House Select Committee on 1/6

[LFC]

Trumpworld is playing musical chairs in an effort to find out who they can leave standing to take the blame.

On the latest episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, host Will Sommer and guest host Asawin Suebsaeng—returning to the podcast he helped launch—talk about the MAGA hunt to set someone up to take the fall for Trump.

“The more you talk to people who are advising Donald Trump daily on what they hope to be his every political or legal maneuver, the more you get the sense straight from the horse’s mouth that they think, ‘OK, there’s gonna be a fall guy here,’” said Suebsaeng, now a senior political reporter for Rolling Stone.

One potential candidate is former Trump lawyer John Eastman, now known for his “Eastman strategy” meant to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence to effectively steal the election for Trump on Jan. 6. Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, whose actions in the lead-up to the riot were recently exposed by testimony from former aide Cassidy Hutchinson, could make another appealing scapegoat for Republicans.

“I think Mark Meadows has really opened himself up to a lot of criminal exposure here,” Suebsaeng said. “I’m not going to mince words while I’m talking about John Eastman and the ‘coup memo’ author.”

“Look around Mar-a-Lago,” Sommer said. “If you don’t see the fall guy, you are the fall guy.”

[LFC]

A terrorist from the Jan 6 Republican Insurrection attempted to apologize to a police officer with permanent disabilities Team Treason caused in the attack. It wasn't accepted.

One of the most poignant moments at Tuesday’s insurrection hearings came when convicted rioter Stephen Ayres apologized afterward to police who defended the Capitol during the attack. But while images of Ayres’ act of contrition quickly went viral, Officer Harry Dunn made it clear that he did not accept the apology. On Tuesday evening, a Twitter user captioned a picture of Ayres and Dunn shaking hands: “An apology given and accepted.” Minutes later, Dunn replied to the post to say: “*Apology given…” Dunn later appeared on MSNBC’s The Last Word in which he clarified his feelings toward Ayres, who had testified that he’d gone to the Capitol following a tweeted call to action from former President Donald Trump. “I acknowledged his apology, but I had other things going on where I’m not accepting it at the moment,” Dunn said.

[goldenvalley]

Jul 13, 2022 14:48:41 GMT LFC said:

Trumpworld is playing musical chairs in an effort to find out who they can leave standing to take the blame.

On the latest episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, host Will Sommer and guest host Asawin Suebsaeng—returning to the podcast he helped launch—talk about the MAGA hunt to set someone up to take the fall for Trump.

“The more you talk to people who are advising Donald Trump daily on what they hope to be his every political or legal maneuver, the more you get the sense straight from the horse’s mouth that they think, ‘OK, there’s gonna be a fall guy here,’” said Suebsaeng, now a senior political reporter for Rolling Stone.

One potential candidate is former Trump lawyer John Eastman, now known for his “Eastman strategy” meant to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence to effectively steal the election for Trump on Jan. 6. Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, whose actions in the lead-up to the riot were recently exposed by testimony from former aide Cassidy Hutchinson, could make another appealing scapegoat for Republicans.

“I think Mark Meadows has really opened himself up to a lot of criminal exposure here,” Suebsaeng said. “I’m not going to mince words while I’m talking about John Eastman and the ‘coup memo’ author.”

“Look around Mar-a-Lago,” Sommer said. “If you don’t see the fall guy, you are the fall guy.”

So Eastman deserves to fall, but I don't think anything has shown that he was involved in the decision to assemble the mob and send it to the Capitol.  I am still waiting for someone to say Trump called Stone in the hour or so between the unhinged meeting and Trump's tweet of Dec. 19.  There's your fall guy...Stone but will he fall on the sword for Trump?  He only cops to being a dirty trickster if the trick is successful.

[LFC]

More characters being lined up for their treason. To nobody's surprise there's Mark Meadows but this little tidbit was new to me.

Chief of staff Mark Meadows revealed on Dec. 2, 2020 that Donald Trump did not intend to leave office despite losing the presidential election to Joe Biden, a former top White House official revealed on CNN.

Former White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin recounted on CNN a conversation she had with Mark Meadows on that day while wondering who allowed Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne into the White House for the "unhinged" Dec. 18 meeting.

"Who waived them?" Griffin asked. "Which is putting them through security to get onto White House grounds. We don't even have that answer now."

"I suspect it was Mark Meadows and I say that because I can tell you before I resigned, I said 'Sir, I'm planning to move on, I want to put in my notice.' And he said to me, 'What if I could tell you we're actually going to be staying?' You can interpret that as hypothetical, but there were people around the president telling him that and that's what led to this absolute insanity," Griffin said.

She noted she "moved up my resignation to the next morning and I said, 'No, of course, we're not.' I told all my staff we lost"

Next we have Maryland's only Republican House member.

The lone Republican representing Maryland in Congress was implicated in Tuesday's public hearing by the House Select Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 Attack at the U.S. Capitol.

"As former President Donald Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election, nearly a dozen Republican members of Congress -— including Maryland’s Andy Harris -— gathered with the president in the White House and discussed having Vice President Mike Pence reject the election results, according to the Jan. 6 committee," The Baltimore Sun reported. "The House members’ attendance at the Oval Office meeting — which the committee said also included Pence, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and attorney Rudy Giuliani — was confirmed by White House visitor logs, the committee said during a hearing Tuesday."

The newspaper reported the Congressman's office "did not return emails seeking comment."

And then we'll cap it off with Alex Jones. This just amuses me because it's his ex-wife.

Hours after the House select committee investigating the Jan 6th insurrection completed their Tuesday nationally televised hearing, the former wife of Infowars founder Alex Jones took to Twitter and alerted the committee that she can help with their investigation on the uprising.

On Tuesday the committee worked on establishing the links between Donald Trump's Dec. 19 tweet stating "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” and far-right militia groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who participated in the attack.

Infowars' Jones was also featured prominently in the hearing, shown promoting the rally that preceded the Capitol riot.

That appears to have inspired Jones' ex-wife Kelly Jones to take to Twitter to get the committee's attention.

Late Tuesday, over a video clip of her ex-husband exhorting a crowd to violence , she tweeted, "I'm #AlexJones' ex-wife, & I lost my kids for exposing infowars, even while he was under subsequent Federal Investigation. I have insider info that I believe is relevant to the #January6thCommitteeHearings. Pls share."

[pnwguy]

Jul 13, 2022 17:33:32 GMT LFC said:

More characters being lined up for their treason. To nobody's surprise there's Mark Meadows but this little tidbit was new to me.

That appears to have inspired Jones' ex-wife Kelly Jones to take to Twitter to get the committee's attention.

Late Tuesday, over a video clip of her ex-husband exhorting a crowd to violence , she tweeted, "I'm #AlexJones' ex-wife, & I lost my kids for exposing infowars, even while he was under subsequent Federal Investigation. I have insider info that I believe is relevant to the #January6thCommitteeHearings. Pls share."

Right-wingers sure must make lousy spouses.  Think of the rogues gallery of cretins, like Eric Greitens and his ilk. Even Palin's hubby left Caribou Barbie once he had enough.  I hope Kelly Jones opens up a box of scorpions for Alex to stick his penis in.   

[goldenvalley]

Well here's a new avenue of investigation....Secret Service texts from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021 were erased as part of a device replacement program.

A government watchdog accused the U.S. Secret Service of erasing texts from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, after his office requested them as part of an inquiry into the U.S. Capitol attack, according to a letter sent to lawmakers this week.
Joseph V. Cuffari, head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, wrote to the leaders of the House and Senate Homeland Security committees indicating that the text messages have vanished and that efforts to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack were being hindered.

“The Department notified us that many U.S. Secret Service (USSS) text messages, from January 5 and 6, 2021 were erased as part of a device-replacement program,” he wrote in a letter dated Wednesday and obtained by The Washington Post. The letter was earlier reported on by CNN.

Cuffari emphasized that the erasures came “after” the Office of Inspector General requested copies of the text messages for its own investigation, and signaled that they were part of a pattern of DHS resistance to his inquiries. Staff members are required by law to surrender records so that he can audit the sprawling national security agency, but he said they have “repeatedly” refused to provide them until an attorney reviews them.

But her emails!

[jackd]

Recall too that Mike Pence refused to get in the car with the SS agent who wanted to remove him from the Capitol grounds because, impliedly, he didn't trust him. Beginning to look like this conspiracy was wide pretty wide.

[goldenvalley]

[LFC]

This should make for some interesting TV.

The committee’s next public hearing is tentatively scheduled for July 21. In an interview on “GMA 3” Wednesday, Luria said the public can expect her and Kinzinger to give a detailed timeline of the 187 minutes between then-President Trump leaving the stage at the “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse and Trump delivering remarks telling the mob of his supporters who stormed the Capitol to go home.

“Mr. Kinzinger and I plan to go through that 187 minutes,” she said. “What happened between the time that [former President Donald Trump] left the stage, gave these inflammatory remarks and gave people the impression … that he was going to himself march with this crowd to the Capitol.”

“[And] what happened between that moment and then around 4:17 in the afternoon, which is about 187 minutes later, when he finally made a statement to the nation, to the people at the Capitol to go home,” Luria continued.

[goldenvalley]

follow up to the tweet about Biden's dog

[LFC]

Apparently the Secret Service's use of text rather than radios was already a red flag.

Appearing on CNN on Monday morning, the co-author of a book on what it is like to be a Secret Service agent found Secret Service agents using texts during the Jan 6th insurrection -- instead of their radios -- to be highly "suspicious."

Speaking with host John Berman, Jeffrey Robinson, who co-wrote "Standing Next to History: An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service," claimed the entire story that the texts from Jan 5 and 6th were accidentally erased was not credible and suggested a cover-up by the Secret Service.

"Rep Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) says it's quite crazy that anything would be deleted. How crazy do you think?" host John Berman prompted.

"It's criminal," the author immediately shot back. "First of all, you have to understand something, and you've been in the business long enough to know that when you do any sort of investigative journalism there are two pillars, first is there is no such thing as a coincidence and the second thing is everybody lies. That explains the Secret Service response."

RELATED: Secret Service scrambling to explain deleted Jan. 6 texts to 'skeptical' House committee members: report

"Also, emails and texts do not get erased," he continued. "You may take them off of your phone, you may take them off of some server, but they exist somewhere out in cyberspace. So if the Secret Service cannot find them, cannot turn them over or, more relevantly, is not willing to turn them over, the NSA [National Security Agency] can get them and the committee should turn immediately to the NSA to have everything."

"But there's something else at work here," he continued. "These are texts and emails. You've followed the president, you know that when the secret service goes out with the principal, the president, there may be 150, 200 agents at every stop along the way in advance of where he's going, where he's been, whatever. They are all on the earpiece in their ear and the microphone on their sleeve. That's radio traffic going around all the agents in real time and that's all recorded. Why would anybody send a text or an email unless they didn't want to be on radio traffic -- that's very suspicious."

[LFC]

The 3 Trumpies in the insane Dec. 19 meeting where they outright plotted a coup all had ties to Russia. Gee. What a shock. Putin's Puppets all together in one room.

In a thread posted to Twitter, former FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Peter Strzok noticed a pattern among some of the participants. Strzok had also headed the FBI's counterespionage section.

Strzok said the meeting had 'staggering counterintelligence issues' presented by three of those in attendance.

"Mike Flynn, who who was paid by an organ of Russian state media to travel to Moscow to attend a dinner where he was seated next to Putin. Flynn later plead guilty to lying to the FBI about conversations he had with the Russian Ambassador about election interference," he noted.

"Patrick Byrne, one of several men once in an intimate relationship with convicted Russian agent Marina Butina. Byrne gave money to Butina after her return to Russia, where she ran for the Duma, hounded Navalny, and supported the invasion of Ukraine," Strzok continued. "Rudy Giuliani, who repeatedly met with and took info from sanctioned Russian agents like Andrii Derkach, despite USIC warnings to the White House in 2019 that Trump’s personal lawyer 'was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence.'"

"So in this tiny meeting in the Oval Office where options to upend US democracy were advanced to the President of the United States, there were not one, not two, but three people directly linked to sanctioned and convicted agents of the Russian government," Strzok noted. "While I doubt Russia planned it, their efforts to gain access to Trump’s inner sanctum succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. And it demonstrates just how successful seemingly amateurish intelligence activity can be."

[LFC]

I suspect the fake electors scheme is well within their sites and we'll hear more about it later. Politico just announced who in was involved in trying to get the lists to Pence so he could start the process of overturning the election. The guy who brought them to Rep. Mike Kelly(R-PA) is a real scumbag.

Politico on Friday identified the Donald Trump aide who delivered lists of fake electors in a bid to get them to Mike Pence.

"Mike Roman, then Trump’s 2020 director of Election Day operations, delivered those false elector certificates — signed by pro-Trump activists in Michigan and Wisconsin — to Rep. Mike Kelly’s (R-PA) chief of staff at the time, both people told Politico," Kyle Cheney and Nicholas Wu reported. "Kelly was a Trump ally in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, and his then-top aide received the documents from Roman before deputizing a colleague to disseminate copies on Capitol Hill, according to both people."

Roman was subpoenaed in February by the House Select Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

"The origin of the false elector lists, which never got to Pence before he presided over certification of Joe Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, has become an enduring subplot in the select panel’s investigation of the Capitol attack designed to disrupt that day," Politico reported. "After the committee revealed the role of a top aide to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) in the episode during a hearing last month, Johnson said the false elector lists came from Kelly — who has repeatedly denied any involvement by his office in their distribution."

Kelly chief of staff Matt Stroia was reportedly the intermediary.

The Trump White House did not announce Roman's hiring.

"Mike Roman, a longtime Republican opposition researcher who worked for billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch before joining the Trump campaign, is now the White House’s director of special projects and research," ProPublica reported in May of 2017. "He is one of a half-dozen unannounced hires the White House has made since President Trump took office. Roman, who led the Kochs’ surveillance and intelligence-gathering unit before it was disbanded in April 2016, is best known for promoting a video showing members of the New Black Panthers allegedly intimidating voters outside a Philadelphia polling place in 2008."

"ProPublica noted "Roman, who made roughly $246,000 in salary from the Koch-backed Freedom Partners, according to his financial disclosure, was also a contributor to the conservative news site Breitbart and was tapped to run Trump's 'election protection' poll-watching efforts this November."

[LFC]

Agents were expected to manually back up their texts? Are you f***ing kidding me? And then they did a conversion that destroyed them all AFTER the IG requested them? The stink coming off of this is suffocating. Time to do a top down review of the entire Secret Service. Between a string a failures, a string of scandals, and now this it is clearly contains a rot that has to be removed.

A Secret Service official told CNN that the document production did not include any of the potentially missing texts from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021 because the agency is still unable to recover any records that were lost during a phone migration in that time period.

“Any message that was not uploaded by the employee as a government record would have been lost during the migration,” the USSS official told CNN, referring to the agency’s protocol to backup data.

Prior to the phone migration, agency employees were reportedly expected to manually back up their text messages. Any employees who did not take that step would have their texts permanently deleted when their phones would be wiped during the migration, according to CNN.

The Secret Service claims that it is still continuing its efforts to recover any lost messages.

Fine, then fire any agents who did not back up their texts. Fire persons in charge of agents who did not ensure they backed up their texts. Fire anybody responsible. Time to start fresh.

[LFC]

Oh, look! "Compliance" by the Secret Service!

The U.S. Secret Service just barely fulfilled the Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s demand for a month’s worth of texts sent and received by 24 Secret Service members, according to a letter from the agency to the House Jan. 6 Committee.

The letter (which was obtained by CNN) was written by Ronald Rowe, the assistant director for the Office of Intergovernmental and Legislative Affairs at the Secret Service, who informed the Jan. 6 panel that the agency had handed over one text exchange in response to Inspector General Joseph Cuffari’s request.

Cuffari had asked the Secret Service to hand over texts to and from 24 Secret Service personnel between the dates of Dec. 7, 2020 and Jan. 8, 2021, according to Rowe’s letter to the committee.

“The Secret Service submitted the responsive records it identified, namely, a text message conversation from former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund to former Secret Service Uniformed Division Chief Thomas Sullivan requesting assistance on January 6, 2021, and advised the agency did not have any further records responsive to the DHS OIG’s request for text messages,” Rowe wrote.

The 24 Secret Service personnel are not identified in the letter, according to CNN.

If they failed to back up their texts as government records, as they were required to do, then fire them. Fire them now. We need dependable agents for such incredibly sensitive and important duties, not slackers.

[jackd]

They may be worse than slackers.

[LFC]

Jul 20, 2022 21:47:55 GMT jackd said:

They may be worse than slackers.

I think "may" is being generous but failure to follow company policy is a good objective reasons to fire them.

[LFC]

My, my, my. Isn't this assclown a real piece of shit. I bet he was Stephen Miller's best bud.

A former Trump White House aide who met with the January 6 committee earlier this week went on a profane and sexist rant on a livestream after his testimony, where he railed against the lawmakers and attacked other witnesses, according to audio posted to his Telegram.

The aide, Garrett Ziegler, met with the House panel on Tuesday. Lawmakers were likely interested in hearing from him because of his ties to one of the most shocking episodes of the 2020 election saga: A White House meeting where then-President Donald Trump's outside allies tried to convince him to declare martial law and use the military to seize voting machines.

In the 27-minute livestream, Ziegler used vulgar and misogynistic language to attack Cassidy Hutchinson and Alyssa Farah Griffin, two women who worked for the Trump White House but have since publicly broken from the former President and cooperated with the January 6 panel.

He also accused the January 6 House select committee of being "anti-White," without any evidence. (The nine-member panel is led by Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, who is Black.)

"They're Bolsheviks," Ziegler said in the stream, referring to the far-left communists who led the Soviet Union, "so, they probably do hate the American founders and most White people in general. This is a Bolshevistic anti-White campaign. If you can't see that, your eyes are freaking closed. And so, they see me as a young Christian who they can try to basically scare, right?"

The livestream is audio-only, but the voice on the recording matches past videos of Ziegler. CNN has reached out to the January 6 committee and Ziegler's attorney seeking comment.
At the White House, Ziegler was an aide to Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro, who was charged with contempt of Congress for defying the panel's subpoena. (He pleaded not guilty.)

[LFC]

FFS, even the IG investigating the deleted Secret Service tweets kept it quite for months.

What’s Going On?

Joseph Cuffari, the inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security, found out all the way back in February that the Secret Service had deleted texts from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021–but he chose not to report it to Congress, according to the Washington Post.

• Cuffari also reportedly didn’t put out a public alert his office had prepared in October 2021 reporting that the Secret Service was stonewalling his requests for records on the Jan. 6 attack.

• Two whistleblowers who worked with Cuffari recently alerted the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) on the inspector general’s delay, according to the Post.

[LFC]

With the DHS's record of stonewalling and protecting their own it's no wonder the IG wants them to stop "investigating."

Exactly What Needs To Happen

The Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security has ordered the Secret Service to stop its internal investigations into its deleted text messages because it could interfere with his own investigation of what happened. I was wondering why this hadn’t happened yet frankly. Given the facts as we know them no Secret Service investigation would be credible. And it would be hard to have confidence that it would become a vehicle for destroying or covering up evidence about the data purge itself.

Questions over the destruction of data have now creeped into the Inspector General’s office itself. According to the Post, the IG’s office has known about the document destruction since February – five months ago – and failed to notify Congress despite the obvious centrality of the documents to the Jan 6th investigations. In October 2021 the office draw up a public alert accusing the Secret Service and other DHS agencies of stonewalling document requests tied to the Jan 6th investigation. But the alert was never sent out. These revelations come from two whistleblowers.

[LFC]

Trump is putting up millions for legal representation of those called to testify before the committee. Gee, if all you're going to do is walk in and tell the truth then why the need for so much legal help?

It’s been widely reported that former President Donald Trump has covered legal expenses for witnesses testifying before the Jan. 6 committee, but the full amount that Trump has been forking over has largely remained a mystery.

A new federal filing has fleshed that number out. And it turns out, it’s a lot higher than previously reported.

Trump’s latest Federal Election Commission report indicates that payments from his political committees to firms representing Jan. 6 witnesses are now approaching $2 million.

But even before this number emerged, Trump’s patronage was already raising concerns among Democrats and legal experts that the ex-president is—once again—trying to exert influence over witnesses who could have information implicating him in possible criminal activity.

Some of those witnesses sat for interviews with the committee as the investigation was heating up this spring. And according to a disclosure filed last week, around that same time, Trump’s old campaign committee made a curious, and major, payment—a flat $1 million to a law firm called Elections, LLC.

Trump is under no obligation to spell out exactly what that payment is for, and he does not do so. But we do know a lot about that firm, which has long been close to Trump.

Elections, LLC was founded by three Trump alums. Two of them have given testimony that the Jan. 6 panel aired in public videos, and the third has represented a star witness against the president—former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson.

Additionally, the new filing—covering April through June—revealed hundreds of thousands of dollars to law firms Trump has rarely or never paid. Some of those firms are known to represent witnesses who have given crucial testimony to House investigators.

Trump has reportedly tapped leadership PAC money to foot legal costs for witnesses. But the specific group behind the million-dollar check—called “Make America Great Again PAC”—has not been previously reported to have covered such expenses.

[jackd]

Probably not a coincidence that Cassidy Hutchinson changed lawyers (from a Trump supplied one) before her public testimony.

[pnwguy]

Jul 21, 2022 17:14:16 GMT jackd said:

Probably not a coincidence that Cassidy Hutchinson changed lawyers (from a Trump supplied one) before her public testimony.

Such lawyers should be disbarred on ethics grounds.  As members of the bar and officers of the court, they are to represent the person testifying, not the interests of the criminal person paying them.

[jackd]

Agreed. I'm sure the Trump paid lawyer would deny any ethical violation.

[LFC]

Steve Bannon is still attempting to, in his own earlier uttered words, flood the zone with shit.

Federal prosecutors on Wednesday morning fiercely attacked Steve Bannon for seemingly trying to poison his own ongoing trial, citing the rightwing media personality’s decision yesterday to decry the government at a press conference held just a few feet from the door of the District of Columbia federal courthouse.

So run around screeching, frothing, and telling lies and then play the victim, claiming you can't get a fair trial because of all the publicity. Sounds like classic Bannon.