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      Kamala Harris drove within yards of pipe bomb on January 6 – report

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      Kamala Harris drove within yards of pipe bomb on January 6 – reportThen vice-president elect remained inside DNC for nearly two hours before bomb was found, new details by CNN reveal Kamala Harris, then vice-president elect, drove within yards of a pipe bomb left outside the Democratic National Committee on January 6 2021 and remained inside for nearly two hours before the bomb was found, it was reported on Monday.Quiet part loud: Trump says Pence ‘could have overturned the election’Read moreHarris’s proximity to the bomb was known previously, but not how close or for how long. CNN reported the new details in the case, part of alarming events in Washington on the day Congress met to certify Joe Biden’s election victory over Donald Trump.A pipe bomb was also left near the Republican National Committee. More than a year later, no suspect has been named or apprehended.Citing “multiple sources”, CNN said Harris “pulled into DNC headquarters in Washington at around 11.30am ET with her motorcade through the garage leading to the parking deck near where law enforcement discovered the pipe bomb”.It also cited a US Capitol police document that showed “an unnamed ‘protectee’ was removed from the DNC building at approximately 1.14pm ET – seven minutes after Capitol Police began investigating the bomb”.That protectee was known to be Harris when Politico first reported the story, but it was not known how long she was in the building.More than 700 people have been charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on January 6, including 11 members of a far-right militia who face charges of seditious conspiracy. One rioter pleaded guilty to bringing with him Molotov cocktails, guns and other weapons.The rioters attacked after Donald Trump told them to “fight like hell” in service of his lie that his defeat by Biden was the result of electoral fraud. Seven people died and more than 100 police officers were injured.Trump was impeached but acquitted. A House committee has recommended criminal charges. Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, has pleaded not guilty to contempt of Congress.The White House and Harris’s office did not comment on CNN’s pipe bomb report. A Secret Service spokesperson told CNN that “in order to maintain operational security”, it did not comment on protection arrangements.CNN said a “law enforcement source” said the Secret Service “swept the interior of the building, the driveway, parking deck and entrances and exits prior to [Harris’s] arrival” and Harris was “evacuated using an alternate route away from the bomb”.Earlier this month, Lis Wiehl, a former prosecutor and author of a book on the hunt for the Unabomber, told the Atlantic would-be bombers were usually “trying to send a message through killing people”.Of the Capitol Hill pipe bomber, she said: “Because it wasn’t successful and they weren’t apprehended, you can bet they’re thinking about doing it again – and doing it better.”TopicsKamala HarrisUS Capitol attackUS politicsJoe BidennewsReuse this content More

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      Trump pardon promise for Capitol rioters ‘stuff of dictators’ – Nixon aide

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      Trump pardon promise for Capitol rioters ‘stuff of dictators’ – Nixon aideTrump makes promise at rally in Texas on SaturdayJohn Dean: ‘Failure to confront tyrant encourages bad behavior’ Donald Trump’s promise to pardon supporters who attacked the US Capitol on January 6 2021 was “the stuff of dictators”, Richard Nixon’s White House counsel warned.Trump tours the country endorsing candidates to reinforce the ‘big lie’Read moreTrump made the promise at a rally in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday.“If I run and if I win,” he said, referring to the 2024 presidential election, “we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”More than 700 people have been charged in connection with the Capitol attack, around which seven people died as Trump supporters tried to stop certification of his election defeat, in service of his lie that it was caused by electoral fraud. More than 100 police officers were hurt.Eleven members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia have been charged with seditious conspiracy. Trump himself was impeached for inciting the riot. Ten House Republicans voted to impeach but Trump was acquitted when only seven Republican senators found him guilty. That left him free to run for office again.John Dean, 83, was White House counsel from 1970 to 1973 before being disbarred and detained as a result of the Watergate scandal, which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Dean responded to Trump on Twitter.“This is beyond being a demagogue to the stuff of dictators,” he wrote. “He is defying the rule of law. Failure to confront a tyrant only encourages bad behaviour. If thinking Americans don’t understand what Trump is doing and what the criminal justice system must do we are all in big trouble!”Trump was generous with pardons in office, recipients including Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn, both now targets of the House committee investigating January 6 and with Trump in its sights. On Sunday morning, the New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu, widely seen as a relative moderate in Trump’s Republican party, was asked if pardons should be offered to Capitol rioters.“Of course not,” he told CNN’s State of the Union. “Oh, my goodness. No.”Even Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator and dogged Trump ally, said the former president was wrong.“I don’t want to send any signals that it was OK to defile the Capitol,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation. “I want to deter what people did on January 6, and those who did it, I hope they go to jail and get the book thrown at them because they deserve it.”But a moderate Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, indicated the hold Trump has on the party. Appearing on ABC’s This Week, the senator said Trump should not “have made that pledge to do pardons. We should let the judicial process proceed.”But Collins, who voted to convict Trump over the Capitol attack, would not say that she would not support him if he ran for president again.“Well certainly it’s not likely given the many other qualified candidates that we have, that have expressed interest in running,” she said. “So it’s very unlikely.”Trump dominates polling concerning potential Republican nominees for 2024.Others deplored Trump’s words in Texas. Richard Painter, a White House ethics counsel under George W Bush, said the promise of pardons should, constitutionally speaking, stop Trump running again.“This alone is giving aid or comfort to an insurrection within the meaning of the 14th amendment, section three,” Painter wrote. “Trump is DISQUALIFIED from public office.”Trump also complained about investigations of his business and political affairs which have landed him legal jeopardy. On Sunday, Graham, whose actions in support of Trump are being investigated in Georgia, said he would cooperate if asked.“Yeah,” he said. “Give me a call.”But he also complained about a supposed “effort here to use the law, I think inappropriately. So I don’t know what they’re going to do in Fulton county [Georgia]. I don’t know what the January 6 committee is going to do. I expect those who defile the Capitol to be prosecuted. But there’s a political movement using the law to try to knock Trump out of running. And I, particularly, don’t like it or appreciate it.”Lindsey Graham, reverse ferret: how John McCain’s spaniel became Trump’s poodleRead moreIn Texas, Trump urged supporters to protest.“If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal,” he said, “I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington DC, in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere, because our country and our elections are corrupt.”Prosecutors, he said, were “trying to put me in jail. These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They’re racists and they’re very sick. They’re mentally sick. They’re going after me without any protection of my rights by the supreme court or most other courts.”Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor now a legal analyst for NBC, said: “Trump is not only encouraging his supporters to violence if he’s arrest[ed], he’s also signaling that he’ll pardon them, just as he’ll pardon the [January 6] insurrectionists.“Will this finally move prosecutors to hold him accountable for his crimes?”TopicsDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS elections 2024TexasnewsReuse this content More

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      January 6 panel subpoenas figures in scheme backing fake Trump electors

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      January 6 panel subpoenas figures in scheme backing fake Trump electorsHouse committee seeks to determine whether Trump White House was behind plan to send false certificates to Congress The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack on Friday issued subpoenas to lead participants in an audacious scheme to send fake Trump slates of electors to Congress.The development comes as the panel seeks to learn whether the plan was coordinated by the Trump White House.The fake certificates – which falsely declared Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 election, though the states had officially declared otherwise – are significant as they appear to have been a central tenet of the former president’s effort to return himself to power.Capitol attack committee has spoken to Trump AG William Barr, chairman saysRead moreThe fake slates of electors were sent to Congress from seven contested states that were in fact won by Joe Biden. Trump and his allies might have hoped to use them as justification for having Biden’s wins in those states rejected.Congressman Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the select committee, said that he had authorized subpoenas to 14 Republicans who were listed as the chairperson and the secretary of each group of “alternate electors” in order to learn how the scheme was coordinated.The move by the select committee comes days after the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, confirmed that the justice department had opened an investigation into the scheme, raising the stakes for the fake electors and any Trump White House aides who may have been involved.Thompson issued subpoenas to the two most senior Republicans who signed onto the fake certificates in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, including several prominent current and former state Republican party leaders.The subpoena targets included: Nancy Cottle, Loraine Pellegrino, David Shafer, Shawn Still, Kathy Berden, Mayra Rodriguez, Jewll Powdrell, Deborah Maestas, Michael McDonald, James DeGraffenreid, Bill Bachenberg, Lisa Patton, Andrew Hitt and Kelly Ruh.Trump’s plan to return himself to office rested on two elements: the existence, or possible existence, of alternate slates, and then-vice president Mike Pence using the ambiguity of “dueling slates” for Trump and Biden to reject those results at Biden’s certification.The effort to subvert the results of the 2020 election at the joint session of Congress on 6 January fell apart after Pence refused to abuse his ceremonial role to certify the results, and it was clear the “alternate slates” were not legitimate certificates.But in some cases, top officials, such as Republican National Committee members Berden and DeGraffenreid and former state GOP chairs Hitt and Maestas, signed the fake certificates that used official state seals and sent them to the National Archives.“The phony electors were part of the plan to create chaos on Jan. 6,” said congressman Jamie Raskin, a member of the select committee. “The fake slates were an effort to create the illusion of contested state results,” as “a pretext for unilateral rejection of electors.”The panel is seeking to examine whether the effort was coordinated by the Trump White House and whether it amounted to a crime, according to a source familiar with the investigation. The subpoenas compel the production of documents and testimony through February.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsHouse of RepresentativesRepublicansDonald TrumpUS elections 2020newsReuse this content More

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      Seditious conspiracy is rarely proven. The Oath Keepers trial is a litmus test

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      Seditious conspiracy is rarely proven. The Oath Keepers trial is a litmus testExtensive planning and tangible action by the far-right militia group’s members provide ‘strong grounds’ for case, experts say Later this year the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia and nine alleged co-conspirators will be the first to face trial on seditious conspiracy charges related to the insurrection at the US Capitol.Outrage as Newt Gingrich says Capitol attack investigators could be jailedRead moreThe charges are significant because they allege that the January 6 attack went beyond disorderly conduct and assaults on law enforcement, instead constituting an organized and violent attempt to stop the democratic transfer of power.But because sedition charges so rarely go to trial, there isn’t a great deal of precedent for how such trials proceed, experts say. And US prosecutors have a checkered history in securing sedition convictions. “It’s been used in ways that have been absurd and has been used in ways that were slam dunks,” said Joshua Braver, an assistant professor of law at the University of Wisconsin.But unlike some previous uses of seditious conspiracy, many experts say the case against the Oath Keepers is strong. “This case is different. This case is a plan that was executed and the federal government is on much stronger grounds,” Braver said. “If anything is seditious conspiracy, this is it.”The checkered history of seditious conspiracy trialsSeditious conspiracy is a broad statute that concerns attempts to overthrow the government, levy war against it or prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law. It also can be applied in cases where suspects seize any government property and carries up to 20 years in prison if convicted.Partly because seditious conspiracy allegations carry so much political weight, prosecutors have generally been hesitant to bring such charges in the past.“Seditious conspiracy charges are rarely used in American jurisprudence,” said Jeffrey Ian Ross, a criminologist and expert on political crime at the University of Baltimore. Prosecutors can be wary of issuing such charges, even in cases that may fall under its broad statute, he added.The last successfully prosecuted seditious conspiracy case came in the mid-1990s, when authorities charged Islamist extremist Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman and nine co-conspirators with seditious conspiracy. Prosecutors alleged that Abdel-Rahman and his followers plotted to bomb the United Nations, the FBI building and several other landmarks around New York City.During the trial, prosecutors presented the jury with speeches of Abdel-Rahman and a recording from an FBI informant in which Abdel-Rahman discussed attacking military installations. The defense, meanwhile, argued that Abdel-Rahman’s speech was constitutionally protected and that he never directly planned attacks. After a week of deliberation, jury members convicted the group of seditious conspiracy along with numerous other charges. Abdel-Rahman died in prison in 2017.Decades before the Abdel-Rahman trial, prosecutors secured a seditious conspiracy conviction against Puerto Rican nationalists who stormed the Capitol building. The Puerto Rican independence activist Lolita Lebrón and three accomplices entered the House floor and fired dozens of bullets around the chamber, wounding five legislators. The group, along with numerous people charged as co-conspirators, were convicted of seditious conspiracy and spent over two decades in jail until Jimmy Carter commuted their sentence in 1979.Other seditious conspiracy cases have fallen apart once they have gone to trial, including the most recent attempt at the charge in 2012. Prosecutors alleged that nine members of the Christian far-right Hutaree militia committed seditious conspiracy through a plot to kill a police officer and then attack their funeral in order to incite an uprising against the government. The defense successfully argued that militia members’ discussion of violent rebellion was essentially fantastical boasting, protected by the first amendment and that any specific plots were instigated by an FBI informant who had infiltrated the group. The militia members were ultimately acquitted of sedition, albeit with several pleading guilty to less severe weapons charges.A 1988 seditious conspiracy trial involving 13 white supremacists accused of plotting to overthrow the government and assassinate a federal judge provided an even more severe cautionary tale. Prosecutors in the case cut a plea deal with a white supremacist leader, Glenn Miller, who potentially faced decades in prison for other crimes, agreeing to reduce his charges in exchange for him testifying in the sedition trial. But Miller’s testimony turned out to be weak and unreliable, leading to an all-white jury acquitting all 13 white supremacists. The national chaplain of the Ku Klux Klan hugged several defendants following the verdict and touted it as a victory for white nationalism.In the years after the trial, Miller was released from prison and once again became active in the white supremacist movement despite being in the federal witness protection program. In 2014, he killed three people, including a 14-year-old boy, at a Jewish community center and retirement home in Kansas. He died in prison last May.The case against the Oath KeepersThe case against Rhodes and the Oath Keepers is more straightforward than past seditious conspiracy charges against the far right, experts say, both because there appears to be extensive evidence of planning before the Capitol attack and because numerous members took tangible actions to breach the Capitol.Even Rhodes, who is not believed to have actually stormed the building, is alleged to have plotted to bring weapons to the area and coordinate militia movements.In the weeks before the insurrection, Rhodes allegedly purchased tens of thousands of dollars worth of weapons and began communicating to other Oath Keepers in an encrypted group chat. “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war,” he messaged days after the presidential election. One Oath Keeper admitted as part of a plea deal last year that he brought an M4 rifle to a Comfort Inn hotel near the Capitol, while Rhodes and others allegedly discussed “quick reaction force” teams that could move into Washington DC with firearms. Once inside the Capitol, prosecutors state in their indictment that one group of Oath Keepers moved in a military “stack” formation and went in search of the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.The Oath Keepers “coordinated travel across the country to enter Washington, DC, equipped themselves with a variety of weapons, donned combat and tactical gear, and were prepared to answer Rhodes’s call to take up arms”, the charging documents against Rhodes state.Rhodes this week pleaded not guilty to the charges and has repeatedly denied that he has done anything wrong or broken any laws. After federal agents used a warrant to seize his phone in May last year, Rhodes stated that he sat for a nearly three-hour interview with authorities and claimed he had nothing to hide. He claims that Oath Keepers who entered the Capitol went “totally off mission” and that he was only there to prevent his militia members from getting into trouble. At a Texas rally in the months following the insurrection, he told a crowd that he may go to jail for “made-up crimes”.Rhodes was denied bail, in part because the federal judge overseeing his detention hearing stated that the militia leader had installed “elaborate escape tunnels” on his property and posed a flight risk.As one of the most prominent leaders in the far-right movement over the past decade, Rhodes’s trial is set to be the highest-profile case so far in the investigation and one of the most significant domestic extremism cases in years.More than 700 people are charged with crimes related to the insurrection, but the majority of those cases have involved less complex charges that don’t require proving the type of coordination and planning that seditious conspiracy indictments involve. Meanwhile, most of the more than 150 people who have so far pleaded guilty in the investigation have received relatively short sentences or no jail time at all.“They’ve gone for the low-hanging fruit first and things are going to get more interesting as the days go by,” Ross said.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsWashington DCLaw (US)featuresReuse this content More

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      Man who wore ‘Camp Auschwitz’ shirt admits joining US Capitol rioters

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      Man who wore ‘Camp Auschwitz’ shirt admits joining US Capitol rioters Robert Keith Packer of Virginia pleads guilty to parading, demonstrating or picketing in Capitol building A Virginia man who wore a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt at the US Capitol during last year’s riot pleaded guilty on Wednesday to joining the mob of people who stormed the building. Photographs of Robert Keith Packer wearing the sweatshirt with the antisemitic message went viral after the 6 January 2021 insurrection. The words “Camp Auschwitz” were above an image of a human skull. Packer’s sweatshirt also bore the phrase “work brings freedom”, a rough translation of the German words above the entrance gate to Auschwitz, the concentration camp in Poland where Nazis killed more than 1 million men, women and children.Packer’s guilty plea came one day before Holocaust Memorial Day.Packer, 57, of Newport News, Virginia, pleaded guilty to parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building, a misdemeanor that carries a maximum sentence of six months imprisonment. The US district judge Carl Nichols is scheduled to sentence him on 7 April. FBI agents arrested Packer a week after the riot. He remains free pending his sentencing hearing. A witness who contacted law enforcement recognized Packer as a regular customer at a store near Newport News. A surveillance camera captured an image of him wearing the same sweatshirt in the store in December 2020. Packer’s sweatshirt “appears to be a symbol of Nazi hate ideology”, an FBI agent wrote in an affidavit. The assistant US attorney Mona Furst said Packer entered the Capitol despite seeing broken glass and police officers using teargas. Packer was in the area where a police officer shot a rioter, Ashli Babbitt, and he left the building after that fatal shooting, Furst said. A photograph of Packer inside the Capitol shows him near people holding a broken nameplate from the office of the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi. More than 730 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the Capitol riot. About 200 of them have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsThe far rightnewsReuse this content More

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      Outrage as Newt Gingrich says Capitol attack investigators could be jailed

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      Outrage as Newt Gingrich says Capitol attack investigators could be jailed
      Committee member Zoe Lofgren: ‘I think Newt has really lost it’
      ‘Walls closing in’: Trump reels from week of political setbacks
      Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, stoked outrage on Sunday by predicting members of the House committee investigating the Capitol attack will be imprisoned if Republicans retake the chamber this year.Capitol attack committee has spoken to Trump AG William Barr, chairman saysRead moreOne of two Republicans on the committee, Liz Cheney, said: “A former speaker of the House is threatening jail time for members of Congress who are investigating the violent attack on our Capitol and our constitution. This is what it looks like when the rule of law unravels.”Gingrich made his name with scorched-earth opposition to Bill Clinton in the 1990s and ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. He is now a prominent Trump supporter, rightwing gadfly and adviser to House Republican leaders.He made his prediction on Fox News, for which he is a contributor.Calling the members of the 6 January committee “wolves [who] are going to find out that they’re now sheep”, he said that if Republicans take Congress in November, “this is all going to come crashing down … they’re the ones who in fact, I think, face a real risk of jail for the kinds of laws they’re breaking”.The 6 January committee has recommended criminal charges for the former White House adviser Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows, Trump’s final chief of staff. Both refused to comply with subpoenas.Bannon has pleaded not guilty to contempt of Congress, a charge that carries a year in jail, with a trial set for the summer. The Department of Justice has not acted regarding Meadows.Gingrich said: “You have, both with Attorney General [Merrick] Garland and this select committee on 6 January, people who have run amok … they’re running over people’s civil liberties.“And what they need to understand is on 4 January next year, you’re going to have a Republican majority in the House and a Republican majority in the Senate. And all these people who have been so tough, and so mean, and so nasty are going to be delivered subpoenas for every document, every conversation, every tweet, every email.”Gingrich also said the committee was “basically a lynch mob”.Another member of the committee, the Democrat Zoe Lofgren, told CNN Gingrich’s comments were “just bizarre. I think Newt has really lost it. You know, it leaves me speechless.”Alluding to Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat in part through the Capitol putsch, Lofgren added: “I mean, unless he is assuming that the government does get overthrown and there’s no system of justice.”Most observers expect Republicans to at least retake the House in November and to turn their sights on Democrats, who impeached Trump twice, and Joe Biden.But some see a legal net closing on Trump himself. Last week it emerged that the 6 January committee has requested interviews with figures including Ivanka Trump, a move that prompted the former president to complain about “vicious people” who “go after children”.Ivanka Trump is 40. Furthermore, Donald Trump’s niece was among observers to point out that Trump himself has no problem going after other people’s children.Speaking to MSNBC, Mary Trump accused her uncle of “enormous hypocrisy”, for going after Hunter Biden, the president’s son, “who last I checked never worked for the federal government, so his double standard is grotesque on its face”.Mary Trump also had a warning for her cousin, saying Trump “will throw anybody under the bus if he believes it’s in his best interest to do so”.Ivanka Trump asked to cooperate with Capitol attack committeeRead moreAlso on Sunday, the chair of the House committee, the Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson, told CBS the panel has spoken to William Barr, Trump’s second attorney general.Barr stoked criticism by overseeing investigation of Trump’s claims of electoral fraud in his defeat by Biden but infuriated the president when he said no evidence was found. He resigned before 6 January.Cheney and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois defied Republican leadership to join the select committee. Kinzinger will retire at the midterms. Cheney faces a Trump-endorsed challenger.Other senior Republicans, including Trump allies Jim Jordan and Scott Perry and the minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, have refused requests to co-operate with the House committee.TopicsRepublicansUS Capitol attacknewsReuse this content More

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      Capitol attack committee has spoken to Trump AG William Barr, chairman says

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      Capitol attack committee has spoken to Trump AG William Barr, chairman says
      Bennie Thompson reveals attorney general interviews
      Trump complains panel is going after his children
      ’Walls closing in’: Trump reels from week of political setbacks
      The chairman of the congressional committee investigating the US Capitol attack and Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election revealed on Sunday that the panel has spoken to the former attorney general William Barr, a further indication that the inquiry has moved closer to the ex-president’s inner circle.‘House of Trump is crumbling’: why ex-president’s legal net is tighteningRead moreBennie Thompson told CBS’s Face the Nation that Barr, who was accused of making the justice department Trump’s tool but who resigned before Trump left office, had spoken more than once with the panel.“To be honest with you, we’ve had conversations with the former attorney general already,” Thompson said.His host, Margaret Brennan, asked if the panel would seek answers from Barr over the discovery of a draft executive order for the US military to seize voting machines in contested states.“We have talked to Department of Defense individuals,” Thompson said. “We are concerned that our military was part of this big lie on promoting that the election was false. If you are using the military to potentially seize voting machines, even though it’s a discussion, the public needs to know.”News of the interviews with Barr, who angered Trump by insisting there was no evidence to support his lies of a stolen election, dealt another blow to the former president, whose political and legal woes escalated significantly this week.Unlike other Trumpworld insiders who have refused to cooperate with the January 6 committee, such as the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, strategist Steve Bannon and national security adviser Michael Flynn, Barr appears to have spoken willingly.It reflects moves by the House panel to focus more closely on Trump’s actions following the election, including his inciting of the deadly January 6 attack on the US Capitol.This week, the committee asked for the cooperation of Trump’s daughter Ivanka.“Our strategy is to get to all the facts and circumstances that brought about January 6,” Thompson said.“And obviously Ivanka Trump was a major adviser to the president all along, a number of items [are] attributed to what she’s been saying and so we asked her to come in voluntarily and give us the benefit of what she knows.”The inquiry has also subpoenaed phone records of Trump’s son Eric and Kimberly Guilfoyle, partner of Donald Jr.Trump is not pleased, complaining in an interview with the rightwing Washington Examiner that the committee was made up of “vicious people” who “go after children”.Donald Trump Jr is 44, Ivanka Trump is 40 and Eric Trump is 38.TopicsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpWilliam BarrUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘The walls are closing in’: Trump reels from week of political setbacks

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      ‘The walls are closing in’: Trump reels from week of political setbacks It was a terrible seven days, with major developments in investigations of his election lies and the Capitol riot reaching into his inner circle

      ‘House of Trump is crumbling’: why the legal net is tightening
      The last time Donald Trump heard such hammer blows, they were from renovations at Mar-a-Lago that displeased the former president. But not even that sound would have left his ears ringing like last week’s avalanche of bad news that some believe nudged a criminal indictment one step closer.Rudy Giuliani and Michael Flynn to see honorary university degrees revokedRead moreNo single week in the year since Trump left the White House has been as dramatic, or for him as potentially catastrophic, as the one just passed.It included a rebuke from the supreme court over documents related to the 6 January insurrection which Trump incited; news that the congressional committee investigating the riot was closing in on Trump’s inner circle; evidence from New York’s attorney general of alleged tax fraud; and, perhaps most damaging of all, a request from a Georgia prosecutor for a grand jury in her investigation of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.The week ended with the leaking of a document showing that Trump at least pondered harnessing the military in his attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.It all left the former president with plenty to ponder.“He’s Teflon Don, he said he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and survive it, his supporters are going to support him no matter what, but I’m starting to think more and more that the walls are closing in on this guy,” said Kimberley Wehle, a respected legal analyst and professor of law at the University of Baltimore.“The most immediate thing is the grand jury in Georgia because there’s audio of him trying to get [secretary of state] Brad Raffensperger to ‘find’ votes. Under Georgia election laws as I read them that is potentially a crime.“The looming question is whether Trump will be indicted along with 11 others so far for seditious conspiracy [over the 6 January Capitol attack]. To me that’s the biggest turn of events … the justice department believes they have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of an agreement, a meeting of minds to overturn a legitimate election.“And that there are a lot of high-level people that are looped into it, including potentially Donald Trump himself, and of course he’s not president, so he’s not immune from prosecution any more.”It is that Department of Justice investigation into the deadly Capitol assault, parallel but separate to the 6 January House committee, which harbors the most legal peril for Trump. Some believe sedition charges for members of the Oath Keepers militia indicate that the inquiry has moved into a higher gear.Others, most recently Preet Bharara, former district attorney for the southern district of New York, have questioned why it appears members of Trump’s inner guard, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows, have not yet been questioned.“It’s just not a possibility they’ve tried to interview, you know, a dozen of the top people at and around the White House like the [6 January] committee has [because] they squeal like stuck pigs when people approach them,” Bharara told The New Abnormal podcast, a Daily Beast podcast.“It’s odd to have allowed all this testimony to be collected, all these documents to be subpoenaed and compiled, and they don’t look like they’ve done any of these interviews. There are some lower-level people who breached the doors to the Capitol, but I don’t think those people are giving it up in a straight line to Trump.”At a rare press conference earlier this month, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, did not mention Trump by name but sought to reassure critics of his investigation.“The justice department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law – whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy,” he said in a carefully worded address.The objectives of the House committee are easier to divine and more likely in the immediate term to cause political harm to Trump as he mulls another White House run.Thursday’s request for testimony from his daughter Ivanka, a former White House adviser, brings the investigation to the heart of Trump’s inner circle. Trump’s actions are also set to be explored in primetime TV hearings that Jamie Raskin, a Democratic member of the committee, has promised will “blow the roof off the House”.The panel also scored a big victory on Wednesday when the supreme court ended Trump’s efforts to shield more than 700 pages of White House records. The treasure trove of documents included a draft executive order directing the Department of Defense to seize voting machines, and appointing a special counsel to look into the election, in support of Trump’s “big lie” that the election was stolen.“Documents don’t die, they don’t lie,” Wehle said. “A witness can say, ‘Oh, I don’t recall,’ and dance around it. Documents cannot. Secondly, the documents will lead to more people to discuss what happened, including Ivanka Trump.”Trump himself has been uncharacteristically quiet about his week of setbacks, other than two statements attacking Fani Willis, the Democratic district attorney for Fulton county, Georgia, for requesting a grand jury to assist her investigation into his election interference.Draft Trump order told defense chief to seize swing-state voting machinesRead more“The people looking for the crime are being hounded and the people who committed the crime are being protected,” he said. “This is not the American way.”To Wehle, the week’s developments have significance not only for Trump but for November midterm elections in which Republicans are tipped to reclaim Congress.“We have to think about the January 6th committee as getting information to voters before November about sitting members who might be up for reelection,” she said.“The question is not so much whether Trump will be indicted, but who in a seat of power in the US Congress was potentially involved in this conspiracy.“Frankly, if American democracy is to be saved from single-party minority rule, November is absolutely vital.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS elections 2020US midterm elections 2022US elections 2024US CongressfeaturesReuse this content More