Committee Summary: “Extended evidence suggests specific attempts to obstruct” the investigation of possible collusion between Trump and a prosecuting official

In its summary Monday, the committee gave several other examples of “evidence suggesting specific efforts to obstruct” their work. They noted efforts by Trump to contact some witnesses, as well as multiple Secret Service agents hiring private lawyers rather than agency-provided lawyers who would represent them for free. The lawyer of a Secret Service driver admitted to writing notes to his client as he testified, according to the committee.

The political law office founded by Passantino and his team after the president left the White House has received regular payments from groups associated with the president. The Save America PAC will give about $275,000 in 2022, which is more than the total for all of the previous years. The firm also has worked for major Republican congressional campaigns.

“She was told to say that she did not remember anything when she did” stated Lofgren when questioned about pressure on Hutchinson. That is pretty serious stuff.

According to two sources, Hutchinson discussed the situation with the Justice Department. CNN has previously reported that Hutchinson was cooperating with the Justice Department’s January 6 investigation, after she became a crucial public witness in the House probe.

Comments on a lawyer’s involvement in the Mar-a-Lago trial: a rebuttal to the testimony of Hutchinson

Passantino pointed out it’s not uncommon for people to change lawyers “because their interests or strategies change,” according to his statement. He also said political committees sometimes cover client fees “at the client’s request.”

Passantino acknowledged in a statement that he was on a leave of absence from the law firm and that he had removed his professional biography from the website. Michael Best and Friedrich said it did not have anything to do with the situation and that Hutchinson was not a client.

The committee looked at the issue in the executive summary of the final report and handed the investigation over to the Justice Department.

The witness raised concerns with the lawyer about the approach, and she said that they didn’t know what she knew. They don’t know that you can recall some things. You say “I don’t recall” is an acceptable response to this.

The lawyer told the client that the issue would make a bad light of President Trump. We wouldn’t want to go there. The report said they didn’t want to talk about it.

At the final public hearing, Lofgren said that they were concerned that the witnesses may have been trying to affect her testimony to prevent them from finding the truth.

Lawyers must follow extensive ethics guidelines as part of their profession, including avoiding conflicts of interest that could compromise their representation of a client. According to legal ethics experts, a lawyer swaying their client’s testimony in a way that wouldn’t be entirely truthful could be looked at as possible obstruction of an investigation.

This year, Trump’s Save America PAC has made payments to several law firms representing witnesses in the January 6 and Mar-a-Lago investigation. Legal experts and professional rules say that issues only arise if the lawyer doesn’t follow the client’s wishes.

Bipartisan Subcommittency Panel Report on Trump and His Allies’s Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Presidential Election: The Central Cause of January 6th

The recommendation is among the conclusions of the panel’s final report, a comprehensive overview of the bipartisan panel’s findings on how Trump and his allies sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election, released late Thursday evening.

The effort to put forward fake slates of pro-Trump electors is under scrutiny by federal and state prosecutors investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory in 2020.

The evidence led to a definite conclusion: that the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump. None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him,” the report states.

Bennie Thompson believes that the work of the committee will lead to a road map to justice, and that the agencies and institutions that are responsible for ensuring justice under the law will use the information they’ve received from the committee.

Special counsel Jack Smith is leading the Justice Department’s investigations related to Trump, including both his post-election actions and classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago resort earlier this year.

Between Election Day and January 6th, Donald Trump and his inner circle went after election officials in at least 200 public or private contacts in an effort to overturn the results in several states.

Trump “spearheaded outreach aimed at numerous officials in States he lost but that had GOP-led legislatures, including in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona,” the report says. He lost all of the states.

During a call between the president and the Georgia Secretary of State on January 2, 2020, Trump asked him to deliver him a second term, but he went through any false election-fraud claims.

The committee wrote that Rudy Giuliani was sent a memo by Chesebro that wrongly claimed that the vice president could pick which presidential electors to count.

The committee wrote that Eastman received a call from the White House switchboard, and the call lasted 23 minutes, according to Eastman’s phone records. The two-page memo discussed various ways to ensure that President Trump is reelected even though he had been projected to lose the election, according to the committee.

Trump latched onto Eastman’s theories that incorrectly claimed Pence could overturn the election, and launched a pressure campaign against Pence in the days leading up to January 6. When Congress certified the Electoral College vote on January 6th, Trump tried to convince Pursuant to a meeting that took place in the Oval Office.

The 14th Amendment and the Associated Campaign to Overturn Certified Presidential Elections: Summary Report of the Select Committee on ‘Insurrections and Propagation of Political Crime’

The panel zeroes in on the section of the Constitution that states an individual who has taken an oath to support the US Constitution but has “engaged in an insurrection” or given “aid or comfort to the enemies of the Constitution” can be disqualified from office. The former president and other people have been referred to the Department of Justice for their involvement in an insurrection.

It calls on congressional committees of jurisdiction to create a “formal mechanism” for evaluating whether those individuals violate that section of the 14th Amendment should be barred from future federal or state office.

In addition to criminal referrals, the select committee is calling for lawyers involved in the efforts to overturn the election to be held accountable.

The panel wrote that the courts and bars should keep an eye on the conduct of attorneys who are associated with the Department of Defense.

The report even calls on Congress to amend statutes and consider the severity of penalties that deter individuals from efforts to obstruct, influence or impede the Joint Session of Congress that certifies election results. It calls for statutes of federal penalties for certain types of threats against election workers to be strengthened.

With the panel’s report public and witness interview transcripts trickling out on a daily basis, we’re getting a new glimpse into how these obscure figures played an outsize role in the inquiry. The information they provided will be useful to the prosecutors in Georgia who are investigating Trump’s election schemes.

The panel calls on Congress to pass an overhaul of the 1887 Electoral Count Act aimed at making it harder to overturn a certified presidential election – the first legislative response to the insurrection and Trump’s relentless pressure campaign to stay in power.

The report summary first released Monday says there’s evidence to pursue Trump on multiple crimes, including obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to make false statements, assisting or aiding an insurrection, conspiring to injure or impede an officer and seditious conspiracy.

The panel says it also has the evidence to refer Eastman on the obstruction charge, and it names him as a co-conspirator in other alleged criminal activity lawmakers have gathered evidence on.

17 findings from the committee’s investigation have been used to support criminal referrals, including that Donald Trump knew fraud allegations he was making were false.

The decision by President Trump to declare victory in the presidential election and then to call for the vote counting to be stopped was not a spur of the moment decision. It was premeditated, according to the report.

The committee also revealed emails from Tom Fitton, president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, from before the 2020 presidential election that say Trump should declare victory regardless of the outcome.

“For example, although Giuliani repeatedly had claimed in public that Dominion voting machines stole the election, he admitted during his Select Committee deposition that ‘I do not think the machines stole the election,’” it states.

The committee investigators describe how Trump campaign and Republican National Committee fundraising pitches containing false claims of a stolen election ultimately raised more than $250 million – but were met internally with some resistance.

The RNC was aware of the fact that President Trump’s claim that he won the election were baseless, and made changes to fundraising copy in order to protect the RNC from legal exposure, according to investigators.

The committee wrote that President Trump claims were treated as true and blasted to millions of people with little to no scrutiny.

Trump campaign’s deputy director of communications and research Zach Parkinson told investigators that reviews for accuracy were limited to “questions concerning items such as time and location.”

The RNC lawyers instructed the copywriters not to use the termrigged, according to interviews conducted by the committee. The examples of appeal that the panel obtained were toned down so they were not inflammatory.

According to the committee’s final report, Donald Trump called the claims of foreign powers interfering in the election crazy and laughed at one of his election lawyer’s claims.

Powell wrongly claimed that the software used to swing election results in Venezuela was created at the direction of the late President Hugo Chavez and the company has ties to the Clinton Foundation.

The president chuckled at Powell as he hid his phone in his suit, telling the other people in the room that it sounded crazy. The report said so.

The committee lays out Trump’s failure to act as the riot unfolded, noting that as he watched the riot on television, he made no calls for security assistance and resisted efforts from staffers asking him to call off his supporters.

“President Trump did not contact a single top national security official during the day. The committee wrote that there were not departments at the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, F.B.I., Capitol Police Department, or the D.C. Mayor’s office. “As Vice President Pence has confirmed, President Trump didn’t even try to reach his own Vice President to make sure that Pence was safe.”

Milley told the committee that he had a reaction to Trump, stating that he was the Commander in Chief. You’ve got an assault going on on the Capitol of the United States of America. And there isn’t anything? No call? Nothing? Zero?

“No photographs exist of the President for the remainder of the afternoon until after 4 p.m. President Trump appears to have instructed that the White House photographer was not to take any photographs,” the committee writes, citing testimony from former White House photographer Shealah Craighead.

The Day of January 6: An Overview of Trump’s Campaign to Overturn the 2016 U.S. Presidential Candidate Lisa Pierson

In the aftermath, on the evening of January 6, Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale told Katrina Pierson, one of the rally organizers, that he felt guilty helping Trump win, the report states.

In newly revealed testimony included in the final report, the aide, John McEntee, said Trump told him “[t]his is a crazy day” – and that he did not recall Trump expressing any sadness over the violence that had unfolded at the Capitol.

Ivanka Trump said her father was disappointed and surprised by the attack on the Capitol.

She could not provide any examples of the president talking about the people who died or were injured on January 6 or if he did the right thing.

The story of January 6 has largely focused on a cast of very prominent characters, including former President Donald Trump and members of his inner circle who have become household names, like his former attorney Rudy Giuliani and his White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

But those with notable names were merely the tip of the iceberg for the January 6 committee, which spent 18 months investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. Scores of Trump aides, who were hardly ever in the headlines, were interviewed behind closed doors.

A young RNC staffer was fired after he pushed back on some of the statements being made in emails in the investigation of Trump’s fraudulent election claims.

Several lower-leveldigital staffers spoke to the committee on how the RNC tried to walk a line between not putting themselves in legal jeopardy and exploiting Trump’s fraud narrative for raising money.

His direct boss told the committee that she wasn’t sure why Katz was terminated three weeks after the election. It happened after the leadership of the Republicans was questioned about their post election messaging.

The first confrontation – corroborated by multiple witnesses – came in a meeting with the entirety of the Trump digital team, where Katz grilled a higher-up on how the campaign was saying it wanted to stop the count in several battleground states while keep it going in another.

In the second episode in the report, he refused a directive to write an email declaring Trump the winner in Pennsylvania – an email Katz suspected was meant to preempt the election being called for Biden in that state.

Supposed election fraud by Democrats is “only one rationale for slating Trump electors,” Haley told Johnny McEntee, an assistant to Trump, in text messages one week after the 2020 election that he turned over to the committee.

The fake electors plan and the cooperation between the left and right of the legislative branch offices: a little known insiders’ perspective

State legislators have the right to substitute their judgment for a majority of their population if socialism is against them, he said.

The messages highlight how Trump allies and White House staffers appeared to know that their efforts to overturn the election could be problematic early on but believed they were justified if the plan was successful in keeping Trump in office.

Haley said that she’s dependent of fraud along with that argument. In order to apply pressure to the weak kneed legislators in those states, conservative radio hosts should rally the grassroots, suggesting that they do not have to sit idly by and submit themselves to rule by Beijing and Paris.

Haley then sent McEntee names and contact information for state legislators in six states, including Pennsylvania and Michigan. Trump later called several of those state officials, according to the report.

Two officials from the Trump campaign gave testimony to the committee which gave a lot to the Justice Department.

One of them, Georgia-based staffer Robert Sinners, described how he felt misled by campaign higher-ups about the legal sketchiness around the fake electors plan – evidence that might go to show a corrupt intent.

The plot to the former president was said to have been brought to the attention of the former president. The official tasked with exploring the feasibility of the plan told him the president wanted the campaign to look into the proposal.

When it was decided that Giuliani would be in charge, it seemed that Trump wanted him to lead it. Findlay testified that Trump campaign leadership backed off of the plan a few days after he had been told to look into it, with top lawyers bailing on the idea.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/24/politics/january-6-little-known-insiders/index.html

McCallum’s Campaign Communication with the House Armed Services Committee on the Fauxtography of the 2016 Midterm Reionization Convention

The role played by Roman in his testimony, where he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and refused to answer many of committee’s questions, was supported by communications given to the committee by Sinners. They showed Roman was organizing information tracking the effort.

To get to the heart of what was happening in White House and Trump campaign war rooms, the committee looked to junior staffers – people who were key observers to the action but didn’t have an orchestrating role.

McCallum’s text records also show how campaign supervisors viewed the ongoing outreach efforts. The committee believes that the fake elector certificates might have been brought to Washington by a text message sent by an ex-Oprah staffer who was in front of the Capitol.

The report showed that she turned over several text messages, campaign spreadsheets, and even a script to call state lawmakers, though she didn’t appear to have a leadership role in the operation.

Her insight appears to have given committee information on the efforts to push the fake electors plan. Her notes say that campaign staff tried contacting over 190 Republican state legislators in Arizona, Georgia and Michigan alone.

The committee was unable to serve a subpoena so the operatives message said that he would write a book on the matter one day. Hasn’t been done since 1876 and it was only 3 states that did it.”

In another message the operative, who was McCallum’s supervisor, celebrated after reporters published a recorded voicemail McCallum left on a state legislators’ phone.

He continued, telling McCallum that “you used the awesome power of the presidency to scare a state rep into getting a statewide newspaper to deliver your talking points.”

The National Guard Col. Craig Hunter testified before the committee on January 6 in order to untangle conflicting accounts from senior officials and eventually arrive at a conclusion about what caused the delayed response.

Hunter had a plan for the next hour. In order for the National Guard troops to be reloaded onto buses, they were already loaded onto the buses, and Hunter told other law enforcement agencies that back-up was going to be ready as soon as he got approval.

Hunter said that they had to move because they would be requesting the DC National Guard now.

In hindsight, the failures of top military officials are even more glaring considering Hunter had already devised a plan that could have been put into motion hours earlier.

At that very moment, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy was putting together a redundant plan for transporting those forces to the Capitol and was not aware that he had already been given authority to issue the order himself, the report says.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/24/politics/january-6-little-known-insiders/index.html

Did President Donald Trump Interact with the U.S. Military? Absolutely not, and if so, when did he intervene?

They also did not occur in a vacuum. Trump could have personally intervened at any time, to hasten and coordinate the military response, but chose not to.