The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol wraps up season 1 tonight with its season finale, “187 Minutes – Donald Trump’s Complete Dereliction of Duty.” There almost certainly will be more televised hearings later this year in season 2 when the committee issues its written report.
The New York Times reports, Jan. 6 Panel to Sum Up Its Case Against Trump: Dereliction of Duty:
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol plans to return to prime time on Thursday to deliver what amounts to a closing argument in the case it has made against former President Donald J. Trump, accusing the former commander in chief of dereliction of duty for failing to call off the assault carried out in his name.
To do so, the panel will put two military veterans — Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia and Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois — front and center in leading its presentation and questioning.
Ms. Luria, the only Democrat on the panel involved in a competitive re-election race, served in the Navy for more than 20 years and achieved the rank of commander. Mr. Kinzinger is an Air Force veteran who flew missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the witnesses they plan to question in person, Matthew Pottinger, who was deputy national security adviser under Mr. Trump and the highest-ranking White House official to resign on Jan. 6, 2021, is a Marine Corps veteran.
In an interview previewing the hearing, which is scheduled for 8 p.m. ET on July 21, Ms. Luria said the panel planned to document in great detail how Mr. Trump did nothing for more than three hours while his supporters stormed the Capitol, raising ethical, moral and legal questions around the former president.
Trump ‘gleefully’ watched the Capitol riot from White House dining room, ex-Trump aide alleges: Former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham alleged that not only did former President Donald Trump fail to quickly and adequately condemn last year’s attack on the Capitol as it happened, he quite happily watched the situation unfold from the safety of the White House.
Will the committee attempt a minute-by-minute tick-tock with side-by-side images of Trump at the White House and what was occurring at the Capitol? Let’s see the DOJ not do something with that!
Ms. Luria said the panel planned to elicit in-person accounts of what went on in the West Wing on Jan. 6 from Mr. Pottinger and Sarah Matthews, a former White House press aide who had resigned in the aftermath of the riot. It also plans to play recorded testimony from Pat A. Cipollone, the former White House counsel, and others to document Mr. Trump’s inaction on Jan. 6.
“We have accounts from people who observed him,” Ms. Luria said. “There was no concern, anger, distress. He wasn’t upset by it.”
The committee plans to demonstrate that Mr. Trump had the power to call off the mob but refused to do so until after 4 p.m. that day — and then only after hundreds of officers had responded to the Capitol to support the overrun Capitol Police force – over 140 of whom suffered injuries, and had begun to turn the tide against the mob, making it clear that the siege would fail, according to committee aides.
The panel also plans to show outtakes from Mr. Trump’s video remarks of Jan. 7 in which he struggled to condemn the violence and promise a peaceful transfer of power, according to a person familiar with the committee’s plans. The plans to show the outtakes were reported earlier by The Washington Post.
CNN adds that we will finally get to see the video that never aired that day:
The House committee investigating the insurrection plans to show footage at Thursday’s hearing of then-President Donald Trump having difficulty working through efforts to tape a message to his supporters on January 7, 2021, the day after the Capitol riot, sources familiar with the committee’s plans tell CNN.
The outtakes, first reported by The Washington Post, were part of production of a speech Trump gave the night after the riot. They show Trump having a difficult time working through the effort to tape the message. Trump refused to say the election results had been settled and attempted to call the rioters patriots. He also went to great lengths to not accuse them of any wrongdoing.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who is a member of the committee, confirmed Wednesday night to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that the panel has the outtakes and plans to share some of them during the hearing.
“The President displayed extreme difficulty in completing his remarks,” Raskin said on “Anderson Cooper 360.”
“It’s extremely revealing how exactly he went about making those statements, and we’re going to let everybody see parts of that,” he added.
Rep. Adam Schiff, another committee member, told CNN’s Don Lemon later Wednesday that the outtakes “will be significant in terms of what the President was willing to say and what he wasn’t willing to say.”
The California Democrat said the outtakes will show “all of those who are urging him to say something to do something to stop the violence. You’ll hear the terrible lack of a response from the President, and you’ll hear more about how he was ultimately prevailed upon to say something and what he was willing to say and what he wasn’t.”
The Times continues:
The panel has already started detailing some of its evidence of Mr. Trump’s inaction. Ms. Matthews has told the committee that a tweet Mr. Trump sent attacking Vice President Mike Pence while the riot was underway was like “pouring gasoline on the fire.”
Mr. Trump had tried unsuccessfully to pressure Mr. Pence, who was inside the Capitol as rioters breached the building chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” to reject Congress’s official count of electoral votes to confirm Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the president-elect.
Both Mr. Pottinger and Ms. Matthews have cited that tweet as contributing to their desire to leave the White House.
“These were people who believed in the work of administration, yet, on this day, when faced with the circumstances, the president’s inaction, and some of the statements he made, they decided they were done, they were going to resign,” Mrs. Luria said. “That is very powerful when you heard from them directly.”
The committee has also said it received testimony from Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who was Mr. Pence’s national security adviser. He told the panel that Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s eldest daughter, urged her father at least twice to call off the violence, as did Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, and Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary.
The panel has also released text messages from Fox News hosts, including Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, and Donald Trump Jr., one of the president’s sons, calling for him to do more to stop the violence that day.
“Anyone who came into contact with him that day and everyone who had access to him, from what they’ve shared with the committee, made some degree of effort to try to get him to do more,” Ms. Luria said.
[W]hile there are penalties for members of the military who are found derelict in their duties, Ms. Luria said she was not sure Mr. Trump could be charged with a criminal offense as a result of his inaction.
Note: Trump’s second impeachment for the January 6 insurrection occurred after he left office. Had he still been in office at the time, the dereliction of duty to faithfully execute the laws of the United States would have been included as a count for impeachment, and may have attracted enough Republican votes to convict him on that one count. Republican senators also cited the lack of first-person witness testimony at the time to prove Trump’s culpability for the first coup d’état in America history. Had these witnesses come forward at that time, there may hve been enough Republican votes to convict Trump. While the witnesses are to be comended for testifying now, that was the time for a true patriotic citizen to come forward and testify to the impeachment committee.
This should be fun. Rolling Stone reports, Exclusive: Jan. 6 Committee Plans to Humiliate MAGA Lawmakers Who Cowered During Capitol Attack:
The Jan. 6 committee plans to use its Thursday-night hearing to call out insurrection-friendly lawmakers who cowered during the Capitol attack but have since downplayed the insurrection’s severity, according to two sources familiar with the committee’s planning.
“They have plans to paint a really striking picture of how some of Trump’s greatest enablers of his coup plot were — no matter what they’re saying today — quaking in their boots and doing everything shy of crying out for their moms,” one source tells Rolling Stone. “If any of [these lawmakers] were capable of shame, they would be humiliated.”
Oh please tell me that they have security camera footage of Trump Fluffer Maskless Lindsey Graham ‘screaming at a cop during Capitol siege for failing to protect politicians from Trump’s MAGA mob’. I’ll bet he even peed his pants!
WATCH: @SenSherrodBrown reports publicly for the first time that during the attack on the Capitol he saw a maskless Sen. Graham scream at a Capitol police officer for not "doing enough" to protect the Senators pic.twitter.com/LKkfIkmfiH
— The Beat with Ari Melber 📺 (@TheBeatWithAri) January 12, 2021
[It] remains unclear which specific lawmakers the committee could call out. But at least some Republicans have already had their attempts to downplay or justify the attempted coup undone by footage 
from the day of the attack. When Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) claimed the insurrection “a normal tourist visit,” social media users quickly located photos of the Georgia Republican gasping in terror and hiding behind an armed Capitol police officer pointing a handgun at a barricaded entrance to the Senate floor.
Will the Committee add captions?
In the 18 months since the insurrection, Republican lawmakers have tried to whitewash it through a series of contradictory talking points. Republicans have alternately downplayed the attack by calling it “a peaceful protest,” claimed it was violent but that the violence was carried out solely by nonexistent “antifa” or federal informants at the Capitol, or that Democrats were to blame for failing to adequately defend the Capitol against the protesters they variously claim weren’t violent or a threat.
Republicans like Reps. Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Paul Gosar have gone so far as to cast alleged rioters held in pretrial detention as unjustly accused political prisoners.
They are among the Coup Plotter co-conspirators, 11 House Republicans attended a White House meeting with Trump to strategize about overturning the election results on January 6. Six of them later asked for pardons, and are accessories in furtherance of the crime. Each of them should be prosecuted for their participation in the conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government, and for giving aid and comfort to the violent MAGA/QAnon seditious insurrectionists on January 6, 2021.
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Josh Hawley.
Ahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!
I will forever hear the Monty Python song about brave sir Robin running away every time I see that traitorous f%$&.
An interesting contrast with the picture of his raised fist.
https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1550289002586161153
The Recount
@therecount
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) — who raised his fist in support of the Capitol insurrectionists earlier in the day — runs for his life from the rioters inside the building in never-before-seen video.
Hawley Runs From The Protesters He Riled Up
6:17 PM · Jul 21, 2022·Twitter Media Studio
In light of recently released information about the Secret Service, Pence telling the USSS “I’m not getting in that car” is maybe the scariest thing I’ve ever heard.
What did the Vice President of the United States of America think the United States Secret Service was going to do with him?
Deliver him to the mob?
I hope the Dems use every bit of footage from these hearings during the upcoming election and the next five upcoming elections.
The GQP wants no rules or regulations, guns in the streets, and palace coup’s. They want to turn the USA into a third world country.
Admirals Steve Abbot, James Loy, John Nathman and William Owens, and Generals Peter Chiarelli, John Jumper and Johnnie Wilson are retired four-star generals and admirals in the U.S. armed forces, who write at the New York Times, “We Are Retired Generals and Admirals. Trump’s Actions on Jan. 6 Were a Dereliction of Duty.”, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/21/opinion/january-6-trump-military.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhkT1UZAibSRdkhrxqAwvrGxqE1nG67cm2JUytH16EQAoyB507XdOxje943lXy9deN2DYUOFrZ03_MNeAtkURWpqZ-J38lVLyhv-Y7sGzJr05iIALsxq3q6MmSybbcilLDlthmMPWjuWLfNkiF0fHYTqpNgc16v0HwPxr6UUbImn4kjgopyQ8xyVjwCZyKVvvf3CB0YON6ObhrU6ABeSPgOEHiI3obas-RcBV0UXVHWT3p_4nI-4cdePb4UP6X8LB0heKnukND2CYwgOBQ0TxknWgtvubw&referringSource=articleShare
The inquiry by the House’s Jan. 6 committee has produced many startling findings, but none to us more alarming than the fact that while rioters tried to thwart the peaceful transfer of power and ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the president and commander in chief, Donald Trump, abdicated his duty to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.
In the weeks leading up to that terrible day, allies of Mr. Trump also urged him to hold on to power by unlawfully ordering the military to seize voting machines and supervise a do-over of the election. Such an illegal order would have imperiled a foundational precept of American democracy: civilian control of the military.
Americans may take it for granted, but the strength of our democracy rests upon the stability of this arrangement, which requires both civilian and military leaders to have confidence that they have the same goal of supporting and defending the Constitution.
We hope that the country will never face such a crisis again. But to safeguard our constitutional order, military leaders must be ready for similar situations in which the chain of command appears unclear or the legality of orders uncertain.
The relationship between America’s civilian leadership and its military is structured by an established chain of command: from unit leaders through various commanders and generals and up to the secretary of defense and the president. Civilian authorities have the constitutional and legal right and responsibility to decide whether to use military force. As military officers, we had the duty to provide candid, expert advice on how to use such force and then to obey all lawful orders, whether we agreed or not.
The events of Jan. 6 offer a demonstration on how military and civilian leaders execute this relationship and what happens when it comes under threat. When a mob attacked the Capitol, the commander in chief failed to act to restore order and even encouraged the rioters. As Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified to Congress, Vice President Mike Pence attempted to fill the void by calling on the National Guard to intervene.
Given the urgent need to secure the Capitol, Mr. Pence’s request was reasonable. Yet the vice president has no role in the chain of command unless specifically acting under the president’s authority because of illness or incapacitation, and therefore cannot lawfully issue orders to the military. Members of Congress, who also pleaded for military assistance as the mob laid siege to the Capitol, are in the same category. In the end, the National Guard deployed not in response to those pleas but under lawful orders issued by the acting secretary of defense, Christopher Miller.
Should civilians atop the chain of command again abandon their duties or attempt to abuse their authority, military ranks can and must respond in accordance with their oaths — without a lawful order from appropriate command authority, they cannot unilaterally undertake a mission. Concurrent with a duty to obey all lawful orders is a duty to question and disobey unlawful orders — those a person “of ordinary sense and understanding,” as a Court of Military Review ruling put it, would know to be wrong.
Operations on U.S. soil must also specifically comply with the Standing Rules for the Use of Force, which limit use of force but explicitly authorize it to protect people from imminent threat of death or serious harm, to defend “assets vital to national security” and “to prevent the sabotage of a national critical infrastructure.”
These are essential checks on civilian officials who would make unlawful use of U.S. military personnel. Governors, who possess broad command authority over our 54 National Guard organizations, for example, may face political pressure to deploy these forces to illegally interfere with elections or other democratic processes.
To recognize these threats to our democracy, military leaders must continue to develop robust training, guidance and resources for service members in accordance with these safeguards, ensuring the integrity of the chain of command and effective operation of civil-military relations.
But while such preparedness is necessary, it is not sufficient.
We each took an oath as former leaders of the armed forces to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” We fulfilled that oath through service to civilian leadership elected by and accountable to the American people. This essential arrangement, however, is not self-executing; it relies on civilian leaders equally committed to protecting and defending the Constitution — including, most important, the commander in chief.
The principle of civilian control of the military predates the founding of the Republic. In 1775, George Washington was commissioned as the military commander of the Continental Army under the civilian command authority of the Second Continental Congress. The next year, among the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence against King George III was his making “the military independent of and superior to the civil power.”
The president’s dereliction of duty on Jan. 6 tested the integrity of this historic principle as never before, endangering American lives and our democracy.
The lesson of that day is clear. Our democracy is not a given. To preserve it, Americans must demand nothing less from their leaders than an unassailable commitment to country over party — and to their oaths above all.