Justice Department

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      D.C. Bar Moves to Penalize Jeffrey Clark, Who Aided Trump in Election Plot

      by

      A D.C. Bar office filed a complaint against Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department official who worked to undo the results of the 2020 election.WASHINGTON — A disciplinary board is moving to penalize Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department official who worked to undo the results of the 2020 election, including the possibility of disbarment.A complaint filed this week by the D.C. Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel, which governs lawyers in Washington, accused Mr. Clark of interfering in the administration of justice in his bid to keep President Donald J. Trump in power.The ethics complaint comes as the Justice Department’s watchdog and federal prosecutors are also scrutinizing Mr. Clark for his efforts to wield the department’s authority to falsely persuade election officials and the American public that Mr. Trump had won the presidential race.Mr. Clark “attempted to engage in conduct involving dishonesty” and “attempted to engage in conduct that would seriously interfere with the administration of justice,” the complaint said.Once Mr. Clark receives the complaint, he has 20 days to respond to the accusations, according to a filing by the D.C. Bar. Mr. Clark and his lawyers can present evidence in his defense and cross-examine witnesses. Should he lose his case, the board could ultimately strip him of his law license.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 8Numerous inquiries. More

    • 150 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      The Jan. 6 Panel After 8 Hearings: Where Will the Evidence Lead?

      by

      The House committee has set out a comprehensive narrative of the effort to overturn the 2020 election. But it’s unclear if that will be enough to achieve its legal and political goals.Comprehensive, compellingly scripted and packed with details, the eight hearings of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack have laid out a powerful account of President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The select committee assembled a mass of evidence and testimony — provided in large part by Mr. Trump’s aides and other Republicans — not only for the judgment of history but for the purpose of two more immediate and related goals that the panel’s leaders highlighted during the hearing on Thursday night.One, as Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who is the panel’s vice chair, said explicitly, is to convince voters that Mr. Trump, who has made clear he is likely to run for president in 2024, should be disqualified from holding the office again.“Every American must consider this,” Ms. Cheney said. “Can a president who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of Jan. 6 ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?”The other goal, as the committee has been signaling for months, is to pressure the Justice Department to pursue a more urgent and aggressive investigation into whether Mr. Trump could be prosecuted for his actions.Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, concluded the hearing on Thursday by alluding to the likelihood that Mr. Trump would run for president again. “Can a president who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of Jan. 6 ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?” she said.Doug Mills/The New York Times“There needs to be accountability, accountability under the law, accountability to the American people, accountability at every level,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who is the panel’s chairman.“If there is no accountability for Jan. 6, for every part of this scheme, I fear that we will not overcome the ongoing threat to our democracy,” he said. “There must be stiff consequences for those responsible.”The extent to which the committee’s work imposes a political cost on Mr. Trump by changing views of him among persuadable voters might not be fully clear until the next campaign gets underway. And the committee has yet to decide whether to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department, a step that would be entirely symbolic and would not bind federal prosecutors to the case against Mr. Trump, as it has been laid out in the hearings.But at a minimum, the committee’s hearings have created a backdrop to the early maneuvering around the 2024 campaign that presents challenges for Mr. Trump among independents and Republicans who might want a new face and a more forward-looking candidate. Indeed, the panel’s use of military leaders, top Trump aides and loyal Republicans to narrate its case has arguably been intended to speak to those potential voters.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Making a case against Trump. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      How Lawyer William Olson Pitched Trump on a 2020 Election Plot

      by

      The role of William J. Olson in advising the president in late 2020, which has not previously been disclosed, shows how fringe figures were influencing him at a critical time.Around 5 in the afternoon on Christmas Day in 2020, as many Americans were celebrating with family, President Donald J. Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Fla., on the phone with a little-known conservative lawyer who was encouraging his attempts to overturn the election, according to a memo the lawyer later wrote documenting the call.The lawyer, William J. Olson, was promoting several extreme ideas to the president that Mr. Olson later conceded could be regarded as tantamount to declaring “martial law” and could even invite comparisons with Watergate. They included tampering with the Justice Department and firing the acting attorney general, according to the Dec. 28 memo by Mr. Olson, titled “Preserving Constitutional Order,” describing their discussions.“Our little band of lawyers is working on a memorandum that explains exactly what you can do,” Mr. Olson wrote in his memo, obtained by The New York Times, which he marked “privileged and confidential” and sent to the president. “The media will call this martial law,” he wrote, adding that “that is ‘fake news.’”The document highlights the previously unreported role of Mr. Olson in advising Mr. Trump as the president was increasingly turning to extreme, far-right figures outside the White House to pursue options that many of his official advisers had told him were impossible or unlawful, in an effort to cling to power.The involvement of a person like Mr. Olson, who now represents the conspiracy theorist and MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, underscores how the system that would normally insulate a president from rogue actors operating outside of official channels had broken down within weeks after the 2020 election.Read William J. Olson’s Memo to TrumpA memorandum sent in December 2020 to President Donald J. Trump by the right-wing lawyer William J. Olson on how to seek to overturn the election.Read DocumentThat left Mr. Trump in direct contact with people who promoted conspiracy theories or questionable legal ideas, telling him not only what he wanted to hear, but also that they — not the public servants advising him — were the only ones he could trust.“In our long conversation earlier this week, I could hear the shameful and dismissive attitude of the lawyer from White House Counsel’s Office toward you personally — but more importantly toward the Office of the President of the United States itself,” Mr. Olson wrote to Mr. Trump. “This is unacceptable.”The memo was written 10 days after one of the most dramatic meetings ever held in the Trump White House, during which three of the president’s White House advisers vied — at one point almost physically — with outside actors to influence Mr. Trump. In that meeting, the lawyer Sidney Powell and Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, pushed for Mr. Trump to seize voting machines and appoint Ms. Powell special counsel to investigate wild and groundless claims of voter fraud, even as White House lawyers fought back.But the memo suggests that, even after his aides had won that skirmish in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump continued to seek extreme legal advice that ran counter to the recommendations of the Justice Department and the counsel’s office.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 8Making a case against Trump. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Read William Olson’s Memo to Trump on Election Plan

      by

      4

      against, and two abstentions, the oath was extended to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Art. 2, §1, cl. 8, Document 1, Records of the Federal Convention reprinted in 3 The Founders Constitution, Item # 1 at 574 ) (emphasis added).

      Had the presidential oath or affirmation been adopted without modification, then the President’s fealty to the Constitution would have been no different from that of any other government official, federal or state, a “guaranty … that he will be conscientious in the discharge of his duty.” Story’s Commentaries § 1838 reprinted in 4 Founders, Item # 17 at 645. But more was to be required of the President.

      By extending his oath or affirmation to include the duty to “preserve, protect and defend,” the President not only is constrained to act in accord with his specific constitutional obligations, but also, as Joseph Story so eloquently wrote in his Commentaries:

      It is a suitable pledge of his fidelity and responsibility to his country; and creates upon his conscience a deep sense of duty, by an appeal, at once in the presence of God and man, to the most sacred and solemn sanctions which can operate upon the human mind. [2 J. Story Commentaries at § 1488 at 325-26 (Little, Brown, 5th ed., 1891.) (emphasis added).]

      The meaning of the Constitutional text could not be more clear:

      In order for the President to discharge his duty to “defend” the Constitution, he must be vigilant, for example, to “drive back,” to “repel” and to “secure against” attacks on the liberties of American citizens from all

      sources.

      In order to discharge his duty to “preserve” the Constitution, the president must, for example, “keep or save from injury,” “keep or defend from corruption,” and “save from decay” the federal system establishing the means by which the States select electors.

      Finally, to be true to his oath to “protect” the Constitution, the President must, for example, “cover or shield from danger,” “preserve in safety” the separation of powers among the three branches of the federal government.

      In contrast, the Constitution requires all other officers of the judicial and legislative branches of the federal government, and the President’s subordinates in the executive branch, simply to swear or affirm their “support” of the Constitution.

      As President Andrew Jackson wrote in his message defending his veto of the Second Bank of the United States: More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Jan. 6 Panel Will Turn Over Evidence on Fake Electors to the Justice Dept.

      by

      The department has asked the House committee investigating the Capitol attack to share transcripts regarding the false electors scheme, the only topic it has broached with the panel.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has asked the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol for evidence it has accumulated about the scheme by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies to put forward false slates of pro-Trump electors in battleground states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020.Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, disclosed the request to reporters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, and a person familiar with the panel’s work said discussions with the Justice Department about the false elector scheme were ongoing. Those talks suggest that the department is sharpening its focus on that aspect of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, one with a direct line to the former president.Mr. Thompson said the committee was working with federal prosecutors to allow them to review the transcripts of interviews the panel has done with people who served as so-called alternate electors for Mr. Trump. Mr. Thompson said the Justice Department’s investigation into “fraudulent electors” was the only specific topic the agency had broached with the committee.A Justice Department official said the agency maintained its position that it was requesting copies of all transcripts of witness interviews.For weeks, the Justice Department has been negotiating with the Jan. 6 panel about turning over transcripts of its interviews to federal prosecutors. The agency has asked the committee for copies of every transcript of each of its more than 1,000 interviews, while the committee has pushed back, requesting that the department narrow its request.Mr. Thompson’s comments Wednesday were the clearest indication yet of what the Justice Department is looking for.“We’re in the process of negotiating how that information will be viewed,” Mr. Thompson said, adding that he believed Justice Department officials would make an appointment with the committee to review the transcripts in person. “We’re engaging.”The Justice Department has been investigating the scheme to put forward fake electors for months and has issued subpoenas to top Trump lawyers who worked on the plan.Last month, the committee tied Mr. Trump directly to the scheme and presented fresh details on how the former president sought to bully, cajole and bluff his way into invalidating his 2020 defeat in states around the country.The committee presented evidence that Mr. Trump sought to persuade lawmakers in battleground states won by Mr. Biden to create the slates of alternate electors supporting him, hoping that Vice President Mike Pence would use them to subvert the normal democratic process when he oversaw Congress’s official count of electoral votes on Jan. 6.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 8Making a case against Trump. More

    • 163 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Federal Agents Seized Phone of John Eastman, Key Figure in Jan. 6 Plan

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Election Workers Don’t Feel Safe Despite Federal Effort to Combat Threats

      by

      WASHINGTON — “Do you feel safe? You shouldn’t.”In August, 42-year-old Travis Ford of Lincoln, Neb., posted those words on the personal Instagram page of Jena Griswold, the secretary of state and chief election official of Colorado. In a post 10 days later, Mr. Ford told Ms. Griswold that her security detail was unable to protect her, then added:“This world is unpredictable these days … anything can happen to anyone.”Mr. Ford paid dearly for those words. Last week, in U.S. District Court in Lincoln, he pleaded guilty to making a threat with a telecommunications device, a felony that can carry up to two years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.But a year after Attorney General Merrick B. Garland established the federal Election Threats Task Force, almost no one else has faced punishment. Two other cases are being prosecuted, but Mr. Ford’s guilty plea is the only case the task force has successfully concluded out of more than 1,000 it has evaluated.Public reports of prosecutions by state and local officials are equally sparse, despite an explosion of intimidating and even violent threats against election workers, largely since former President Donald J. Trump began spreading the lie that fraud cost him the 2020 presidential election.Colorado alone has forwarded at least 500 threats against election workers to the task force, Ms. Griswold said.The sluggish pace has sparked consternation among both election workers and their supporters, some of whom say they are souring on the idea of reporting the menacing messages to prosecutors if nothing comes of it.“The reaction usually is ‘Thank you for reporting that; we’ll look into it,’ and there’s no substantive follow-up to understand what they’re doing,” said Meagan Wolfe, the president of the National Association of State Election Directors. That leads some “to feel there isn’t adequate support that can deter people from doing this in the future,” she added.U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland formed the Election Threats Task Force in June 2021.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesThe depth of election workers’ fear was underscored in hearings this month by the congressional panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault at the U.S. Capitol. Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who are mother and daughter and both election workers in Atlanta, told of being forced into hiding by a barrage of threats in December 2020, after being falsely accused of election fraud by Rudy Giuliani, who was then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer. Protesters tried to enter a relative’s house in search of the two. Eventually, they quit their positions.That is not the norm, but neither is it uncommon. Ms. Griswold said one Colorado county clerk wears body armor to work, and another conducts business behind bulletproof glass.“In my experience, if someone is telling you over and over how they’re going to hang you, asking you the size of your neck so they can cut the rope right, you have to take the threats really seriously,” she said, citing threats she had received.The city clerk in Milwaukee, Claire Woodall-Vogg, said she had “completely redesigned our office at City Hall for safety reasons” after receiving hundreds of threats, which she said had been forwarded to the task force.An investigation by Reuters in September turned up more than 100 threats of death or violence to election officials in eight battleground states, which at that time had produced four arrests and no convictions.A survey in March by the Brennan Center for Justice found that one in six local election officials have personally experienced threats, and nearly a third said they knew people who had left their jobs at least in part because of safety concerns.Justice Department officials declined to comment on the task force’s progress. The department has said previously that the task force was tracking and logging election-related threats, and had opened dozens of criminal investigations as a result. That led to charges in February against men from Texas and Nevada and the recent guilty plea in Nebraska.Claire Woodall-Vogg, the city clerk in Milwaukee, had to reconfigure the clerk’s office due to safety concerns.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesThe task force also has conducted training and education sessions on threats with state and local law enforcement and election officials and social media platforms. Each of the 56 F.B.I. field offices has assigned an agent to collect and analyze threat reports, and federal prosecutors have been trained in assessing and investigating threats.The trickle of prosecutions in the wake of those moves is explained in part by federal law, which defines illegal threats extremely narrowly in the name of preserving the constitutional right to free speech.“You need to say something like, ‘I am going to kill you.’ It can’t be ‘Someone ought to kill you,’” said Catherine J. Ross, a professor and expert on First Amendment law at George Washington University. “That’s a very high bar, and intentionally a high bar.”That so-called true threat doctrine classifies even many extreme statements as protected political speech. That rules out charges in a great many cases of threats against election officials — even when the recipients feel terrified for their lives.Joanna Lydgate, founder and chief executive officer of the bipartisan legal watchdog organization States United Democracy Center, said she was encouraged to see results from the task force and understood, “These cases can be challenging to bring, and they take time.”She said: “We definitely hope to see more of this from DOJ, because investigating these threats, building these cases and holding people accountable is critically important, especially as we’re looking toward the midterms.”In Arizona, the office of Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has reported more than 100 threats to the F.B.I. in the last year, said a spokeswoman, C. Murphy Hebert. Ms. Hebert said she was confident that the task force was reviewing those threats, but that could be cold comfort to recipients who have not seen results.“For the folks monitoring and the folks being targeted, a hundred messages saying ‘You should die’ is pretty threatening,” she said. “But based on what we know of the process,” they are not actionable, she said.Protesting supporters of U.S. President Donald J. Trump are reflected in a window of a tabulation center during the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County, Ariz.Jim Urquhart/ReutersMatt Crane, the executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said threats sent to him in the past year included voice mail and online chatter urging that he, his wife and children be shot in the head. He said he had reported at least one threat to the F.B.I.But while the bureau has helped clarify how its threat review process works and has met with local clerks, he said, he still does not know whether his report was followed up on.“It does not give a lot of comfort to the people who receive threats,” he said. “I’ve heard some say: ‘Why should I report it? I’m better off just carrying my gun with me and if something happens, at least I can do something to protect myself.’”Other experts say the lack of both action and transparency was undermining the principal goal of the task force — to stop the epidemic of violent threats.“Three prosecutions in a year for a problem that is nationally widespread seems awfully low,” said David J. Becker, a onetime voting rights lawyer at the Justice Department who now directs the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research. “Whether accurate or not, the impression among election officials is that the effort the Department of Justice launched with great fanfare a year ago isn’t getting the job done.”The Brennan Center report in March found that more than half the threats against election officials who were polled had gone unreported, and that a vast majority of threats were forwarded to local law enforcement agencies, not state or federal law enforcement.Four in 10 election officials said they had never heard of the task force. And while the Justice Department has increased outreach to election officials and publicized a hotline that can be used to report complaints, “there is really very little detail about what happens when complaints are made,” said Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the center’s Elections and Government Program.“Election officials rightly feel that public repercussions for these threats are going to be critical to curtailing them,” he said. But, so far, there have been too few court cases to provide any sense that offenders will be held accountable.Until that changes — if it does — election officials need more reassurance that law enforcement has their back, he and others said.“You have a lot more election officials who are exercising their Second Amendment rights than before 2020,” said Mr. Crane, the head of the Colorado clerks association. “It only takes one of these crazy people to show up at your doorstep.” More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Proud Boys Ignored Orders Given at Pre-Jan. 6 Meeting

      by

      The directives, given during a video conference, included obeying police lines and keeping away from ordinary protesters. But members of the far-right group played aggressive roles in several breaches at the Capitol.One week before scores of Proud Boys helped lead a pro-Trump mob in a violent assault on the Capitol last year, Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the group, and some of his top lieutenants held a foul-mouthed video conference with a handpicked crew of members.The meeting, on Dec. 30, 2020, marked the founding of a special new chapter of the Proud Boys called the Ministry of Self-Defense. The team of several dozen trusted members was intended, Mr. Tarrio told his men, to bring a level of order and professionalism to the group’s upcoming march in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, that had, by his own account, been missing at earlier Proud Boys rallies in the city.Over nearly two hours, Mr. Tarrio and his leadership team — many of whom have since been charged with seditious conspiracy — gave the new recruits a series of directives: Adopt a defensive posture on Jan. 6, they were told. Keep the “normies” — or the normal protesters — away from the Proud Boys’ marching ranks. And obey police lines.“We’re never going to be the ones to cross the police barrier or cross something in order to get to somebody,” Mr. Tarrio said.There was one overriding problem with the orders: None of them were actually followed when the Proud Boys stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.Far from holding back, members of the far-right group played aggressive roles in several breaches at the Capitol, moving in coordination and often taking the lead in removing police barricades, according to a visual investigation by The New York Times of hundreds of hours of video footage of the assault.And despite what Mr. Tarrio said about keeping away from ordinary protesters, members of the group repeatedly instigated people around them in a tactic that some Proud Boys later described in private messages as “riling up the normies.”While the video conference has been mentioned in court papers, it has not been widely seen. A recording of it was seized from Mr. Tarrio’s phone by the F.B.I. this year, and a copy was recently obtained by The Times.Lawyers for the Proud Boys say the recorded meeting is a key piece of exculpatory evidence, contradicting claims by the government that a conspiracy to attack the Capitol was hatched several weeks before Jan. 6.In court filings, prosecutors have claimed that the Proud Boys began to plan their assault as early as Dec. 19, 2020 — the day that President Donald J. Trump posted a tweet announcing his Jan. 6 rally and saying it would be “wild.” But the video conference shows that, just one week before the event, when Mr. Tarrio and other Proud Boys leaders gathered their team for a meeting, they spent most of their time discussing things like staying away from alcohol and women and taking measures to ensure their own security.The recorded meeting makes no mention of any planning that might have occurred in the week directly before the Capitol attack. And while Mr. Tarrio suggests during the meeting that the complex structure he created for the Ministry of Self-Defense was meant to be self-protective — not offensive — in nature, prosecutors have claimed that the group’s “command and control” design was instrumental in facilitating the Capitol attack.In the meeting, Mr. Tarrio laid out how the group — whose members were chosen because of their “throttle control,” as another Proud Boys leader put it — had a three-person leadership team that sat above a larger group of eight or so regional leaders. There was a “marketing” division too, Mr. Tarrio explained, that would craft and promote the Proud Boys’ “narrative” to the media. The group’s rank and file, he said, would work in 10-man teams on Jan. 6 with medics and communications experts.Throughout the meeting, Mr. Tarrio and others used blatantly misogynistic, homophobic and antisemitic language, disparaging the Proud Boys’ female supporters and making references to the “J.Q.” — or the Jewish Question, a phrase that harks back to Nazi ideology. Mr. Tarrio also threatened participants in the video conference with expulsion from the Ministry of Self-Defense if they drank too much at the Jan. 6 event, noting that too many Proud Boys were sloppily intoxicated at earlier pro-Trump rallies.As for the Capitol itself, it came up only occasionally.At one point, as the floor was opened for questions, various Proud Boys asked Mr. Tarrio about the group’s goals for Jan. 6, including how much they would focus on Vice President Mike Pence’s certification of the election results that day. Mr. Tarrio deflected the inquiries, saying that the details of the Proud Boys’ mission would be discussed in future meetings.Nayib Hassan, Mr. Tarrio’s lawyer, declined to comment on the video. Lawyers for Joseph Biggs and Zachary Rehl, two other Proud Boys leaders who were on the call and are facing sedition charges, also declined to comment.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 6Making a case against Trump. More