Update to Senate Report Details How Donald Trump And DOJ Lawyer Plotted The Coup D’etat on January 6.
Politico reports, Rosen, former acting AG under Trump, appears before Jan. 6 committee:
Jeff Rosen, the acting attorney general during the final days of the Trump administration, sat for an interview with the Jan. 6 select committee on Wednesday, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
The committee also subpoenaed another top Trump Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, for documents and testimony, with a deadline of Oct. 29.
Rosen has detailed, firsthand knowledge of Trump’s attempt to dragoon DOJ into his effort to overturn the 2020 election. But it’s unclear how much new information the panel will get from him: Rosen has testified publicly about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and took questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee for its separate probe into Trump’s efforts to influence DOJ.
That Senate committee released a report on its investigation last week. A spokesperson for the Jan. 6 panel declined to comment on Rosen’s appearance.
Clark, however, has yet to field questions from congressional investigators scrutinizing Trump’s final weeks in office. His lawyer declined to comment on the subpoena. And while Rosen resisted Trump’s efforts to co-opt DOJ, Clark appears to have facilitated them.
Internal emails show that he urged top DOJ officials to send out a letter he drafted falsely claiming the FBI found evidence of serious voter fraud in multiple states. Another then-senior official –– Richard Donoghue, who fielded questions from the Jan. 6 committee last week –– told Clark that sending out the letter was “not even within the realm of possibility.”
Clark also told Rosen that Trump was going to oust him as acting head of DOJ and give that role to Clark, Rosen testified earlier to the Senate judiciary panel.
“Well, here’s the thing, Jeff Clark, my subordinates don’t get to fire me,” Rosen replied to Clark, according to his testimony. “So I’m not accepting what you’re telling me, that you’re going to replace me. I’m going to contact the President and tell him I need to talk with him.”
Clark’s plans did not come to fruition; the DOJ never sent out his letter and Trump did not fire Rosen.
Note: Just because one did not successfully complete a crime does not mean one did not engage in a criminal conspiracy to commit a crime, and unsuccessfully attempted the crime. John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark and Rudy Giuliani most certainly engaged in a criminal seditious conspiracy. They should all be prosecuted and disbarred.
“The Select Committee needs to understand all the details about efforts inside the previous administration to delay the certification of the 2020 election and amplify misinformation about the election results,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the Jan. 6 panel’s chair, in a statement. “We need to understand Mr. Clark’s role in these efforts at the Justice Department and learn who was involved across the administration.”
The subpoena calls on Clark to appear for a deposition on Oct. 29, the same day documents are due to the panel.
The Washington Post first reported that the Clark subpoena was forthcoming. Jan. 6 committee subpoenas former Justice Dept. official viewed as key to examination of Trump’s efforts to overturn election.
The January 6 Select Committee has scheduled depositions for Kash Patel and Steve Bannon on Oct. 14, and for Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino on Oct. 15. If they don’t show up for their depositions, members of the committee have indicated it will be criminal referral time.
Laura Clawson reports at Daily Kos, Jan. 6 committee is ‘completely of one mind’ about criminal referrals if Team Trump won’t cooperate:
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol is moving toward a hard do-it-now-or-face-criminal-referral deadline for the four members of Team Trump whose original subpoena deadlines were last week. That’s progress—but the committee needs to follow through.
“I think we are completely of one mind that if people refuse to respond to questions, refuse to produce documents without justification that we will hold them in criminal contempt and refer them to the Justice Department,” Rep. Adam Schiff told CNN.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) confirmed to MSNBC that witnesses defying subpoenas from the House panel investigating the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol will be criminally prosecuted and charged with contempt of Congress.
“People will have the opportunity to cooperate, they will have the opportunity to come in and work with us as they should,” said Rep. Liz Cheney, one of the Republicans on the committee. “If they fail to do so, then we’ll enforce our subpoenas.”
The Jan 6. select committee investigating the Capitol riot “will move” criminal contempt charges against anyone who doesn’t comply with its subpoenas, warned Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the panel’s vice chair, Tuesday, per Reuters.
Patel, a former administration aide, and Meadows, a former White House chief of staff, are already “engaging” with the committee. While that’s different from fully complying with subpoenas, it suggests there’s a chance they will show up for depositions. Bannon, Trump’s former campaign manager and a White House adviser early on, has said he will not comply. Scavino, a longtime Trump aide, was only even served with his subpoena after the original deadline has passed. Depositions aren’t the only question, though. The subpoenas include demands for documents relating to Jan. 6, and Patel and Meadows cannot be allowed to get away with, for instance, a half-assed deposition and no documents.
The timing of the next move is the question. Rep. Jamie Raskin said “I would expect the Chairman to decide to move immediately on criminal referrals” is the deposition dates pass and the men do not show up and sit down and talk. That’s surely what needs to happen, though Chair Bennie Thompson has not said anything so concrete. (Thompson has mentioned the possibility of criminal referrals, though.) So the committee should be prepared to move on Oct. 15. Especially in Bannon’s case, they can have referral all teed up and ready to go and send it out as soon as he doesn’t show up.
Then Attorney General Merrick Garland will need to follow through, more aggressively than he’s done so far when faced with Team Trump wrongdoing. Garland has to back Congress in investigating an insurrection against the U.S. government in an attempt to overturn an election, or he is useless as a defender of the rule of law.
Meanwhile, CNN reports that as many as five of the 11 rally organizers who received subpoenas from the committee have started cooperating by sharing documents. That group of 11 faces a Wednesday deadline to comply, so the committee may need to be working on a few more criminal referrals in the near future. But it may also have a lot of interesting new documents to sift through, as well, allowing it to make progress on some of key questions.
Friday, Oct. 15, though. That’s the day we want to either know that four Trump loyalists sat down and talked, really talked, to the committee (and turned over documents), or that they now face criminal referrals and that a resolute Merrick Garland is moving with dispatch.
As Kerry Eleveld at Daily Kos says, History is about to call AG Garland in the case of Trump’s Jan. 6 subpoena dodgers:
Attorney General Merrick Garland is facing yet another critical test of whether he’s up to the job of safeguarding American democracy in perilous times.
Trump ally and former aide Steve Bannon is openly defying a subpoena from the Select Committee investigating Jan. 6, and to date three other Trump aides appear poised to simply ignore subpoenas from the panel.
Bannon is scheduled for a deposition with the panel Thursday and, given his blood-sucking desperation for attention and martyrdom, he’s guaranteed to skip it.
Not surprisingly, Democrats on the Jan. 6 committee are already anticipating Bannon’s defiance and beginning to lobby for the backing they’ll need from Garland’s Justice Department to pressure Bannon should they make a criminal referral.
“Lock him up!”
“We are prepared to go forward and urge the Justice Department to criminally prosecute anyone who does not do their lawful duty,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, a member of the panel, Sunday on CBS. Schiff’s comments follow a joint statement Friday from Reps. Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney, the chair and vice-chair of the committee, promising to “swiftly consider advancing a criminal contempt of Congress referral” for anyone who defies their subpoenas.
On Tuesday morning, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, another Jan. 6 panel member, restated the obvious: “The law applies to everybody, including former presidents and including friends of former presidents who are facilitating the incitement of violent insurrection against the union.”
Bannon, in particular, is making a laughable executive privilege claim, despite the fact that Donald Trump is no longer in office and that Bannon wasn’t even a White House official at the time of the Jan. 6 insurrection. In fact, Bannon hadn’t worked at the White House since 2017 and is the only one of the four subpoenaed Trump aides who wasn’t working for the administration during the Capitol siege. The other aides defying subpoenas thus far include former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former Pentagon aide Kash Patel. Former White House communications aide Dan Scavino wasn’t subpoenaed until Friday, and it remains unclear how he plans to respond.
Bannon’s attorney claimed in a letter to the Jan. 6 panel that the executive privileges “belong to Trump.” They don’t really. Even if Bannon had been an administration official at the time of the coup attempt—which he wasn’t—the power to claim executive privilege would belong to the sitting president, Joe Biden, and he’s waived that power.
But facts are beside the point. “We will comply with the directions of the courts, when and if they rule on these claims of both executive and attorney-client privileges,” wrote Bannon attorney Robert Costello.
But the question here isn’t the law—it’s whether the Justice Department is willing to fully leverage its power on behalf of justice and saving U.S. democracy. And whatever Attorney General Garland decides to do in the case of Bannon will set the tone for how other Trump advisers choose to respond to Jan. 6 panel subpoenas moving forward.
“There are a number of things prosecutors have to think about,” former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade told The Hill. “One is, what is the deterrent effect of bringing a case here in light of the history of the Trump administration, allies and others thumbing their noses at congressional subpoenas and stalling? There’s a compelling case here for bringing criminal charges,” she said.
Unfortunately, as McQuade notes, Garland hasn’t proven particularly aggressive in areas concerning the separation of powers since he took over at the Department of Justice.
“So I don’t know that he’s going to be terribly aggressive here,” McQuade.
For the sake of our democracy, let’s hope McQuade’s crystal ball is on the fritz. History is calling, Attorney General Garland, and the time to answer that call is now.
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