Mike Pence

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump brought US ‘dangerously close to catastrophe’, January 6 panel says

      by

      Trump brought US ‘dangerously close to catastrophe’, January 6 panel saysBennie Thompson says US ‘fortunate for Mike Pence’s courage’ in refusing to accept Trump’s scheme to reject electoral count The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol presented evidence on Thursday that Donald Trump was told his last-gasp attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election was unlawful but forged ahead anyway.Trump then pressured his vice-president, Mike Pence, to reject a tally of state electors as part of a plot that brought the country “dangerously close to catastrophe”, the panel heard.January 6 hearings live: ‘Our democracy came dangerously close to catastrophe,’ says panel chairRead moreWith live witnesses and recorded depositions from its yearlong investigation, the panel offered a dramatic accounting of the days and hours that preceded the assault. Chilling new evidence also detailed the frantic moments after rioters stormed the Capitol, as Pence was rushed from the Senate chamber to a secure underground location.“Approximately 40 feet – that’s all there was – 40 feet between the vice-president and the mob,” said the California congressman Pete Aguilar, a Democrat who led the panel’s third hearing. “Make no mistake about the fact that the vice-president’s life was in danger.”The committee spent the majority of the hearing dissecting the “completely nonsensical and antidemocratic” theory, devised by the conservative law professor John Eastman and embraced by Trump, that suggested Pence had the authority to reverse the results of the 2020 election. The vice-president has no such power.“Trump wanted Mike Pence to do something no other vice-president has ever done,” Congressman Bennie Thompson, chairman of the committee and a Democrat of Mississippi, said opening the hearing. “We were fortunate for Mr Pence’s courage.”Trump was told repeatedly that the plan was unlawful, according to witnesses and testimony from his closest advisers. Yet in the final days before Congress was due to certify the election results Trump increased his public and private pressure campaign on his loyal lieutenant to do his bidding. “What the president wanted the vice-president to do was not just wrong, it was illegal and unconstitutional,” Congresswoman Liz Cheney, a Republican of Wyoming and the committee’s vice-chair, said on Thursday.Squeezed between a president who refused to accept defeat and a constitution that provided him no such power to change the course of the election, the vice-president chose the constitution, those who advised him testified on Thursday.Greg Jacob, who served as counsel to Pence when he was vice-president, told the panel that Eastman’s plot to nullify the results of the 2020 election was unlawful from its conception – and Eastman knew it. During a meeting with Eastman on 4 January, Jacob testified that Eastman “acknowledged” that the strategy would violate the Electoral Count Act, the 19th-century law that Trump pressured Pence to exploit. In an exchange the next day, Eastman conceded that if the supreme court heard a challenge to his interpretation of the act, it would have been rejected, 9-0.The second witness, retired judge and informal Pence adviser J Michael Luttig, said that if Trump had succeeded, it would have “plunged America into what I believed would have been tantamount to a revolution” and “the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the Republic”.02:17“I would have laid my body across the road before I would have let the vice-president overturn the 2020 presidential election on the basis of that historical precedent,” the staid former judge said.A federal judge ruled in March that Trump and Eastman “more likely than not” had committed felonies in their efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including obstructing the work of Congress and conspiring to defraud the American people. The committee showed a clip of Trump White House attorney Eric Herschmann testifying that he told Eastman, “get a great effing criminal defense lawyer – you’re gonna need it.”The committee provided a cinematic accounting of a call between Trump and Pence on the morning of 6 January that turned “pretty heated”, according to Ivanka Trump who was in the Oval Office with her siblings during the exchange. “It was a different tone than I heard him take with the vice-president before.”A top aide to Ivanka testified that Trump called Pence “the p-word” during the call.Early drafts of the speech Trump delivered at a rally on the Ellipse before the riot, when he encouraged his supporters to “fight like hell” for his presidency, included no reference to the vice-president, Aguilar said. But Trump changed the remarks to sharply criticize Pence, imploring him to find the “courage” to overturn the election.The committee also played testimony showing that Trump was told of the violence breaking out in his name at the Capitol before he tweeted at 2.24pm that Pence did not have the “courage to do what should have been done”. In the moments after Trump sent the tweet, the crowds both inside and outside “surged” and overwhelmed law enforcement officers.A montage played during the hearing showed rioters threatening to drag Pence through the streets and chanting “bring out Pence” and “hang Mike Pence” near where a gallows had been erected outside the Capitol.The committee displayed an email from Eastman to Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, sent days after the Capitol riot asking to be put on a potential list to receive a presidential pardon. A pardon was never granted.Relying on emails written by Eastman, the committee argued that the law professor knew the scheme involving an alternative slate of electors from a handful of states Trump was disputing was unlawful. But he nevertheless presented it to the White House as a viable course of action as early as 13 December 20202, according to emails released in court filings.Crucially, however, the state legislatures had still not met by that date to certify an alternate Trump slate of electors, which Eastman showed in emails that he knew needed to happen in order for his delicate scheme to have any chance of success.Eastman also undermined the scheme when he admitted in emails on 19 December 2020, released in court filings, that “unless those electors get a certification from their State Legislators”, the Trump slates would be “dead on arrival in Congress”.The emails showed Eastman knew the plan rested on states certifying Trump slates. But when he presented a memo to Pence in January 2021 attesting to the existence of Trump slates – that did not actually exist – he revealed corrupt intent to obstruct proceedings on 6 January, the panel believes.No state legislatures ultimately certified an alternate slate of electors for Trump. The Trump White House appears to have participated in a related scheme to send fake Trump slates to Congress, though those were not introduced at the certification on the day of the attack.The opening primetime hearing last week, which drew more than 20 million viewers, focused on placing Trump at the heart of a sprawling “seven-part” plot to overturn an election the committee says he knew he lost. The second hearing traced the origins and spread of Trump’s stolen-election myth.Recorded testimony from Pence’s former chief of staff, Marc Short, also played a prominent role in Thursday’s hearing. In his deposition to the committee, Short said Pence had informed the president “many” times that he would not go along with the scheme.Pence “never budged” from his initial view that the founding fathers would not have left it to one person to determine the outcome of a presidential election, and certainly not someone with such a significant stake in the outcome as a vice-president, Jacob testified.The hearing concluded ominously, with a warning from Luttig that the same forces continue to threaten American democracy.Trump and his allies remain “clear and present danger to American democracy,” Luttig told the panel, not because of what happened on January 6 but because of their determination to “succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020”.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackUS politicsDonald TrumpMike PencenewsReuse this content More

    • 238 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Jan 6 hearings: Trump is ‘clear and present danger to American democracy’, conservative judge warns – as it happened

      by

      J Michael Luttig, a former US appellate court judge who is considered one of the top conservative legal minds in the United States, has warned the January 6 committee that Donald Trump poses a continuing danger to the country’s democracy.“Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy,” Luttig said. “That’s not because of what happened on January 6. It’s because to this very day, the former president and his allies and supporters pledge that in presidential election of 2024, if the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican party presidential candidate were to lose that election, that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020.”“That’s what the former president and his allies are telling us,” Luttig said.The US politics live blog is ending its day following the third hearing of the January 6 committee, which revealed that the architect of Trump’s strategy to overturn the election sought a pardon from the president, and featured a warning from a noted conservative jurist that the former president jeopardizes American democracy. Meanwhile, Trump’s troubles in court continued.Here’s what else was in the news:
      President Joe Biden defended his economic record in an interview with the Associated Press, saying a recession was “not inevitable” despite troublingly high inflation and the Federal Reserve’s aggressive moves to lower it.
      John Hinckley, who shot president Ronald Reagan in 1981, was released from court oversight and celebrated on Twitter, as one does.
      Senators continued work on a bipartisan gun control compromise, with the main Republican negotiator saying an agreement needed to be reached today.
      The January 6 committee said it wants to talk to Ginni Thomas following a report from The Washington Post that the wife of conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas corresponded with John Eastman, the Trump lawyer who plotted to overturn the election.
      Deborah Birx, the White House pandemic response coordinator under Trump, will testify before Congress next week for the first time .
      Biden campaigned on fighting climate change, but many of his proposals to do that have stalled in Congress. The Guardian’s Oliver Milman reports that whether or not Washington takes meaningful action to cut its emissions may determine if millions of people live or die:The rapidly shrinking window of opportunity for the US to pass significant climate legislation will have mortal, as well as political, stakes. Millions of lives around the world will be saved, or lost, depending on whether America manages to propel itself towards a future without planet-heating emissions.For the first time, researchers have calculated exactly how many people the US could save by acting on the climate crisis. A total of 7.4 million lives around the world will be saved over this century if the US manages to cut its emissions to net zero by 2050, according to the analysis.The financial savings would be enormous, too, with a net zero America able to save the world $3.7tn in costs to adapt to the rising heat. As the world’s second largest polluter of greenhouse gases, the US and its political vagaries will in large part decide how many people in faraway countries will be subjected to deadly heat, as well as endure punishing storms, floods, drought and other consequences of the climate emergency.How millions of lives can be saved if the US acts now on climateRead morePresident Joe Biden has defended his economic record in an interview with the Associated Press, downplaying the risk of a recession but acknowledging that many Americans are going through hard times.Biden doesn’t grant very many interviews, and this encounter comes after a slew of grim economic developments. These include worse-than-expected inflation numbers in May that show prices continuing to rise, gasoline at a record high and aggressive Federal Reserve action that’s raised fears the economy could be set for a prolonged contraction.All of these have been factors in his record-low approval ratings.Here’s the president’s perspective on the state of the world’s largest economy:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}He said a recession is not inevitable and bristled at claims by Republican lawmakers that last year’s COVID-19 aid plan was fully to blame for inflation reaching a 40-year high, calling that argument “bizarre.”
      As for the overall American mindset, Biden said, “People are really, really down.”
      “They’re really down,” he said. “The need for mental health in America, it has skyrocketed, because people have seen everything upset. Everything they’ve counted on upset. But most of it’s the consequence of what’s happened, what happened as a consequence of the COVID crisis.”
      Speaking to the AP in a 30-minute Oval Office interview, Biden addressed the warnings by economists that the United States could be headed for a recession.
      “First of all, it’s not inevitable,” he said. “Secondly, we’re in a stronger position than any nation in the world to overcome this inflation.”
      The president said he saw reason for optimism with the 3.6% unemployment rate and America’s relative strength in the world.
      “Be confident, because I am confident we’re better positioned than any country in the world to own the second quarter of the 21st century,” Biden said. “That’s not hyperbole, that’s a fact.”The January 6 committee has concluded for the day, but before they finished, they revealed a key piece of information about the conduct of John Eastman, the lawyer who crafted former president Donald Trump’s strategy to overturn the election in 2020.Eastman sought a pardon from Trump in the closing days of his presidency, writing to Rudy Giuliani, another lawyer for the president, “I’ve decided that I should be on the pardoned list, if that is still in the works.” The committee added that he did not receive one.Eastman’s actions were covered in detail at today’s hearing, particularly his efforts to convince Mike Pence that his position as vice-president gave him the authority to hand the election to Trump when Congress met to certify on January 6, 2021. Pence declined to do that.Trump lawyer knew plan to delay Biden certification was unlawful, emails showRead moreJ Michael Luttig, a former US appellate court judge who is considered one of the top conservative legal minds in the United States, has warned the January 6 committee that Donald Trump poses a continuing danger to the country’s democracy.“Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy,” Luttig said. “That’s not because of what happened on January 6. It’s because to this very day, the former president and his allies and supporters pledge that in presidential election of 2024, if the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican party presidential candidate were to lose that election, that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020.”“That’s what the former president and his allies are telling us,” Luttig said.John Eastman himself has finally appeared, this time in a frosty videotaped deposition shown by the committee. “I assert my fifth amendment right against being compelled to be a witness against myself,” Eastman said in the compilation of clips from the encounter, which shows lawyers from the committee asking Eastman a series of questions about his actions around January 6.“Fifth,” he replies to each one.Before that aired, former White House attorney Eric Herschmann described a call from Eastman the day after the attack.“He started to ask me about something dealing with Georgia and preserving something potentially for appeal. And I said to him, are you out of your effing mind?” Herschmann recalls. “I only want to hear two words coming out of your mouth for now on: orderly transition,” he said he told Eastman. “I don’t want to hear any other effing words coming out of your mouth, no matter what.”“Eventually, he said ‘orderly transition.’ I said, good, John. Now I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life. Get a great effing criminal defense lawyer, you’re going to need it. And then I hung up on him,” Herschmann said.Even after the Capitol had been stormed, Trump lawyer John Eastman continued to pressure Pence to try to overturn the election.“I implore you one last time, can the vice-president please do what we’ve been asking him to do these last two days: suspend the joint session, send it back to the states,” Pence’s counselor Greg Jacob recalls Eastman asking, citing alleged violations of the Electoral Count Act during the joint session of Congress disrupted by the insurrection.The committee is now dealing with the storming of the Capitol, showing Pence working in what looks like a loading dock after evacuating the Senate chamber as the rioters approached.“Make no mistake about the fact that the vice-president’s life was in danger,” Representative Pete Aguilar said, pointing to an FBI affidavit from an informant in the Proud Boys militia group.“They said that anyone they got their hands on they would have killed including Nancy Pelosi,” the informant told the FBI, adding that “members of the Proud Boys said that they would have killed Mike Pence if given a chance.”As for Trump, Jacob said the president never called Pence to check on him, which the vice-president reacted to “with frustration.”Pence started January 6 out with a prayer with his staff, followed by what witnesses described to the committee as a nasty phone call from Trump.“The conversation was pretty heated,” testified Ivanka Trump, who saw the president on the phone.“I remember hearing the word wimp,” Nicholas Luna, an assistant to Trump, testified. “I don’t remember, he said you are a wimp. You’ll be a wimp. Wimp is the word I remember.”Gen Keith Kellogg, Pence’s national security advisor at the time, said Trump told the vice-president he was “not tough enough to make the call.”The January 6 committee has resumed its hearing, after spending most of the past two hours detailing the pressure campaign in the days before the insurrection against vice-president Mike Pence.“Despite the fact that the vice-president consistently told the president that he did not have and would not want the power to decide the outcome of the presidential election, Donald Trump continued to pressure the vice-president, both publicly and privately,” California Democrat Pete Aguilar said as the hearing resumed.“You will hear things reached a boiling point on January 6, and the consequences were disastrous.” More

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Pence was 40ft from mob on January 6: ‘Vice-president’s life was in danger’

      by

      Pence was 40ft from mob on January 6: ‘Vice-president’s life was in danger’Committee hearing details how Trump whipped up hostility towards Pence for refusing to overturn election Marching on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, a supporter of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election recorded himself on his phone.Ginni Thomas sought by panel over role in Trump’s bid to overturn electionRead moreHe said: “I’m telling you, if Pence caved, we’re gonna drag motherfuckers through the streets. You fucking politicians are gonna get fucking took to the streets.”Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president, refused to stop certification of Joe Biden’s victory. In the eyes of Trump and the mob, he did indeed “cave”.On Thursday, in their third hearing, the seven Democrats and two Republicans on the House January 6 committee also displayed a court filing from the Department of Justice revealing the shocking scope of the threat to Pence during the attack on the Capitol.The document, the California Democrat Pete Aguilar said, “explains that a confidential informant in the Proud Boys [extremist group] told the FBI the Proud Boys would have killed Mike Pence if given a chance.“The witness whom the FBI affidavit refers to stated that other members of the group … said that anyone they got their hands on would have been killed, including Nancy Pelosi”, the House speaker.Politicians were not killed, or dragged through the streets of Washington. But the mob that smashed its way into Congress gave every indication of trying. Some chanted “Hang Mike Pence”. A gallows was erected outside.In its Thursday hearing, the January 6 committee examined Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence and shone a harsh spotlight on the peril in which it placed the vice-president.Bennie Thompson, the panel chair, said: “Mike Pence’s courage put him in tremendous danger. When Mike Pence made it clear that he wouldn’t give in to Donald Trump’s scheme, Donald Trump turned the mob on him.”The committee focused on a tweet sent by Trump at 2.24pm, when he knew the Capitol had been breached and when Pence had been hustled from the Senate chamber.Trump wrote: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”The committee’s first hearing was watched by 20 million in primetime. That session revealed Trump’s chilling response when told rioters chanted that Pence should hang.Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican and deputy committee chair, said then: “Aware of the rioters’ chants to ‘hang Mike Pence,’ the president responded with this sentiment: ‘Maybe our supporters have the right idea.’ Mike Pence ‘deserves it’.”That bombshell came at the very start of televised hearings. In the second half of the third hearing, the committee came back to the very real threats to Pence’s safety.In recorded testimony about a conversation on 5 January 2021, Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, said: “The concern was for the vice-president’s security so I wanted to make sure the head of the vice-president’s Secret Service was aware it was likely, as these disagreements became more public, that the president would lash out.”Aguilar read tweets sent by Trump on 6 January in which he claimed Pence had the authority to reject electoral college results. Witnesses including Ivanka Trump discussed a call Trump placed to Pence. Nick Luna, Trump’s former body man, said: “I remember hearing the word ‘wimp’.” Ivanka Trump’s former chief of staff, Julie Radford, said Donald Trump used “the p word”, presumably a reference to “pussy”.The committee played footage of Trump telling a rally near the White House Pence could stop certification and should “come through”.Pence issued a letter saying he would not.Aguilar said: “We all know what happened next. The president’s words had an effect. President Trump’s supporters became angry. When the vice-president issued his public letter, the crowd at the Capitol erupted in anger. Rioters who had erected makeshift gallows began chanting, ‘Hang Mike Pence.’”The committee played more footage of Trump supporters.One said: “Pence is nothing but a traitor and he deserves to burn with the rest of them. Pence didn’t do what we wanted. Pence voted against Trump. That’s when we marched on the Capitol.”In the Senate chamber, a Trump supporter said: “Justice is coming.”At 2.26pm, Pence had been rushed to a secure location, an underground parking bay, where he stayed for four and a half hours.“Approximately 40ft,” Aguilar said. “That’s all there was: 40ft between the vice-president and the mob. Make no mistake, the vice-president’s life was in danger.”TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackMike PenceDonald TrumpUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Ex-judge says Pence obeying Trump would have plunged US into constitutional crisis – video

      by

      J Michael Luttig, a former federal judge and Republican, said during his testimony to the House select committee on the January 6 attack that Mike Pence could have plunged the US into a ‘revolution within a constitutional crisis’. If the vice-president had followed the lead of Donald Trump and rejected the result of the 2020 election, Luttig warned, the US would have faced its first constitutional crisis ‘since the founding of the republic’. In 2021, Luttig outlined his view that the vice-president had only the power to count the electoral college votes as they are cast, not to alter them or reject them

      January 6 hearings live: White House officials thought idea of Pence overturning election was ‘crazy’
      Trump brought US ‘dangerously close to catastrophe’, January 6 panel says More

    • 200 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Retired judge to testify on Trump’s ‘well-developed plan’ to overturn election at any cost – live

      by

      In his testimony before the January 6 committee today, former US appellate court judge J Michael Luttig will warn that the plot to overturn the 2020 election was well-coordinated and threatened the nation’s very existence, according to his opening remarks obtained by CNN.Luttig is one of two guests in Thursday’s third hearing of the committee, which will focus on Trump’s pressure campaign against vice-president Mike Pence to get him to go along with his plans to stop Joe Biden from taking office.“The war on democracy instigated by the former president and his political party allies on January 6 was the natural and foreseeable culmination of the war for America,” Luttig warns in his opening remarks. “It was the final fateful day for the execution of a well-developed plan by the former president to overturn the 2020 presidential election at any cost, so that he could cling to power that the American People had decided to confer upon his successor, the next president of the United States instead.”“Had the Vice President of the United States obeyed the President of the United States, America would immediately have been plunged into what would have been tantamount to a revolution within a paralyzing constitutional crisis,” Luttig says.Conspiracies like the effort to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election win could tear the United States apart, former vice-president Mike Pence’s lawyer Greg Jacob will tell the January 6 committee today.“The law is not a plaything for presidents or judges to use to remake the world in their preferred image,” Jacob said in his opening remarks, which do not mention Donald Trump by name but are sharply critical of the idea that Pence could unilaterally decide an election — an idea the former president promoted.“Our Constitution and our laws form the strong edifice within which our heartfelt policy disagreements are to be debated and decided. When our elected and appointed leaders break, twist, and fail to enforce our laws in order to achieve their partisan ends, or to accomplish frustrated policy objectives they consider existentially important, they are breaking America,” Jacob said.You can read the full remarks below:READ: The full statement from Pence counsel Greg Jacob to the select committee. 1/3 pic.twitter.com/2smpKVxDhk— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) June 16, 2022
      Page 2 of 3 pic.twitter.com/TfQKr7sdlm— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) June 16, 2022
      Page 3 of 3 pic.twitter.com/KzpxylqbUK— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) June 16, 2022
      Eric Berger reports on another factor that led to the United States’s disastrous experience with Covid-19: its lack of a universal health care system:The US could have saved more than 338,000 lives and more than $105bn in healthcare costs in the Covid-19 pandemic with a universal healthcare system, according to a study.More than 1 million people died in the US from Covid, in part because the country’s “fragmented and inefficient healthcare system” meant uninsured or underinsured people faced financial barriers that delayed diagnosis and exacerbated transmission, the report states.The US had the highest death rate from the virus among large wealthy countries and is also the only one among such countries without universal healthcare. It spends almost twice as much on healthcare per capita as the other wealthy countries, according to Kaiser Family Foundation data.US could have saved 338,000 lives from Covid with universal healthcare, study findsRead moreThe House subcommittee investigating the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic announced that Deborah Birx, the former president’s Covid-19 coordinator, will testify publicly next week.For the first time, former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx will publicly testify about her role in the Trump Administration’s #COVID19 response.Tune in next week, June 23, at 10AM ET.https://t.co/aOsMX29Q1b— Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis (@COVIDOversight) June 16, 2022
      Birx was among the public health officials who became household names during the pandemic’s worst months, but later fell out of favor with Trump. Last October, the Democratic chair of the subcommittee Jame Clyburn said its interviews with Birx “confirm that President Trump’s prioritization of politics, contempt for science, and refusal to follow the advice of public health experts undermined the nation’s ability to respond effectively to the coronavirus crisis.”The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell explain why the January 6 committee has opted to make today’s hearing about the actions of Mike Pence, who played a major role in torpedoing Trump’s plan to stop Biden from taking office:The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack intends to outline at its third hearing on Thursday how Donald Trump corruptly pressured then vice-president Mike Pence to reject the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election and directly contributed to the insurrection.The panel will first examine the genesis of Trump’s pressure campaign on Pence to adopt an unconstitutional and unlawful plan to reject certified electors from certain states at the congressional certification in an attempt to give Trump a second presidential term.The select committee then intends to show how that theory – advanced by external Trump legal adviser John Eastman – was rejected by Pence, his lawyers and the White House counsel’s office, who universally told the former president that the entire scheme was unlawful.Third panel hearing will show Trump’s pressure on Pence to overturn electionRead moreIn his testimony before the January 6 committee today, former US appellate court judge J Michael Luttig will warn that the plot to overturn the 2020 election was well-coordinated and threatened the nation’s very existence, according to his opening remarks obtained by CNN.Luttig is one of two guests in Thursday’s third hearing of the committee, which will focus on Trump’s pressure campaign against vice-president Mike Pence to get him to go along with his plans to stop Joe Biden from taking office.“The war on democracy instigated by the former president and his political party allies on January 6 was the natural and foreseeable culmination of the war for America,” Luttig warns in his opening remarks. “It was the final fateful day for the execution of a well-developed plan by the former president to overturn the 2020 presidential election at any cost, so that he could cling to power that the American People had decided to confer upon his successor, the next president of the United States instead.”“Had the Vice President of the United States obeyed the President of the United States, America would immediately have been plunged into what would have been tantamount to a revolution within a paralyzing constitutional crisis,” Luttig says.The Washington Post report further detailing Ginni Thomas’s involvement in the effort to stop Joe Biden from taking office underscores just how much evidence the January 6 committee is accumulating in its effort to unravel what happened that day.It’s not clear if the lawmakers will opt to publicly explore what they’ve learned about conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas’s wife in the course of their investigation, but they must surely feel tempted. Thomas was the only one of the court’s nine members who dissented from a January ruling ordering the release of records from the Trump administration to the committee.The revelations about Ginni Thomas come as tensions around the court are as high as ever. Its conservative majority is widely believed to be poised to strike down the nationwide right to an abortion, and a draft opinion of the decision was leaked last month, sparking uproar. Other decisions expected in the coming days or weeks could expand the right to carry a concealed weapon, weaken the government’s ability to regulate and upend the Biden administration’s effort to end the “remain in Mexico” policy Trump implemented to stop border crossings.Trump is out of office but the court’s rightward swing is one of his legacies. Had he not won in 2016, it’s possible the institution’s ideological makeup may look quite different.Good morning, US politics blog readers! Today’s marquee event in Washington will be the third hearing of the January 6 committee, which is to center on the pressure campaign around Mike Pence, the vice-president to Donald Trump. The Washington Post is reporting that the committee is also considering what to do with new evidence that shows Ginni Thomas, wife of conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, was talking to a lawyer for Trump, who played a major role in trying to stop Joe Biden from taking office.Here’s what else is happening today:
      Anthony Fauci is positive for Covid but that’s apparently not stopping him from testifying before the Senate health committee, though he will undoubtedly not be in the room.
      Biden will sign a bill to overhaul regulations on ocean shipping that he hopes will help lower the US’s high rate of inflation.
      Republicans are kicking off their “Road to Majority” conference hosted by the Faith & Freedom Coalition, which is accurately named: the party is viewed as having a good chance of taking back one or both houses of Congress in the November midterm elections.
      The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives may be closer to getting a director after the Senate Judiciary Committee votes on confirming Steven Dettelbach. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Third panel hearing will show Trump’s pressure on Pence to overturn election

      by

      Third panel hearing will show Trump’s pressure on Pence to overturn electionEx-president leaned on then vice-president to reject certified electors despite being told scheme was unlawful The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack intends to outline at its third hearing on Thursday how Donald Trump corruptly pressured then vice-president Mike Pence to reject the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election and directly contributed to the insurrection.The panel will first examine the genesis of Trump’s pressure campaign on Pence to adopt an unconstitutional and unlawful plan to reject certified electors from certain states at the congressional certification in an attempt to give Trump a second presidential term.The select committee then intends to show how that theory – advanced by external Trump legal adviser John Eastman – was rejected by Pence, his lawyers and the White House counsel’s office, who universally told the former president that the entire scheme was unlawful.Trump’s raising of $250m for fund that ‘did not exist’ suggests possible fraudRead moreBut Trump deliberately ignored his top White House advisers to go down that path, the panel will show. And, the panel contends, in escalating his campaign to obstruct Biden’s certification through the morning of 6 January 2021, Trump contributed to the violence of the Capitol attack.The select committee will additionally show that Trump’s false public remarks about Pence having the power to refuse to count votes for Biden – Pence had no such power – directly put the vice-president’s life in danger as the mob chanted “hang Mike Pence”.Trump’s involvement in the Pence strategy makes the former president liable for the crimes of obstructing an official proceeding and conspiring to defraud the United States, the panel has argued. A federal judge has agreed, calling it “a coup in search of a legal theory”.The select committee previewed details on the third hearing on a call with reporters. The panel said the hearing would be led by congressman Pete Aguilar, with witness questioning done by former US attorney John Wood, who was appointed senior investigative counsel by vice-chairperson Liz Cheney.The select committee will hear from Pence’s former counsel Greg Jacob as well as retired former US appellate court judge J Michael Luttig over the course of the hearing, which is expected to last around two hours, according to a source familiar with its planning.The select committee is likely to focus heavily on the role played by Eastman, who as early as 18 November 2020 was writing memos under the guise of the “Trump legal team” and proposing a brazen plan to send Trump slates of electors to Congress for certification.But Eastman’s plan to have Pence see that there were “duelling” slates of electors and therefore refuse to certify either Biden or Trump slates – which would result in Trump’s receiving more electoral college votes – relied on states certifying the Trump slates.On 13 December 2020, the so-called Trump legal team was circulating a “President of the Senate” strategy that referred to Pence taking such action on 6 January 2021, a clear violation of the law governing the certification, according to emails released in court filings.Crucially, however, the state legislatures had still not met by that date to certify an alternate Trump slate of electors, which Eastman showed in emails that he knew needed to happen in order for his delicate scheme to have any chance of success.Eastman also undermined the scheme when he admitted in emails on 19 December 2020, released in court filings, that “unless those electors get a certification from their State Legislators”, the Trump slates would be “dead on arrival in Congress”.The emails showed Eastman knew the plan rested on states certifying Trump slates. But when he presented a memo to Pence in January 2021 attesting to the existence of Trump slates – that did not actually exist – he revealed corrupt intent to obstruct proceedings on 6 January 2021, the panel believes.No state legislatures ultimately certified an alternate slate of electors for Trump. The Trump White House appears to have participated in a related scheme to send fake Trump slates to Congress, though those were not introduced at the certification on the day of the attack.But the select committee intends to reveal at the hearing that Pence’s counsel, Jacob, and others including Luttig, all informed the then-vice-president that even if the states had transmitted alternate slates of electors, the plan was unlawful from the start.The Trump White House counsel separately told Trump that Eastman’s plan violated the law, Cassidy Hutchinson, a top former aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, has also testified to the panel.Yet Trump and Eastman proceeded with the plan anyway. At the Save America rally on 6 January 2021, Trump told his supporters that he hoped Pence would do the “right thing” and just refuse to certify Biden’s election win, knowing full well by then that it was unlawful.The select committee is likely to show, finally, that Eastman himself knew the strategy was unlawful. In an email he sent to Jacob as the Trump mob stormed the Capitol, he admitted the scheme violated the law, but then he said Pence could surely violate the law a little more.Eastman said in the email that because Biden’s certification had been temporarily interrupted by the Capitol attack, Congress had violated the law governing the process. So Pence should have no problem committing “one more minor violation and adjourn for 10 days”, he said.TopicsJan 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpMike PenceTrump administrationUS elections 2020House of RepresentativesReuse this content More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      January 6 hearing: five key takeaways from the first primetime Capitol attack inquiry

      by

      January 6 hearing: five key takeaways from the first primetime Capitol attack inquiryThe House select committee presented their findings that the US Capitol attack was the ‘culmination of an attempted coup’ The first primetime hearing from the House select committee investigating January 6 presented gut-wrenching footage of the insurrection, and a range of testimony to build a case that the attack on the Capitol was a planned coup fomented by Donald Trump.After a year and half investigation, the committee sought to emphasize the horror of the attack and hold the former president and his allies accountable.Here are some key takeaways from the night: Attack on January 6 was the ‘culmination of an attempted coup’Presenting an overview of the hearing and the ones to come, House select committee chair Bennie Thompson and vice-chair Liz Cheney presented their findings that the violent mob that descended on the Capitol was no spontaneous occurrence.January 6 hearing: Trump was at heart of plot that led to ‘attempted coup’Read moreVideo testimony from Donald Trump’s attorney general, his daughter, and other allies make the case that the former president was working to undermine the 2020 election results and foment backlash. “Any legal jargon you hear about ‘seditious conspiracy’, ‘obstruction of an official proceeding’, ‘conspiracy to defraud the United States’ boils down to this,” Thompson said. “January 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup. A brazen attempt, as one rioter put it shortly after January 6, to overthrow the government. Violence was no accident. It represented Trump’s last stand, most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power.” Trump’s own team contested election liesAs Trump carried on his lies that victory was stolen from him, his own administration and allies agreed the election was legitimate.Former attorney general William Barr testified that he expressed Trump’s claims of a stolen election were “bullshit”. A Trump campaign lawyer told Mark Meadows in November “there’s no there there” to support Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud. Even Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, said she was convinced by Barr that the election was legitimate.A gut-wrenching review of a violent dayGraphic footage and harrowing testimony came from Capitol officer Caroline Edwards, who on the first line of defense against the attacking mob, reiterated the terror of the insurrection.Edwards compared the scene to a war zone, saying she was slipping on others’ blood as she fought off insurrectionists. “It was carnage. It was chaos. I can’t even describe what I saw,” she said. The officer sustained burns from a chemical spray deployed against her, and a concussion after a bike rack was heaved on top of her. Officers and lawmakers watching the hearings teared up as they relived the violence of that day.Work of undermining election continued as violence ensuedAs the attack was being carried out, and the mob was threatening Vice-president Mike Pence’s life, Trump and his team continued to work to undermine the election. Vivid retelling brings horror of January 6 back to scene of the crimeRead moreAfter Pence refused to block the election certification, Trump and his supporters turned against him. Trump instigated the riot through a series of tweets.As the mob cried “Hang Mike Pence!” the committee presented evidence that Trump suggested that might not be a bad idea. “Mike Pence deserves it,” the president then said. As violence ensued, “the Trump legal team in the Willard Hotel war room”, continued attempts to subvert the election results, Cheney said.Committee presents case that attack was premeditatedFootage and testimony from film-maker Nick Quested, one of two witnesses at the hearing, suggested the Proud Boys had planned to attackOn the morning of January 6, Quested testified that he was confused to see “a couple of hundred” Proud Boys walking away from Trump’s speech and toward the Capitol. The committee implied that this might have allowed them to scope out the defenses and weak spots at the Capitol.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesDonald TrumpIvanka TrumpWilliam BarrMark MeadowsnewsReuse this content More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Secret Service were warned of security risk to Pence day before Capitol attack

      by

      Secret Service were warned of security risk to Pence day before Capitol attackEx-vice-president’s chief of staff warned head of his Secret Service detail that Trump was about to turn on Pence A day before the deadly attack on the US Capitol, Mike Pence’s chief of staff warned the head of Pence’s Secret Service detail that Donald Trump was about to turn on his own vice-president, endangering his security.Ex-Trump aide Peter Navarro indicted for defying Capitol attack panelRead moreThe news was reported on Friday by Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, who said she uncovered it during research for a book on Trump due out in October.On 5 January, Haberman wrote, Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, did not know how his boss’s security might be threatened if Trump turned on him. But Trump and advisers had been formulating a plan under which Pence would stop certification of electoral college results in Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden.Under pressure which the Times said included withholding funding for the vice-president’s transition out of power, Pence considered the plan before concluding he did not have the authority to reject electoral college results.When the mob attacked the Capitol on 6 January, rioters were heard to chant “Hang Mike Pence” while a gallows was set up outside.The Times recently reported that two witnesses who spoke to the January 6 committee said Trump told Mark Meadows, his own chief of staff, “something to the effect of, maybe Mr Pence should be hung”.The Times said it was not clear if Trump was serious.Trump told another reporter and author, Jon Karl, his supporters “were very angry” with Pence and that it was just “common sense” to be so, because Pence was not helping overturn Trump’s election defeat.US Justice Department could be zeroing in on Trump lawyers, experts sayRead moreThe Times said it was not clear what Tim Giebels, the head of Pence’s Secret Service detail, did with the warning from Short.The next day, with the Capitol under attack, Pence’s protectors rushed him from the Senate chamber to an underground parking bay. Multiple accounts have said the vice-president refused to leave the building.According to Short, Pence said: “I’m not going to let the free world see us fleeing the Capitol, and I’m staying.”Authors of books on the Trump presidency have been widely criticised for withholding news until publication. Haberman was known for having strong sources in the Trump White House, and was filmed taking calls from Trump himself.She published her nugget about Trump’s threat to Pence in the run-up to public hearings due to be staged by the House committee investigating the events of 6 January 2021.Pence and the Secret Service did not comment on the new Times report.TopicsUS Capitol attackMike PenceDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More