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      Nancy Pelosi signals hard line on formation of 6 January select committee

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      Nancy Pelosi is poised to take a hard line should Republicans try to derail her recently announced select committee into the 6 January Capitol attack and she may appoint its members at her sole discretion, according to a source familiar with the matter.The committee, which passed the House in a near-party-line vote on Wednesday, will have eight members appointed by Democrats and four members appointed by Republicans, as well as broad subpoena power and no deadline to complete its work.“We have the duty, to the constitution and the country, to find the truth of the January 6th insurrection and to ensure that such an assault on our Democracy cannot happen again,” the House speaker wrote in a letter to colleagues.But, deeply distrustful of the GOP, Pelosi is prepared to veto any Republican member and is considering not allowing any Republican who objected to the certification of Joe Biden’s election win to serve on the select committee, the source said.The thinly veiled warning being sent behind the scenes to the Republican House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, reflects Pelosi’s resolve to investigate the root causes of the Capitol attack that left five dead and scores more injured and shocked many Americans.It also underscored Pelosi’s far-reaching power over the select committee in the Democratic-controlled House and her ability to shape the contours of an investigation that could continue through the midterm elections in 2022 and give Democrats a powerful tool to hit Republicans with.The speaker remains acutely aware of how Republicans, in a stark display of loyalty to Trump and self-interest to shield themselves from an inquiry that could tarnish their party, blocked the creation of a 9/11-style commission into the Capitol attack.Pelosi has expressed in private that she will not allow the select committee to be derailed, the source said, and could block the appointment of extremist Republicans such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who refused to accept Biden’s win.An additional concern raised by some Democrats, but not Pelosi herself, revolves around how to approach conflict of interest situations with Republicans who might be named to the select committee but also be connected to events on or before 6 January.McCarthy is likely to be deposed by the select committee himself over his phone call to Trump as the insurrection unfolded. McCarthy begged Trump to call off the rioters, only for the former president to side with his supporters.The top Republican on the House judiciary committee, Jim Jordan – a likely pick by McCarthy for the select committee – also appeared to suggest in recent months that he spoke with Trump during the insurrection.Such conversations between Trump and top House Republicans are significant as they address the crucial question of what Trump was doing and saying as the Capitol was overrun, and will almost certainly be of central importance to the committee’s investigation.The deliberations over whether to take that kind of aggressive move – which would in effect see Pelosi unilaterally decide appointments to the select committee – come as the speaker prepares to decide on a chair and her other Democratic members.Among the leading contenders to lead the committee is the House homeland security committee chair, Bennie Thompson, who negotiated the framework of the aborted 9/11-style commission into 6 January, and has the backing of the House majority whip, Jim Clyburn.As for the other Democratic appointments, members of Pelosi’s leadership and whip teams are not expecting the speaker to name any managers from Trump’s second impeachment trial to the committee, with the possible exception of congressman Jamie Raskin, the source said.The fraught situation surrounding the select committee, which would hand Democrats sweeping power to issue subpoenas for witnesses and documents that could reveal new information about the Capitol attack, is indicative of a highly partisan dynamic on Capitol Hill.The bill to create the select committee became a lightning rod for Republicans after the framework mirrored the language the GOP used for the 2014 select committee to investigate the attack on a US compound in Benghazi, Libya.Pelosi has reiterated the 6 January select committee will examine the root causes of the Capitol attack, though for months, Republicans have argued Democrats are fixated on 6 as a way of tarnishing Trump and their party.Pelosi moved to create a special House select committee – among the top weapons for congressional oversight – after Senate Republicans blocked the commission, fearful that a close accounting of the Capitol attack could pose an existential threat to the GOP.The speaker maintained that she preferred an independent inquiry modeled on the commission set up after the September 11 terrorist attacks. But with Republicans opposed and downplaying the riot, she eventually conceded that only a select committee was possible.“It is imperative that we seek the truth,” Pelosi said. “It is clear the Republicans are afraid of the truth.”Several investigations into the Capitol attack are already under way across the justice department and Capitol Hill, but they have lacked a mandate to conduct a forensic examination of both the circumstances and causes of the assault. More

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      US House to vote on bill launching committee to investigate Capitol attack

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      A select committee to investigate the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol will have 13 members and the power to subpoena witnesses, according to legislation released by the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. The House is expected to vote on the bill this week.Senate Republicans blocked an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the attack in which hundreds of Donald Trump’s supporters broke into the Capitol and interrupted certification of Joe Biden’s election victory.The new House panel will have eight members appointed by Pelosi and five appointed “after consultation with” the Republican minority leader, Kevin McCarthy. A Pelosi aide said the speaker was considering including a Republican among her appointments, which would bring the split to 7-6.Pelosi said 6 January was “one of the darkest days in our nation’s history”.“The select committee will investigate and report upon the facts and causes of the attack and report recommendations for preventing any future assault,” she said.Democrats are likely to investigate Trump’s role in the siege and rightwing groups that were present. Almost three dozen House Republicans voted to create an independent panel, which would have had an even partisan split. Seven Republicans in the Senate supported that bill.The new committee will have subpoena power and no end date. It will be able to issue interim reports.Trump is not explicitly referenced in the legislation, which directs the committee to investigate “facts, circumstances and causes relating to the 6 January 2021 domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex and relating to the interference with the peaceful transfer of power”.The panel will also study “influencing factors that fomented such an attack on American democracy while engaged in a constitutional process”.Pelosi has not said who will lead the committee. She has said she is “hopeful there could be a commission at some point”. The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, has said he might hold a second vote on forming the independent body, but there’s no indication any Republican votes have changed.Many Republicans have brushed aside questions about the insurrection, including how government and law enforcement missed intelligence and the role of Trump.One Republican has said the rioters looked like tourists and another insisted a Trump supporter named Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed while trying to break into the House, was “executed”.Two officers who battled rioters, Metropolitan officer Michael Fanone and Capitol officer Harry Dunn, have been lobbying Republicans. They met McCarthy on Friday and said they asked him to denounce comments downplaying the violence.Fanone said he asked McCarthy for a commitment not to put “the wrong people” on the new select committee and that McCarthy said he would take it seriously. McCarthy’s office did not respond to requests for comment.The officers also asked McCarthy to denounce 21 Republicans who voted against giving medals of honor to the Capitol and Metropolitan Police for their service on 6 January. Dozens suffered injuries, including chemical burns, brain injuries and broken bones.McCarthy, who voted for the measure, told them he would deal with those members privately.Seven people died during and after the rioting, including Babbitt and three Trump supporters who died of medical emergencies. Two police officers died by suicide and a third, Brian Sicknick, collapsed and died after engaging with the protesters. A medical examiner determined he died of natural causes. More

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      New Michael Wolff book reports Trump’s confusion during Capitol attack

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      Donald Trump told supporters he would march on the Capitol with them on 6 January – then abandoned them after a tense exchange with his chief of staff, according to the first excerpt from Landslide, Michael Wolff’s third Trump White House exposé.The extract was published by New York magazine. Wolff’s first Trump book, Fire and Fury, blew up a news cycle and created a whole new genre of salacious political books in January 2018, when the Guardian revealed news of its contents.That book was a huge bestseller. A sequel, Siege, also contained bombshells but fared less well. Wolff’s third Trump book is among a slew due this summer.On 6 January, Congress met to confirm results of an election Trump lost conclusively to Joe Biden. Trump spoke to supporters outside the White House, telling them: “We’re going to walk down [to the Capitol to protest] – and I’ll be there with you.”According to Wolff, the chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was reportedly approached by concerned Secret Service agents, who he told: “No. There’s no way we are going to the Capitol.”Wolff, one of a number of authors to have interviewed Trump since he left power, writes that the chief of staff then approached Trump, who seemed unsure what Meadows was talking about.“You said you were going to march with them to the Capitol,” Meadows reportedly said. “How would we do that? We can’t organize that. We can’t.”“I didn’t mean it literally,” Trump reportedly replied.Trump is also reported to have expressed “puzzlement” about the supporters who broke into the Capitol in a riot which led to five deaths and Trump’s second impeachment, for inciting an insurrection.Wolff says Trump was confused by “who these people were with their low-rent ‘trailer camp’ bearing and their ‘get-ups’, once joking that he should have invested in a chain of tattoo parlors and shaking his head about ‘the great unwashed’.”Trump and his family watched the attack on television at the White House.As reported by Wolff, the exchange between Trump and Meadows sheds light on how the would-be insurrectionists were abandoned.The White House, Wolff writes, soon realised Mike Pence had “concluded that he was not able to reject votes unilaterally or, in effect, to do anything else, beyond playing his ceremonial role, that the president might want him to do”.Trump aide Jason Miller is portrayed as saying “Oh, shit” and alerting the president’s lawyer and chief cheerleader for his lie about electoral fraud, Rudy Giuliani.Wolff writes that the former New York mayor was “drinking heavily and in a constant state of excitation, often almost incoherent in his agitation and mania”.As the riot escalated – soon after Trump issued a tweet attacking the vice-president – aides reportedly pressed the president to command his followers to stand down.Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and adviser, reportedly saw the assault on the Capitol as “an optics issue”. After an hour or so, Wolff writes, Trump “seemed to begin the transition from seeing the mob as people protesting the election – defending him so he would defend them – to seeing them as ‘not our people’”.In a further exchange, Trump reportedly asked Meadows: “How bad is this? This looks terrible. This is really bad. Who are these people? These aren’t our people, these idiots with these outfits. They look like Democrats.”Trump reportedly added: “We didn’t tell people to do something like this. We told people to be peaceful. I even said ‘peaceful’ and ‘patriotic’ in my speech!” More

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      ‘I need a drink’ after Republican talks, says officer beaten in Capitol attack

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      A Washington police officer who suffered a heart attack and a brain injury after being beaten by Trump supporters during the deadly Capitol attack emerged from meeting House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy on Friday to tell reporters: “I need a drink.”“This experience for me is not something that I enjoy doing,” Michael Fanone said. “I don’t want to be up here on Capitol Hill. I want to be with my daughters.”Ten Republicans in the House voted to impeach Donald Trump for inciting the attack on 6 January. But Trump was acquitted in the Senate and under McCarthy the House caucus has remained in line behind the former president and his lie that his defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud.Fanone, of the Washington Metropolitan police, rushed to the Capitol when the mob attacked. Beaten and hit with a stun gun, he has since become a leading voice seeking accountability.He visited McCarthy on Friday with Harry Dunn, a member of the US Capitol police, and Gladys Sicknick, the mother of Brian Sicknick, a Capitol police officer who died after the attack.Fanone said he asked the minority leader to “denounce the 21 House Republicans that voted against the gold medal bill”, a move by Congress to recognise the bravery of those who fought to defend it.He also said he asked McCarthy to publicly disavow a comment by Andrew Clyde, a congressman from Georgia who claimed the mob were as well-behaved as tourists.“I found those remarks to be disgusting,” said Fanone, who said earlier this month Clyde refused to talk to him when confronted on Capitol Hill.“I also asked [McCarthy] to publicly denounce the baseless theory that the FBI was behind the 6 January insurrection,” Fanone said.Tucker Carlson, a primetime Fox News host, is among those who have spread that conspiracy theory.McCarthy “said he would address it at a personal level, with some of those members,” Fanone said. “I think that as the leader of the House Republican party, it’s important to hear those denouncements publicly.”McCarthy did not comment. Earlier in the week, the minority leader said Fanone had not attempted to schedule a meeting. Fanone said that was “bullshit”.Some rioters sought lawmakers, including then Vice-President Mike Pence, to capture or kill. Some brought weapons and explosives to Washington. This week the attorney general, Merrick Garland, said 500 people have been arrested. Christopher Wray, the FBI director, said there are “hundreds more investigations still ongoing”.Nonetheless, last month Senate Republicans blocked the formation of an independent, 9/11-style investigatory commission. On Thursday Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House speaker, said she would form a select committee.Dunn told reporters McCarthy “did commit to taking [the committee] serious, once he heard from the speaker about it”.Fanone said he saw his efforts “as an extension of my service on 6 January”. More

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      Pence rebukes Trump and says he was ‘proud’ to certify election result

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      Former vice-president Mike Pence used a speech late on Thursday to go much further than he has before in public to rebuke Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the Republican defeat in the 2020 presidential election, while adding he will “always be proud” of playing his part to certify Joe Biden’s victory.The US Congress, with Pence presiding in the Senate, confirmed the election result in the early hours of 7 January after the deadly insurrection the day before by extremist supporters of Trump, shortly after the then president had urged them “to fight like hell” to reverse his defeat and pressured Pence not to certify Biden’s win.“I will always be proud that we did our part on that tragic day to reconvene the Congress and fulfilled our duty under the constitution and the laws of the United States,” Pence said in a speech in California.He noted that the vice-president has no constitutional power to throw out a presidential result submitted to the US Congress by the states, or send the votes back to the states in rejection.Pence contradicted “those in our party” who think that “any one person” could select the president, without mentioning Trump directly.“The truth is, there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president,” he said.He called the insurrection a “dark day in the history of the United States Capitol”, following which 500 people have been arrested in the biggest US crime investigation since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.The Indiana Republican’s speech was made at the Ronald Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley. Pence showed he still hews to the Trump policies he loyally help craft and promote during the Trump-Pence administration. He also appeared to be laying out his path to a potential candidacy for president himself.Trump persists in his claims that the election was “stolen” from his because of widespread fraud, despite the failure of more than 80 court challenges, and lately told an interviewer that he “never admitted defeat” and was “very disappointed that [Pence] didn’t send it back to the legislatures” in the states, effectively rejecting the result.In his speech, Pence acknowledged his “disappointment” at November’s defeat, with Democrats Biden and Kamala Harris winning decisively.“Now, I understand the disappointment many feel about the last election,” he said. “I can relate. I was on the ballot. But you know, there’s more at stake than our party and our political fortunes in this moment. If we lose faith in the constitution, we won’t just lose elections – we’ll lose our country,” he said.He praised the “Trump-Pence administration’s” accomplishments in office and urged his party to take advantage of “traditional conservative priorities” as well as the “new pillars” of Trump’s populist politics. He called Trump a “one of a kind” disrupter who also “invigorated our movement” in the same way Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s.Meanwhile, a further excerpt of the forthcoming book Nightmare Scenario by two Washington Post journalists claims that if Trump had become incapacitated or died of Covid-19 last fall that there were no plans in place at the White House to swear in Pence.Under the Presidential Succession Act, Pence would have taken over as president if Trump had died.The book has further details of how Trump was much sicker than was ever officially acknowledged.But adds: “Trump’s brush with severe illness and the prospect of death caught the White House so unprepared that they had not even briefed Mike Pence’s team on a plan to swear him in if Trump became incapacitated.” More

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      Teargas and shots fired as pro-Trump mob rampages through Congress

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      This article is more than 1 year old Teargas and shots fired as pro-Trump mob rampages through Congress This article is more than 1 year old Presidential handover collapses into chaos as Trump supporters break through barricades and enter building Pro-Trump mob storms US Capitol – follow live The presidential handover collapsed into chaos on […] More