Elections

January 6 committee schedules surprise session to hear new evidenceSense of urgency suggested by sudden plan to hear new testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Mark Meadows The House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection is expected to hear live public testimony on Tuesday from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top aide to Mark Meadows, the last chief of staff to Donald Trump, according to a source familiar with the matter.The committee on Monday abruptly scheduled a hearing for Tuesday, suggesting a sense of urgency to disclose what it said was “recently obtained evidence”. The committee had previously said it would not hold any more hearings until next month.It is the sixth public hearing held by the committee after a year-long investigation into the Capitol attack. Two more hearings are expected next month.The session is scheduled for 1pm on Capitol Hill, the committee announced. Hutchinson’s appearance before the committee was first reported by Punchbowl News and later confirmed by other outlets, including the Guardian.Hutchinson has provided the committee with some of its most shocking revelations, including that Trump approved of his supporters chanting “Hang Mike Pence” and that several far-right members of Congress who had attempted to stop the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory sought pardons after the attack. The disclosures emerged during Hutchinson’s closed-door testimony to the committee, videos of which have been played during the hearings.Tuesday’s hearing came as a surprise after Mississippi congressman Bennie Thompson, the chair, said last week that the panel would not hold another hearing until July. But the committee also made clear that the public sessions were prompting more witnesses to come forward, helping to uncover new evidence about what Thompson said was the “culmination of an attempted coup”.In its episodic presentation, the committee has made use of recorded depositions with witnesses, blending the tapes with moving public testimony and dramatic speech-making from lawmakers and staff who led the investigation. At the end of each hearing, members of the panel have directed anyone with information to their tip line and called on those with direct knowledge of the events to come forward and testify publicly.The committee recently obtained documentary footage from the British film-maker Alex Holder, who was embedded with Trump, his family and inner circle from before the election to after the January 6 attack. The committee is particularly interested in footage he captured involving phone calls and conversations among Trump’s children and top aides discussing election strategies on the evening of the first presidential debate on 29 September 2020, sources told the Guardian.Holder is cooperating with the committee.The hearings next month are expected to delve into the role of far-right and paramilitary groups organized and prepared for the January 6 attack and Trump’s abdication of leadership during the hours-long siege of the Capitol.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

Colorado conducts its elections mainly by mail, but voters do have the option to cast their ballot in person on Tuesday. Here’s what to know:How to voteEvery registered voter in Colorado was mailed a ballot. To be counted, ballots must be received by a county election official by 7 p.m. local time.You can check the status of your mail ballot through the secretary of state’s website.Not sure if you’re registered to vote? You can search the state’s voter rolls here by providing your name, birthday and ZIP code.Where to voteIf you prefer to cast a ballot in person, on Election Day, you can vote at any polling location in your county from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. You can find ones closest to you by searching your address here, which will also show you the closest ballot drop box locations.What’s on the ballotSeveral statewide offices are on the ballot this year. Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat, is seeking his third term. Gov. Jared Polis, also a Democrat, is defending the seat he has held since 2019. There are also primaries in House races.Colorado voters can see exactly what will appear on their ballots here. More

Shane Goldmacher
June 21, 2022 More

Shane Goldmacher
June 21, 2022 More

Shane Goldmacher
June 21, 2022 More

Shane Goldmacher
June 21, 2022 More

January 6 committee focuses on phone calls among Trump’s children and aidesFootage captured by documentary film-maker understood to show ex-president’s children privately discussing election strategies The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack is closely focused on phone calls and conversations among Donald Trump’s children and top aides captured by a documentary film-maker weeks before the 2020 election, say sources familiar with the matter.The calls among Trump’s children and top aides took place at an invitation-only event at the Trump International hotel in Washington that took place the night of the first presidential debate on 29 September 2020, the sources said.The select committee is interested in the calls, the sources said, since the footage is understood to show the former president’s children, including Donald Jr and Eric Trump, privately discussing strategies about the election at a crucial time in the presidential campaign.‘Watergate for streaming era’: how the January 6 panel created gripping hearingsRead moreHouse investigators first learned about the event, hosted by the Trump campaign, and the existence of the footage through British film-maker Alex Holder, who testified about what he and his crew recorded during a two-hour interview last week, the sources said.The film-maker testified that he had recorded around seven hours of one-to-one interviews with Trump, then-vice president Mike Pence, Trump’s adult children and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the sources said, as well as around 110 hours of footage from the campaign.But one part of Holder’s testimony that particularly piqued the interest of the members of the select committee and chief investigative counsel Tim Heaphy was when he disclosed that he had managed to record discussions at the 29 September event.The select committee is closely focused on the footage of the event – in addition to the content of the one-on-one interviews with Trump and Ivanka – because the discussions about strategies mirror similar conversations at that time by top Trump advisors.On the night of the first presidential debate, Trump’s top former strategist Steve Bannon said in an interview with The Circus on Showtime that the outcome of the election would be decided at the state level and eventually at the congressional certification on January 6.“They’re going to try and overturn this election with uncertified votes,” Bannon said. Asked how he expects the election to end, Bannon said: “Right before noon on the 20th, in a vote in the House, Trump will win the presidency.”The select committee believes that ideas such as Bannon’s were communicated to advisers to Donald Jr and his fiancee, Kimberly Guilfoyle, even before the 2020 election had taken place, the sources said – leading House investigators to want to review the Trump hotel footage.What appears to interest the panel is whether Trump and his children had planned to somehow stop the certification of the election on January 6 – a potential violation of federal law – and to force a contingent election if Trump lost as early as September.The event was not open to the public, Holder is said to have testified, and the documentary film-maker was waved into the Trump hotel by Eric Trump. At some point after Holder caught the calls on tape, he is said to have been asked to leave by Donald Jr.Among the conversations captured on film was Eric Trump on the phone to an unidentified person saying, according to one source familiar: “Hopefully you’re voting in Florida as opposed to the other state you’ve mentioned.”January 6 hearings: if Republicans did nothing wrong, why were pardons sought?Read moreThe phone call – a clip of which was reviewed by the Guardian – was one of several by some of the people closest to Trump that Holder memorialized in his film, titled Unprecedented, which is due to be released in a three-part series later this year on Discovery+.Holder also testified to the select committee, the sources said, about the content of the interviews. Holder interviewed Trump in early December 2020 at the White House, and then twice a few months after the Capitol attack both at Mar-a-Lago and his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey.The select committee found Holder’s testimony and material more explosive than they had expected, the sources said. Holder, for instance, showed the panel a discrepancy between Ivanka Trump’s testimony to the panel and Holder’s camera.In her interview in December 2020, the New York Times earlier reported, Ivanka said her father should “continue to fight until every legal remedy is exhausted” because people were questioning “the sanctity of our elections”.That interview was recorded nine days after former attorney general William Barr told Trump there was no evidence of election fraud. But in her interview with the select committee, Ivanka said she had “accepted” what Barr had said.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackUS politicsDonald TrumpRepublicansDonald Trump JrSteve BannonnewsReuse this content More

The action suggests that the criminal inquiry is accelerating into the efforts to help overturn the results of the 2020 election.Federal agents armed with a search warrant have seized the phone of John Eastman, a lawyer who advised former President Donald J. Trump on key elements of the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to a court filing by Mr. Eastman on Monday.The seizure of Mr. Eastman’s phone is the latest evidence that the Justice Department is intensifying its sprawling criminal investigation into the various strands of Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in power after he was defeated for re-election.In the past week alone, the department has delivered grand jury subpoenas to a variety of figures with roles in backing Mr. Trump’s efforts and it carried out at least one other search of a key figure.The filing by Mr. Eastman, a motion to recover property from the government, said that F.B.I. agents in New Mexico, acting on behalf of the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General, stopped Mr. Eastman as he was leaving a restaurant last Wednesday and seized his iPhone.A copy of the warrant included as an exhibit in Mr. Eastman’s filing said that the phone would be taken to either the Justice Department or the inspector general’s forensic lab in Northern Virginia.According to the filing, the seizure of Mr. Eastman’s phone came on the same day that federal agents raided the home and seized the electronic devices of Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who was central to Mr. Trump’s attempts to coerce the department’s leaders into backing his false claims of fraud in the election.The inspector general’s office, which has jurisdiction over investigations of Justice Department employees, also issued the warrant in the search of Mr. Clark’s home, a person familiar with the investigation said. The warrant indicated that prosecutors are investigating Mr. Clark for charges that include conspiracy to obstruct the certification of the presidential election, the person familiar with the investigation said.A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, which is overseeing the inquiry, declined to comment on Mr. Eastman’s court filing.With Mr. Eastman and Mr. Clark, the department is gathering information about two lawyers who were in close contact with Mr. Trump in the critical weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.The advice they were giving Mr. Trump involved separate but apparently intersecting proposals to provide him with a means of averting his defeat, with Mr. Clark focused on using the power of the Justice Department on Mr. Trump’s behalf and Mr. Eastman focused on disrupting the congressional certification of the election’s outcome.Jeffrey Clark at a news conference in October 2020.Yuri Gripas/ReutersThe search warrant executed on Mr. Eastman by the inspector general’s office may have been issued because of his connections to Mr. Clark, which were briefly touched on at a hearing by the House select committee on Jan. 6 last week, a day after the raids on the two men.At the hearing, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the panel’s vice chairwoman, said that Ken Klukowski, a Justice Department lawyer who was in contact with Mr. Eastman, also helped Mr. Clark draft a letter to Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia stating falsely that the Justice Department had identified “significant concerns” about the “outcome of the election” in Georgia and several other states.The letter further recommended that Mr. Kemp call a special session of the state legislature to create “a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump.”Mr. Klukowski, who briefly served under Mr. Clark at the Justice Department and had earlier worked at the White House budget office, also “worked with John Eastman,” Ms. Cheney said during the hearing. She went on to describe Mr. Eastman as “one of the primary architects of President Trump’s scheme to overturn the election.”Ken Klukowski, center, a Justice Department lawyer who was in contact with Mr. Eastman, arrived for a meeting with the Jan. 6 House select committee late last year.Al Drago for The New York TimesThe inspector general’s office has the authority to look into any public corruption crimes committed by Justice Department personnel, said Michael R. Bromwich, a former department inspector general during the Clinton administration.“Those investigations can lead to people and places outside the Justice Department,” Mr. Bromwich said. “There must be a connection between Eastman and someone who worked at the department.”Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 6Making a case against Trump. More