Things seem to be unfolding rather quickly. Former White House aides and advisors are scrambling to cover themselves as they receive subpoenas to appear and produce documents.
It’s rare when lawyers — as opposed to their clients — take the Fifth Amendment. But Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department lawyer who reportedly tried to help Donald Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election, is now claiming the privilege against self-incrimination to avoid testifying before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. He has just been joined in that posture by one of Trump’s main outside legal advisers, John Eastman.
The lawsuit comes after the committee signaled it would pursue a criminal contempt referral against Meadows because of his refusal to sit for a deposition in the investigation into the Capitol riot. Meadows alleges that the subpoenas are "overly broad and unduly burdensome," while claiming that the committee "lacks lawful authority to seek and to obtain" the information requested.
And apparently Mark Meadows had a power point outlining how to overturn election results.
The 38-page presentation, entitled "Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 Jan," is dated one day before the Capitol riot. It's believed to have been submitted by Meadows after he was subpoenaed by the panel in connection with the insurrection.
Specializes in NICU, PICU, Transport, L&D, Hospice.
4 minutes ago, Justlookingfornow said:
I haven't watched all of it today. Care to specify?
I'm sure inflation would still be happening if they didn't hold this committee, however the everday person might not be impressed with the money and time spent while there are other issues effecting them daily.
I'm certain that the Republicans who don't want to talk about the facts and findings from this investigation will be busily telling the American people that they shouldn't be impressed and that this issue doesn't deserve their attention. They'll even have folks like yourself repeating that opinion.
Are you really suggesting that because police had to abandon the outer barricade lines that this is proof they were let into the Capitol itself, even though there are plenty of video evidence that they forced their way in?
Specializes in Peds/outpatient FP,derm,allergy/private duty.
8 hours ago, Justlookingfornow said:
It could except they will be asked questions in a leading way without a cross examine.
Well, in many hearings like this what you normally see are politicians using their question time for some grandstanding and tossing softball questions to witnesses they know will put them in a favorable light. It isn't technically a trial, but it gets very testy and therefore seems like a cross-examination.
Honestly, I've never seen a high profile hearing so devoid of that type of atmosphere, perhaps because those who support Trump insisted it was going to be a political circus, and refused to be a part of it.
So far all of the witnesses have been staunch conservative Republicans, but I think they've avoided inflammatory questioning, and relying heavily on the witness own words.
Are you really suggesting that because police had to abandon the outer barricade lines that this is proof they were let into the Capitol itself, even though there are plenty of video evidence that they forced their way in?
lets release all the video and see what happened. We already know they let them in and even posed for selfies with the protestors.
Telling them to stop it would have been a good start.
It wasn't that he was misunderstood at that he didn't want to do anything illegal. His publicly stated plan, which he repeated numerous times, was to have Pence alter the electoral college outcome, which multiple Trump staffers have testified that he was told would be illegal, yet he continued to push for this publicly.
Again, it's pretty clear he wasn't misunderstood, he confirmed this in a Tweet following the riot.
Yes. I meant to follow up with that tweet you refereced. I did not think he said he caused it rather that he referred to "why it happened I'm paraphrasing but something like, "this is what happens when a landslide win is unjustly stolen....." or something like that. Then went on to say "go home in love and peace ". I guess it can be interpreted loosely as an admission but I don't think so. Definitely not enough for any substantial incriminating evidence.
2 hours ago, toomuchbaloney said:
I'm certain that the Republicans who don't want to talk about the facts and findings from this investigation will be busily telling the American people that they shouldn't be impressed and that this issue doesn't deserve their attention. They'll even have folks like yourself repeating that opinion.
Well, as of yet, people are free to have an opinion.
2 hours ago, nursel56 said:
Well, in many hearings like this what you normally see are politicians using their question time for some grandstanding and tossing softball questions to witnesses they know will put them in a favorable light. It isn't technically a trial, but it gets very testy and therefore seems like a cross-examination.
Honestly, I've never seen a high profile hearing so devoid of that type of atmosphere, perhaps because those who support Trump insisted it was going to be a political circus, and refused to be a part of it.
So far all of the witnesses have been staunch conservative Republicans, but I think they've avoided inflammatory questioning, and relying heavily on the witness own words.
Specializes in NICU, PICU, Transport, L&D, Hospice.
Trump, Told It Was Illegal, Still Pressured Pence to Overturn His Loss https://nyti.ms/3b6XK8d
Quote
Through testimony from a conservative legal scholar, Mr. Jacob and other West Wing aides, as well as Mr. Pence’s own words, the committee dismantled the legal argument Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman relied on, showing that it had no legal or historical precedent — and went against the fundamental tenets of American democracy. They also showed that both men knew that their plans were not legitimate, but insisted on pushing forward anyway.
Quote
Had Mr. Pence followed Mr. Trump’s demands, it would have been “tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis,” J. Michael Luttig, a conservative retired federal appeals court judge, testified before the panel, using sweeping language to describe the threat to the rule of law. Judge Luttig, who had advised Mr. Pence against taking such action immediately beforehand, added on Thursday that had Mr. Trump succeeded, it would have amounted to “the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the Republic.”
And he warned that the threat remains, calling Mr. Trump and his supporters a “clear and present danger to American democracy.”
WASHINGTON — President Donald J. Trump continued pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to unilaterally overturn his election defeat even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out in extensive detail on Thursday by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
The committee showed how Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign — aided by a little-known conservative lawyer, John Eastman — led his supporters to storm the Capitol, sending Mr. Pence fleeing for his life as rioters demanded his execution.
In the third public hearing this month to lay out its findings, the panel recounted how Mr. Trump’s actions brought the nation to the brink of a constitutional crisis, and raised fresh questions about whether they were also criminal. It played videotaped testimony in which Mr. Pence’s top White House lawyer, Greg Jacob, said Mr. Eastman had admitted in front of Mr. Trump two days before the riot that his plan to have Mr. Pence obstruct the electoral certification violated the law.
Following the riot, Mr. Eastman sought a pardon after being informed by one of Mr. Trump’s top White House lawyers that he had criminal exposure for hatching the scheme, according to an email displayed by the committee during the session.
The panel also offered a reconstruction of Mr. Pence’s harrowing day on Jan. 6. It began with a heated phone call in which Mr. Trump berated him as a “wimp” and questioned his manhood for resisting his order to obstruct the electoral count. It grew more dire as the president, knowing his supporters were attacking the Capitol with the vice president inside, tweeted a public condemnation of him, further whipping up a crowd chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”
“We are fortunate for Mr. Pence’s courage on Jan. 6,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee. “Our democracy came dangerously close to catastrophe.”
Through testimony from a conservative legal scholar, Mr. Jacob and other West Wing aides, as well as Mr. Pence’s own words, the committee dismantled the legal argument Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman relied on, showing that it had no legal or historical precedent — and went against the fundamental tenets of American democracy. They also showed that both men knew that their plans were not legitimate, but insisted on pushing forward anyway.
Had Mr. Pence followed Mr. Trump’s demands, it would have been “tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis,” J. Michael Luttig, a conservative retired federal appeals court judge, testified before the panel, using sweeping language to describe the threat to the rule of law. Judge Luttig, who had advised Mr. Pence against taking such action immediately beforehand, added on Thursday that had Mr. Trump succeeded, it would have amounted to “the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the Republic.”
And he warned that the threat remains, calling Mr. Trump and his supporters a “clear and present danger to American democracy.”
The panel’s inquiry is continuing; on Thursday, it wrote to Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, requesting an interview after obtaining an email exchange she had with Mr. Eastman. Ms. Thomas, known as Ginni, is reviewing the request, a person familiar with the matter said.
In the hearing, the panel revealed that in the days after the Jan. 6 attack, Mr. Eastman told Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Rudolph W. Giuliani, in an email that he would like to be included in a list of people for Mr. Trump to pardon before leaving office. The committee showed a video clip of Mr. Eastman’s testimony in which he flatly answered “Fifth” to a series of questions about his scheme to invalidate the election results. He invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination 146 times during the interview, the panel said.
In one of the most dramatic moments of the hearing, the committee displayed a graphic of Mr. Pence’s flight from the Senate chamber as rioters stormed the Capitol. At 2:26 p.m., the mob was just down the hall from him to his left, only 40 feet away. It also showed previously unseen photographs of Mr. Pence huddled in his office off the Senate floor during the mayhem, as his wife pulled closed the drapes so they could not be seen, and of the vice president in a loading dock somewhere in the Capitol complex, at a time when he had refused to be evacuated from the premises.
“The vice president did not want the world to see the image of the vice president of the United States fleeing the Capitol,” Mr. Jacob said.
The portrait that emerged of Mr. Pence was that of a man who risked his life to prevent a meltdown of democracy set in motion by the president himself.
“Make no mistake about the fact that the vice president’s life was in danger,” said Representative Pete Aguilar, Democrat of California, who led much of the session.
The committee traced a remarkable series of events that began in December 2020, when Mr. Trump and his allies realized that they had exhausted all legal avenues to overturn the election and turned their attention to trying to keep Mr. Trump in office through Congress. Seeking to exploit ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act, an 1887 law that lays out the process by which Congress finalizes a presidential election, they argued that the vice president, who presides over the ceremonial session, could unilaterally throw out electoral votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Jacob testified that his boss knew early on that the plan was unlawful. Mr. Pence’s first reaction upon hearing of it, Mr. Jacob said, was that there was “no way” this was “justifiable.”
Greg Jacob, the top White House lawyer to Mr. Pence, told the hearing on Thursday that his boss knew early on that President Donald J. Trump’s plan was unlawful.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
When it came time to stand up to Mr. Trump, Mr. Pence told his staff, “This might be the most important thing I ever say,” Mr. Jacob testified.
By Jan. 4, Mr. Pence and Mr. Jacob were sitting in the Oval Office with Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman. At the meeting, Mr. Jacob recalled, Mr. Eastman admitted in front of the former president that his plan violated the Electoral Count Act.
Still, Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman pressed on, continuing with meetings and calls the next day. Mr. Jacob took notes. On Jan. 5, Mr. Eastman told him directly: “I’m here to request that you reject the electors.”
But as they discussed the legal arguments, it became clear Mr. Jacob had the law on his side. Mr. Eastman admitted his theories would fail 9 to 0 before the Supreme Court, Mr. Jacob said.
The pressure on Mr. Pence began to worry his chief of staff, Marc Short. A day before the mob violence, Mr. Short grew so concerned about Mr. Trump’s actions that he presented a warning to a Secret Service agent, according to videotaped testimony the panel played on Thursday: The president was going to publicly turn against the vice president, and potentially creating a security risk to Mr. Pence.
Other aides and advisers were also imploring Mr. Eastman to abandon the plan.
“You’re going to cause riots in the streets,” Eric Herschmann, a White House counsel, testified that he told Mr. Eastman. In videotaped testimony, he said Mr. Eastman had responded: “There’s been violence in the history of our country to protect the democracy or protect the Republic.”
Mr. Jacob said his faith sustained him through the ordeal. He pulled out his Bible in the secure location with Mr. Pence and read a passage in which Daniel is thrown in the lion’s den after he refuses a king’s order, but is protected by God.
Later that evening, with the Capitol secure, Mr. Eastman emailed Mr. Jacob again still seeking to overturn the election.
Mr. Jacob showed it to the vice president. His response? “That’s rubber room stuff.”
Mr. Jacob described what Mr. Eastman was doing as “certifiably crazy.”
A federal judge has already concluded in a civil case that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman “more likely than not” committed two felonies in their attempts to overturn the election.
The panel has never heard from Mr. Pence himself, and at one point considered issuing a subpoena to obtain his testimony.
But Mr. Thompson said it ruled out a subpoena for Mr. Pence after receiving “significant information” from two of his top aides: Mr. Short and Mr. Jacob.
In a speech in February, Mr. Pence offered a rebuke of Mr. Trump, saying that the former president had been mistaken in asserting that Mr. Pence had the legal authority to change the results of the election and that the Republican Party must accept the outcome and look toward the future.
“President Trump is wrong,” Mr. Pence said in remarks before the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization. “I had no right to overturn the election.”
The Jan. 6 committee has been presenting the televised hearings as a series of movie-length chapters laying out the different ways in which Mr. Trump tried to cling to power. After an initial prime-time hearing that drew more than 20 million viewers, in which the panel sought to establish that the former president was at the center of the plot, investigators focused their second hearing on how Mr. Trump spread the lie of a stolen election.
Future hearings are expected to focus on how Mr. Trump and his allies pressured state officials to overturn the election; attempted to interfere with the Justice Department; created slates of pro-Trump electors in states won by Mr. Biden; and amassed a mob that marched on the Capitol, while the president did nothing to stop the violence for 187 minutes.
June 16, 2022
Alan Feuer
Here are 4 takeaways from Thursday’s Jan. 6
The Jan. 6 committee’s hearing on Thursday, which documented the relentless but unsuccessful campaign by President Donald J. Trump to pressure Vice President Mike Pence into helping him to reverse his defeat in the 2020 election, swerved wildly at times between wonky discussions of constitutional law and unsettling images of the threats and violence that Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Pence inspired.
But at the heart of the committee’s presentation was a straightforward narrative.
Weeks before the mob attack on the Capitol, Mr. Trump joined forces with a law professor named John Eastman, who was espousing a theory that Mr. Pence, in his role as president of the Senate, had the power to alter the outcome of the election — or at least to delay certification of Mr. Trump’s defeat.
Armed with this dubious legal cudgel, and with his other avenues for retaining power closing off, Mr. Trump pushed and pushed at Mr. Pence, including publicly on Jan. 6, helping to rile up his supporters and trigger the riot at the Capitol.
Mr. Pence — backed by his own advisers and other legal experts — resisted Mr. Trump from the moment the idea came up.
Here are four takeaways from Thursday’s hearing.
Even Eastman doubted his plan’s legality, and he let Trump know that.
The panel displayed on Thursday an image of the handwritten notes of Greg Jacob, attorney for Vice President Mike Pence, from a meeting with John Eastman.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Mr. Trump went ahead with the pressure campaign on Mr. Pence even though Mr. Eastman, a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas and a law professor at Chapman University, was less than certain at times about the legality and political viability of his own plan.
The committee, for example, introduced an email that Mr. Eastman had written in the early stages of the scheme, in which he said that the idea of having lawmakers in pro-Trump states draft alternate slates of electors to give Mr. Pence a reason for disputing the results was “dead on arrival in Congress.”
Mr. Eastman also admitted in a private conversation with Mr. Pence’s top lawyer, Greg Jacob, that if the Supreme Court ever had to rule on the legality of a vice president deciding the results of an election on his own, the court would unanimously vote to toss the matter, Mr. Jacob testified.
But more important, Mr. Jacob told the committee in a videotaped deposition — snippets of which were played during the hearing — that Mr. Eastman had admitted in Mr. Trump’s presence that the plan to pressure Mr. Pence violated an 1887 law known as the Electoral Count Act. According to Mr. Jacob, Mr. Eastman acknowledged the illegality of the scheme in front of Mr. Trump on Jan. 4, 2021, just two days before Mr. Pence was to oversee the certification of the election.
That crucial admission by Mr. Eastman was highlighted by Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the committee’s vice chairwoman, who has long suggested that Mr. Trump could be charged with a federal crime for the role he played in obstructing the certification of the vote count on Jan. 6.
If prosecutors can prove that both Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman were aware in advance that the scheme to pressure Mr. Pence would violate the law, it could be an important piece of evidence suggesting intent, should the Justice Department decide to pursue a criminal case against either of them.
Both Ms. Cheney and a colleague on the committee, Representative Pete Aguilar, Democrat of California, mentioned that a federal judge had already ruled in a related civil suit that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman most likely conspired together to obstruct the certification of the election and to commit fraud against the United States.
In his ruling from March, Judge David O. Carter wrote that “the illegality of the plan was obvious,” calling it a “coup in search of a legal theory.”
Mr. Eastman was apparently sufficiently worried about being prosecuted for his role that he inquired a few days after Jan. 6 about getting a pardon before Mr. Trump left office.
Pence never wavered on rebuffing Trump.
If there was one thing the committee’s hearing made clear, it was that Mr. Pence, despite his history of loyalty to Mr. Trump, never believed he had the power to decide the election — and almost no one else in Mr. Trump’s orbit did, either.
According to Mr. Jacob, Mr. Pence’s “first instinct” was to reject the notion out of hand, undercutting assertions by Mr. Trump’s allies at the time that he was open to the idea. Mr. Jacob told the committee that even during his first meeting with Mr. Pence about Mr. Eastman’s plan, the vice president was horrified, saying he did not believe that the founders who “abhorred concentrated power” would have ever agreed that one person — especially one who had an interest in the outcome — could have exercised sole discretion over an election.
Mr. Pence, it turned out, had wide support both inside and outside the White House. The committee, in its presentation, offered up a lengthy list of aides and advisers who seemed to disagree with Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman.
In a recorded deposition, Marc Short, Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, said that Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s own chief of staff, agreed that the vice president did not have a broad or decisive role to play in determining election results.
Another top Trump aide, Jason Miller, in his own recorded deposition, told the committee that Pat Cipollone, Mr. Trump’s White House counsel, thought Mr. Eastman’s plan was “nutty.” He added that Sean Hannity, the very pro-Trump Fox News host, felt that Mr. Pence had done the “right thing” by rebuffing it.
Even Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, seemed to doubt Mr. Eastman’s legal theory, according to Eric Herschmann, a former top White House lawyer. But, as Mr. Herschmann noted in a recorded deposition, that did not stop Mr. Giuliani from publicly promoting Mr. Eastman’s plan on Jan. 6.
There was no legal underpinning to the Eastman plan.
J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge, speaking during Thursday’s hearing.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
At times, the hearing sounded not unlike like a law school seminar on election procedure, with highly technical discussions of how the vice president’s role on Jan. 6 fit into the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act.
Leading those discussions was J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge, revered by conservatives. On the morning before the Capitol attack, Judge Luttig posted a thread of messages on Twitter asserting that Mr. Pence had no power to use his own discretion in deciding the election.
“The only responsibility and power of the Vice President under the Constitution is to faithfully count the electoral college votes as they have been cast,” Judge Luttig wrote.
He added: “The Constitution does not empower the vice president to alter in any way the votes that have been cast, either by rejecting certain of them or otherwise.”
In his testimony on Thursday, Judge Luttig denounced Mr. Eastman’s plan as “constitutional mischief,” adding that if Mr. Pence had gone along with it, it would have “plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis in America.”
The pressure campaign helped trigger the violence.
Mr. Trump’s public calls for Mr. Pence to carry out Mr. Eastman’s plan raised expectations among his supporters that the vice president would do so — and ignited fury when he did not.
Mr. Short, Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, had grown sufficiently concerned about the potential for Trump supporters to turn against the vice president that he alerted the Secret Service on Jan. 5.
Mr. Pence continued to rebuff Mr. Trump even after a call from the president on the morning of Jan. 6 in which Mr. Trump called him a “wimp” and worse, according to testimony gathered by the committee.
At 2:24 p.m. on Jan. 6, Mr. Trump sent out a tweet that said, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence spent almost five hours on Jan. 6 in a loading dock beneath the Capitol. At one point, an angry mob chanting “hang Mike Pence” came within 40 feet of him.
One Trump aide told the committee that it felt at the time like Mr. Trump was “pouring gasoline on the fire.” Immediately, the committee said, there was a noticeable surge in the crowds both inside and outside the Capitol, some of whom began to chant, “Hang Mike Pence!”
Mr. Pence was evacuated from his ceremonial office in the Senate and taken to a secure location, barely escaping the angry mob that breached the building. When Mr. Aguilar told Mr. Jacob, who had been with Mr. Pence in the Capitol that day, that members of the crowd had been only 40 feet from them, he seemed unnerved.
“I could hear the din of the rioters in the building while we moved,” Mr. Jacob said. “But I don’t think I was aware that they were as close as that.”
toomuchbaloney
16,055 Posts
I'm certain that the Republicans who don't want to talk about the facts and findings from this investigation will be busily telling the American people that they shouldn't be impressed and that this issue doesn't deserve their attention. They'll even have folks like yourself repeating that opinion.