Jan 6 hearings: Trump-linked lawyer compares FBI to Stasi, as ex-president’s call to Putin revealed

Trump to DOJ: Say the election was corrupt and ‘leave the rest to me’

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.

Key points

• Trump told DOJ to say election was corrupt and ‘leave the rest to me’ and GOP
• Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mo Brooks asked for pardons from Trump, Jan 6 hearing told
• Trump calls Capitol rioters ‘smart’ in clip from documentary that shocked his aides
• What did Trump and Putin talk about in October 2020?
• ‘Proud’ Donald Trump Jr boasts his father and ‘God’ overturned Roe v Wade

[23 June 2022 22:45 · Josh Marcus]

Donald Trump was willing to ‘undermine’ US democracy to defend his ‘very fragile ego’: Adam Kinzinger

The committee just heard closing statements.

“The facts were irrelevant to president Trump,” Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger said. “It was about protecting his very real power and his very fragilfe ego, even it if it meant recklessly undermining our entire electoral system.”

Mr Kinzinger said he’s worried another attempt to overturn the election could happen again.

“I’m still worried that not enough has changed to prevent this from happening again,” he continued. “The oath that we take has to mean something.”

[23 June 2022 23:00 · Josh Marcus]

Trump asked ‘Kraken’ conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell to be a special counsel, she confirms to Jan 6 committee

Donald Trump personally tapped conspiracy theorist and attorney Sidney Powell to be a “special counsel” working in the White House to investigate his allegations of voter and election fraud, though he never went through with her appointment, Ms Powell testified to the Jan 6 committee on Thursday.

The former Trump attorney’s testimony to the Jan 6 committee was one of several pieces of witness testimony revealed publicly for the first time by the select committee at the hearing.

“On Friday, he had asked me to be a special counsel to address the election issues,” she told the lawmakers.

Mr Trump’s offer had been previously reported by The New York Times in December of 2020, just a few weeks before the January 6 riot, but never confirmed publicly by either the president or Ms Powell before now.

John Bowden has the story.

[23 June 2022 23:15 · Josh Marcus]

WATCH: White House advisor details GOP attempts to get pardons for election scheme

Multiple Republicans in Congress, including Matt Gaetz, Mo Brooks, Andy Biggs, Louie Gohmert, and Scott Perry all asked the White House for pardons in the context of the plan to challenge the 2020 election.

“The general tone was, we may get prosecuted because we were defensive of the president’s positions on these things,” former White House senior advisor Eric Herschmann said in pre-taped testimony played for the commitee on Thursday.

The former official said the pardons being sought seemed to cover conduct “from the beginning of time up until today,” he went on, noting that, “[Richard] Nixon’s pardon was never nearly that broad.”

[23 June 2022 23:30 · Josh Marcus]

‘Pure insanity’: White House wanted DOJ to pursue conspiracy theory that Italian satellite meddled in election

DOJ officials testified today about the numerous ways the Trump White House and its allies pressured them to cast doubt on the 2020 election result, even though they were existensively briefed that their claims were false.

Richard Donoghue, former acting deputy attorney general, described how White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Pennsyvlania congressman Scott Perry urged him to look into an internet conspiracy theory that an Italian defence satelite somehow compromise the election.

The DOJ official said the claims were “pure insanity” and “patently absurd.”

Mr Meadows kept at it, however, calling acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and asking him to meet with one of the men featured in a YouTube video about the Italy story.

“I told him this whole thing about Italy had been debunked, and that should be the end of that,” Mr Rosen told the January 6 committee on Thursday. “If he has real evidence, which this video doesn’t show, he can walk into an FBI field office anywhere in the United States. There’s 55 of them.”

[23 June 2022 23:48 · Josh Marcus]

January 6 hearing challenges claim that Rep. Scott Perry didn’t seek pardon

As the campaign to overturn the 2020 election result heated up, numerous Republicans reached out to the White House to secure a pardon.

Among them was Pennsylvania congressman Scott Perry, according to Cassidy Hutchinson, who worked for the White House chief of staff’s office.

In pre-taped testimony played in Congress on Thursday, she said she was contacted directly by the GOP rep about a “pre-emptive” pardon.

Mr Perry has denied he ever sought a pardon.

“The notion that I ever sought a Presidential pardon for myself or other Members of Congress is an absolute, shameless, and soulless lie,” he wrote on social media earlier this month.

[24 June 2022 00:00 · Josh Marcus]

‘Pure insanity’: Jan 6 committee hears pro-Trump conspiracy theory involving vote-switching Italian satellites

Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows requested that the US Department of Justice call the Italian government to consider a conspiracy theory that migrated from QAnon-linked corners of the internet to the White House, according to a House select committee investigation into the baseless voter fraud narrative that fuelled violence at the US Capitol on 6 January.

Mr Meadows – according to documents first obtained by members of Congress and reviewed by news outlets last year – reportedly told then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen in the wake of Mr Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss to investigate spurious fraud claims in states that he lost.

He allegedly pressed Mr Rosen to investigate several debunked allegations, including a “theory” that Italian officials in coordination with Barack Obama and the CIA used satellites and military technology to manipulate US voting machines, a claim that circulated among QAnon-affiliated groups and far-right media outlets before coming to the attention of Republican congressman Scott Perry, who sent a YouTube link to Mr Meadows.

“Why can’t we just work with the Italian government?” Mr Perry wrote to Mr Meadows on 31 December, 2020, according to texts obtained by the committee. The video was posted on YouTube on 18 December.

Alex Woodward has more on this strange story.

[24 June 2022 00:15 · Josh Marcus]

Matt Gaetz, Mo Brooks and Louie Gohmert among lawmakers who asked for pardons from Trump, Jan 6 hearing told

Representatives Mo Brooks, Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, Louie Gohmert and Scott Perry were among the Republican members of Congress who asked then-president Donald Trump to insulate them from future prosecutions by granting them presidential pardons in the days immediately following the attack on the US Capitol on January 6 last year.

Their names were revealed by the House January 6 select committee hearing on Thursday that examined Mr Trump’s efforts to pressure the Department of Justice to assist in his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.

Cassidy Hutchinson, a former special assistant to the president, said Mr Gaetz and Mr Brooks had both advocated for a “blanket pardon” for members involved in a December meeting to plan for events on January 6.

“Mr Gaetz was personally pushing for a pardon and was doing so since early December,” she said in pre-recorded testimony played by the committee.

The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg has more.

[24 June 2022 00:30 · Josh Marcus]

Alex Holder: How a little known British filmmaker came to be at the centre of the case against Trump

Up close? For sure. Personal? Perhaps not.

Alex Holder, a little-known British filmmaker, has found himself at the centre of an unlikely political storm, after it emerged the committee investigating the Jan 6 attacks had issued a subpoena, calling on him to hand over hours of footage of Donald Trump and his family he had filmed for a documentary in the last weeks of 2020, and of the events of the day of the storming of the US Capitol.

He had shot it for inclusion in a yet to be released three-part documentary about the final months of the Trump presidency. The film – Unprecedented – is slated to be released this summer and has been bought by Discovery Plus.

The committee also requested that Holder provide an interview to committee members himself, something he agreed to do, and which happened on Thursday morning, shortly before the “National Commission to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol Complex” held its fifth public session.

Andrew Buncombe has the full profile.

[24 June 2022 00:45 · Josh Marcus]

More Nixon flashbacks at the January 6 hearings

In addition to just about every journalist in Washington, Donald Trump, and citizens around the country, one John Wesley Dean III was watching Thursday’s January 6 hearings.

Mr Dean served as White House counsel for president Richard Nixon and helped cover up the Watergate burglary, before agreeing to cooperate with Senate investigators and testify publicly about the scandal and resulting efforts to conceal it.

On Thursday, Mr Dean posted a photo on Twitter showing him watching the hearings alongside other former Nixon officials.

[24 June 2022 01:00 · Josh Marcus]

We now know the names of Republicans who asked for pardons after January 6. Remember them

As Thursday’s hearings illuminated, Donald Trump waged a frenzied campaign to get the DOJ on his side and back up his false election claims.

Top officials were so incensed and concerned about Mr Trump’s intentions they threatened to resign en masse.

As columnist Ahmed Baba argues in his latest, “If this wasn’t clear before, it’s certainly clear after tonight’s hearing: The only widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election was Donald Trump’s widespread effort to overturn it.”

Read more here.