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      Trump privately admitted he lost 2020 election, top aides testify

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      Trump privately admitted he lost 2020 election, top aides testifyAlyssa Farah and Cassidy Hutchinson tell January 6 panel former president acknowledged he had been defeated by Joe Biden Donald Trump privately admitted to losing the 2020 election even as he worked to undermine and change the results, according to two top aides who testified before the January 6 committee.During the ninth and possibly final hearing, the committee investigating the January 6 insurrection shared new testimony from Alyssa Farah, a former White House aide, who said that a week after the election was called in favor of Biden, Trump was watching Biden on the television in the Oval Office, and said: “‘Can you believe I lost to this effing guy?’”Jan 6 hearing updates: committee plans vote to subpoena Donald Trump – liveRead moreIn another new clip of testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, she shared that Trump told Meadows: “I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out.”The committee tried to build out the case that Trump tried to change the outcome of the election, despite knowing and believing that he had lost. Adam Kinzinger, one of the two Republicans on the committee, also pointed to Trump’s actions in his final weeks in office, which carried with them a sense of reckless urgency.“President Trump rushed to complete his unfinished business,” Kinzinger said, point to one example of an order calling for an immediate withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Somalia. The order was signed on 11 November, which means troops would have to be pulled out rapidly, before Biden took office on 20 January.The results would have been “catastrophic”, Gen Keith Kellogg, Trump’s acting national security adviser, testified. “It would have been a debacle.”‘These are the highly consequential actions for a president who knows his term will shortly end,” Kinzinger said.As the panel weighs whether to directly subpoena Trump, this is the strongest evidence they have presented so far that he was fully aware of his defeat, even as he falsely alleged election fraud.TopicsDonald TrumpUS elections 2020January 6 hearingsUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘Start smashing pumpkins’: January 6 panel shows Roger Stone discussing violence

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      ‘Start smashing pumpkins’: January 6 panel shows Roger Stone discussing violenceVideo footage obtained from a Danish documentary film-maker shows Trump ally discussing violence after 2020 election The House January 6 committee on Thursday played as promised video footage of the Republican operative and Trump ally Roger Stone discussing the need for violence after the 2020 election, before 6 January 2021, the day of the deadly Capitol attack.“Let’s just hope we’re celebrating,” Stone said, in footage obtained from a Danish documentary film-maker.“I really do suspect that [the election result] will still be up in the air. When that happens, the key thing to do is to claim victory. Possession is nine tenths of law. ‘No we won, fuck you. Sorry, you’re wrong, fuck you.’”In another clip, Stone said: “I say fuck the voting, let’s get right to the violence.”To laughter, an associate with Stone said: “Start smashing pumpkins, if you know what I mean.”In her opening statement at a hearing officially designated as a business meeting, to set up votes on further investigations, the California Democrat Zoe Lofgren laid out the committee’s interest in Stone.Stone, she said, “is a political operative with a reputation for dirty tricks. In November 2019 he was convicted of lying to Congress and other crimes and sentenced to more than three years in prison. He’s also a longtime adviser to President Trump, and was in communication with President Trump throughout 2020. Mr Trump pardoned Roger Stone on 23 December 2020.”Stone, she said, “apparently knew of Mr Trump’s intentions” to reject the election result long before election day.The congresswoman said: “Although we don’t yet have all the relevant records of Roger Stone’s communications, even Stone’s own social media posts acknowledge that he spoke with Donald Trump on 27 December as preparations for January 6 were under way.”Stone, Lofgren showed, discussed the idea of appointing a special counsel to “ensure those who are attempting to steal the 2020 election through voter fraud are charged and convicted and to ensure Donald Trump continues as our president” – an idea the president is known to have discussed with allies and advisers.Lofgren mentioned links between Stone and the Capitol attack, including his attendance at the Willard hotel the night before January 6, as Trump allies planned their actions the next day, and his links with the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, extremist rightwing groups who led the Capitol riot.“Individuals from both of these organisations have been charged with a crime of seditious conspiracy,” Lofgren said. “… Multiple associates of Roger Stone from both the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys have been charged with this crime.”Lofgren also played footage of Stone refusing to answer questions from the committee, invoking his fifth-amendment right against self-incrimination.The committee also played footage of Steve Bannon, Trump’s 2016 campaign chair who became a White House strategist, discussing what would happen on January 6, and revealed a hitherto unseen memo from Tom Fitton, another pro-Trump activist.“The select committee got this pre-prepared statement from the National Archives,” Lofgren said, displaying and describing the draft statement sent by Fitton on 31 October, three days before election day.According to Fitton’s proposed memo, Trump would simply “declare we had an election today and I won”.TopicsUS Capitol attackRoger StoneUS politicsSteve BannonDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS elections 2020newsReuse this content More

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      US supreme court rejects MyPillow chief’s bid to dodge $1.3bn lawsuit

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      US supreme court rejects MyPillow chief’s bid to dodge $1.3bn lawsuitDominion Voting Systems accuses Mike Lindell, a prominent Trump supporter, of promoting baseless voter fraud claims The defamation lawsuit that voting machine company Dominion is pursuing against the MyPillow chief executive, Mike Lindell, can proceed after the US supreme court rejected the prominent Donald Trump supporter’s appeal aiming to block the case.Dominion Voting Systems in February 2021 filed a $1.3bn lawsuit accusing Lindell of promoting the debunked conspiracy theory that the company’s machines manipulated vote counts in favor of Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election that ousted Trump from the Oval Office.Ex-US army medic allegedly lured migrants on to flights to Martha’s VineyardRead moreLindell had been appealing an August 2021 ruling by federal court judge Carl Nichols, who refused to dismiss the lawsuit at the MyPillow leader’s request. An appellate court in Washington DC later decided the case was not ready for review. And in its first day back from its summer break, the US supreme court decided it would not take up Lindell’s appeal for consideration, clearing the way for the lawsuit against Lindell to progress.Nichols wrote in the ruling that Dominion “has adequately alleged that Lindell made his claims knowing that they were false or with reckless disregard for the truth” and therefore had grounds to file a defamation lawsuit.Dominion also alleges that Lindell participated in a defamatory marketing campaign against the company in efforts to sell more pillows by telling audiences to purchase MyPillow products after making his claims of election fraud and providing promotional codes related to those theories.Dominion and Smartmatic, which has also sued Lindell, have demanded damages from several Trump allies and rightwing news networks that spread conspiracy theories about the companies’ vote tallying machines being compromised to Biden’s benefit.In September, Lindell said that FBI investigators seized his cellphone in connection with an alleged election security breach in Colorado.Lindell said he was in the drive-through lane of a Hardee’s fast-food restaurant when agents surrounded him and took his phone.TopicsUS politicsUS supreme courtDonald TrumpUS elections 2020Law (US)newsReuse this content More

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      Confidence Man review: Maggie Haberman takes down Trump

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      Confidence Man review: Maggie Haberman takes down Trump The New York Times reporter presents a forensic account of the damage he has done to AmericaMaggie Haberman, the New York Times’ Trump whisperer, delivers. Her latest book is much more than 600 pages of context, scoop and drama. It is a political epic, tracing Donald Trump’s journey from the streets of Queens to Manhattan’s Upper East Side, from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, his Elba. There, the 45th president holds court – and broods and plots his return.Kushner camping tale one of many bizarre scenes in latest Trump bookRead moreHaberman gives Trump and those close to him plenty of voice – and rope. The result is a cacophonous symphony. Confidence Man informs and entertains but is simultaneously absolutely not funny. Trumpworld presents a reptilian tableau – reality TV does Lord of the Flies.For just one example, Mark Meadows, Trump’s last White House chief of staff, is depicted as erratic and detestable. Then there’s the family. Haberman reports how, after the 2016 election, Melania Trump won a renegotiated pre-nuptial agreement. Haberman also describes Trump repeatedly dumping on his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. If only he looked like Tom Brady and spoke in a deeper register. If only Ivanka had not converted to Judaism.The abuse gets absurd – even a kind of baroque. According to Haberman, at one 2020 campaign strategy meeting Trump implied Kushner might be brutally attacked, even raped, if he ever went camping: “Can you imagine Jared and his skinny ass camping? It’d be like something out of Deliverance.”The reader, however, should not weep for Jared. In Haberman’s telling, he is the kid who was born on third base and mistakes his good fortune with hitting a triple. For his part, Kushner is shown trashing Steve Bannon, the far-right ideologue who was campaign chair and chief White House strategist but was forced out within months.Haberman catches Kushner gleefully asking a White House visitor: “Did you see I cut Bannon’s balls off?”To quote Peter Navarro, like Bannon now a former Trump official under indictment, “nepotism and excrement roll downhill”.As it happens, Bannon’s testicles grew back. Like Charlie Kushner, Jared’s father, he received a Trump pardon. Bannon also helped propagate the big lie that Trump won the election, stoking the Capitol attack.These days, Bannon awaits sentencing, convicted of contempt of Congress. He also faces felony fraud charges arising from an alleged border-wall charity scam. In Trump’s universe, there is always a grift.For Confidence Man, Haberman interviewed Trump three times. He confesses that he is drawn to her, like a moth to a flame.“I love being with her,” he says. “She’s like my psychiatrist”.The daughter of Clyde Haberman, a legendary New York Times reporter, is not flattered or amused. She sees through her subject.“The reality is that he treats everyone like they are his psychiatrists,” Haberman writes. “All present a chance for him to vent or test reactions or gauge how his statements are playing or discover how he is feeling.”Also, Trump and Haberman have not always had a rapport. When he was president, she would interview him and he would attack her. In April 2018, Trump tweeted that Haberman was a Clinton “flunkie” he didn’t know or speak with, a “third-rate reporter” at that. He called her “Maggot Haberman” and even contemplated obtaining her phone records to identify her sources.Trump is 76 but he remains the envious boy from a New York outer borough, face pressed against the Midtown glass. Haberman is not the only Manhattan reporter he has courted and attacked. In 2018, he threatened Michael Wolff for writing Fire and Fury, the Trump book that started it all. Later, he welcomed Wolff to Mar-a-Lago.Haberman vividly captures Trump’s lack of couth. For just one example, according to Haberman the president chose to enrich his first meeting with a foreign leader, Theresa May, by asking the British prime minister to “imagine if some animals with tattoos raped your daughter and she got pregnant”.Each of Trump’s three supreme court justices voted to overturn Roe v Wade. One might wonder how the young woman in Trump’s hypothetical would feel about that.Haberman also pierces Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns. All that talk about an “audit” was a simple dodge, birthed on a campaign plane.In the run-up to Super Tuesday, the crucial day of primaries in March 2016, aides confronted Trump about his taxes. The candidate, Haberman writes, “thought for a second about how to ‘get myself out of this’, as he said. He leaned back, before snapping up to a sudden thought.01:13“‘Well, you know my taxes are under audit. I always get audited … So what I mean is, well I could just say, ‘I’ll release them when I’m no longer under audit. ‘Cause I’ll never not be under audit.’”These days, the Trump Organization faces criminal tax fraud charges. Together with Ivanka, Don Jr and Eric, his children from his first marriage, Trump is also being sued for fraud by Letitia James, the New York attorney general.As a younger reporter, Haberman did two stints at the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch’s flagship US tabloid. Murdoch’s succession plans – it’s Lachlan, he told Trump – appear in Confidence Man. So does Tucker Carlson, the headline-making Fox News host and kindred spirit to Vladimir Putin.Trump made up audit excuse for not releasing tax returns on the fly, new book saysRead moreAccording to Haberman, Carlson met Kushner and demanded Trump commute Roger Stone’s conviction for perjury.“What happened to Roger Stone should never happen to anyone in this country of any political party,” Carlson reportedly thundered, threatening to go public.Stone has since emerged as a central figure in the January 6 insurrection. Apparently, he has a thing for violence. For some Republicans, a commitment to “law and order” is elastic.When it comes to the attempt to overturn the election and the Capitol attack it fueled, Trump’s fate rests with prosecutors in Washington DC and Fulton county, Georgia.That old campaign chant from 2016, “Lock her up”? It carries its own irony.
      Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America is published in the US by Penguin Random House
      TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsRepublicansUS elections 2016US elections 2020reviewsReuse this content More

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      McConnell endorses bipartisan bill to prevent efforts to overturn US elections

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      McConnell endorses bipartisan bill to prevent efforts to overturn US elections Legislation would clarify and expand parts of 1887 Electoral Count Act and aim to avoid repeat of January 6 insurrection The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said on Tuesday he would “proudly support” legislation to overhaul rules for certifying presidential elections, bolstering a bipartisan effort to revise a 19th-century law and avoid any repeat of the January 6 insurrection.The legislation would clarify and expand parts of the 1887 Electoral Count Act, which, along with the constitution, governs how states and Congress certify electors and declare presidential winners.The changes in the certification process are in response to unsuccessful efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to exploit loopholes in the law and overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden.Senate to vote on funding bill to avert shutdown amid Manchin standoffRead moreMcConnell made the remarks just before a committee vote on the legislation. He said he would back the bill as long as a bipartisan agreement on the language was not significantly changed.“Congress’s process for counting the presidential electors’ votes was written 135 years ago,” McConnell said. “The chaos that came to a head on January 6 of last year certainly underscored the need for an update.”McConnell noted that in addition to Republican objections to Biden’s win, Democrats objected the last three times that Republicans won presidential elections. The legislation would make it harder for Congress to sustain those objections.A total of 147 Republicans in the House and Senate objected to results in key states won by Biden. Handfuls of Democrats objected to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 and George W Bush’s wins in 2000 and 2004.McConnell’s comments gave the legislation a major boost as its bipartisan sponsors push to pass the bill before the end of the year and the next election cycle. Trump is still lying about election fraud as he considers another run.The House has passed a more expansive bill overhauling electoral rules but it has far less Republican support. While the House bill received a handful of GOP votes, the Senate version has the backing of at least 12 Republicans – more than enough to break a filibuster and pass the legislation in the 50-50 Senate.The Senate rules committee was expected to approve the legislation on Tuesday and send it to the full chamber. A vote isn’t expected until after the November elections.Senators were expected to make minor tweaks to the legislation but keep the bill largely intact. The bill, written by the Republican Susan Collins of Maine and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat, would make clear that the vice-president only has a ceremonial role in the certification process, tighten the rules on states sending votes to Congress and make it harder for lawmakers to object.Trump publicly pressured states, members of Congress and his vice-president, Mike Pence, to undo Biden’s win. Even though Trump’s effort failed, lawmakers in both parties said his attacks showed the need for stronger safeguards in the law.The bill would be the strongest legislative response yet to the January 6 attack, in which hundreds of Trump supporters beat police officers, broke into the Capitol and interrupted as lawmakers were counting the votes. Once the rioters were cleared, the House and Senate rejected GOP objections to the vote in two states.Differences between the House and Senate bills will have to be resolved before final passage, including language on congressional objections.While the Senate bill would require a fifth of both chambers to agree on an electoral objection to trigger a vote, the House bill would require agreement from at least a third of House members and a third of the Senate. Currently, only one objection in each chamber is required for the House and Senate to vote on whether to reject a state’s electors.The House bill also lays out new grounds for objections. The Senate bill does not.TopicsUS elections 2020RepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Meadows was central to hundreds of texts about overturning 2020 election, book says

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      Meadows was central to hundreds of texts about overturning 2020 election, book saysMessages include group chat among cabinet officials and plans by lawmakers to object to election certification Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff, was at the center of hundreds of incoming messages about ways to aid Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to texts he turned over to the House January 6 select committee that have been published in a new book.The texts included previously unreported messages, including a group chat with Trump administration cabinet officials and plans to object to Joe Biden’s election certification on January 6 by Republican members of Congress and one former US attorney, as well as other Trump allies.The book, The Breach, was obtained by the Guardian in advance of its scheduled publication on Tuesday. Written by the former Republican congressman and senior adviser to the investigation Denver Riggleman, the work has already become controversial after being condemned by the panel as “unauthorized”.Though most of the texts sent to and from Meadows that Riggleman includes have been public for months, the book offers new insight and fills some gaps about how all three branches of government were seemingly involved in strategizing ways to obstruct the congressional certification on January 6.Less than an hour after the election was called for Biden, for instance, Rick Perry, Trump’s former energy secretary, texted a group chat that included Meadows; the housing secretary, Ben Carson; and the agriculture secretary, Sonny Perdue, that Trump should dispute the call.“POTUS line should be: Biden says hes [sic] president. America will see what big data says,” Perry wrote. “This sets the stage for what we’re about to prove.” While Carson was more cautious, Perdue appeared unconcerned about seeing concrete proof of election fraud. “No quit!” he wrote.White House switchboard called phone linked to January 6 rioter after attackRead moreThe former president’s final White House chief of staff also fielded a text from the Republican senator Kevin Cramer, who forwarded a note from North Dakota’s then US attorney, Drew Wrigley, who offered his own advice for overturning the results because “Trump’s legal team has made a joke of this whole thing”.“Demand state wide recount of absentee/mail-in ballots in line with pre-existing state law with regard to signature comparisons,” Wrigley wrote. “If state officials refuse that recount, the legislature would then act under the constitution, selecting the slate of electors.”The suggestion from Wrigley echoed what the Trump legal team would ultimately pursue in having fake electors sent to Congress on January 6 to have the then vice-president, Mike Pence, refuse to certify Biden’s win – a scheme now part of a criminal investigation by the US attorney in Washington DC.The text from Wrigley is significant since the justice department is supposed to remain above the political fray. Wrigley’s note appears to mark an instance of a federal prosecutor endorsing a legally dubious scheme when there was no fraud sufficient to alter the outcome of the 2020 election.A justice department spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment. Wrigley, now the North Dakota state attorney general, also could not be immediately reached for comment.Texts to Meadows also show Republican lawmakers started to finalize objections to the certification of the 2020 election only hours after Trump sent a tweet about a “big protest” that the House January 6 committee has said mobilized far-right groups to make preparations to storm the Capitol.The former president sent the pivotal tweet in the early hours of 19 December 2020. The panel previously described it as the catalyst that triggered the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers groups, as well as “Stop the Steal” activists, to target obstructing the certification.But the tweet also coincided with efforts by Republican lawmakers to finalize objections to the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election win, new texts from some of Trump’s most ardent supporters on Capitol Hill sent to Meadows show.Hours after Trump sent his tweet, according to texts published in the book, the Republican congressman Jody Hice messaged Meadows to say he would be “leading” his state’s “electoral college objection on Jan 6” – days before Trump is known to have met with Republicans at the White House to discuss it.The congressman also told Meadows that Trump “spoke” with Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Republican who had been elected to a House seat in Georgia but had yet to be sworn in, and was interested in meeting with the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus.Hice’s messages to Meadows came at a critical juncture: it was the Saturday after a contentious Friday meeting at the White House, where Trump entertained seizing voting machines and installing a conspiracy theorist lawyer, Sidney Powell, as special counsel to investigate election fraud.The meeting to discuss objecting to Biden’s win on January 6 was originally scheduled for the next Monday, 21 December 2020, but it was rescheduled to take place on the next Tuesday, according to the book, citing additional messages sent by the Republican congressman Brian Babin.Nine days after the meeting with Trump, the Republican members of Congress seemed to finish their objection plans, and Babin texted Meadows to say the “objectors” would be having an additional strategy session at the Conservative Partnership Institute, which played host to other January 6 efforts.The timing of the new texts to Meadows raised the prospect that Trump’s tweet moved ahead several plans that worked in concert, with the Republican objections about supposed fraud giving Pence a pretext to throw out Biden votes as rioters obstructed proceedings.TopicsTrump administrationDonald TrumpUS elections 2020US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Trump claimed ‘I was not watching television’ on January 6, book says

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      Trump claimed ‘I was not watching television’ on January 6, book says Ex-president denied knowing his supporters were rioting and called them ‘fucking crazy’, Maggie Haberman writes in new book Donald Trump denied knowing at the time the January 6 attack on the US Capitol started that a mob of his supporters – whom he privately called “fucking crazy” – were rioting, the author of a forthcoming book on his chaotic presidency writes in what may stand as one of the most surprising, non-believable postscripts of his tenure in the Oval Office.“I didn’t usually have the television on. I’d have it on if there was something. I then later turned it on and I saw what was happening,” Trump told New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman for her forthcoming account Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.“I had heard that afterward and actually on the late side. I was having meetings. I was also with [then-chief of staff] Mark Meadows and others. I was not watching television.”Trump’s comments on what Haberman describes as one of the persistent mysteries of January 6 – what he was doing during the deadly Capitol attack – comes despite congressional testimony that he was indeed watching events that day in early 2021 when his supporters tried desperately to prevent the certification of his defeat to Joe Biden in the presidential race weeks beforehand.In an extract published in the Atlantic, Haberman writes that she was given three post-presidential opportunities to speak with Trump and found that “his impulse to try to sell his preferred version of himself was undeterred by the stain that January 6 left on his legacy and on the democratic foundations of the country – if anything, it grew stronger”.At Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s “Winter White House”, the former president appeared “diminished”, she writes.Haberman continued: “After the headiness of being at the center of the world’s gaze, his time after the White House made him seem shrunken.“He often played golf and then went to his newly built office at the club for meetings with whoever traveled down to seek his approval.“He would watch television before going to dinner, where club members would sometimes applaud him, and then it would start all over again the next day, so removed from the daily rhythms of the broader world that he was oblivious to holidays on the calendar and staff had to remind him.”Within the book’s pages, Haberman reports that Trump dissed his supporters to aides ( “They’re fucking crazy”) ; that she found it “difficult to discern, though, whether Trump actually believed what he was saying about the election”; that while president he considered he was doing two jobs: “running the country and survival”.Asked about a second run for the presidency, Haberman writes, Trump “was more comfortable looking backward than forward. When I told Trump I wanted to talk about 2024, he asked, quizzically, ‘2024?’”In typical Trump style, he insulted allies that he felt had turned against him, saying of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell that “the Old Crow’s a piece of shit”.The former president also ruminated that he would not be facing civil indictment for fraud in New York under ex-state attorney general Robert Morgenthau, and he claimed that he had not taken important documents from the White House at the end of his term.“Nothing of great urgency, no,” Trump told Haberman, except letters from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with whom, he hinted, he was still in touch.Asked if he would do it over again, Trump said that he gets asked that question more than any other. “The answer is, yeah, I think so,” he said, according to Haberman. “Because here’s the way I look at it. I have so many rich friends and nobody knows who they are.”Ultimately, Haberman concludes, Trump “works things out in real time in front of all of us. Along the way, he reoriented an entire country to react to his moods and emotions.”To understand him at all, she writes, one would first have to understand the New York from which Trump emerged – “its own morass of corruption and dysfunction”.“I spent the four years of his presidency getting asked by people to decipher why he was doing what he was doing, but the truth is, ultimately, almost no one really knows him,” Haberman writes. “Some know him better than others, but he is often simply, purely opaque, permitting people to read meaning and depth into every action, no matter how empty they might be.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsUS elections 2020newsReuse this content More

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      January 6 panel to take up key unanswered questions in final hearing

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      January 6 panel to take up key unanswered questions in final hearingWednesday’s session is committee’s last chance to show potential culpability of Donald Trump before midterm elections The House January 6 select committee is expected to hold its final public hearing next Wednesday, with the congressional investigation into the US Capitol attack nearing its conclusion as staff counsel prepare to produce an interim report of its findings before the 2022 midterm elections.The specific topic of the final hearing that the panel’s chairman, Congressman Bennie Thompson, will convene starting at 1pm is unclear.But the select committee is expected to make headway on some of the most pressing questions about January 6 that remain unanswered since the panel last convened in July and made the case that Donald Trump violated the law by refusing to take action to call off the Capitol attack, sources said.Virginia Thomas agrees to interview with House January 6 panelRead moreThe principal issues at play include whether there was a concrete through-line from the former president to political operatives like Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, who were in close contact with the far-right extremist groups – including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers – that stormed Congress.The select committee has found some circumstantial evidence about such ties and previously revealed that Trump directed his then White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to call both Stone and Flynn the night before January 6 as the extremist groups finalized their plans for the day.Another issue for House investigators is whether Trump’s ouster of former defense secretary Mark Esper was an effort to install in his place a loyalist who might have had no objection to using the national guard to seize voting machines or delay their deployment to stop the Capitol attack.The select committee has viewed the plot to seize voting machines – suggested by Flynn during a contentious White House meeting in December 2020, hours before Trump sent a tweet urging his supporters to attend a “wild protest” on January 6 – as a crucial moment in the overall timeline.House investigators have also spent time in recent weeks examining Microsoft Teams chats and emails sent between Secret Service agents on security details for Trump and former vice-president Mike Pence that day, as well as discussions about invoking martial law even after the Capitol attack.The hearing on Wednesday is likely to touch on some of those issues, the sources said, in the last opportunity for the select committee to show potential culpability by Trump and Republican members of Congress on national television before the midterm elections take place in early November.Trump’s attempts to delay Mar-a-Lago inquiry largely fail as legal woes mountRead moreWith their control of the House and Senate hanging in the balance, this hearing is also widely being seen on Capitol Hill as the final chance for Democrats to persuade voters that the midterms are a referendum on the Republican party’s role in January 6.Part of the reason the Wednesday hearing is expected to be the final one is because next week is the last that the House is in session until the midterms, and the panel was reluctant to schedule an event during campaign season, when committee members like Elaine Luria face uphill re-election battles.The select committee is also starting to shift its focus away from the made-for-television hearings – which have required time-consuming preparation and rehearsals – and towards putting together an interim report in the coming weeks as well as a final report by the end of the year.The panel remained undecided on the final direction of each of the reports, the sources said, as well as whether to make a criminal referral to the justice department against Trump and key aides, including his former lawyer John Eastman, who orchestrated the fake elector scheme.Once a major priority, the need for such a referral appears to have diminished in recent weeks. Subpoenas reviewed by the Guardian show the justice department is pursuing at least three investigations examining January 6 and issued more than 30 subpoenas to top Trump aides.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS elections 2020newsReuse this content More