Latest Developments In January 6 Committee Investigation (Updated)

While we were all distracted by the Christmas holiday, some important new developments occurred in the January 6 investigation.

The Washington Post reported, Thompson says Jan. 6 committee focused on Trump’s hours of silence during attack, weighing criminal referrals:

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is focusing intently on Donald Trump’s actions that day as it begins to discuss whether to recommend that the Justice Department open a criminal investigation into the former president.

Begins to discuss? WTF has the Department of Justice been doing for the past year? I have seen enough in the public record available to support a criminal indictment on multiple counts.

Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) said in an interview that of particular interest is why it took so long for him to call on his supporters to stand down, an area of inquiry that includes obtaining several versions of a video Trump reportedly recorded before finally releasing a message 187 minutes after he told his supporters to march on the Capitol during the rally that preceded the attack.

“It appears that he tried to do a taping several times, but he wouldn’t say the right thing,” Thompson said, basing his statement on information the panel has gleaned from interviews with witnesses as well as media reports about that day.

He said the president’s delayed response to the Capitol attack could be a factor in deciding whether to make a criminal referral, which is when Congress informs the Justice Department it believes a crime has been committed. It would be up to federal prosecutors to decide whether to pursue a charge.

“That dereliction of duty causes us real concern,” Thompson said. “And one of those concerns is that whether or not it was intentional, and whether or not that lack of attention for that longer period of time, would warrant a referral.”

A criminal referral against a former president would be historic and would ratchet up the political tensions that continue to swirl over the congressional inquiry into the worst attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812 as Trump considers running again for president.

Excuuuse me, but a president engaging in a seditious conspiracy and coup d’etat to interfere with Congress certifying the Electoral College vote to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power for the fist time in U.S. history was also historic. As was the 147 Republican lawmakers who still objected to the election results even after the Capitol attack on January 6, in furtherance of the “coup memos” by Trump lawyers John Eastman and Jenna Ellis (and possibly DOJ attorney Jeffrey Clark). As was the 106 congressional Republicans who joined 17 GQP state attorneys general in support of Texas suit to overturn election results in Ga., Mich., Pa., Wis.. They were all either co-conspirators, aiders and abettors, accessories-after-the-fact, or provided aid and comfort to the violent MAGA/QAnon seditious insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6 – all felonies for which they should be charged and disqualified from serving in public office.

I will reiterate what I have said many times before. The Party of Trump is a criminal enterprise led by a third-rate mafia “Don” Trump. They are all accomplices, coconspirators and accessories who aid and abet his criminality and corruption. There is not a patriot among them. They put fealty to their “Dear Leader” above all else, including loyalty to their country and our national security, and their oaths of office to defend the Constitution. They reject the rule of law and are amoral. It is a betrayal of the faith of the American people in our constitutional government. They all must all be held accountable.

Thompson said the committee is not deterred by criticisms from Trump and congressional Republicans and will seek to hold anyone to account for their role in what panel members say was an attack on democracy that has to be addressed.

“I can assure you that if a criminal referral would be warranted, there would be no reluctance on the part of this committee to do that,” he said.

As for what crime the panel believes Trump may have committed, Thompson echoed the assertion made by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the panel’s vice chair, that Trump’s actions could amount to criminally obstructing Congress as it sought to certify the election results.

He also said the committee is weighing other potential criminal referrals surrounding the pressure put on state and local officials to overturn the results of the election, along with whether people raised money for the rallies and events surrounding Jan. 6 while knowing the claims of election fraud were false.

The New York Times reported this week that the panel was looking at a possible criminal referral for Trump and others as part of its investigation.

Thompson has not previously discussed the issue or what information will be key to making the decision, raising the stakes for the committee’s work and who should be held accountable for the violence of that day.

Bill Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia — which has been leading the Justice Department’s Jan. 6 investigation — declined to comment, pointing only to a statement he issued last week after the House voted to hold former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in contempt for not complying with the panel’s subpoena.

“As with all criminal referrals, we will evaluate the matter based on the facts and the law, and the Principles of Federal Prosecution,” the statement said.

[A] Washington Post investigation found that Trump resisted calls to intervene on Jan. 6 while watching the riot play out on television for 187 minutes before finally released a video calling on his supporters to stand down.

“I know your pain. I know you’re hurt,” Trump began. “We had an election that was stolen from us.” After claiming he had won by a “landslide,” Trump told his supporters on the video that “you have to go home now.” He added, “We love you. You’re very special.”

Staffers in the White House were frustrated that Trump did not say anything sooner, and outside allies repeatedly sought to get messages to him to speak out, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. Some contacted Meadows, while others tried to reach Trump through the White House switchboard.

Before posting the video on his social media accounts, Trump sent tweets disavowing violence, but also urged followers to press on at the Capitol as they sought to prevent lawmakers from certifying the electoral college results and declaring Joe Biden the next president.

During that time, three rioters died and scores of police officers were assaulted, some with their own weapons, while dozens of lawmakers feared for their lives in hiding.

“He wasn’t telling the people to go home,” Thompson said, characterizing Trump’s behavior that day. “He wouldn’t tell them that this is not the way to do it. So I think, since the taping was recorded at the White House, we’ll have access to it.”

The possibility of multiple recordings of a message from Trump to his supporters has been discussed in interviews with several witnesses, according to a person familiar with the panel’s work who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss details.

The committee had requested that the National Archives turn over videotapes among a long list of items from Trump’s final days in office. Trump has sued to block release of the data requested by the committee. A three-judge federal appellate panel ruled against the former president earlier this month, but Trump filed his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday morning.

Then there is the matter of Trump making phone calls to “Coup Central” at the Willard Hotel where his team of coup co-conspirators were plotting the days events on January 6.

The Guardian reports, Capitol panel to investigate Trump call to Willard hotel in hours before attack:

Congressman Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, has said the panel will open an inquiry into Donald Trump’s phone call(s) seeking to stop Joe Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January hours before the insurrection.

The chairman said the select committee intended to scrutinize the phone call(s) – revealed last month by the Guardian – should they prevail in their legal effort to obtain Trump White House records over the former president’s [bogus assertion] of executive privilege.

“That’s right,” Thompson said when asked by the Guardian whether the select committee would look into Trump’s phone call, and suggested House investigators had already started to consider ways to investigate Trump’s demand that Biden not be certified as president on 6 January.

Thompson said the select committee could not ask the National Archives for records about specific calls, but noted “if we say we want all White House calls made on January 5 and 6, if he made it on a White House phone, then obviously we would look at it there.”

The Guardian reported last month that Trump, according to multiple sources, called lieutenants [coup plotters] based at the Willard hotel in Washington DC from the White House in the late hours of 5 January and sought ways to stop Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January.

Trump first told the lieutenants his vice-president, Mike Pence, was reluctant to go along with the plan to commandeer his ceremonial role at the joint session of Congress in a way that would allow Trump to retain the presidency for a second term, the sources said.

But as Trump relayed to them the situation with Pence, the sources said, on at least one call, he pressed his lieutenants about how to stop Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January in a scheme to get alternate slates of electors for Trump sent to Congress.

The former president’s remarks came as part of wider discussions he had with the lieutenants [coup plotters] at the Willard – a team led by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn and Trump strategist Steve Bannon – about delaying the certification, the sources said.

Really important re Trump War Rooms at the Willard: there were MULTIPLE war rooms — Trump lawyers Giuliani, Eastman, Epshteyn plus Bannon was one “command center.” Flynn and Stone had a separate operation.

— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) December 28, 2021

House investigators in recent months have pursued an initial investigation into Trump’s contacts with lieutenants [coup plotters] at the Willard, issuing a flurry of subpoenas compelling documents and testimony to crucial witnesses, including Bannon and Eastman.

But Thompson said that the select committee would now also investigate both the contents of Trump’s phone calls to the Willard and the White House’s potential involvement, in a move certain to intensify the pressure on the former president’s inner circle.

“If we get the information that we requested,” Thompson said of the select committee’s demands for records from the Trump White House and Trump aides, “those calls potentially will be reflected to the Willard hotel and whomever.”

A spokesperson for the select committee declined to comment about what else such a line of inquiry might involve. But a subpoena to Giuliani, the lead Trump lawyer at the Willard, is understood to be in the offing, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The Guardian reported that the night before the Capitol attack, Trump called the lawyers and non-lawyers at the Willard separately, because Giuliani did not want to have non-lawyers participate on sensitive calls and jeopardize claims to attorney-client privilege.

It was not clear whether Giulaini might invoke attorney-client privilege as a way to escape cooperating with the investigation in the event of a subpoena, but Congressman Jamie Raskin, a member of the select committee, noted the protection does not confer broad immunity.

The crime-fraud exception eviscerates the privilege –

“The attorney-client privilege does not operate to shield participants in a crime from an investigation into a crime,” Raskin said. “If it did, then all you would have to do to rob a bank is bring a lawyer with you, and be asking for advice along the way.”

The Guardian also reported Trump made several calls the day before the Capitol attack from both the White House residence, his preferred place to work, as well as the West Wing, but it was not certain from which location he phoned his top lieutenants at the Willard.

The distinction is significant as phone calls placed from the White House residence, even from a landline desk phone, are not automatically memorialized in records sent to the National Archives after the end of an administration.

That means even if the select committee succeeds in its litigation to pry free Trump’s call detail records from the National Archives, without testimony from people with knowledge of what was said, House investigators might only learn the target and time of the calls.

The Daily Beast reports today, Trump Adviser Peter Navarro Lays Out How He and Bannon Planned to Overturn Biden’s Electoral Win:

A former Trump White House official says he and right-wing provocateur Steve Bannon were actually behind the last-ditch coordinated effort by rogue Republicans in Congress to halt certification of the 2020 election results and keep President Donald Trump in power earlier this year, in a plan dubbed the “Green Bay Sweep.”

In his recently published memoir, Peter Navarro, then-President Donald Trump’s trade adviser, details how he stayed in close contact with Bannon as they put the Green Bay Sweep in motion with help from members of Congress loyal to the cause.

But in an interview last week with The Daily Beast, Navarro shed additional light on his role in the operation and their coordination with politicians like Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX).

“We spent a lot of time lining up over 100 congressmen, including some senators. It started out perfectly. At 1 p.m., Gosar and Cruz did exactly what was expected of them,” Navarro told The Daily Beast. “It was a perfect plan. And it all predicated on peace and calm on Capitol Hill. We didn’t even need any protestors, because we had over 100 congressmen committed to it.”

That commitment appeared as Congress was certifying the 2020 Electoral College votes reflecting that Joe Biden beat Trump. Sen. Cruz signed off on Gosar’s official objection to counting Arizona’s electoral ballots, an effort that was supported by dozens of other Trump loyalists.

Staffers for Cruz and Gosar did not respond to requests for comment. There’s no public indication whether the Jan. 6 Committee has sought testimony or documents from Sen. Cruz or Rep. Gosar. But the committee has only recently begun to seek evidence from fellow members of Congress who were involved in the general effort to keep Trump in the White House, such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA).

In his new book, former Trump aide Peter Navarro appears to be bragging that he got away with seditious conspiracy and conspiracy to obstruct and impede Congress, not to mention several other serious crimes. Apparently the Department of Justice could care less? I don’t get it! https://t.co/dq4g49ZPgI

— John W. Dean (@JohnWDean) December 29, 2021

This last-minute maneuvering never had any chance of actually decertifying the election results on its own, a point that Navarro quickly acknowledges. But their hope was to run the clock as long as possible to increase public pressure on then-Vice President Mike Pence to send the electoral votes back to six contested states, where Republican-led legislatures could try to overturn the results. And in their mind, ramping up pressure on Pence would require media coverage. While most respected news organizations refused to regurgitate unproven conspiracy theories about widespread election fraud, this plan hoped to force journalists to cover the allegations by creating a historic delay to the certification process.

“The Green Bay Sweep was very well thought out. It was designed to get us 24 hours of televised hearings,” he said. “But we thought that we could bypass the corporate media by getting this stuff televised.”

Navarro’s part in this ploy was to provide the raw materials, he said in an interview on Thursday. That came in the form of a three-part White House report he put together during his final weeks in the Trump administration with volume titles like, “The Immaculate Deception” and “The Art of the Steal.”

“My role was to provide the receipts for the 100 congressmen or so who would make their cases… who could rely in part on the body of evidence I’d collected,” he told The Daily Beast. “To lay the legal predicate for the actions to be taken.” (Ultimately, states have not found any evidence of electoral fraud above the norm, which is exceedingly small.)

The next phase of the plan was up to Bannon, Navarro describes in his memoir, In Trump Time.

“Steve Bannon’s role was to figure out how to use this information—what he called ‘receipts’—to overturn the election result. That’s how Steve had come up with the Green Bay Sweep idea,” he wrote.

“The political and legal beauty of the strategy was this: by law, both the House of Representatives and the Senate must spend up to two hours of debate per state on each requested challenge. For the six battleground states, that would add up to as much as twenty-four hours of nationally televised hearings across the two chambers of Congress.”

His book also notes that Bannon was the first person he communicated with when he woke up at dawn on Jan. 6, writing, “I check my messages and am pleased to see Steve Bannon has us fully ready to implement our Green Bay Sweep on Capitol Hill. Call the play. Run the play.”

Navarro told The Daily Beast he felt fortunate that someone cancelled his scheduled appearance to speak to Trump supporters that morning at the Ellipse, a park south of the White House that would serve as a staging area before the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol building.

“It was better for me to spend that morning working on the Green Bay Sweep. Just checking to see that everything was in line, that congressmen were on board,” he said during the interview. “It was a pretty mellow morning for me. I was convinced everything was set in place.”

Later that day, Bannon made several references to the football-themed strategy on his daily podcast, War Room Pandemic.

“We are right on the cusp of victory,” Bannon said on the show. “It’s quite simple. Play’s been called. Mike Pence, run the play. Take the football. Take the handoff from the quarterback. You’ve got guards in front of you. You’ve got big, strong people in front of you. Just do your duty.”

This idea was weeks in the making. Although Navarro told The Daily Beast he doesn’t remember when “Brother Bannon” came up with the plan, he said it started taking shape as Trump’s “Stop the Steal” legal challenges to election results in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin fizzled out. Courts wouldn’t side with Trump, thanks to what Navarro describes in his book as “the highly counterproductive antics” of Sydney Powell and her Kraken lawsuits. So instead, they came up with a never-before-seen scheme through the legislative branch.

Navarro starts off his book’s chapter about the strategy by mentioning how “Stephen K. Bannon, myself, and President Donald John Trump” were “the last three people on God’s good Earth who want to see violence erupt on Capitol Hill,” as it would disrupt their plans.

When asked if Trump himself was involved in the strategy, Navarro said, “I never spoke directly to him about it. But he was certainly on board with the strategy. Just listen to his speech that day. He’d been briefed on the law, and how Mike [Pence] had the authority to it.”

Indeed, Trump legal adviser John Eastman had penned a memo (first revealed by journalists Robert Costa and Bob Woodward in their book, Peril) outlining how Trump could stage a coup. And Trump clearly referenced the plan during his Jan. 6 speech, when he said, “I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so… all Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president and you are the happiest people.”

When Pence certified the electoral votes instead, he became what Navarro’s book described as “the Brutus most responsible… for the final betrayal of President Trump.”

Although the bipartisan House committee investigating the violence on Jan. 6 has demanded testimony and records from dozens of Trump alliesand rally organizers believed to be involved in the attack on the nation’s democracy, Navarro said he hasn’t heard from them yet. The committee did not respond to our questions about whether it intends to dig into Navarro’s activities.

And while he has text messages, phone calls, and memos that could show how closely an active White House official was involved in the effort to keep Trump in power, he says investigators won’t find anything that shows the Green Bay Sweep plan involved violence.

Um, you dumbass criminal, violence is not an essential element of any of the crimes to which you have confessed in your book: a seditious conspiracy and coup d’etat to interfere with Congress certifying the Electoral College vote to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power for the fist time in U.S. history.