Jan 6 hearings: Trump-linked lawyer compares FBI to Stasi, as ex-president’s call to Putin revealed
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Donald Trump is celebrating the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning the constitutional right to abortion, saying it will “work out for everybody” and amounts to “giving rights back when they should have been given long ago” – this as the furor over the decision overshadows devastating evidence of his plan to subvert the US’s democratic process in 2020 and 2021.
At yesterday’s hearing of the 6 January select committee, several ex-Justice Department appointees confirmed that even after being repeatedly briefed that his election claims were meritless, Mr Trump still praised supporters who rioted at the Capitol.
“They’re smart,” Mr Trump told filmmaker Alex Holder, “and they see and they saw what happened, and I believe that that was a big part of what happened on January 6.”
Mr Holder has described an incident in October 2020 when an interview he had scheduled with Mr Trump was cancelled because the then-president was on the phone with Vladimir Putin. The substance of their conversation is so far unknown.
Meanwhile, a former Department of Justice lawyer who tried to advance Donald Trump’s baseless election claims inside the government has been searched by the FBI.
In an interview with Fox news shortly after, Jeffrey Clark compared the raid to the Stasi secret police of East Germany.
GOP Congressman accuses Ron Johnson of lying about role in fake elector plot
Among his various confused rebuttals of evidence that his staff tried to hand Mike Pence “alternate” slates of fake pro-Trump electors from Michigan and Wisconsin, Republican Senator Ron Johnson has claimed that the document in question was ferried to his staff from the office of Republican Congressman Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania.
However, Mr Kelly has now pushed back – hard.
Adam Kinzinger defends Republican role in January 6 hearings
Donald Trump’s latest line of criticism against the January 6 hearings is that not enough Republicans participated in the process to defend him and amplify his (almost entirely false) claims about the election. That’s even though the GOP largely elected to sit the process out when the committee was being established.
Trump angrily watches every Jan 6 hearing, almost screaming at TV, report says
‘The Republicans don’t have a voice. They don’t even have anything to say,’ former president says
Adamin Kinzinger of Illinois, one of the few Republicans on the panel, pushed back on this argument on Friday.
“Yesterday’s January 6 hearing, was overrepresentative of one party,” wrote Mr Kinzinger, who led much of the questioning at the most recent hearing, on Twitter. “Only Republicans testified to almost only Republican questions from almost only Republican congressmen.”
Not that that representation will last going forward. Mr Kinzinger, a rare Republican willing to criticise Donald Trump, announced in October he won’t seek reelection.
GOP Trump critic Rep. Adam Kinzinger won't seek reelection
Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a critic of Donald Trump who is one of two Republicans on the panel investigating the deadly Capitol attack, announced Friday he would not seek reelection next year
Should the DOJ bring charges against Donald Trump for trying to steal the election?
The January 6 hearings have driven home the fact that Donald Trump used all the power at his disposal to try and overturn the 2020 election results.
As University of California, Irvine law professor Richard Hasen argues in today’s New York Times, this should be grounds for criminal prosecution.
If the DOJ doesn’t go after Mr Trump, Professor Hasen argues, it would be enable all those who wish to ignore the results of democratic elections.
“Although a Trump prosecution is far from certain to succeed, too much focus has been put on the risks of prosecuting him and too little on the risks of not doing so,” he writes. “The consequences of a failure to act for the future of democratic elections are enormous.”
And the Justice Department should act fast, Mr Hasen continues. If Donald Trump declares the 2024 presidential campaign he’s been teasing, any future prosecution could be criticised as a politically motivated attempt by a Democratic administration to tank a Republican rival.
There is some popular support for the idea of a prosecution, with a majority of Americans thinking that Mr Trump bears either a good or a great amount of responsibility for the events on 6 January and should be charged with a crime.
Majority of Americans believe Trump should face charges for January 6, poll finds
A new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds that 60 per cent of Americans believe the select committee is conducting a fair and impartian investigation.
And law enforcement has been ramping up its searches of those tied to the plot to steal the election in recent days.
FBI raids homes and new subpoenas issued as January 6 committee pushes back hearings
The select committee will push back hearings to examine new evidence
However, the Biden administration is often loathe to rock the boat too much politically, and a criminal case against a former president would be politically explosive.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has said the DOJ “remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law.”
What that means, however, remains to be seen.
Biden blames Trump for appointing justices who overturned Roe v Wade
Donald Trump’s fingerprints are on today’s Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade, according to President Biden.
“It was three justices named by one president, Donald Trump, who are the core of today’s decision to upend the scales of justice and eliminate a fundamental right for women in this country,” Mr Biden said on Friday in remarks from the White House.
The president called on Congress to make the right to an abortion part of federal law.
“Let me very clear and unambiguous,” Mr Biden continued. “The only way we can secure a women’s right to choose and the balance that existed is for Congress to restore the protections of Roe v Wade as federal law. No executive action from POTUS can do that.”
Watch: Witnesses on members of Congress who wanted pardons
As part of the evidence unveiled yesterday, the 6 January select committee has put together this video of key witnesses describing which Republican members of Congress got in touch with the Trump administration to seek pardons after the Capitol attack.
Jeffrey Clark, Trump ally scrutinised in January 6 hearings, compares FBI search of his home to the Stasi
Former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark was the main focus of Thursday’s January 6 hearings, perhaps only second to Donald Trump himself.
Following the election, the environmental lawyer was a key Trump ally inside the Justice Department, pushing his superiors to get behind Donald Trump’s baseless election claims and trying to encourage states Biden won to send their own, illegimate pro-Trump electors.
On Wednesday, the FBI raided Mr Clark’s home in Virginia, as part of its investigation into those subverting the 2020 election.
Mr Clark spoke with the January 6 committee, but largely claimed the 5th Amendment, refusing to answer numerous questions.
That didn’t stop him from going on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on Thursday, where he compared the FBI search of his home to the Stasi, the former East Germany’s secret police force.
“I don’t recognize this country anymore with these kinds of Stasi-like things happening,” he told Mr Carlson.
Group calls for Trump-appointed Louis DeJoy to resign from Post Office for election role
One Trump administration official who has managed to quietly continue his career into the Biden era is US Post Office Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a former logistics executive.
Now, he is facing calls to resign for his alleged role in trying to aid Donald Trump in winning the 2020 election.
During the campaign, Mr DeJoy was accused of causing mail slowdowns that amounted to “weaponising the United States Postal Service to disenfranchise Americans who choose to vote by mail,” a group that leans Democratic.
Voting rights groups sue postmaster general Louis DeJoy to reverse post office reforms
Voting rights advocates say changes to the postal service must be reversed to ensure a fair election
Now, in the context of the January 6 hearings, advocacy group Citizens for Resonsibility and Ethics in Washington is calling for Mr DeJoy to leave office.
“Donald Trump’s plans to interfere with the election went beyond spreading lies about wide spread voter fraud,” the group wrote on Twitter on Friday. “He had an ally in USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy who tried to slow down the mail service to interfere with voting by mail. It’s time to remove DeJoy from his post.”
‘Proud’ Donald Trump Jr boasts his father and ‘God’ overturned Roe v Wade
Donald Trump Jr sang his father’s praises and cited him as being personally responsible for Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the landmarkRoe v Wade ruling that recognised a woman’s constitutional right to abortion.
“Proud of my father for what he has accomplished today,” the president’s eldest son and namesake tweeted just hours after the high court made its announcement on Friday.
“He gave our movement 3 strong pro-life Supreme Court Justices and despite the Dems and the leftwing media doing everything they could to stop their confirmations, especially with Kavanaugh, he never wavered!!!”
For his part, the former US president took a humbler course and cited “God” as being responsible for the end of Roe, which came by way of the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation.
Johanna Chisholm has the story.
‘Proud’ Donald Trump Jr boasts his father and ‘God’ overturned Roe v Wade
The former US president’s son praised his father for appointing ‘3 strong pro-life Supreme Court Justices’ during his tenure
Rudy Giuliani dismisses Jan 6 problems as he campaigns for his son
As Rudy Giuliani’s conduct between the 2020 election and the Capitol attack is examined in forensic detail in Washington, Politico has this look at his performances on the campaign trail for his son, Andrew Giuliani, who is running for the Republican nomination in the New York governor’s race.
And as might be expected, the former New York City mayor and leading national advocate for demonstrably false election fraud conspiracy theories has been asked a lot about what happened in Washington, DC 18 months ago.
One topic that has come up repeatedly throughout the upstate tour is an allegation from two Trump confidants that Giuliani was drunk when he urged the then-president to declare victory on election night. He denies that claim, saying he stuck to Diet Pepsi.
But that has led to several press conferences that are far from typical for the gubernatorial campaign trail.
“You’ve made terrible defamatory comments about me. You’re suggesting I’m a criminal, you’re suggesting I’m intoxicated,” he said as reporters in Buffalo shouted questions at him earlier this month. “Is your zealotry, is your hatred for Trump so great … you can’t let me get the last part of a sentence out?”
Read the full report below.
Trump obsesses over exact position of water glass in bizarre clip from bombshell Jan 6 film
In a clip shared by the January 6 documentary filmmaker Alex Holder, the former president can be seen fussing over a glass of water in the camera frame.
Mr Holder, the maker of ‘Unprecedented’ — a three-part documentary about the final months of the Trump presidency — tweeted a clip from it and wrote: “The Trumps did not have editorial control. Full stop.”
Unprecedented is slated to be released this summer and has been bought by Discovery Plus.
In fact, Mr Holder’s documentary footage has been subpoenaed by the House Select Committee investigating the Capitol riot of last year.
The clip shows Mr Trump checking himself in the frame after he takes a seat for the interview. Then goes: “I don’t think you want to have the water in the picture. You can take it. Yeah.”
Maroosha Muzaffar has the story.
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