The House Committee’s Investigation of the Analytic Attack on Capitol Hill Revealed: Julian Zelizer, CSP Chuck Schumer, and Donald J. Trump
Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of 24 books, including The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment. He has a bio on the website atjulianzelizer. The views he expresses in this commentary are his own. More opinions on CNN can be found here.
The House committee’s probe into the attack on US Capitol has shed light on how it was done, with more details about what key witnesses said.
The committee has done its business at a moment in American history when shock and awe among the public seem impossible. The historic impact of congressional investigations has always depended on the ability of elected officials to move the political needle by producing findings that prove a leader acted far outside the parameters of what’s acceptable.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, and Vice President Mike Pence were shown in never-before-seen footage scrambling in order to repel the rioters on Capitol Hill.
In public hearings over the last four months, the panel tried to uncover the full context of what happened that day and who was responsible.
Unlike the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon in 1974, one of the most distinctive elements of Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 election is that so much of it happened in broad daylight.
On election night, President Trump made an illegal decision, by declaring victory and then calling for the vote counting to stop. The report states that it was premeditated.
The 2016 January 6 Committee: How Did The Former President Donald Trump Overstep His Campaign to Overturn the Election? And Why Did He Get His Vote?
Yet the committee managed to fill out the story in very important ways, providing shocking evidence and details as to how the events of those months were even more dangerous than we understood at the time.
There is irrefutable evidence 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.
The report consists of over 1,000 interviews, documents and a year and a half of investigation, and it suggests that Trump oversaw an effort to put forward fake slates of electors in seven states.
As viewers could hear, Steve Bannon said to a group of non-identified associates that the former president would declare victory, which didn’t mean he was victorious, just that he would say he was. If Biden wins, Trump is going to do something crazy, according to Bannon.
“President Trump was informed over and over again, by his senior appointees, campaign experts and those who had served him for years,” the executive summary states, “that his election fraud allegations were nonsense.” The testimony of some of Trump’s top advisers helped build the panel’s case.
On January 6, 2021, Trump knew the protesters were armed and dangerous and did not stop them. He was stopped by a Secret Service agent from going to Capitol Hill, even though he wanted to. Cassidy Hutchinson, who worked for the former president, said that the president lunged at a Secret Service agent and tried to steer the car when told he could not go.
The pressure campaign against Pence was launched the days leading up to January 6 after Trump latched onto the false theories that he could overturn the election. At the meeting in the Oval Office on January 4, 2021, Trump tried to convince Pence to allow the electoral college vote to go ahead despite Congress’ certification of the vote.
Continuum: January 6 was just one piece of a much larger story. The January 6 Committee is not a committee to investigate the campaign to overturn the election, but a committee to do so. The months between January 2020 and November 2020 can be understood with this reframing.
The Trump-Delta Campaign in 2022: From Election Day to January 6, Trump vowed to Defend the Doomsday Campaign
In an effort to overturn election results in key states, Trump and his inner circle targeted election officials in “at least 200 apparent acts of public or private outreach, pressure, or condemnation,” between Election Day and the January 6 attack, according to the report.
To convey his state of mind, committee members made clear that Trump was not “duped” or “irrational,” as Cheney said Thursday. He understood what he was doing. After the Supreme Court rejected the former president’s lawsuit in December 2020, Trump was heard saying he didn’t want people to know we lost.
Then on January 6, Trump purposely ignored many warnings of violence. He had a plan to go to Capitol Hill. Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland reminded viewers that he sat passively, watching television, as the attacks against Congress unfolded and as staunch allies pleaded with him to call off the troops. It wasn’t that Trump didn’t act on January 6; it was that he didn’t want to act. Can you believe it? Pelosi was heard saying to Thompson that day.
The committee wanted to make clear that it is not over in 2022, in its important hearing Thursday. Raskin said that there was a danger to the electoral system and to democratic institutions. This is not an old history; it is a continuing threat. There is a continued threat on many levels. The rhetoric of election denialism has taken hold among many of Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections.
Republicans who subscribe to this agenda are running for a range of office, from governor in Pennsylvania to secretaries of state in key states like Arizona, which will be important roles in overseeing future elections. And, finally, the former president remains the top contender for the Republican nomination in 2024.
Cheney asked Americans if the wrong people would be in power next time, and she said that this point was clear. The January 6 story was about a group of officials, many of them Republicans, who were against the scheme. She reminded the nation that our institutions “only hold when men and women of good faith” make sure that they are strong regardless of the political consequences.
Cheney said the committee is considering making criminal referrals, but it’s up to prosecutors to figure out what will happen. We will find out if Congress can complete work on reforms, such as the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, that renders some of the mechanisms Trump was counting on incapable of doing damage in the future. We will watch as voters make their choices in the upcoming midterms and presidential election to see if they want to send a message to Washington that it can’t messed with democracy. Right now, January 6 has not been a major issue in most of the campaigns.
Unless successful prosecutions of key players is forthcoming, the report is unlikely to be viewed in a different light than the evidence that a major presidential candidate may have been close to changing the outcome of the election.
Concluding its final public meeting Monday, the House January 6 committee released a summary of its key findings — the conclusions of which are devastating, even if they lack all the details expected in the final report.
The January 6 committee spent 18 months investigating Trump’s attempts to overturn the election. Scores of Trump aides who were rarely seen in the news were interviewed behind closed doors.
But it would be wrong to think of the report as the closing chapter of the insurrection and its aftermath. Instead, it represents another test: for the justice system, for elected officials and for the American people. The committee said the insurrection at the Capitol was a wake-up call and that it was an invitation to danger for future elections.
A person who has taken an oath to support the US Constitution but has also been involved in an insurrection or given aid to the enemies of the Constitution can be disqualified from office. The former president and others have been referred by the committee to the Department of Justice for assisting or aiding an insurrection.
The committee found that Trump stoked the violence with incendiary tweets and that the White House was purposely slow in responding to the insurrection at the US Capitol.
Citing the example of Ronald Reagan, Liz Cheney argued that the peaceful transfer of power had been a miracle and only one President, Trump, had failed to abide by it.
The findings certainly rank among the worst scandals in presidential history. It is fair to say that the abuses of power that President Richard Nixon engaged in, as well as the violations of law under the Reagan administration, are linked to the efforts being made to reverse his own election.
In other words, the committee concluded that Trump made history by participating in an unrivaled abuse of presidential power that threatened the very foundation of our democracy: elections. The term “unprecedented” has been used many times, but in this instance the term works.
The “smoking gun” tape that allowed legislators to hear Nixon obstructing an investigation were enough in 1974 for politicians in both parties to say enough.
The discoveries that national security officials in the Reagan administration violated the Boland Amendment by sending money and arms to the Nicaraguan Contras caused Reagan’s approval ratings to plummet and put his legacy in jeopardy.
The President was only saved by the fact that the committee could not directly connect the illicit operation to him and by the fact that the administration mounted an effective public relations campaign to win back public support. Democrats decided that they wouldn’t pursue impeachment.
Even Clinton’s scandal, which was over an issue far less relevant than what faced Nixon or Reagan, clearly contradicted his public statements and legal testimony about the subject after DNA evidence emerged of his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
The Censorship of January 6: Why the Democrat Party Acceded to Partisanship and Ostracization
It was the January 6 committee who had to contend with this challenge, as dramatic televised hearings that were capable of shifting attention to how bad the coup attempt was were drowned out by the latest celebrity scandal in Washington. There are so many outlets for information that it is virtually impossible to keep the public eye committed to any single subject.
Political realignment didn’t happen even after 9/11. Even though the leader of a party may have committed egregious abuses of power, polarization is almost always triumphant.
Another related challenge stems from what social scientists call “asymmetric polarization.” The Republican Party is now to the right of the Democrats. And much of the extremism in the GOP has been tactical, where some party leaders have embraced a form of smashmouth partisanship with no guardrails as to what is permissible.
In this case, the odds that the relevant party will change its ways or respond are minimal. The Senate Republicans originally objected to setting up an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate January 6th and didn’t cooperate with the congressional committee that was set up instead.
The Republicans who did serve on the committee, including Cheney and Kinzinger, have been ostracized and pushed out of the party. During the 2022 midterms, election denialism was a central campaign theme for the GOP rather than an issue candidates ran away from.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/20/opinions/historical-context-january-6-committee-report-zelizer/index.html
News Media Reactions After the Watergate Scenario: The Watergate Story That Never Cames to Light (and Does Not Come To Light)
The sort of reaction on the part of the media doesn’t fit in with what took place with Watergate. The time when professional journalists coalesced around the facts presented by an investigating team is gone.
Partisan media outlets such as Fox News ignore the weight of evidence. Show hosts are more than willing to spin the news in a particular direction that satisfies political yearnings.
In the coming weeks, there will likely be stories that misrepresent what the committee discovered and that will promote conspiratorial claims with no basis in fact. The world of social media is devoid of filters so there will be an opportunity to spread lies that are not in line with the stories in the report.
The opposition in the congressional investigation of Iran-Contra put out a minority report in 1987, but today that is no longer necessary. Opponents of the committee have multiple platforms and opportunities to spin a different tale that undercuts the power that the official findings will have.
And some of the forces that will check the impact of the report stem from a broader national culture that seems incapable of staying focused on issues for long. In our short attention span, everything must be new and fresh; we push the media from one issue to the other — and much of the news media happily oblige — with the lightning speed of TV commercials.
The Watergate scandal was the story that defined much of the period between 1972 and 1974, but for many Americans January 6 has just become one other thing among many that happened in the chaos of our era.
Summary of the Causal Committee on Investigations of the 2020 Presidential Election. J. P. Smith, special counsel for the Garland investigation of Donald Trump, J. Biden, and Rob Eastman
The Attorney General needs to decide whether to indict Donald Trump because he is now one of the President Joe Biden’s campaign opponents. Jack Smith, a special counsel, has been appointed by Garland to oversee the investigations of Trump.
The question is whether the report will push Garland to take action to make sure accountability is ensured rather than focusing on how division can be perpetuated within the electorate.
Given its expected dramatic findings, the January 6 report is certainly a stress test for the problematic state of our democracy. It’s not likely that the basic dynamics will change.
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.
In a statement on Monday, committee Chairman Bennie Thompson said that he has every confidence that the work of the committee will help provide a road map to justice and that the agencies and institutions responsible for ensuring justice under the law will use the information given to them.
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.
There were 68 meetings, attempted or connected phone calls, or text messages, aimed at state or local officials, as well as 125 social media posts by Trump or senior aides targeting state officials.
Republican-led legislatures in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona are mentioned in the report. (He lost all of those states.)
During a January 2, 2021 call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the president asked for a second term after being accused of election fraud.
The committee wrote that Chesebro sent a memo to then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani after a request from Trump campaign official Boris Epshteyn about a “‘President of the Senate’ strategy,” which wrongly asserted that the vice president could pick which presidential electors to count during the joint session of Congress on January 6.
Eastman emailed Trump’s assistant, Molly Michael, at 1:32 p.m., according to the committee. Is the President available for a call at some point today? I want to make him aware of our overall strategic thinking.
The Select Committee on Judgment Appeals for the Corrupt Practices of Donald J.C. Trump in the Presidency of the 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.
Lawyers involved in the efforts to overturn the election are being asked to be held accountable by the select committee.
“Those courts and bar disciplinary bodies responsible for overseeing the legal profession in the states and the District of Columbia should continue to evaluate the conduct of attorneys described in this Report” the panel writes, adding that there are specific attorneys the report identifies as having “conflicts of interests” for the Department of Justice to evaluate.
It’s recommended that Congress consider the severity of penalties for individuals who impede the Joint Session of Congress from certifying election results. Statutes of federal penalties for some types of threats against election workers should be strengthened.
Although it was successful in getting more than 1,000 witnesses to testify as part of its investigation, it wasn’t easy to get people to cooperate with it. The report says the House should make a cause of action for the federal court to enforce its subpoenas.
Congress should pass an amendment to the Electoral Count Act that would make it harder to overturn a Presidential election, as a result of the insurrection and Trump’s 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 has evidence to refer the charge of obstruction and also names him as a co-conspirator in other criminal activity.
The committee has revealed emails from Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch who said that Trump should declare victory regardless of the outcome of the election.
It notes that Trump’s top allies, including those who testified before the committee, acknowledged they found no proof to back up the former president’s claims.
“Ultimately, even Rudolph Giuliani and his legal team acknowledged that they had no definitive evidence of election fraud sufficient to change the election outcome,” it adds, referring to Trump’s then-personal attorney.
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 committee believes the RNC toned down some of the messages to protect themselves from legal exposure and that the RNC knew that President Donald Trump had lied about winning the election.
The committee describes, based on interview with Trump campaign officials, that much of the material in the fundraising emails was based on messages said by Trump – but were not checked for accuracy before being used to ask for donations.
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.”
House investigators said that RNC lawyers directed copywriters not to use the term “rigged,” according to interviews conducted by the committee. There are several examples that have been toned down to be more accurate and less inflammatory.
According to the committee’s final report, the White House communications director said Donald Trump laughed at one of his lawyer’s claims about foreign powers interfering in the election.
“The day after the press conference, President Trump spoke by phone with Sidney Powell from the Oval Office. During the call, Powell repeated the same claims of foreign interference in the election she had made at the press conference,” the report said, referring to conspiratorial claims made by Powell, Trump’s onetime attorney, at an outlandish press conference after the 2020 election.
“While she was speaking, the President muted his speakerphone and laughed at Powell, telling the others in the room, ‘This does sound crazy, doesn’t it?’” The report said it.
“President Trump did not contact a single top national security official during the day. Not at the Pentagon, nor at the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the F.B.I., the Capitol Police Department, or the D.C. Mayor’s office,” the committee writes. “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, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the committee he had this reaction to Trump, “You know, you’re the Commander in Chief. You have a battle going on on the United States of America. There is nothing? No call? Nothing? Zero?
The committee says that the White House photographer was not given permission to take photographs of the President for the rest of the day.
The Secret Life of President Donald J. Parscale and the Day of January 6, 1981: From the Starr Report to the 9/11 Commission, and the National Book Awards
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.
On the night of January 6, when he last spoke to him, Trump said, “can you believe this sh*t?” a former White House aide told the January 6 committee.
A senior White House adviser told the committee that her father was disappointed by the attack on the Capitol.
But when pressed by committee investigators, she could not provide any instances of the president discussing whether or not he did the right thing on January 6 or speaking about those who were injured or died that day.
These high-profile reports often captured public attention for the secrets they revealed. The Church Committee report, the result of investigations in the mid-1970s into the intelligence community, exposed wide-ranging wrongdoing: assassination attempts, support for international coups, drug experiments, domestic spying. It led to an executive order barring political assassinations being issued by Gerald Ford, but it also broke the shroud of confidentiality that had allowed some intelligence operatives to act in strange and illegal ways.
In part the reports’ revelations and style helped them to find eager audiences. The Starr Report, which covered investigations into then-President Bill Clinton’s sexual relationships and his efforts to conceal them, combined a peek-through-the-keyhole tone with lascivious details of the president’s liaisons. It became a bestseller. As did the 9/11 Commission Report, which presented the details of the terror attacks and their causes in such captivating detail that it not only sold briskly, but it was a finalist for the National Book Awards. (The report on the Attica prison uprising, written for a state-level commission in 1972, was also a finalist for the prestigious prize.)
The danger of the January 6 hearing: The story of a young RNC staffer who was fired for pushing back against Trump’s election fraud emails
There is a real danger for the January 6 commission. Should he be reelected, Trump said he would seriously consider pardoning people who were involved in the insurrection.
In her newly released testimony, Hutchinson reflected on her journey to becoming one of the star witnesses of the hearing. Her first two depositions had been an exercise in evasion, as she followed her lawyer’s instructions to claim she could not recall in response to most of the committee’s questions. The problem for Hutchinson was that she could recall: She had clear memories of much of the planning leading up to the insurrection, and detailed recollections of the events that unfolded that day.
When she realized that she had failed the “mirror test” by not being proud of herself, she was in a crisis. She told the committee that she was disappointed in herself. I was frustrated with myself. I was disgusted with myself, to be honest. I never thought I would become a person like that.
The January 6 story focused mostly on a cast of very prominent characters including former President Donald Trump and members of his inner circle, like his former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his White House chief of staff MarkMeadows.
The story of a young RNC staffer who was fired for pushing back against some of the misleading information in emails related to Trump was included in the committee’s dive into the hundreds of millions of dollars that were made in campaign fundraise off of Trump’s election fraud claims.
The report states that an RNC writer, who testified to the committee, made a point to his superiors he wasn’t comfortable with the false claims Trump’s team made after the election.
His direct boss told the committee that she wasn’t sure why Katz was terminated three weeks after the election. However, it came after Katz repeatedly questioned the direction leadership was taking in Republicans’ post-election fundraising messaging.
In the first confrontation, which is supported by multiple witnesses, a higher-up in the Trump campaign was grilled about how they wanted to stop the counting in several battleground states while they kept going in another.
He refused a directive to write an email stating that Trump was the winner in Pennsylvania, which he thought was meant to protect Biden from the election being called in that state.
The panel revealed during its hearings over the summer that Trump called McDaniel directly in December to tell her about the plan for a group of states to submit alternate slates of electors and connected her to his elections lawyer John Eastman, but her full transcript reveals more details about what was shared between the RNC, Trump White House and the Trump campaign at the time.
The Fake Alternative Electors Plan: Why Trump and Higgs Solves the “Fake Elections” Without Judgment
If state legislators have the right to replace their judgement for a majority of their fellow citizens, then socialism is not possible, he said.
The messages show how Trump allies and White House staffers believed they were justified in their attempts to overturn the election, even though it was questionable early on.
Haley said she was dependent on the fraud along with that argument. Lansing [Michigan] do not have to sit idly by and submit themselves to rule by Beijing and Paris,” proposing that conservative radio hosts “rally the grassroots to apply pressure to the weak kneed legislators in those states.”
Haley sent contact information and names for state legislators in six states. According to the report, Trump made calls to several of those state officials.
The committee got extremely helpful testimony from two people who were already of interest to the Justice Department.
One of them, a staffer from Georgia named Robert Sinners, said that he felt misled by the legal sketchiness around the fake electors plan.
Findlay also gave valuable testimony connecting the plot to the former president himself. He told the committee he was tasked by another campaign official in early December with exploring the feasibility of the plan, and that the official conveyed to him that the president wanted the campaign to “look into” the alternative electors proposal.
When it was decided that Giuliani would be in charge of it, it seemed like it was because Trump wanted Giuliani 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
Messages from Senator Mike Roman during the 2016 U.S. Capitol War Room and the Campaign for Repatrino Elections: Report on a Stealth Committee
The role played by Roman – who declined to answer many of committee’s questions in his testimony, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights – was fleshed out by communications handed over to the committee by Sinners. They showed Roman was organizing information tracking the effort.
Junior staffers were looked at by the committee as those who were key watchers of the action in the White House and Trump campaign war rooms.
More than 100 state legislators were contacted by the Trump campaign to get their support for efforts to replace state electors.
Though McCallum does not appear to have had a leadership role in the operation, nor was she directly quoted by the committee, footnotes from the report show that she turned over several text messages, campaign spreadsheets and even a script for calling state legislators.
Her insight appears to have given the committee information on the campaign’s outreach 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 could not serve a subpoena, but the person who wrote the message asked if he could send Mike Roman a tie or something to help him cover his tracks. Hasn’t been done since 1876 and it was only 3 states that did it.”
The operatives celebrated after reporters published a recording of a recorded message on the phone of a state legislator.
He said that the power of the Presidency was used to scare a state rep into getting a statewide newspaper.
The committee’s report outlines in worrisome detail the number of weapons, including high-powered AR-15 rifles, carried by members of the crowd converging on the Capitol, as well as the vicious fighting at the Capitol as the Metropolitan Police lines collapsed (what the report calls “the first fighting withdrawal in the history of that force”) and rioters stormed into the building.
Hunter provided a detailed timeline of his own actions that day, including that he immediately started preparing his troops to respond at around 2 p.m. ET after hearing shots had reportedly been fired at the US Capitol.
Hunter told the committee that they have to move now because they will be requesting the DC National Guard.
But Hunter was unaware that a looming communication breakdown between senior military leaders – including the acting Secretary of Defense and Secretary of the Army – would delay approval of his plan for more than three hours.
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.
The Select Committee on Electoral Investigations. I. Mark Meadows and the 2016 Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel
They also did not occur in a vacuum. Trump could have acted personally to speed up the military response, but he didn’t.
The latest transcript drop comes as the panel winds down its work with the House majority set to change hands from Democrats to Republicans on Tuesday at the start of the new Congress.
According to a transcript of a deposition that Mark Meadows did not appear for in December, the former White House Chief of Staff provided the select committee with over 7,000 pages of email records and approximately 2,000 text messages.
They ran through some items that they hoped to interviewMeadows about, such as a December 2020 email that saidRudy was put in charge. The committee transcript states that it was the President’s decision.
The committee held depositions for people who worked in the Trump Administration, including former White House aide Dan O’ Connell, former administration official Peter Navarro, and right-wing media personality Steve Bannon. The failure of witnesses to appear and the committee communication with them are recorded in the brief transcripts of those meetings.
Preates said “I don’t recall that, it was not my deal”, when asked if she and Bannon talked about bringing people back to Washington, DC. Preate also said she believes Trump lost the election.
Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel told the committee that the former president called her on January 1, 2021, and asked her about her relationship with then-Vice President Mike Pence.
“I do have a recollection of him asking me what my relationship was with the Vice President, and I said I didn’t know him very well,” McDaniel told the select committee, according to a transcript.
McDaniel told committee investigators that after that December call, she called the Trump campaign’s counsel Justin Clark, who gave her the impression that the campaign was aware of the so-called alternate elector plan and was working on it. She said she sent a note to Molly Michael when she got the news that false electors met.
In the lead-up to January 6, McDaniel testified that she did not know that the alternate slates of electors were being considered for anything other than contingent electors in case legal challenges changed state election results. She stated that she was going through ankle surgery around the time of the Capitol attack and that she wasn’t aware of many of those discussions.
The RNC worked closely with Clark, but after Giuliani took over Trump’s legal work, he didn’t really contact the RNC.
CNN previously reported that Giuliani was asking for $20,000-per-day in November 2020, citing a source. Giuliani denied to the New York Times that he was trying to get that figure.
Matthew Morgan, who was general counsel for former President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, described to the committee how the campaign handled requests by Giuliani and his team – which took over the campaign’s litigation strategy in mid-November 2020 – to bring on outside attorneys and firms.
In an interview with Piers Morgan that was made public on Sunday, Morgan said that Giuliani asked through a surrogate what was viewed as a large amount of compensation.
“And when I presented this to (Trump deputy campaign manager) Justin Clark, Justin Clark didn’t think that was a number the campaign was willing to pay and I relied on then Justin to tell me if we could do such an engagement letter and then it never materialized.”
Trump White House aides offered conflicting accounts of how the former president reacted when he learned he would not be taken to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
When he returned to White House after Trump spoke, he stopped by an office that had been shared by two former White House staff members.
We were made aware that the President asked where I was going. I am going back to the White House. According to the transcript, Harrison told the investigators that Bob said we were going back to the White House.
“And at that point I have a specific memory of Bobby telling both Tony and myself, as we were in the room, no one else was in the room, that the President almost kind of shrugged it off,” Harrison told the committee. “He just kind of moved on.”
For his interview with the committee Harrison was represented by a man who used to represent Hutchinson, who allegedly encouraged him to provide misleading testimony. Passantino insisted he represented Hutchinson ethically.
When Hutchinson testified, Harrison got a call from Ornato. Ornato said, essentially, “Can you believe this?” According to the committee transcript, there is a question of where the story is coming from.
Chesebro did answer some of the committee’s more abstract questions about how he learned of the legal questions that shaped the theories he promoted after the 2020 election. However, citing the Fifth Amendment, he refused to say whether he went to the White House on December 16, 2020, as suggested by an email obtained by the committee, or if he was in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021.
He also refused to confirm that he was the Kenneth Chesebro listed on some emails obtained by the committee that investigators sought to ask him about.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/01/politics/january-6-transcript-release-latest/index.html
11 Key Points in the Final Report of the Capitol Attack on September 11, 2015: The Case for a Major Security Force that Pre-located Weapons
“I think I would take the Fifth in terms of authenticating a document that is related to the subject matter as to which I’m taking the Fifth,” he said.
Here are 11 of the important points that stand out as historically important in the final report about the attack on the Capitol.
The Secret Service officers who took the 28,000 Trump rallygoers to the Ellipse for his speech had to take a lot of knives, cans of pepper spray, brass knuckles and tasers. But tens of thousands refused to go through the magnetometers and remained outside the secure viewing area—including those with heavier weapons. There were three men in fatigues Brandished AR-15s in front of officers on Independence Avenue as reported by the report. One person was possibly armed with a lock at Fourteenth street and Constitution Avenue and another with a gun at Fifteenth Street and Constitution Avenue around 11:23 a.m. We have now learned from court cases that far-right groups pre-located weapons in Virginia as part of a group called the Quick Reaction Force. (It’s worth noting that nowhere in the committee’s final report does it mention the pipe bombs also placed on Capitol Hill that day, a case where the FBI appears to still have no meaningful leads two years later and where it just upped the reward money to $500,000.)
One of the most vivid and striking passages in the report comes from Secret Service officials who listened to the radio reports coming from Vice President Pence’s detail inside the Capitol—the detail literally feared for their lives and began telling colleagues back at headquarters to say goodbye to their families and to tell their families they loved them. One official said they were getting anxious as they ran out of options. It sounds like we came very close to either Service having to use lethal options or worse, and they were saying goodbye to the family.