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The chair of the January 6th committee, Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, was born into segregation in the Delta town of Bolton, Mississippi, population five hundred and twenty-one, a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, Ku Klux Klan, and lynching, as he said during the first hearing. The vice-chair, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, is twenty years younger and the daughter of Vice-President Dick Cheney; she had spent most of the Trump years occupying the third-ranking position in the Republican House leadership, until she was forced to step down in May, 2021, having repeatedly criticized Trump and voted for his impeachment. The scene is straight out of a John Grisham thriller: the slow-speaking Southern judge with a long historical memory, the sharp female prosecutor who is turning against her former political patrons. This is what justicesimple, crowd-pleasing justiceis supposed to look like.

In its focus on the period between the Presidential election on November 3, 2020, and the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the committee has built an account in which successive advisers to the Presidenteach of them representing a portion of his partyturn away from him in disgust, as he tries to sell the badly organized fiction of a stolen election. Those with him on November 3, 2020 were already a self-selecting group of loyalists, given how much of the Party refused to work for Trump in the first place, and how many of his early aides burned out and left. In November, most of the Trump White House lawyers and campaign staff, who saw no major fraud in the election, had consolidated around Team Normal, as the political aide Bill Stepien termed it in his testimony; the Trump camp was arranged around Team Rudy, a few lawyers allied with the former New York mayor Giuliani, who were searching for evidence of fraud that never turned out to be there. In every scene recreated in the hearing room, every heated Oval Office session recounted by a lawyer, every memo highlighted and projected on a screen above the dais, the central question is: Who was with Trump, and who was against him?

But this alignment had a political valence as well. In December, as Trump continued to pursue his election-fraud claims, his Attorney General, Bill Barr, the embodiment of the conservative legal establishments truce with the President, resigned. In Congress, the Republicans clearly with Trump were the members of the right-wing House Freedom Caucusmost prominently, Rep. Jim Jordan, of Ohio, Rep. Paul Gosar, of Arizona, Rep. Louie Gohmert, of Texas, and Rep. Scott Perry, of Pennsylvaniawhose line to the President ran through the White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, formerly the chair of the House Freedom Caucus. The Committee etched another dividing line: among the lawyers, it was Team Normal versus Team Rudy, but among the politicians it was Team Republican Party versus Team Freedom Caucus.

Thursdays hearing centered on a dramatic Oval Office meeting on January 3rd, three days before the insurrection. One attendee was a lawyer at the D.O.J. named Jeff Clark, who helped lead the departments environmental division. Clark had met Trump through Rep. Perry, of the Freedom Caucus, and made clear that he would back the Presidents claimsClark had gone so far as to draft a D.O.J. letter, at Trumps urging, asking the Georgia state legislature to adopt a fake set of electors rather than those fairly won by President Biden. Also at the meeting were acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen and acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, who had been running the D.O.J. since Barrs departure, and had refused to send Clarks letter. According to the testimony that Rosen and Donoghue gave on Thursday, the President asked why he should not replace Rosen with Clark, given that Rosen would not do what his Commander-in-Chief wanted. Donoghue told the committee that he had said that Clark was not qualified to either run the Department of Justice or investigate an election-fraud claimhe had never even tried a case. Clark protested that he had led very complicated environmental appeals. In one of the all-time Oval Office disses (assuming it really happened; we only have Donoghues word here), Donoghue said, Thats right. Youre an environmental lawyer. Go back to your office and well call you when theres an oil spill. Trump did not make Clark acting Attorney General; Donoghue advised him that if he did all of his Assistant Attorneys General would resign en masse. Trumps own Department of Justice was against him. What he still had were the Freedom Caucus andseventy-two hours latera mob.

Trumps instincts are not especially sharp these days, and he seemed to recognize very belatedly that the events of January 6th not only put him in legal jeopardy but political peril, too. For a half decade, part of his pitch has been that, however reluctant the Republican establishment seemed, however disgusted it pretended to be with him, it would always come home to him in the end. But, the same week that the January 6th committee emphasized how even the Trump diehards in the White House, in the days before the riot, were fed up with him, a poll of Republican primary voters in New Hampshire put him behind Ron DeSantis. Brit Hume of Fox News emphasized on air that, if the hearings mean Trump does not run in 2024, then the committee will have done the Republican Party a great service, because many Republicans think they cannot win with Trump at the head of the ticket. Speaking with a conservative talk-radio host last week, the former President said that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthys decision to boycott the January 6th committee was very, very foolish since that step had allowed Trumps opponents to pick the members of the committee by themselves, and to shape the story as they saw fit. McCarthy did not respond. He has long bowed to Trump, but he has also been an antagonist of the Freedom Caucus, not a member. Is he still on the former Presidents side?

At some points during the hearings, a slight suspension of narrative disbelief has been required. Among the many former Trump staffers who have been obviously disgusted by him, none has been so disgusted as the White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, who often appears by Zoom with a black baseball bat mounted on the wall behind him, emblazoned with the word JUSTICE. (Next to the baseball bat is a large painting of a panda.) Thursdays committee hearing featured Herschmanns description of a conversation with Jeff Clark, the environmental lawyer with dreams of fake electors from Georgia. Herschmann said, When he finished discussing what he planned on doing, I said, Good, fuckingexcuse meeffing A-hole, congratulations. You just admitted that your first step or act youd take as Attorney General would be committing a felony and violating Rule 6C. Some suppressed inner lawyer in me rebelled: Was that a word-for-word renactment, complete with subsectional citation? Was it not just a little self-aggrandizing? But the Mississippi judge and the Washington prosecutor let it slide. They have allowed the Republicans who broke with Trump to tell the story, and have praised them as heroes. Their bravery is a high moment in the sordid story of what led to January 6, Rep. Adam Kinzinger said, on Thursday, speaking of Rosen and Donoghue. As Grisham might have recognized, justice is not the only process under way.

Toward the end of Thursdays hearing, Herschmann and several other White House aides (among them, Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Meadows, and John McEntee, the head of the Office of Presidential Personnel) testified that several members of Congress had contacted the Presidents advisers to see whether he might premptively pardon them, to protect them from any prosecution for their role in January 6th. Rep. Mo Brooks wrote a letter to the White House not only formally requesting a pardon but asking for an all-purpose pardon for the hundred and forty-seven members of the House of Representatives who objected to the certification of the election. But, for the most part, the committee has cast ordinary Republicans as the heroes. The villains were the sixjust sixmembers of Congress who had reportedly requested pardons for themselves: Brooks (who lost a primary for Senate in Alabama); Rep. Matt Gaetz, of Florida (who is facing a federal probe for sex trafficking); Rep. Andy Biggs, of Arizona; Rep. Perry, of Pennsylvania; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia; and Rep. Louie Gohmert, of Texas. It was a sign of just how small the caucus of dead-enders was, and of what political line the hearings have offered to draw for Republicans: civil society on one side, and on the other, the former President, a few lawyers, a half-dozen members of Congress, the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, the mob.

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Who Was Willing to Stand with Donald Trump? - The New Yorker

The details to emerge from the inquiry into the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 have been extraordinary.

An insurrection. An attempted coup. A president who did all he could to overturn an election he lost. A president who even encouraged the hanging of his own deputy.

But is anyone listening? Does anyone care? Or is American society so divided and so siloed that nothing will shift opinion?

We went to rural Pennsylvania to find out. But first, a little background.

Read more:Surprise last-minute hearing on US capitol riots announced to present new evidence

The purpose of the Capitol Hill committee has been to investigate what happened that day in January last year and in the months leading up to it. Crucially, the committee is examining the role Donald Trump played in it all.

From the start, the committee was dismissed by Mr Trump and his allies as a partisan witch-hunt.

The panel consists of seven Democrats and just two Republicans, which feels pretty partisan.

But for those of us who have tuned in to the prime-time hearings, it has become plainly clear: it is not a Democratic Party witch-hunt.

One after the other, the witnesses there to expose Donald Trump as a corrupt, dangerous cheat have been Republicans, conservative ones at that; many of them one-time allies of the former president.

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'The whole thing's a witch-hunt'

That brings us to Kempton, Pennsylvania.

The intended audience for the hearings is people like farmers Harry and Mark, who I meet at the town's annual summer fair.

"I think it was all orchestrated," Harry tells me over a hot dog. He's seen only snippets from the hearings. "It was a Hollywood presentation of something that's not real."

"I think the whole thing's a witch-hunt" fellow farmer Mark says.

Neither of them will give their surname. They are deeply suspicious of the "fake-news media" and only agreed to talk to me after they realised I wasn't American - such is the state of things here.

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These two men, in their 60s, are a key focus for those who wish to try to prove that Donald Trump remains a persistent threat to the democratic structures in America.

Mark and Harry are not life-long Republicans, but were swayed by Donald Trump's vision for America in 2016 and remain loyal to him today.

I put it to them that the witnesses spilling the beans at the hearings are Republicans; White House insiders who saw Mr Trump's attempts to steal the election.

"Donald Trump has had people that call themselves his friends, stab him in the back over and over again," Harry says.

"Do you think that he is honest and transparent, given what you've now heard?" I asked them.

Mark replies: "I do think that he has the interests of the country at heart."

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'People that voted Biden - they're turning'

The first stall to greet visitors to this small summer fair is chock-a-block full of "Trump 2024" merchandise.

The former president has left hanging whether he will run again in the 2024 presidential election. But here they would be delighted if he did.

"I truly believe he won the last election in all my heart and soul," the woman who runs the Trump stall tells me.

A banner with "Trump won: you know it, I know it" adorns the wall behind her. This central claim, entirely unproven, that Trump won the 2020 election has penetrated deep in communities across America.

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Consistent polling reveals that 70% of Republicans believe Donald Trump was the rightful winner in 2020 and that mass voter fraud delivered Joe Biden the White House.

Investigations have found no evidence to back this up.

"I hope he runs again," another local, Sandy, tells me.

"He's got your vote?" I ask.

"And everybody else I know," Sandy says.

"And they will all vote for him again?" I ask.

"Oh, my God! Yeah. And people that voted for Biden that I've heard, they're changing. They're turning," she says.

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The persistent lure of Donald Trump and his tangible populist politics, combined with a bumpy 24 months in the White House for Joe Biden, suggests the midterm elections later this year will be dramatic to say the least.

The enduring power of Trumpism in communities across this nation is palpable. And with it, Mr Trump's apparent disregard for the rule of law and truth seem to have penetrated deep.

More than a hundred of the Republican candidates for key political positions in upcoming local nationwide state elections back the rigged election claims.

If they win, they will be in powerful positions to interfere with the outcome of future elections or to block election certification, including the 2024 presidential race.

The search for 'truth'

Judging the sheep shearing competition is Kelly. My conversation with her cuts to the heart of this nation's problems.

It's clear immediately that she is deeply sceptical of me as a journalist, but my foreign accent breaks the ice.

"As an American how do you find out the truth?" I ask.

"I find out the truth because I do a lot of digging myself. I am on different applications with social media," she says.

But that might not be the truth, I suggest.

"I think they need to have conversations with friends. I try to talk to my friends about what I think is going on versus what we're being told by mainstream media," she says.

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Like the farmers, Kelly is unwilling to give me her surname.

"Do I have to? Go with 'Kelly'," she says. "I am a little worried about the CIA and FBI"

She suggests the FBI are working with the Democrats. It's mad stuff, but not unusual.

Kelly is among millions, in an echo chamber where conspiracy theories stew.

It is a place where Donald Trump continues to convince people that they've been robbed and that they can't trust their own elections.

That puts this country in a dangerous place.

Continued here:
Donald Trump supporters' reaction to 'Hollywood-style' Capitol riots inquiry shows America is in a dangerous place - Sky News

The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack is closely focused on phone calls and conversations among Donald Trumps children and top aides captured by a documentary film-maker weeks before the 2020 election, say sources familiar with the matter.

The calls among Trumps children and top aides took place at an invitation-only event at the Trump International hotel in Washington DC that took place the night of the first presidential debate on 29 September 2020, the sources said.

The select committee is interested in the calls, the sources said, since the footage is understood to show the former presidents children, including Donald Jr and Eric Trump, privately discussing strategies about the election at a crucial time in the presidential campaign.

House investigators first learned about the event, hosted by the Trump campaign, and the existence of the footage through British film-maker Alex Holder, who testified about what he and his crew recorded during a two-hour interview last week, the sources said.

The film-maker testified that he had recorded around seven hours of one-to-one interviews with Trump, then-vice president Mike Pence, Trumps adult children and Trumps son-in-law Jared Kushner, the sources said, as well as around 110 hours of footage from the campaign.

But one part of Holders testimony that particularly piqued the interest of the members of the select committee and chief investigative counsel Tim Heaphy was when he disclosed that he had managed to record discussions at the 29 September 2020 event.

The select committee is closely focused on the footage of the event in addition to the content of the one-on-one interviews with Trump and Ivanka because the discussions about strategies mirror similar conversations at that time by top Trump advisors.

On the night of the first presidential debate, Trumps top former strategist Steve Bannon said in an interview with HBOs The Circus that the outcome of the 2020 election would be decided at the state level and eventually at the congressional certification on January 6.

Theyre going to try and overturn this election with uncertified votes, Bannon said. Asked how he expects the election to end, Bannon said: Right before noon on the 20th, in a vote in the House, Trump will win the presidency.

The select committee believes that ideas such as Bannons were communicated to advisors to Donald Jr and his fiancee, Kimberly Guilfoyle, even before the 2020 election had taken place, the sources said leading House investigators to want to review the Trump hotel footage.

What appears to interest the panel is whether Trump and his children had planned to somehow stop the certification of the election on January 6 a potential violation of federal law and to force a contingent election if Trump lost as early as September.

The event was not open to the public, Holder is said to have testified, and the documentary film-maker was waved into the Trump hotel by Eric Trump. At some point after Holder caught the calls on tape, he is said to have been asked to leave by Donald Jr.

Among the conversations captured on film was Eric Trump on the phone to an unidentified person saying, according to one source familiar: Hopefully youre voting in Florida as opposed to the other state youve mentioned.

The phone call a clip of which was reviewed by the Guardian was one of several by some of the people closest to Trump that Holder memorialized in his film, titled Unprecedented, which is due to be released in a three-part series later this year on Discovery+.

Holder also testified to the select committee, the sources said, about the content of the interviews. Holder interviewed Trump in early December 2020 at the White House, and then twice a few months after the Capitol attack both at Mar-a-Lago and his Bedminster golf club.

The select committee found Holders testimony and material more explosive than they had expected, the sources said. Holder, for instance, showed the panel a discrepancy between Ivanka Trumps testimony to the panel and Holders camera.

In her interview in December 2020, the New York Times earlier reported, Ivanka said her father should continue to fight until every legal remedy is exhausted because people were questioning the sanctity of our elections.

That interview was recorded nine days after former attorney general William Barr told Trump there was no evidence of election fraud. But in her interview with the select committee, Ivanka said she had accepted what Barr had said.

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January 6 committee focuses on phone calls among Trumps children and aides weeks before election - The Guardian US

A conservative lawyer who aided former President Donald Trumps efforts to undo the 2020 election results and who has been repeatedly referenced in House hearings on the January 6assault on the Capitol said on Monday that federal agents seized his cellphone last week.

John Eastman said the agents took his phone as he left a restaurant last Wednesday evening, the same day law enforcement officials conducted similar activity around the country as part of broadening investigations into efforts by Trump allies to overturn the election results in an unsuccessful bid to keep the Republican president in power.

Eastman said the agents who approached him identified themselves as from the FBI but appeared to be serving a warrant on behalf of the justice departments office of inspector general, which he contends has no jurisdiction to investigate him since he has never worked for the department.

The action was disclosed in a filing in federal court in New Mexico in which Eastman challenges the legitimacy of the warrant, calling it overly broad, and asks that a court force the federal government to return his phone. The filing does not specify where exactly agents seized his phone, and a lawyer for Eastman did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

Federal agents last week served a raft of subpoenas related to a scheme by Trump allies to put forward fake slates of electors in hopes of invalidating the election won by Democrat Joe Biden. Also that day, agents searched the Virginia home of Jeffrey Clark, a Trump justice department official who encouraged Trumps challenges of the election results.

A spokeswoman for the inspector generals office declined to comment. Eastman, who last year resigned his position as a law professor at Chapman University, has been a central figure in the ongoing hearings by the House committee investigating the riot at the Capitol, though he has not been among the witnesses to testify.

The committee has heard testimony about how Eastman put forward a last-ditch, unorthodox proposal challenging the workings of the 130-year-old Electoral Count Act, which governs the process for tallying the election results in Congress.

The committee has heard testimony about how Eastman pushed for vice-president Mike Pence to deviate from his ceremonial role and halt the certification of the electoral votes, a step Pence had no legal power to take and refused to attempt.

Eastmans plan was to have the states send alternative slates of electors from states Trump was disputing, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

With competing slates for Trump or Biden, Pence would be forced to reject them, returning them to the states to sort it out, under the plan.

A lawyer for Pence, Greg Jacob, detailed for the committee at a hearing earlier this month how he had fended off Eastmans pressure. The panel played video showing Eastman repeatedly invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination while being interviewed by the committee.

Eastman later sought to be on the pardon list, according to an email he sent to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, shared by the committee.

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Feds seize phone of ex-Trump lawyer who aided effort to overturn election - The Guardian US

Nearly two years after losing the election, Donald Trump continues to collect money from his supporters.

Donald Trump never stopped raising funds from his supporters after the 2020 presidential race. His companies, meanwhile, continued to charge his political outfits for goods and services. As a result, the former president has been able to convert about $1.3 million of donor money into business revenue since he lost the 2020 election, according to a review of the latest federal filings.

In the months immediately following the election, much of the money came via Trumps official campaign committee, Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. On December 1, 2020, the committee paid $38,000 in rent to Trump Tower Commercial LLC, the entity through which the former president owns space inside Trump Tower. Fifteen days later, another $38,000 of rent moved from the campaign committee to that same LLC. The committee also made two payments of $3,000 at about the same time to an entity named Trump Restaurants LLC. The former president, who is worth an estimated $3 billion, also owns 100% of that company, according to an analysis of documents his business submitted to federal and local officials while he was president. Between the election and the end of 2020, Trumps campaign committee handed over $113,000 to Trumps business.

In the New Year, Trump didnt really shut down his campaign committee. Instead, he renamed it, turning it into the Make America Great Again PAC. Beginning on January 4, 2021, that PAC started funneling money to the Trump Organization, handing $8,000 to the Trump Hotel Collection by the end of the month. The group also wrote rent checks to the same entities that the campaign had been previously paying$38,000 to Trump Tower Commercial LLC every month or so and often another $3,000 to Trump Restaurants LLC. Its unclear why the Make America Great Again PAC still needed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars of rent in 2021, given that the election took place in 2020. Representatives of the PAC and the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment. By the end of February 2022, the Make America Great Again PAC had paid $526,000 to Trumps companies, according to the review of Federal Election Commission filings.

Its unclear why the Make America Great Again PAC still needed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars of rent in 2021, given that the election took place in 2020.

While the campaign committee and its rebranded offshoot cut big rent checks, other Trump political groups splurged at the former presidents hotels. Nine days after the election, a joint-fundraising committee named Trump Victory, which gathered funds for the Trump campaign and several state-level Republican groups, paid $294,000 to the Trump Hotel Collection. Smaller sums followed. Trump Victory ended up spending more than $300,000 from the election to February 2021, when it last recorded paying a Trump property.

Other entities picked up the slack. In June 2021, a joint-fundraising committee that collects money for Trump and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) paid Trumps hotels $22,000. Six months later, a different joint-fundraising committee handed Mar-a-Lago, Trumps Palm Beach club, $34,000.

Then there was Trumps leadership PAC, Save America. Leadership PACs often allow politicians to dole out money to other candidates they support. In Trumps case, the group also served as a vehicle for directing donor money into his business. From February 2021 to May 2022, Trumps leadership PAC spent $213,000 at Trump properties.

The Save America payments generated some press recently, as the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol took note of the groups operations. The former president told supporters that they could donate to something called the Official Election Defense Fund, even though that fund apparently didnt exist, according to the committee. Most of the money instead went to Save America, which in turn paid a small portion to Trumps business. Not only was there the Big Lie, concluded Repr. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California. There was the big rip off.

Read more from the original source:
Trump Moved More Than $1 Million From His Political Groups To His Private Business After Losing The Election - Forbes