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      Trump as tyrant and Cheney’s cliffhangers: key moments from the January 6 hearings

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      Trump as tyrant and Cheney’s cliffhangers: key moments from the January 6 hearingsFrom Trump’s lack of concern about armed rioters to possible witness tampering, the revelations have been startling The hearings of the House January 6 committee have presented some extraordinary testimony about Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and his supporters’ deadly assault on the US Capitol. Ahead of the primetime TV hearing on Thursday night, here are some of those pivotal moments so far.Hutchinson’s bombshellsSome said that in Cassidy Hutchinson the committee had found its John Dean, the White House counsel who turned on Richard Nixon during Watergate.01:42Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, delivered her dramatic testimony with notable calm. She made headlines by describing how Trump struggled physically with a Secret Service agent who would not let him march to the Capitol himself, and how the president, furious, hurled his dinner at the White House wall.More importantly, Hutchinson described how Trump knew some in the crowd who heard him speak on January 6 were armed – and told them to march on the Capitol anyway. Many observers said such testimony could be crucial to establishing criminal intent, and therefore central to any criminal charges against Trump.Van Tatenhove’s warningJason van Tatenhove, a former spokesperson for the far-right group the Oath Keepers, testified about links between Trump and the far right. Van Tatenhove said the president attempted to mount “armed revolution”. He also said the Oath Keepers leader once asked him to create a deck of cards showing key targets, among them Hillary Clinton.01:10“People died [on 6 January 2021],” Van Tatenhove said. “Law enforcement officers died, there was a gallows set up in front of the Capitol.“This could have been the spark that started a new civil war, and no one would have won there. That would have been good for no one.”Cheney’s cliffhangersLiz Cheney has been the star of the hearings. A hardline Wyoming Republican nonetheless at odds with her party, she has offered successive cliffhangers, each setting up the next session. One was about Trump advisers and allies in Congress seeking pardons. But what she said about possible witness tampering made, perhaps, the biggest impact. In the Hutchinson hearing, Cheney revealed that Trump associates had contacted a witness to say the former president would be watching the hearings and reading transcripts. The witness turned out to be Hutchinson. After the hearing on far-right links to Trump, Cheney said Trump himself had attempted to call another witness, not yet seen.Trump’s enablersThe committee’s reconstruction of an 18 December 2020 meeting at the White House between Trump’s official and unofficial advisers was for the ages. Witnesses including Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, described shouts and threats from members of so-called “Team Crazy”, which included Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn.Giuliani remembered calling the White House advisers “pussies”. Powell said it was the official aides who were crazy, for not backing a scheme to seize voting machines. She also drank a lot of Dr Pepper.Eric Herschmann, a former Trump Organization lawyer who testified by video in front of a baseball bat with “justice” written on it, said Flynn, a retired general, “screamed at me that I was a quitter and kept standing up and turning around and screaming at me. I’d sort of had it with him so I yelled back, ‘Either come over or sit your fucking ass back down.’” More

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      Secret Service turned over just one text message to January 6 panel, sources say

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      Secret Service turned over just one text message to January 6 panel, sources sayHouse committee wants all communications from day before and day of Capitol attack but agency indicates such messages are lost The Secret Service turned over just one text message to the House January 6 committee on Tuesday, in response to a subpoena compelling the production of all communications from the day before and the day of the US Capitol attack, according to two sources familiar with the matter.Primetime January 6 hearing to go ahead despite chairman’s positive Covid testRead moreThe Secret Service told the panel the single text was the only message responsive to the subpoena, the sources said, and while the agency vowed to conduct a forensic search for any other text or phone records, it indicated such messages were likely to prove irrecoverable.House investigators also learned that the texts were seemingly lost as part of an agency-wide reset of phones on 27 January 2021, the sources said – 11 days after Congress first requested the communications and two days after agents were reminded to back up their phones.The disclosures were worse than the committee had anticipated, the sources said. The panel had hoped to receive more than a single text and was dismayed to learn that the messages were lost even after they had been requested for congressional investigations.It marked a damaging day for the Secret Service, which is required to preserve records like any other executive branch agency, and now finds itself in the crosshairs of the select committee examining its response with respect to the Capitol attack.The circumstances surrounding the erasure of the Secret Service texts have become central to the January 6 committee’s work as it investigates how agents and leaders planned to move Donald Trump and Mike Pence as violence unfolded at the Capitol.The controversy – and the subpoena – over the lost text messages came last week after the Department of Homeland Security inspector general, Joseph Cuffari, the watchdog for the Secret Service, revealed many messages from the time in question had gone missing.In a letter to Congress, the inspector general said some Secret Service texts from 5 and 6 January 2021 were erased amid a “device replacement program” and indicated that the agency was stonewalling his investigation by slow-walking the production of evidence.The Secret Service has said the missing texts were purged as part of a planned agency-wide reset of phones and replacement of devices. Agents were told to back up data to an internal drive, one source said, but that directive appears to have been ignored.Hours after the complaint letter from Cuffari, the chair of the January 6 committee, Bennie Thompson, met the panel’s staff director, David Buckley, and his deputy, Kristin Amerling, before convening members to request a closed-door briefing from the inspector general.The Guardian first reported the inspector general told the committee the Secret Service’s account of why the texts went missing kept changing, among other issues, prompting the panel to issue a subpoena for the texts and after-action reports later the same day.But even as the Secret Service complied with the subpoena, and produced thousands of pages of documents related to decisions made on the day of the Capitol attack, the agency could provide just one text message, the sources said.The Secret Service was also unable to provide any after-action reports, the sources said, because none were conducted. Cuffari said the agency opted to use his review as the after-action report – only for personnel to slow-walk his investigation, the sources said.A spokesman for the Secret Service could not immediately be reached for comment.The fallout from the missing text messages episode, as well as testimony from former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson describing a fracas inside the presidential vehicle on January 6 as Trump tried to reach for the steering wheel, has renewed questions over credibility.According to the Secret Service, the sequence of events was as follows: agents were told of a forthcoming update in December 2020, Congress requested communications on 16 January 2021, agents were reminded to back-up data on 25 January and the update went through on 27 January 2021.The agents were told in the reminder about “how to save information that they were obligated or desired to preserve so that no pertinent data or federal records” were lost, though the note seemingly went unheeded and texts were purged.House investigators are currently discussing with the inspector general the possibility of reconstructing the lost texts, the sources said, examining options including acquiring specialized software and forensic tools.The justice department inspector general has been able to retrieve lost texts, recovering messages in 2018 from two senior FBI officials who investigated former presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Trump and exchanged notes criticizing the latter.The Secret Service was not responsible for security at the Capitol on January 6 – that is performed by US Capitol police – but agents led protection details for Trump, Pence, and other executive branch officials across Washington that day.But Secret Service actions have become a focus for House investigators as they investigate whether and when the agency knew Trump wanted to go to the Capitol, and whether it intended to remove Pence from the complex as rioters sought to stop certification of Joe Biden’s election win.The missing texts are also the subject of a new investigation, after the National Archives told the Secret Service to launch an internal review and issue a report within 30 calendar days, if it found that any texts were “improperly deleted”.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsSecret ServiceUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesTrump administrationnewsReuse this content More

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      Thank You For Your Servitude review – disappointing tale of Trump’s town

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      Thank You For Your Servitude review – disappointing tale of Trump’s town Mark Leibovich had a big hit with one Washington exposé but his follow-up tells us little we did not know alreadyMark Leibovich is the winner of a National Magazine Award, a former staffer of the New York Times Magazine, the author of a bestseller about Washington and a recent hire of the Atlantic, one of the hotter, the more serous news websites.Newt and the Never Trumpers: Gingrich, Tim Miller and the fate of the Republican partyRead moreIn short, he has a byline that arouses of expectations of thoroughness and thoughtfulness. So one might assume that his new 304-page tome (before the acknowledgments, the notes and the index) would include some new facts or several new insights about his subjects, the Trump sycophants who enabled the most disastrous presidency of modern times.Sadly, Leibovich has almost nothing fresh to tell us. Instead of new information, we get a recycled account of “the dirt that Trump tracked in, the people he broke, and the swamp he did not drain”.To be fair, Leibovich is remarkably up front about his lack of originality. As early as page 11 he warns the reader that “you will almost certainly recall many of the episodes described in the chapters ahead”. But it is still remarkable that he is unable to tell us almost anything new about the greatest hits of the Trump administration.In its preoccupation with gossip and a near-religious avoidance of substance, this book is a parody of the worst practices of the Washington press corps – which are among the biggest reasons a dangerous buffoon like Trump was able to reach the White House in the first place.Leibovoich does make one interesting observation in the first chapter, when he describes the Republican party as “a political version” of the “Stanley Milgram experiment on obedience” conducted at Yale in the early 1960s, when the researcher’s subjects were instructed to administer electric shocks upon innocent neighbors, ostensibly in the next room.“The force of the shocks was apparently becoming more and more painful as the victims screamed” – yet 65% of the subjects kept following instructions to continue the shocks.“The essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes,” Milgram concluded. “He therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions.”Leibovich writes: “Republicans demonstrated much of the same fealty during the Trump years.”Unfortunately, his original insights begin and end there.The rest of the book consists of everything he wrote down in his notebooks, which he wisely left there until he sat down to compose this volume.His most frequent refrain is “Once again, you might recall all of it” – as indeed we do when he recounts the brief moment during the 2016 campaign when it looked like Marco Rubio might be the man to rescue the Republican establishment from Trump, or Rick Perry’s single spate of truth-telling, when he called the orange man from Queens a “toxic mix of demagoguery, mean–spiritedness and nonsense”.Of course, this “did nothing” to stop Perry endorsing Trump and becoming his energy secretary – but yes, we already recall that too.Like any good clip job, the book does include a few good lines – all of them from stories generated by others. Trump’s second secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, was “like a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass” (reported by Susan Glasser, in the New Yorker). Or Stormy Daniels, recoiling in horror when the late-night comic Jimmy Kimmel referred to her “making love” with the future president.“Gross!” said Daniels. “What is wrong with you? I laid there and prayed for death.”(A few paragraphs before that, Leibovich praises himself for the “minor feat” of not mentioning Daniels until page 153.)The author’s tenuous grasp of substance is most evident when he fudges exactly how much the Republican party had done to prepare itself for this moment, after its decades-long dances with racism and homophobia, dating back to Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy in 1968 and George W Bush’s courageous endorsement of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in 2004.Leibovich makes fun of Mitch McConnell for telling Politico Trump was “not going to change the basic philosophy of the party”, a prediction which turned out to be completely correct, since Trump’s biggest accomplishments were huge tax cuts for the rich and the appointment of three of the most disastrous, pro-business and anti-civil rights supreme court justices of all time.Steve Bannon admitted Trump ‘would lie about anything’, new book saysRead moreBut Leibovich treats the Senate Republican leader’s comment with all the wisdom of a spokesman for the Republican National Committee: “This turned out to be 100% true, except for Trump’s ‘basic philosophy’ on foreign policy, free trade, rule of law, deficits, tolerance for dictators, government activism, family values … and every virtuous quality the Republican party ever aspired to in its best, pre-Trump days.”If you want to hear Leibovich reprise all of the softball questions he asked (half of them off the record) of all Trump’s sycophants, this book is for you. But if you’re interested in explosive new facts about exactly how Trump tried to demolish American democracy, skip this and stay tuned for the next hearing of the House select committee to investigate the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
      Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission is published in the US by Penguin Press
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      Newt and the Never Trumpers: Gingrich, Tim Miller and the fate of the Republican party

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      Newt and the Never Trumpers: Gingrich, Tim Miller and the fate of the Republican party In two new books, a partisan warrior and a repentant operative paint an alarming portrait of a party gone rogueIn 1994, after 40 years in the wilderness, a Republican party led by Newt Gingrich recaptured the House of Representatives. Eventually, scandals of his own making, the impeachment of Bill Clinton and a drubbing in the 1998 midterms forced Gingrich to step down. But he did not leave public life.Newt Gingrich: Democrats are trying to ‘brainwash the entire next generation’Read moreThe former Georgia congressman ran for the presidential nomination in 2012, seamlessly adapted to the rise of Donald Trump in 2016, and kept on publishing all the while. His latest book, the catchily titled Defeating Big Government Socialism, comes as his party anticipates another congressional takeover in November.Tim Miller is another long-term Republican operative, if not a frontline politician. He served in a number of GOP campaigns, demonstrating media savvy and a knack for opposition research. After Jeb Bush left the presidential race in 2016, Miller emerged as vocal Trump critic. Now, in the footsteps of Never Trumpers Rick Wilson and Stuart Stevens, he has penned a political memoir. His subtitle – A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell – refers to a route many would say was partly paved by Gingrich.The former speaker’s new book is heavy on familiar bombast and predictably short on introspection. Its opening pages deliver a familiar beat-down of China and its financial allies.“Many of our elites refuse to even recognize the threat from Beijing,” Gingrich writes. “For many, it is because they make so much money from China.”He would have done better to check his own financial disclosures.By 2018, Newt and Callista Gingrich – ambassador to the Vatican under Trump – had invested at least $100,000 and possibly as much as $250,000 in certificates of deposit issued by the Bank of China.For what it’s worth, Trump maintained a bank account in China. Further, in such spirit of US-Sino amity, the late Sheldon Adelson funded Gingrich’s 2012 presidential run with $20m, courtesy of the blackjack tables and roulette wheels of his casino in Macau.In other words, Gingrich was cool with China until he wasn’t. Government records also show a $368,334 advance for a book with a simple working title: Trump vs China.Gingrich has long known that reality need not be a constraint. He has compared himself to William Pitt the Younger, the British prime minister who was in office for nearly 19 years, rather than Gingrich’s four as speaker. Gingrich has also suggested Brad Pitt should play him onscreen.A little more substantively, Gingrich uses his new book to demand fiscal responsibility, hammering Joe Biden and the Democrats for budgetary profligacy. The first chapter is titled “Big Government Socialism Isn’t Working and Can’t”. Once again, Gingrich should have thought twice.Gingrich’s presidential run to nowhere doubled as a poor man’s Trump University – the scheme by which Trump pulled in money for a product somewhere between shoddy and non-existent. According to the Federal Elections Commission, the Gingrich 2012 campaign remains more than $4.6m in debt. As Business Insider put it, “No presidential campaign from any election cycle owes creditors more money.”As for extravagance, in 2011 Gingrich maintained a credit line of between $250,001 and $500,000 at Tiffany’s, the Fifth Avenue jeweler.On the page, Gingrich also blames the left for America’s high Covid death rate – despite significantly lower post-vaccine mortality in Democratic states. So it goes: at a recent rally in Alaska, Trump declined to use the word “vaccine”, lest he anger the crowd.In Congress, Gingrich wrapped himself in gun rights, opposing the assault weapons ban in Clinton’s 1994 anti-crime bill and subsequently sending a written promise to the National Rifle Association that no gun control legislation would be considered as long as he was speaker.The assault weapons ban expired almost 20 years ago. As Gingrich’s latest book comes out, mass shootings fill the headlines. To the author, no matter: “The Founding Fathers insisted on the second amendment so that armed citizens would make a dictatorship impossible.”Amid all this, Gingrich calls for civility. In case folks forgot, he was the speaker who shut down the government in a snit after he was seated in the back of Air Force One en route to the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, and also called Hillary Clinton a bitch. How will his speakership be remembered? The late Robert Teeter, pollster to George HW Bush, accurately observed: “Gingrich makes a great backbencher.”So to Tim Miller. Like Lot’s wife, he cannot resist looking back. At the same time, he is overly repentant. But his attempt to explain why he stuck with the Republican party for as long as he did is revealing.Miller lets us know that he is gay, married and a dad. His rationales for rejecting his party are understandable but not necessarily satisfying. For him and other Republican operatives, the game was fun – until it wasn’t. The metamorphosis of the party of Lincoln into the party of Trump occurred in broad daylight, a train wreck a long time coming. The Never Trumpers could have spoken out sooner.As long ago as 1968, clashes between demonstrators and Chicago police during the 1968 Democratic convention offered a glimpse of simmering cultural tensions. At the same time, the discontent and racism voiced by the Alabama governor George Wallace found a home with a Republican party following Richard Nixon’s southern strategy. Fast forward three decades and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and Pat Buchanan’s quests for the presidency revealed the darker impulses of the pre-Trump right.Working-class resentment and pitchfork populism appeared long before the Iraq war and the great recession. The rise of Trumpism seems entirely predictable.Miller does deliver a searing indictment of officials and appointees who became Trump’s enablers, listing no less than 11 categories. His portraits of Lindsey Graham, South Carolina’s senior senator, and Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary, are devastating.“More than anything,” he writes, Graham “just wanted to be on the golf cart next to Trump. To be on the right hand of the father. Whether or not Trump did as Graham asked was merely icing on the cake.”Here’s the Deal review: Kellyanne Conway on Trump – with plenty of alternative factsRead moreAs reward for doubling as a human doormat, Graham now battles a subpoena from prosecutors in Fulton county, Georgia, concerning his part in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The senator cloaks himself in congressional immunity and invokes the constitution. It turns out he was fine with attempting to subvert an election but doesn’t like the idea of appearing before a grand jury. Funny, that.As Miller puts it, the same obsequious spirit made Spicer a peddler of lies for the ages, “happy to put up with Trump’s lunacy as long as he became a star. He didn’t see anything wrong with shining a poison apple … And you’d better believe he’d do it all over again.”Both Gingrich and Spicer may get another chance to ride the Trump rodeo. The 45th president is gearing up for 2024. By then, Biden and Gingrich will be octogenarians, Trump 78. Who says America is no country for old men?
      Defeating Big Government Socialism: Saving America’s Future is published in the US by Center Street

      Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell is published in the US by Harper
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      Trump allies ‘screamed’ at aides who resisted seizing voting machines, January 6 panel hears

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      Trump allies ‘screamed’ at aides who resisted seizing voting machines, January 6 panel hears‘Unhinged’ December 2020 meeting saw outside advisers to Trump shouting insults at officials, according to testimony In a bizarre, angry and “unhinged” White House meeting on 18 December 2020, outside advisers to Donald Trump screamed insults at presidential aides who were resisting their plan to seize voting machines and name a special counsel in pursuit of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election.The meeting – which the House January 6 committee in its public hearing on Tuesday described as a “heated and profane clash” – was held between those who believed the president should admit he lost the election to Joe Biden, and a group of outsiders referred to by some Trump advisers as “Team Crazy”.They included Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani; the retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser; and a lawyer for his campaign team, Sidney Powell.The committee confirmed a previous Guardian exclusive that Trump verbally agreed to grant Powell a security clearance and make her special counsel with oversight for seizing voting machines.January 6 hearings: ex-White House lawyer says no evidence of widespread election fraud – liveRead moreIn testimony to the House January 6 committee played at the hearing, Giuliani said that at the meeting he had called the White House lawyers and aides who disagreed with that plan “a bunch of pussies”.Eric Herschmann, a White House lawyer, said that Flynn “screamed at me that I was a quitter and kept standing up and turning around and screaming at me. I’d sort of had it with him so I yelled back, ‘Either come over or sit your effing ass back down.’”Herschmann also said: “I think that it got to the point where the screaming was completely, completely out there. When you got – people walk in, it was late at night, it’s been a long day, and what they were proposing I thought was nuts.”Powell, who wanted to be named special counsel, told the committee how the group had gained access to the White House via a junior official and spent “probably no more than 10 or 15 minutes” with Trump before top Trump aides “set a new land speed record” in order to join the meeting.Testimony from Pat Cipollone, Trump’s second White House counsel and a participant in the meeting with Herschmann and Derek Lyons, then White House staff secretary, was played for the first time at the hearing.He said: “I opened the door and walked in. I saw General Flynn. I saw Sidney Powell sitting there. I was not happy those two people were in the Oval Office … first of all, I saw the Overstock person.”That was Patrick Byrne, a Trump ally and former chief executive of Overstock.com.Cipollone said: “The first thing I did, I walked in, I looked at him, I said, ‘Who are you?’ And he told me.“I don’t think any of these people were providing the president with good advice. So I didn’t understand how they had gotten in.”Cipollone said the plan to seize voting machines and appoint a Powell was a “terrible idea for the country”.Referring to William Barr’s prior rejection of claims of electoral fraud in Trump’s loss to Joe Biden, Cipollone said: “There was a real question in my mind, and a real concern, particularly after the attorney general has reached the conclusion that there wasn’t sufficient election fraud to change the outcome of the election, when other people were suggesting that there was, the answer was at some point you have to put up or shut up. That was my view.”Cipollone said he and others had told Flynn, Giuliani, Powell and Byrne to produce evidence for their claims or stop advancing them, and were told they had no evidence to hand.Cipollone added: “To have the federal government seize voting machines, it’s a terrible idea. That’s not how we do things in the United States.Capitol attack panel examines Trump’s ‘spurring of mob’ on January 6Read more“There is a way to contest elections. That happens all the time. But the idea that the federal government come in and seize election machines and all that.”The committee also displayed a text message in which Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to the White House chief of staff Mark Meadows whose previous testimony lit up Washington and led to Cipollone being served with a subpoena, described the 18 December meeting as “unhinged”.The committee also showed a picture Hutchinson took of Meadows escorting Giuliani off White House grounds after the meeting, to “make sure he didn’t wander back to the mansion”.As described by witnesses answering the Maryland Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, the White House meeting ended without the Trump allies’ wild plans being approved or implemented.But in the early hours of 19 December, Trump sent a tweet encouraging supporters to come to Washington on 6 January 2021, the day Joe Biden’s victory would be certified in Congress.“Be there, will be wild,” Trump wrote.The committee played testimony and archive footage from far-right Trump supporters who planned to answer the call.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Liz Cheney: Donald Trump is not an impressionable child – video

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      The congresswoman, speaking to the January 6 public committee, says Trump was repeatedly told there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Cheney said Trump ‘cannot escape responsibility by being wilfully blind’. The House select committee began its seventh public hearing on Tuesday, investigating Trump’s involvement in the storming of the US Capitol More

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      Barr subpoenaed in voting machine company’s lawsuit against Fox News

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      Barr subpoenaed in voting machine company’s lawsuit against Fox NewsFormer attorney general has rejected conspiracy theory that Dominion manipulated 2020 election to favor Biden William Barr, Donald Trump’s second attorney general, has been served with a subpoena in a $1.6bn defamation suit filed by a voting machine company against Fox News.January 6 hearing to focus on Trump’s tweet to extremist groupRead moreThe subpoena appeared on the court docket for the lawsuit, which was filed by Dominion Voting Systems in Delaware in March 2021.The suit concerns a false conspiracy theory, dismissed by Barr but advanced by the ex-president’s allies, that machines made by the company were tampered with in order to hand the Oval Office to Joe Biden.The suit accuses the on-air personalities Maria Bartiromo, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro “and their chosen guests” of spreading “defamatory falsehoods” about Dominion Voting Systems.The suit alleges that “Fox knew these statements about Dominion were lies” but chose to “[sell] a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process”.It adds: “If this case does not rise to the level of defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.”In a statement when the suit was filed, Fox News said the network “is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court”.Last month, a judge dismissed an attempt to have the suit dismissed.Referring to the owners of Fox, the judge, Eric M Davis, cited “a reasonable inference that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch either knew Dominion had not manipulated the election or at least recklessly disregarded the truth when they allegedly caused Fox News to propagate its claims about Dominion”.News of the subpoena for Barr suggests the suit is moving into a higher gear. It follows a similar order for Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who resisted Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat in that state.Raffensperger and Barr have testified to the House committee investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the election and the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.In public hearings, the committee has played testimony in which Barr discusses the Dominion conspiracy theory and its effects on Trump. More

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      In the Path of Abraham: selective memoir of Trump’s Israel policy

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      In the Path of Abraham: selective memoir of Trump’s Israel policyJason Greenblatt chronicles his work with Jared Kushner for Middle East peace, leaving out anything bad for his boss Jason Greenblatt was once in-house counsel to the Trump Organization. After the 2016 election, he became Donald Trump’s special representative for international negotiations. With Jared Kushner, he aimed to secure peace between Israel and the Palestinians.Trump’s Peace review: dysfunction and accord in US Israel policyRead moreJust like its predecessors, the Trump administration failed at that task.That cold reality might make some think the subtitle of Greenblatt’s new memoir – How Donald Trump Made Peace in the Middle East and How to Stop Joe Biden from Unmaking It – is at least a bit of an overstatement.On the other hand, Trump did deliver the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. The Trump administration also moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and shredded the Iran nuclear deal. The 45th president left his mark in so many places, in so many ways.As to be expected, Greenblatt’s book is silent about some of Trumpism’s darkest hours, its engagement with the antisemitic far right: Charlottesville, Nazis and tiki torch marches, the January 6 insurrection. Also predictably, he is happy to strafe Barack Obama, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.Greenblatt left the White House in late 2019. He volunteers that Kushner was “the best boss I ever had or will ever have – with the possible exception of his father-in-law”. These days, Greenblatt is engaged as an investor, like Kushner with an eye on the Middle East.Greenblatt’s book is a gentler and more graceful version of Sledgehammer, a memoir written by David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel. Like Friedman, Greenblatt attacks Biden and blows kisses at Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s once and possibly future prime minister.As was the case with Friedman, Greenblatt keeps mum about Trump saying of Netanyahu, “Fuck him,” as was reported by Barak Ravid in Trump’s Peace. Ravid captured Trump in all his profane and vindictive reality. He reported Trump’s critique of Netanyahu and his praise for Mahmoud Abbas, the ageing Palestinian leader.Trump told Ravid he believed Netanyahu “did not want to make peace. Never did.” As for Abbas, Trump said: “We spent a lot of time together, talking about many things. And it was almost like a father. I mean, he was so nice, couldn’t have been nicer.”Greenblatt skips both issues, choosing to stress Abbas’s hostility toward Israel and his recalcitrance in negotiations.Greenblatt also says he stood removed from politics until Trump launched his candidacy, and first registered as a Republican in 2016. No one would confuse him with Michael Cohen, the Trump lawyer who entered a guilty plea and turned on his former boss.Greenblatt does not crave the spotlight but he can be subtly subversive. In the Path of Abraham casts bouquets at three Trump nemeses: Mike Pence, HR McMaster and John Bolton, McMaster’s successor as national security adviser. Trump dumped McMaster in a tweet after clashing over the Iran deal, then sent Bolton packing for his bellicosity.“Pence was, refreshingly, the authentic article,” Greenblatt writes, “… a man who was unflappable and unfailingly helpful, no matter the problem, big or small.”Greenblatt offers no comment about Pence’s plight in the Capitol on January 6, when the mob chanted for him to hang, or Trump’s reported comment that his vice-president deserved it.During his trip to Israel in 2017, Trump excluded McMaster from a meeting with Kushner, Netanyahu and the Israeli national security adviser. According to Israeli reports, Rex Tillerson, then secretary of state, was invited to join the group. But “McMaster sat outside the King David room during the course of the entire meeting”.McMaster suffered in silence. Bolton did not. “I don’t think [Trump’s] fit for office. I don’t think he has the competence to carry out the job,” he told ABC, promoting a book of his own.Mike Pompeo, by then secretary of state, called Bolton a traitor. Peter Navarro, the White House trade hawk who now labors under a contempt indictment, called Bolton’s book “deep swamp revenge porn”.In the Path of Abraham is not that. But as Greenblatt conveys his impressions of the Arab world, he chooses to call the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, “a truly visionary leader”.He writes: “I cannot possibly understand what then-candidate Biden was trying to accomplish when he said that he planned to make the ‘Saudis pay the price, and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are’.”It had something to do with US intelligence believing the prince ordered the murder, dismemberment and disposal of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and US resident who wrote for the Washington Post.Then again, with gas topping $5 a gallon, many Americans wish Biden would make nice with the Saudis and stay on script.Greenblatt also offers glowing praise for a leader of the UAE, writing: “Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, colloquially known by his initials as MBZ, is a unique leader. One of the most influential people in the Middle East, he also one of the most humble and thoughtful. Wise and extraordinarily open-minded, he knows the best way to plan for the future is to create it.”Sledgehammer review: David Friedman comes out swinging on Trump and IsraelRead moreIn the same spirit of trans-global high-fiving, Greenblatt has attracted blurbs of praise from Trump, Kushner, Pence, McMaster, Pompeo and a passel of Gulf-state ambassadors. The book could double as a prospectus.As the book lands, Greenblatt finds himself unexpectedly in the news. Last week, the New York Times reported that he made the introduction of Alex Holder to Kushner. Holder is the British documentary film-maker subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the Capitol riot.Fittingly, In the Path of Abraham contains a Yiddish proverb: “Mann Tracht, un Gott Lacht”. Translated: “Man plans and God laughs.” Greenblatt would be hard-pressed to find anyone close to Trump smiling at this moment – whatever their plans may be.
      In the Path of Abraham: How Donald Trump Made Peace in the Middle East – And How to Stop Joe Biden from Unmaking It, is published in the US by Post Hill Press
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