media should be ashamed of themselves. All across the country, conservatives have faced threats to their safety — many threats that received scant coverage or condemnation from the mainstream media.— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) September 27, 2022
It’s clear that the media wants to drum up another controversy involving my work as Attorney General, so they’re attacking me for having the audacity to avoid a stranger lingering outside my home and showing concern about the safety and well-being of my family.— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) September 27, 2022
Denver Riggleman’s book about his time serving as a staffer on the January 6 committee and in Congress comes out today, and while his revelations about the investigation have made headlines, the former lawmaker has plenty to say about his former Republican colleagues, Martin Pengelly reports:The Republican congressmen Louis Gohmert and Paul Gosar adopted such extreme, conspiracy-tinged positions, even before the US Capitol attack, that a fellow member of the rightwing Freedom Caucus thought they “may have had serious cognitive issues”.Denver Riggleman, once a US representative from Virginia, reports his impression of his former colleagues from Texas and Arizona in a new book.The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6th is published in the US on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained an early copy.Riggleman is a former US air force intelligence officer who lost his seat in Congress after he officiated a same-sex marriage. In his book, he describes fallout beyond his primary defeat, including someone tampering with the wheels of his truck, endangering the life of his daughter.Republican ex-congressman suggests colleagues ‘had serious cognitive issues’Read moreBesides the Capitol itself, Mark Meadows’ cellphone is turning into perhaps the most important place for understanding the events around the January 6 attack, The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports:Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff, was at the center of hundreds of incoming messages about ways to aid Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to texts he turned over to the House January 6 select committee that have been published in a new book.The texts included previously unreported messages, including a group chat with Trump administration cabinet officials and plans to object to Joe Biden’s election certification on January 6 by Republican members of Congress and one former US attorney, as well as other Trump allies.The book, The Breach, was obtained by the Guardian in advance of its scheduled publication on Tuesday. Written by the former Republican congressman and senior adviser to the investigation Denver Riggleman, the work has already become controversial after being condemned by the panel as “unauthorized”.Meadows was central to hundreds of texts about overturning 2020 election, book saysRead moreInflation is high in America, but one accused rioter in the January 6 insurrection has a plan to cut costs: go hunting.The Washington Post reports that Jon Mott, an Arkansas man facing charges over unlawfully breaching the Capitol’s rotunda, has been granted permission by a federal judge to uses firearms for hunting, though he can’t keep them in his home or office. Mott was arrested in May 2021 after being identified as part of the mob that attacked the Capitol, and his conditions of release prohibited him from possessing weapons. He’s charged with “entering a restricted building, disorderly conduct in a restricted building and two counts of violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds,” according to the Post, and has pled not guilty.More than 2,000 people may face charges related to January 6, but the report notes this isn’t the first time gun possession issues have popped up. A Georgia defendant has asked for two of his firearms back so he can kill snakes on his property, while a Texas woman who had already been sentenced had her right to own a weapon restored by a judge who found she had a credible safety concern. Five members of the Oath Keepers including founder Stewart Rhodes are facing charges of seditious conspiracy, a dire allegation that the justice department hasn’t pursued since 2010.Federal investigators have alleged that the group spent months planning the attack on the Capitol, with Rhodes spending $20,000 on weapons and equipment in the weeks leading up to the attack. The group also planned to have armed “quick reaction forces” positioned to storm the Capitol, with Rhodes texting an encrypted group chat on January 6, “We will have several well equipped QRF’s outside DC.”A conviction on seditious conspiracy charges could attract a prison sentence of up to 20 years, but keep in mind, the last time the justice department brought the charges in 2010, a judge ultimately threw them out. Elsewhere today, Kyle Young will be sentenced after pleading guilty to one charge of assaulting a police officer. Prosecutors say the Iowa resident restrained Washington, DC police officer Michael Fanone as another rioter shocked him with a taser Young provided. Fanone, who has since left the force but testified before the January 6 committee, wrote for CNN of his hopes for Young’s sentencing:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}On Tuesday, Young’s attorney will ask a judge to sentence him to two years – a laughably short sentence. Prosecutors have asked for a seven-year term – not quite a joke but also not nearly long enough. By comparison, a former New York police officer with no criminal record received 10 years for attacking officers during the riot.
What do I think Young deserves? Not less than 10 years in prison. And an assigned cell in maximum security with his co-conspirator: Donald Trump.Good morning, US politics blog readers. The trial of one of the most notorious groups involved in the January 6 insurrection begins today in Washington, as five members of the Oath Keepers, including its founder Stewart Rhodes, face the rarely used charge of seditious conspiracy for allegedly plotting to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s election win. Separately, a judge will sentence Kyle Young, who pleaded guilty to charges related to violently assaulting a police officer during the attack. More than a year and a half after the insurrection, the cases could bring justice to some of its most high-profile participants.Here’s what else is happening today:
The Senate is getting to work on two important bills, one to prevent a government shutdown at the end of the month, and the other to reform America’s election laws to prevent another January 6.
As Hurricane Ian moves towards Florida, Federal Emergency Management Agency head Deanne Criswell will appear at the White House press briefing beginning at 12pm ET.
Joe Biden will speak about his administration’s efforts to lower healthcare costs and preserve social security at 11.30am ET. More

Denver Riggleman’s interview with 60 Minutes is a rare breach in the carefully stage managed presentation the January 6 committee has given Americans over the past months about what happened during the insurrection at the Capitol.A former Republican congressman who was ousted by a more conservative opponent in 2020 and now considers himself independent, Riggleman acted as a technical adviser for the committee, poring through evidence such as text messages and emails obtained from people thought to have knowledge of the attack. His interview provided a behind-the-scenes look at the investigation, most details about which have come from lawmakers’ comments or the public hearings themselves.Perhaps his most startling admission is his belief that text messages then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows voluntarily turned over the committee amounted to a “roadmap to an attempted coup.” But Riggleman shared other disquieting details in the interview, such as that a White House number called one of the rioters who had stormed the Capitol as it was happening.Then there were the text messages Meadows received containing an array of far-right conspiracy theories from Ginni Thomas, wife of rightwing supreme court justice Clarence Thomas.“What really shook me was the fact that if Clarence agreed with or was even aware of his wife’s efforts, all three branches of government would be tied to the stop the steal movement,” Riggleman said on 60 Minutes.Ginni Thomas’s involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results has been well documented in recent months, leading to calls for the January 6 committee to compel her testimony – efforts Riggleman said he supported. Last week, a deal was reached for Thomas to speak to investigators.Virginia Thomas agrees to interview with House January 6 panelRead moreWhen the January 6 committee holds its Wednesday hearing, don’t be surprised if lawmakers have more to say about the Secret Service’s actions that day, particularly when it comes to agents’ communications that were deleted following the insurrection.What was on the Secret Service text messages that the agency erased following the insurrection and whether they could be recovered have emerged as two of the biggest outstanding questions of the investigation. Over the weekend, Liz Cheney said the committee had received a trove of evidence from the agency, but not as much cooperation as they would like:1/6 Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) on Saturday said the committee received “about 800,000 pages at least” of Secret Service communications on and around Jan. 6:“There are some [agents] who have not been forthcoming with the committee, and you will hear more about that.” pic.twitter.com/lqSrEkGD1f— The Recount (@therecount) September 26, 2022
Secret Service watchdog suppressed memo on January 6 texts erasureRead moreIt’s one of the quieter trends in Congress, but The Guardian’s Chris McGreal reports on the slowly boiling outrage over the killing of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, with a sizable number of Democratic lawmakers warning of consequences if Israel isn’t more forthcoming about her death:Israel has declared the case closed. The US state department has done its best to duck difficult questions. But leading members of the US Congress are refusing to drop demands for a proper accounting of the death of the Palestinian American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, four months ago.The longest-serving member of the US Senate, Patrick Leahy, recently upped the ante by warning that Israel’s failure to fully explain the Al-Jazeera reporter’s killing could jeopardize America’s huge military aid to the Jewish state under a law he sponsored 25 years ago cutting weapons supplies to countries that abuse human rights.Nearly half of the Democratic members of the Senate have signed a letter calling into question Israel’s claim that Abu Akleh was accidentally shot by a soldier. The letter suggests she may have been targeted because she was a journalist.US senators refuse to let killing of Shireen Abu Akleh drop with IsraelRead moreMark Meadows was exchanging text messages with a lot of strange characters in the closing months of 2020. One of them was Phil Waldron, an election conspiracy theorist who texted the then-White House chief of staff about an effort to root out supposed voter fraud in Arizona.CNN reports that the news Waldron brought was that a judge in the state had dismissed the lawsuit from GOP legislators allied with Donald Trump to turn over voting equipment so they could be inspected for alleged election fraud. Waldron, an associate of Michael Flynn, the former Trump White House national security adviser who has lately been known for his Christian nationalist rhetoric, said the ruling meant Trump’s opponents could delay his allies’ efforts to get to voting machines and prove the supposed fraud.Meadows responded with one word: “pathetic”.CNN’s report gets further into Waldron’s activities in both the closing weeks of the Trump administration and in recent months, where he has continued efforts to try to prove that the 2020 election was stolen, without success.The January 6 committee clearly did not take the weekend off ahead of its hearing this Wednesday. Politico reports that investigators have subpoenaed Robin Vos, Republican speaker of the Wisconsin state assembly.They want to know about a phone call he had in July with Donald Trump and are giving him a short deadline to speak to them – today. Vos is suing to stop the subpoena, according to Politico:NEWS: The Jan. 6 select committee subpoenaed Wisconsin House Speaker Robin Vos over the weekend and is seeking his testimony by *today* about a July phone call he had with Donald Trump. https://t.co/ZQD9X84SK4 pic.twitter.com/gfOgHpdfgK— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) September 26, 2022
Vos is suing to block the subpoena, saying the subpoena didn’t give him enough notice and oversteps the select committee’s authority. He’s seeking an injunction from a federal judge.https://t.co/ZQD9X84SK4— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) September 26, 2022
Vos suit drew Judge Pamela Pepper, who issued a scorcher of a ruling against one of the many lawsuits aimed at overturning the 2020 election. https://t.co/hK9XMTEztb— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) September 26, 2022
As eyebrow raising as Riggleman’s interview is, January 6 committee members have also gone out of their way to downplay it, saying he stopped working with them months ago and is not aware of what the investigation uncovered since then.“He does not know what happened after April and a lot has happened in our investigation,” Democratic committee member Zoe Lofgren told CNN. “Everything that he was able to relay prior to his departure has been followed up on and in some cases didn’t really peter out (sic), or there might have been a decision that suggested there was a connection between one number and one e-mail and a person that turned out not to pan out. So we follow up on everything, and, you know, I don’t know what Mr. Riggleman is doing really.”It’s also worth noting the Riggleman has a book out tomorrow called “The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6th”.CNN has more details on the call from a White House number to the phone of one of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6.The nine-second phone call went to the phone of Anton Lunyk, a Brooklyn resident who had traveled to the city for the Donald Trump-hosted rally that preceded the attack, CNN reports. Lunyk, along with two friends who came with him from New York, pled guilty to charges of illegally protesting inside the Capitol, and earlier this month where sentenced to a few months of fines and probation.Who was on the other end of the call remains a mystery. CNN was not able to identify which White House official may have placed it, only that it took place at 4:17 pm, shortly after Trump tweeted at rioters to “go home”.Denver Riggleman’s interview with 60 Minutes is a rare breach in the carefully stage managed presentation the January 6 committee has given Americans over the past months about what happened during the insurrection at the Capitol.A former Republican congressman who was ousted by a more conservative opponent in 2020 and now considers himself independent, Riggleman acted as a technical adviser for the committee, poring through evidence such as text messages and emails obtained from people thought to have knowledge of the attack. His interview provided a behind-the-scenes look at the investigation, most details about which have come from lawmakers’ comments or the public hearings themselves.Perhaps his most startling admission is his belief that text messages then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows voluntarily turned over the committee amounted to a “roadmap to an attempted coup.” But Riggleman shared other disquieting details in the interview, such as that a White House number called one of the rioters who had stormed the Capitol as it was happening.Then there were the text messages Meadows received containing an array of far-right conspiracy theories from Ginni Thomas, wife of rightwing supreme court justice Clarence Thomas.“What really shook me was the fact that if Clarence agreed with or was even aware of his wife’s efforts, all three branches of government would be tied to the stop the steal movement,” Riggleman said on 60 Minutes.Ginni Thomas’s involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results has been well documented in recent months, leading to calls for the January 6 committee to compel her testimony – efforts Riggleman said he supported. Last week, a deal was reached for Thomas to speak to investigators.Virginia Thomas agrees to interview with House January 6 panelRead moreGood morning, US politics blog readers. There was a rare look into the January 6 committee’s investigative process yesterday evening when a former staff member spoke to CBS’ 60 Minutes program, and what Denver Riggleman had to say will do little to soothe the nerves of those fearing for America’s democracy. Among his revelations, Riggleman said text messages from Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s chief of staff during the time of the insurrection, amounted to a “roadmap to an attempted coup”. Expect to hear more about Riggleman’s interview today ahead of the January 6 committee’s first public hearing in more than two months on Wednesday.Here’s what else we can expect today:
Republicans still have a good chance of winning a majority in the House of Representatives, but CBS News believes it won’t be a very large one.
Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, will hold a re-election rally in Alpharetta at 3pm ET, where he will be joined by fellow GOP governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia.
Joe Biden is in Delaware but will return to the White House this morning to greet 2021 World Series champions the Atlanta Braves, then preside over the third meeting of the White House Competition Council in the afternoon. More

White House switchboard called phone linked to January 6 rioter after attackClaim of call at 4.34pm made in book by former Republican congressman and adviser to House select committee The White House switchboard dialled a phone associated with a January 6 rioter after it was clear the deadly Capitol attack had failed to prevent the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, according to a new book.The book from former Republican congressman and House January 6 select committee adviser Denver Riggleman says the connection was an outgoing call routed through the switchboard at 4.34pm, and it was answered by an unnamed rioter who allegedly has since been charged by the justice department with a role in the storming of the Capitol.The January 6 committee has its sights on Ginni Thomas. She should be worried | Kimberly WehleRead moreRiggleman’s book, titled The Breach, was reviewed by the Guardian in advance of its scheduled publication on Tuesday, and it has already become controversial after the select committee decried the work as an incomplete account that lacked information to which he was not privy once he left the panel’s inquiry in April.But in describing his work for the investigation and how he led a team analyzing call detail records, Riggleman offers previously unreported details about the White House calls around January 6 as well as the contacts around Trump’s political operatives, including Roger Stone and Alex Jones.The White House switchboard call was identified because call detail records give information about “seizure times” that indicates whether a call is answered, the book explains. In this case, the book says, there was a seizure time, indicating the call was completed.Riggleman also details other instances of connections between the White House and people connected to the Capitol attack, writing that before January 6, the president of an organization known as Latinos for Trump – closely connected to the Proud Boys group – also received a call from the White House.The Latinos for Trump president, Bianca Gracia, had a total of five connections with White House root numbers starting 202-881 or 202-456, the book said: she placed four outgoing calls and received one incoming call.The significance of the calls was not immediately clear. Sources close to the select committee have insisted that investigators chased down the leads uncovered by Riggleman and his team, but the panel could not conclusively determine the calls’ content or whether their nature was nefarious.Despite being close with the former Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio, and meeting with him in an underground parking garage near the Capitol the evening before the insurrection, Gracia was also chief of staff for Latinos for Trump. Therefore, Gracia’s calls may have been innocuous.Among other possible explanations, the sources said, was that she may have been in touch with a person on the Trump campaign or a person helping organize the Ellipse rally, or perhaps the White House may have reached Gracia when she had a tour of the complex around Christmas.The book also describes some of the sources and methods that Riggleman used to create phone link maps of “persons of interest” in the investigation, including the extensive effort to try to unravel who Stone was speaking with in the post-2020 election period.Stone was one of more than 20 “high-priority targets” but the panel faced an uphill battle identifying his contacts after he refused to voluntarily allow the select committee to obtain his call detail records, forcing investigators to work backwards through associates, the book says.The select committee was able to construct a detailed map of Stone’s contacts after obtaining the call detail records of Kristin Davis, also known as the Manhattan Madam, who was with Stone at the Willard hotel in Washington DC on the day before and the day of the Capitol attack.And after investigators identified Stone’s number, the book says, they compiled an intriguing map: Stone called Tarrio both before and after January 6, and he called the former Oath Keepers chief Stewart Rhodes nine days after the riot. Both have since been charged with seditious conspiracy.The number for Stone also connected to a number of prominent Republicans who each played different roles in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, including the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, and Arthur Schwartz, an aide to Donald Trump Jr, Trump’s eldest son.Riggleman, co-authoring the book with journalist Hunter Walker for the publisher Macmillan, also uses the book to characterize the former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as being at the center of the efforts to stop the certification of Biden’s electoral college win through the thousands of texts he provided to the select committee.Though most of the texts sent to and from Meadows that the book includes have previously been reported by CNN and others, the book fills in some gaps about the effort to object to the certification as well as the additional role played by Republican members of Congress.TopicsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

January 6 panel to take up key unanswered questions in final hearingWednesday’s session is committee’s last chance to show potential culpability of Donald Trump before midterm elections The House January 6 select committee is expected to hold its final public hearing next Wednesday, with the congressional investigation into the US Capitol attack nearing its conclusion as staff counsel prepare to produce an interim report of its findings before the 2022 midterm elections.The specific topic of the final hearing that the panel’s chairman, Congressman Bennie Thompson, will convene starting at 1pm is unclear.But the select committee is expected to make headway on some of the most pressing questions about January 6 that remain unanswered since the panel last convened in July and made the case that Donald Trump violated the law by refusing to take action to call off the Capitol attack, sources said.Virginia Thomas agrees to interview with House January 6 panelRead moreThe principal issues at play include whether there was a concrete through-line from the former president to political operatives like Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, who were in close contact with the far-right extremist groups – including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers – that stormed Congress.The select committee has found some circumstantial evidence about such ties and previously revealed that Trump directed his then White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to call both Stone and Flynn the night before January 6 as the extremist groups finalized their plans for the day.Another issue for House investigators is whether Trump’s ouster of former defense secretary Mark Esper was an effort to install in his place a loyalist who might have had no objection to using the national guard to seize voting machines or delay their deployment to stop the Capitol attack.The select committee has viewed the plot to seize voting machines – suggested by Flynn during a contentious White House meeting in December 2020, hours before Trump sent a tweet urging his supporters to attend a “wild protest” on January 6 – as a crucial moment in the overall timeline.House investigators have also spent time in recent weeks examining Microsoft Teams chats and emails sent between Secret Service agents on security details for Trump and former vice-president Mike Pence that day, as well as discussions about invoking martial law even after the Capitol attack.The hearing on Wednesday is likely to touch on some of those issues, the sources said, in the last opportunity for the select committee to show potential culpability by Trump and Republican members of Congress on national television before the midterm elections take place in early November.Trump’s attempts to delay Mar-a-Lago inquiry largely fail as legal woes mountRead moreWith their control of the House and Senate hanging in the balance, this hearing is also widely being seen on Capitol Hill as the final chance for Democrats to persuade voters that the midterms are a referendum on the Republican party’s role in January 6.Part of the reason the Wednesday hearing is expected to be the final one is because next week is the last that the House is in session until the midterms, and the panel was reluctant to schedule an event during campaign season, when committee members like Elaine Luria face uphill re-election battles.The select committee is also starting to shift its focus away from the made-for-television hearings – which have required time-consuming preparation and rehearsals – and towards putting together an interim report in the coming weeks as well as a final report by the end of the year.The panel remained undecided on the final direction of each of the reports, the sources said, as well as whether to make a criminal referral to the justice department against Trump and key aides, including his former lawyer John Eastman, who orchestrated the fake elector scheme.Once a major priority, the need for such a referral appears to have diminished in recent weeks. Subpoenas reviewed by the Guardian show the justice department is pursuing at least three investigations examining January 6 and issued more than 30 subpoenas to top Trump aides.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS elections 2020newsReuse this content More