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      Trump loyalists push desperate counter narrative to combat damaging January 6 testimony

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      Trump loyalists push desperate counter narrative to combat damaging January 6 testimonyThe Republican faithful defiantly claim the House committee is illegitimate, politically motivated and out of touch Deep in denial, Republicans loyal to former US president Donald Trump mounted a desperate rearguard action on Monday to counter the devastating narrative of Congress’s latest January 6 hearing.A House of Representatives panel investigating the insurrection used testimony from Trump’s own attorney general and campaign manager to assert that the former president knowingly propagated “the big lie” of a stolen election with deadly consequences.But even as the hearing unfolded on live television, leading Republicans defiantly pushed a counter narrative that claims the committee is illegitimate, politically motivated and out of touch with Americans’ everyday lives.“The whole thing’s an absurdity designed by desperate Democrats to try to help them this fall and to try to weaken Trump if he should run again in 2024,” Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker, told the Guardian. “So I don’t pay any attention to it.”Gingrich described the hearings as “a Stalinist show trial” that have “nothing to do with fairness or finding the truth”.On Monday the House committee made the case that Trump and his advisers knew that his claims of fraud in the 2020 election were false. It played video clips in which Trump’s former campaign manager, Bill Stepien, told investigators that lawyer Rudy Giuliani was urging Trump to declare victory on election night, despite Stepien’s warnings that it was “way too early” to make such a prediction.Distancing himself from the wild conspiracy theories, Stepien said: “I didn’t mind being categorized – there were two groups of them, we called them kinda my team and Rudy’s team – I didn’t mind being categorized as Team Normal.”But Republican leaders in the House tweeted a very different sets of messages during the hearing. One even sought to deflect attention to Democrats’ supposed fixation on “woke” cultural issues such as transgender rights.Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the House judiciary committee, posted: “The same party that thinks men can get pregnant wants you to trust them when it comes to the economy and the January 6th Committee.”Others cited House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to exclude Jordan and colleague Jim Banks (both of whom backed Trump’s efforts to overturn the election) as evidence that the committee is one-sided and lacks credibility.Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican conference, wrote on Twitter: “Lame Duck Speaker Pelosi’s select committee is illegitimate. Its purpose is to distract the American people from the FACT that House Dems have no agenda for Americans and no real solutions to the problems that we face on a daily basis.”In more video testimony shown at the hearing, former attorney general William Barr dismissed Trump’s claims of voter fraud as “crazy stuff” and “complete nonsense”.A Twitter account known as “Trump War Room”, run by his political action committee Save America, sought to challenge these assertions. It posted: “FLASHBACK: Barr admits mail-in ballots have been found to have ‘substantial fraud!’ ‘Elections that have been held with mail have found substantial fraud …’” Republican Twitter accounts also deployed the tried and trusted tactic of “whataboutism” – claiming that Democrats have also frequently questioned the legitimacy of elections (though none has instigated an insurrection).Trump War Room posted: “Remember when Hillary Clinton claimed President Trump’s election was illegitimate?”RNC Research posted: “In 2017, Democrat Bennie Thompson – chair of Pelosi’s illegitimate committee – refused to attend President Trump’s inauguration because he questioned the legitimacy of the 2016 election.”The hearing was again broadcast on major nonpartisan TV networks, making it hard for Republicans to ignore. Trump diehards are unlikely to be moved but the damning evidence could cut through and persuade some moderate and independent voters of his culpability.Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal ran an opinion column over the weekend that concluded: “Trump betrayed his supporters by conning them on Jan. 6, and he is still doing it.” Murdoch’s New York Post encouraged readers to move on from Trump, telling them to “unsubscribe from Trump’s daily emails begging for money” and to “pick your favorite from a new crop of conservatives”.But another glimpse into the Republican psyche was offered by Fox News which, having refused to broadcast Thursday’s first hearing during primetime, did provide live coverage of the second during daytime.Its panel of experts gave the session a distinctly lukewarm reception.Martha MacCallum, a Fox News host, pivoted to politics: “You have former President Trump, who is obviously the focus of this, tying him to these events and we’ll see the effort to do that throughout the course of the next hearings, and then you have all these stories this morning about Democrats saying that they think that President Biden is the anchor that needs to be cut loose.“So you’re looking at the two individuals who are the most likely clear next runners for the presidential election and there’s just a lot of questions all across the board.”Then Jonathan Turley, a legal analyst, said he was unsure what case the committee is making and argued it would have greater weight if more Republicans were involved. He commented: “You can say this is laying a foundation for what they said they would be proving, which is an attempted coup. That’s a tall order.“But so far, they seem to be trying to sort of create a persona non grata trial, to declare President Trump a horrible person, and they may not get much pushback by the end of the hearing. I thought the most telling moment came at the end when the chairman said, I’m going to introduce this video unless there is an objection, and that really put a pin on it. It’s like asking at a wedding, anyone who objects to this union speak up. Nobody is really there to do it.”Andy McCarthy, an author and lawyer, also challenged the process: “They’ve got a very good story to tell. The problem is they’ve set it up in a process that is not a fair process that’s aimed at getting to the truth and giving whatever contra arguments there are their day in court. And as a result, it’s more like messaging than it is like a real investigation. I could have been very impressive in court if there were no defense lawyers, you know.”But America’s news agenda is likely to be dominated by clips of Barr and others. The former attorney general delivered some memorable lines, telling investigators at one point that Trump had “become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff.”TopicsRepublicansUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpUS politicsanalysisReuse this content More

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      'Intoxicated' Giuliani wanted Trump to declare victory on election night, investigation told – video

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      An ‘apparently inebriated’ Rudy Giuliani told Donald Trump to declare victory on election night in 2020 despite Fox News calling Arizona for Joe Biden and with votes yet to be fully counted in other states, former advisers to the then president told the House select committee investigating the 6 January riot. The hearing presented testimonies given by Giuliani, the former Trump campaign chair Bill Stepien, the former Trump senior adviser Jason Miller, and Ivanka Trump that detailed the former New York mayor’s actions on election night

      January 6 hearings: latest updates More

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      Jan 6 hearings: Trump ‘lit the fuse that led to horrific violence’, committee chair says – live

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      The January 6 committee is beginning its second hearing into “the conspiracy overseen and directed by Donald Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of power, a scheme unprecedented in American history,” as committee chair Bennie Thompson put it in his opening statement.The Mississippi Democrat is making clear today’s hearing will deal specifically with the former president’s actions.“This morning, we will tell the story of how Donald Trump lost an election and knew he lost an election and as a result of his loss, decided to wage an attack on our democracy and attack on American people, trying to rob you of your voice in our democracy, and in doing so lit the fuse that led to the horrific violence of January 6,” Thompson said.Trump claimed that there was “major fraud” on election night, his former attorney general William Barr told the January 6 committee, according to video the committee aired.“Right out of the box on election night, the president claimed that there was major fraud underway,” Barr said.The commission is discussing the “red mirage” that often occurs on presidential election nights, when Republicans who vote on election day have their votes counted first but Democrats, who often vote early or by mail, sometimes have their votes counted later, creating the impression that Republicans are leading early in the night only to have their share eroded as more Democrats have their votes counted.Barr testifies that though this dynamic was familiar and Trump had been warned about it, the president seized on it to allege fraud.“That seemed to be the basis for this broad claim that there was major fraud. And I didn’t think much of that because people had been talking for weeks and everyone understood for weeks that that was going to be what happened on election night,” Barr said.The committee’s first witness of the day Chris Stirewalt, a former politics editor for Fox News, has been sworn in, and the hearing is now showing a montage of clips from interviews with Trump’s lawyers and other officials.These include Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who became one of Trump’s most notable attorneys. Jason Miller, another former Trump attorney, described Giuliani as being “intoxicated” on election night.Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien testified by video that he did not think the president should declare victory on election night, but said the president disagreed with him.It looks like William Barr, Trump’s final attorney general during the time of the 2020 election, will be playing a major role in the today’s hearing.The committee last Thursday aired video in which he said he thought Trump’s claims of election fraud were “bullshit,” and committee members say he will reappear today to elaborate on his views.“You’ll hear detailed testimony from attorney general Barr describing the various election fraud claims the department of justice investigated. He’ll tell you how he told Mr. Trump repeatedly that there was no merit to those claims. Mr. Barr will tell us that Mr. Trump’s election night claims of fraud were made without regard to the truth, and before it was even possible to look for evidence of fraud,” Democratic representative Zoe Lofgren said as the hearing began.Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair, is showing videos from lawyers who worked for Trump’s campaign that are testifying they never saw evidence that the 2020 election was stolen.“The Trump campaign legal team knew there was no legitimate argument, fraud, irregularities or anything to overturn the election. And yet, President Trump went ahead with his plans for January 6 anyway,” Cheney said.The Wyoming representative accused Trump of using this evidence to deceive his supporters into attacking the Capitol. “As one conservative editorial board put it recently, ‘Mr. Trump betrayed his supporters by conning them on January 6, and he is still doing it,’” she said.The January 6 committee is beginning its second hearing into “the conspiracy overseen and directed by Donald Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of power, a scheme unprecedented in American history,” as committee chair Bennie Thompson put it in his opening statement.The Mississippi Democrat is making clear today’s hearing will deal specifically with the former president’s actions.“This morning, we will tell the story of how Donald Trump lost an election and knew he lost an election and as a result of his loss, decided to wage an attack on our democracy and attack on American people, trying to rob you of your voice in our democracy, and in doing so lit the fuse that led to the horrific violence of January 6,” Thompson said.Meanwhile in the Capitol, we may have more developments today on the gun control compromise reached over the weekend, which could attract enough Republican support to pass. Richard Luscombe has this look at what exactly the measure would do.Joe Biden has urged US lawmakers to get a deal on gun reforms to his desk quickly as a group of senators announced a limited bipartisan framework on Sunday responding to last month’s mass shootings.The proposed deal is a modest breakthrough offering measured gun curbs while bolstering efforts to improve school safety and mental health programs.It falls far short of tougher steps long sought by Biden, many Democrats, gun reform advocates and America citizens. For example, there is no proposal to ban assault weapons, as activists had wanted, or to increase from 18 to 21 the age required to buy them.Even so, if the accord leads to the enactment of legislation, it would signal a turn from years of gun massacres that have yielded little but stalemate in Congress.US senators reach bipartisan gun control deal after recent mass shootings Read moreCould Trump face criminal charges over January 6? As my colleague Richard Luscombe reports, some members of the committee investigating the assault believe the evidence is there.Members of the House committee investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat called on Sunday for the US justice department to consider a criminal indictment for the former president and warned that “the danger is still out there”.Their comments on the eve of the second of the panel’s televised hearings into the January 6 2021 insurrection and deadly Capitol attack will add further pressure on the attorney general, Merrick Garland, who has angered some Democrats by so far taking no action despite growing evidence of Trump’s culpability.“There are certain actions, parts of these different lines of effort to overturn the election, that I don’t see evidence the justice department is investigating,” committee member Adam Schiff, Democratic congressman for California, told ABC’s This Week.Capitol attack panel members urge DoJ to consider criminal charges for TrumpRead moreThe January 6 committee will soon continue building its case against former president Donald Trump, with today’s hearing looking at the motivations behind the attack on the Capitol.However, a wrench has already been thrown into their plans: the ex-president’s former campaign manager has a family emergency, and won’t be able to testify as planned, and the hearing has been pushed back to 10:30 am eastern time.The second hearing of the committee will have some important differences from the first, held last Thursday. First of all, it’s taking place during work hours, not during the primetime TV hour, as in the case of last week’s hearing. Committee member Zoe Lofgren is also set to question witnesses, rather than the body’s counsel.As for the goal of these hearings, my colleague Joan E Greve describes it in the words of committee chair Bennie Thompson:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}If the committee is successful in building its case against Trump, the hearings could deliver a devastating blow to the former president’s hopes of making a political comeback in the 2024 presidential election. But if Americans are unmoved by the committee’s findings, the country faces the specter of another attempted coup, Thompson warned.
      “Our democracy remains in danger. The conspiracy to thwart the will of the people is not over,” Thompson said on Thursday. “January 6 and the lies that led to insurrection have put two and a half centuries of constitutional democracy at risk. The world is watching what we do here.”Protesters are gathering outside the supreme court, with the justices less than a half hour away from releasing rulings in which the conservative majority could make major changes to abortion access, gun rights and environmental regulation.Opposing protestors face to face right now. pic.twitter.com/epObAVwJnp— Whitney Wild (@WhitneyWReports) June 13, 2022
      Scene outside the Supreme Court this morning. Two small groups of protesters have gathered with a group of police on bicycles separating the two groups. T-minutes 40 minutes until opinions. ⁦I’m standing by with ⁦@fox5dc⁩. Join us live on ⁦@SCOTUSblog⁩ TikTok. pic.twitter.com/PNPQifGuD2— Katie Barlow (@katieleebarlow) June 13, 2022
      Last month, the court was rocked by the unprecedented leak of a draft opinion showing conservatives were poised to strike down Roe v Wade and end abortion rights nationwide. Those same justices may also opt to expand the ability to carry concealed weapons and curb the government’s regulatory powers.Bill Stepien, the former campaign manager for Donald Trump who was to be a main witness in today’s hearing of the January 6 committee, will not attend due to an emergency.The hearing is now delayed by 30 minutes to 10.30am, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports:Just in: Former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien is no longer appearing at the second Jan. 6 committee hearing this morning due to a family emergency — and hearing has been delayed to around 10:30a ET— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) June 13, 2022
      The development throws a wrench into the plans for the committee’s second hearing, which was to look deeper into the conspiracy theories that fueled the attack on the Capitol.Lies are going to be the subject of this morning’s January 6 committee hearing, specifically those that motivated Donald Trump’s supporters to attack the Capitol, the Guardian’s Joan E Greve reports:The House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection in 2021 will reconvene Monday to scrutinize the conspiracy theories that led a group of Donald Trump’s supporters to attack the US Capitol.The Democratic chair of the committee, Mississippi congressman Bennie Thompson, has said the second hearing will focus on “the lies that convinced those men and others to storm the Capitol to try to stop the transfer of power”.“We’re going to take a close look at the first part of Trump’s attack on the rule of law, when he lit the fuse that ultimately resulted in the violence of January 6,” Thompson said on Thursday.House panel to scrutinize conspiracy theories that led to Capitol attackRead moreGood morning, everybody. Today could be a very big day in Washington, with the inquiry into the January 6 insurrection continuing, the supreme court releasing opinions and the Senate considering a proposal to restrict gun access following a spate of mass shootings.Here’s a rundown of what to expect:
      Senators have reached a deal on a framework for gun control legislation meant to respond to recent mass shootings in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas, which looks like it could get the support of enough Republicans and Democrats to pass the chamber.
      The supreme court will release another batch of decisions at 10 am eastern time. There’s no telling what the court will opt to release, but major rulings on abortion rights, gun control and environmental regulation are expected before the term is out.
      At the same time, the January 6 committee will begin its second hearing following last Thursday’s blockbuster look into what happened at the Capitol that day. Today’s hearing will look deeper at the conspiracy theories that motivated the attack.
      Democratic senator Bernie Sanders and Republican senator Lindsey Graham will take part in a one-hour debate organized by The Senate Project, intended to build bridges between the two parties while also allowing the lawmakers to air their (very different) perspectives on politics. The event begins at 12 pm eastern time, and will be streamed on Fox Nation. More

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      Fox News will air January 6 hearings, reflecting split between news and hosts

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      Fox News will air January 6 hearings, reflecting split between news and hostsAnchor Bret Baier said Trump looked ‘really bad’ last week as hosts continue to call the proceedings a sham Last week, Fox News was the only major outlet not to air the primetime hearing hosted by the House committee investigating the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. But for the committee’s daytime session on Monday, Fox plans to join the rest of the pack.Fox officials are apparently justifying the switch by saying that the network’s hosts set the agenda for prime time, and they rejected live coverage of Thursday evening’s hearing, CNN reported. Daytime, however, is for news, opening the door for Fox to televise Monday’s session live at 10am ET.The decision by the conservative-leaning network to air the hearing comes amid a discernible split between the network’s news and commentary broadcasts about the meaning of what happened last week and the value of what’s in store.News anchor Bret Baier said Donald Trump looked “really bad” in a video presentation shown at Thursday’s January 6 primetime session“The focus seems to be the target of President Donald Trump, and he looks really bad in this presentation,” Baier said. “He’s just watching the TVs and kind of applauding what’s happening.”Baier also noted that the video of Trump’s speech was cut off before he told the crowd to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”.At the same time, Fox News’ more politically attuned hosts have continued to disparage the hearings. Host Mark Levin described hearings as a “sham” over the weekend.“This will go down in history as a dark mark on the American political system,” Levin said, adding: “It’s an abomination to the American system, not just of justice but our congressional and representative system.”During Thursday’s hearings, host Tucker Carlson broadcast an hour-long, commercial-free discussion of alternative interpretations of the deadly riot, including that it had been instigated by FBI agents.“It tells you a lot about the priorities of our ruling class that the rest of us are getting yet another lecture about January 6 tonight – from our moral inferiors, no less,” Carlson said.“They are lying, and we are not going to help them do it,” he added.In Monday’s session, the second of six scheduled public hearings, the committee chair, Bennie Thompson, will lead a more traditional congressional hearing that will highlight the origins of the “big lie” – Trump’s claims that the election he lost to Joe Biden had been rigged – and how that claim was propagated between 4 November 2020 and 6 January, when Congress moved to certify the election results.The committee will seek to highlight evidence that the Trump campaign and the Republican party sought funds from supporters to bolster their claim and then inundated them with messages to reinforce it.“Some of those individuals … echoed those very same lies the former president peddled in the run-up to the insurrection,” a select committee aide said on Sunday evening.Those preparations, coupled with an effort to question the integrity of mail-in voting and attempts to pressure state legislators to appoint pro-Trump electors, were made alongside intensifying claims by Trump that he had actually won the election.The committee will hear from Chris Stirewalt, Fox News’ former political editor, who made the decision to call Arizona for Biden.It was supposed to also hear from Bill Stepien, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, but his appearance was canceled because his wife was reportedly in labor.Stepien “was present for key conversations about what the data showed about Mr Trump’s chances of succeeding in an effort to win swing states, beginning on election night”, according to the New York Times.A second panel features Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican election lawyer who helped orchestrate the Republican recount strategy in Florida after the 2000 election; BJ Pak, a former US attorney based in north Georgia pressured by Trump to establish election fraud claims; and Al Schmidt, a city commissioner in Philadelphia.“We’re going to hear testimony from government officials who were the ones who looked for the fraud, and about how the effort to uncover these baseless allegations bore no fruit,” a committee aide said on Sunday night. “Simply, the fraud that they were looking for didn’t exist.”TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsFox NewsnewsReuse this content More

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      House panel to scrutinize conspiracy theories that led to Capitol attack

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      House panel to scrutinize conspiracy theories that led to Capitol attackHouse committee’s second hearing on Monday will focus on ‘the lies that convinced those men and others to storm the Capitol’ The House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection in 2021 will reconvene Monday to scrutinize the conspiracy theories that led a group of Donald Trump’s supporters to attack the US Capitol.House January 6 panel shows it still has surprises in store in televised hearingRead moreThe Democratic chair of the committee, Mississippi congressman Bennie Thompson, has said the second hearing will focus on “the lies that convinced those men and others to storm the Capitol to try to stop the transfer of power”.“We’re going to take a close look at the first part of Trump’s attack on the rule of law, when he lit the fuse that ultimately resulted in the violence of January 6,” Thompson said on Thursday.The select committee said ahead of the hearing that the panel would focus on how Trump embraced baseless claims of a stolen election starting on election night – when he falsely declared victory over Joe Biden – and seized upon those claims in the weeks that followed.Trump was told repeatedly on election night that he did not have the numbers to win, the panel is expected to say, relying on live witness testimony from former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien and former Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt.The select committee will then show how Trump embraced election fraud claims despite being told otherwise by top officials, hearing from former US attorney BJay Pak, who resigned when he was told Trump would fire him for not pushing harder that fraud occurred in Georgia.Trump had an obligation to make court challenges if he believed there was fraud, the panel will say, and also accept the decisions of the courts – he lost virtually every case – but he instead chose to attack the “rule of law”.The select committee said it would also show how Trump and the Republican political apparatus used those baseless claims to rake in millions of dollars from unsuspecting Americans in fundraising, and how the Capitol attack was fueled by those claims perpetuated by Trump.The hearing on Monday, which will last around two hours and see select committee member Zoe Lofgren take a lead role in questioning witnesses instead of committee counsel, comes four days after the panel held its first hearing in primetime.At that first session, the select committee featured shocking and at times emotional testimony from key witnesses who have spoken to investigators over the past year as they conducted the first stage of their inquiry behind closed doors in Washington.Members of Trump’s inner circle testified that the former president was repeatedly told his claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election that deprived him of victory over Democrat Joe Biden were entirely baseless, but he continued to spread those lies in the weeks leading up to the insurrection.“I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit,” William Barr, Trump’s former attorney general, told investigators in a clip shared on Thursday.Last week’s hearing laid the groundwork for the committee’s argument that Trump played a central role in the planning of the insurrection and bears personal responsibility for the deadly attack. A mob overran the US Capitol on January 6 last year, the day that Congress was due to officially certify Biden’s win over Trump in the previous Novembers presidential election.The five remaining hearings are expected to build upon that argument, as committee members attempt to present a meticulous case for Trump’s culpability.“On the morning of January 6, President Donald Trump’s intention was to remain president of the United States despite the lawful outcome of the 2020 election and in violation of his constitutional obligation to relinquish power,” Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney, the Republican vice-chair of the committee, said Thursday.“Over multiple months, Donald Trump oversaw and coordinated a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power. In our hearings, you will see evidence of each element of this plan.”The Monday hearing will provide committee members with another opportunity to convince the country that America’s democracy is facing a threat from those who do not believe in free and fair election. The panel has accused Trump and his associates of having engaged in a “criminal conspiracy” and argues that the former president bears personal responsibility for the deadly attack on the US Capitol.Although Trump was impeached by the House for inciting the insurrection, he was acquitted by the Senate, leaving many of his critics feeling as though he was not held accountable for his actions.If the committee is successful in building its case against Trump, the hearings could deliver a devastating blow to the former president’s hopes of making a political comeback in the 2024 presidential election. But if Americans are unmoved by the committee’s findings, the country faces the specter of another attempted coup, Thompson warned.“Our democracy remains in danger. The conspiracy to thwart the will of the people is not over,” Thompson said on Thursday. “January 6 and the lies that led to insurrection have put two and a half centuries of constitutional democracy at risk. The world is watching what we do here.”Hugo Lowell contributed to this reportTopicsUS Capitol attackHouse of RepresentativesDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Capitol attack panel members urge DoJ to consider criminal charges for Trump

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      Capitol attack panel members urge DoJ to consider criminal charges for Trump‘I’d like to see DoJ investigate any credible allegation of criminal activity,’ says Adam Schiff as pressure builds on Merrick Garland Members of the House committee investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat called on Sunday for the US justice department to consider a criminal indictment for the former president and warned that “the danger is still out there”.Their comments on the eve of the second of the panel’s televised hearings into the January 6 2021 insurrection and deadly Capitol attack will add further pressure on attorney general Merrick Garland, who has angered some Democrats by so far taking no action despite growing evidence of Trump’s culpability.“There are certain actions, parts of these different lines of effort to overturn the election, that I don’t see evidence the justice department is investigating,” committee member Adam Schiff, Democratic congressman for California, told ABC’s This Week.“I would like to see the justice department investigate any credible allegation of criminal activity on the part of Donald Trump.”Schiff, who led Democrats’ prosecution of Trump at his first impeachment trial in 2020, said Thursday’s primetime televised hearing, which attracted 20 million viewers, provided “just a sample” of the evidence the panel has gathered.During Monday’s daytime hearing, he said, the committee will “tell the story of how Trump knowingly propagated his big lie” that his election defeat by Joe Biden was stolen from him by fraud, and how that lie was used to spread disinformation by Trump and his allies.“Once the evidence is accumulated by the justice department, it needs to make a decision about whether it can prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt the president’s guilt or anyone else’s,” Schiff said.“But they need to be investigated if there’s credible evidence, which I think there is.”Maryland Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, another panel member, appeared on CNN’s State of the Union to assert his confidence that Garland “knows what’s at stake”.“One of the conventions that was crushed during the Trump administration was respect by politicians for the independence of the law enforcement function,” Raskin said.“Attorney general Garland is my constituent, and I don’t browbeat my constituents [but] he knows, his staff knows, US attorneys know, what’s at stake here.“They know the importance of it, but I think they are rightfully paying close attention to precedent in history as well as the facts of this case.”Raskin said Thursday’s televised hearing had “pierced the sound barrier” but that “Americans need to pay further attention because the danger is still out there”.It emerged that “multiple” Republican congress members had sought pardons from Trump, with Pennsylvania representative Scott Perry, the only one identified so far, denying he had done so.Perry was included in a meeting of congressional Republicans before the 6 January attack that strategized how to prevent lawmakers certifying Biden’s victory on that day.“The seeking of pardons is a powerful demonstration of the consciousness of guilt, or at least the consciousness that you may be in trouble,” Raskin said.“Everything we’re doing is documented by evidence, unlike the big lie, which is based on nonsense. Everything that we’re doing is based on facts.”TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsDonald TrumpMerrick GarlandnewsReuse this content More

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      Capitol attack pardon revelations could spell doom for Trump and allies

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      Capitol attack pardon revelations could spell doom for Trump and alliesDisclosure that many House Republicans sought presidential pardon may show they believed election fraud claim was false The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack revealed at its inaugural hearing that Donald Trump’s top Republican allies in Congress sought pardons after the January 6 insurrection, a major disclosure that bolstered the claim that the event amounted to a coup and is likely to cause serious scrutiny for those implicated.The news that multiple House Republicans asked the Trump White House for pardons – an apparent consciousness of guilt – was one of three revelations portending potentially perilous legal and political moments to come for Trump and his allies.January 6 hearing: Trump was at heart of plot that led to ‘attempted coup’Read moreAt the hearing, the panel’s vice-chair Liz Cheney named only one Republican member of Congress, congressman Scott Perry, the current chair of the ultra conservative House freedom caucus, who sought a presidential pardon for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.The select committee did not elaborate on which other House Republicans were asking for pardons or more significantly, for which crimes they were seeking pardons, but it appeared to show at the minimum that they knew they had been involved in likely illegal conduct.The extraordinary claim also raised the prospect that the Republican members of Congress seeking clemency believed Trump’s election fraud claims were baseless: for why would they need pardons if they really were only raising legitimate questions about the election.“It’s hard to find a more explicit statement of consciousness of guilt than looking for a pardon for actions you’ve just taken, assisting in a plan to overthrow the results of a presidential election,” Jamie Raskin, a member of the select committee, told reporters.Willful blindnessThe disclosure about the pardons came during the opening hour of the hearing where the panel made the case that Trump could not credibly believe he had won the 2020 election after some of his most senior advisors told him repeatedly that he had lost to Joe Biden.Trump, according to videos of closed-door depositions played by the select committee, was told by his data experts he lost the election, told by former attorney general Bill Barr that his election fraud claims were “bullshit”, a conclusion Ivanka Trump said she accepted.The admissions by some of Trump’s top aides are important since they could put federal prosecutors one step closer to being able to charge Trump with obstructing an official proceeding or defrauding the United States on the basis of election fraud claims he knew were false.At the heart of the case the panel appears to be trying to make is the legal doctrine of “willful blindness”, as former US attorney Joyce Vance wrote for MSNBC, which says a defendant cannot say they weren’t aware of something if they were credibly notified of the truth.The potential case against Trump might take the form that he could not use, as his defense against charges he violated the law to stop Biden’s certification on January 6, that he believed there was election fraud, when he had been credibly notified it was “bullshit”.Trump-Flynn-Powell meetingAlso in the first hour of the hearing, the select committee cast in a new light the contentious 18 December 2020 meeting Trump had at the White House with his former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and former Trump lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell.The Guardian has reported extensively on that meeting, where Powell urged Trump to sign an executive order to seize voting machines and suspend normal law, based on Trump’s executive order 13848, and to appoint her special counsel to investigate election fraud.Cheney confirmed the reporting by this newspaper and others, that the group discussed “dramatic steps” such as seizing voting machines, but also alluded to a potential discussion about somehow obstructing Biden’s election win certification.The basis for that characterization, based on how Cheney described the late night meeting in the Oval Office that later continued in the White House residence, appears to be how Trump, just hours later, tweeted that there would be a “wild protest” on January 6.It was not clear whether Cheney was laying the groundwork for the select committee to tie Trump into a conspiracy of some sort, claiming this represented two people entering an agreement and taking overt steps to accomplishing it – the legal standard for conspiracy.But the “wild protest” phrase would shortly after be seized upon by some of the most prominent far-right political operatives.Hours after Trump’s tweet, according to archived versions of its website, Stop the Steal changed its banner to advertise a “wild protest” before Ali Alexander, who led the movement, even applied for a permit to stage a rally on the east side of the Capitol on January 6.TopicsUS newsDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More