Law & Order: Trump Crime Edition
News accounts, court documents, and statements by investigators all strongly infer that the former President of the U.S engaged in illegal activities.
I’d like to say that the noose is tightening, but after five-plus years of watching him skate through situations that would be a death knell for any other politician’s career, I’m increasingly skeptical.
Congressional hearings of the sort that brought down bad guys in the past have now been delayed until April or even May. The ex-President is, however, having a meltdown, no doubt triggered by recent developments.
Early reports had House Select Committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson telling NPR that he was hoping former Vice President Pence would testify before January was over.
Now, the apparently spineless former Indiana governor is using surrogates to do his bidding behind closed doors. Pence’s national security adviser, John Kellogg, testified before the committee a couple of weeks ago.
CNN reported on Monday about Pence’s former chief of staff, Marc Short, testifying before the Jan. 6 committee last week.
Short testified before the select committee in person last Wednesday in a lengthy session, according to a source familiar with the matter. Short had previously supplied a limited number of documents that were subpoenaed by the committee, according to one source, including a memo from Trump aide Johnny McEntee comparing Trump to Thomas Jefferson. It's also customary that witnesses hand over more documents when they testify, according to another source familiar with the matter.
Short and his lawyer, Emmet Flood, had been in talks with the committee for some time about his testimony. According to CNN, Short’s decision to testify is “the most significant sign to date that Pence's team is cooperating with the probe” into that day’s horror. It comes on the heels of Pence’s national security adviser, John Kellogg, also testifying before the committee..
UPDATE:
The former President took the stage at one of his MAGA rallies in Conroe, Texas on Saturday and took his rhetoric to another level. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who sits on the House committee probing the insurrection, characterized the speech as a “call to arms.”
He pledged to pardon US Capitol insurrectionists if elected in 2024. He called on his followers to get ready to respond should prosecutors act against him, saying:
“If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere, because our country and our elections are corrupt,”
New York State Attorney General Letitia James has been conducting a civil probe of his family business, while the district attorney in Manhattan has been running a criminal investigation.
Meanwhile, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, has impaneled a special grand jury just to focus on Trump’s attempt to coerce state officials to “find” enough votes to overturn his loss of that state to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020.
Fulton District Attorney Fani Willis wrote to the FBI on Sunday asking for an immediate risk assessment for the Fulton County Courthouse and government buildings. She said that "security concerns were escalated this weekend" by the former President's speech and added that her office had already received "communications" from people unhappy with the investigation before Trump's rally.
On Sunday, Trump doubled down, releasing a statement all but confessing he had wished for then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election on January 6.
"Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome," his statement claimed. "Unfortunately, he didn't exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!"
On Tuesday, Trump spokeswoman Liz Harrington released what read like a frothing-at-the-mouth statement, attacking the House committee investigating the Capitol riot, and said the panel should be focusing on Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, rather than himself.
“The Unselect Committee should be investigating why Nancy Pelosi did such a poor job of overseeing security and why Mike Pence did not send back the votes for recertification or approval, in that it has now been shown that he clearly had the right to do so!”
The New York Times delved into Trump’s efforts to undo the election results, bringing to light evidence that he was more directly involved than previously known in plans developed by outside advisers to use national security agencies to seek evidence of fraud.
The Times story fleshes out three separate attempts involving using federal authority to seize control of voting systems run by states on baseless grounds of widespread voting fraud.
In November, Trump met with former attorney General Bill Barr, raising the idea of whether the Justice Department could be used to seize voting machines.
Mr. Trump mentioned a specific state that had used machines built by Dominion Voting Systems, where his lawyers believed there had been fraud, although it is unclear which state Mr. Trump was referring to. Mr. Barr, who had been briefed extensively at that point by federal law enforcement officials about how the theories being pushed by Mr. Trump’s legal team about the Dominion machines were unfounded, told Mr. Trump that the Justice Department had no basis for seizing the machines because there was no probable cause to believe a crime had been committed.
Proposals involving the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security were codified by advisers in the form of draft executive orders that were never signed after officials with those agencies expressed doubts about their legality.
Apparently, this “seize the voting machines” effort was so flaky that Rudi Giuliani refused to get involved. Former San Diego wack-a-doodle Peter Navarro was apparently used by proponents of these ideas to get an end run around the usual White House gatekeepers.
You know we're through the looking glass when Rudy Giuliani is portrayed as the voice of reason. (My bet is that the former New York Mayor was a source for the story and was trying to whitewash his role.)
But Flynn and Trump's former attorney Sidney Powell advocated for the idea during a now-infamous Oval Office meeting in mid-December 2020. The meeting devolved into screaming matches as some of the President's advisers pushed back on various proposals, including invoking martial law and naming Powell special counsel to investigate voter fraud claims,
Meanwhile, the ex-President is scheming to control the narrative about the events of January 6, 2021, hoping that he can delay things until after the midterm elections.
Asawin Suebsaeng at the Daily Beast reported on Monday that Trump has been conspiring for months with GOP lawmakers, should they regain control of Congress in the midterm elections, to abuse their power to launch fake "investigations" into January 6 aimed at further confusing public understanding of the riot and painting the insurrectionists as martyrs.
The urgency to see results from all these investigations grows daily. The former President has never had to face real consequences for his actions, and believes (correctly, I think) that he can emerge from this situation unscathed if he just stalls and blusters.
Here’s Amanda Marcotte, writing at Salon:
Neither the Democrats nor the media are helpless in the face of Trump's continued provocations. The January 6 committee needs to be smarter about anticipating Trump's tactics, and moving faster to gain control of the narrative. Biden's Department of Justice needs to arrest Meadows. The media could choose to treat Trump's continuing efforts to end democracy with the same five-alarm coverage they gave to Clinton's mundane use of a personal email account.
The public takes its cues about what is important and what is not from leaders and media figures. If journalists and Democrats don't step up more aggressively, then Trump's lies about January 6 will keep gaining more traction. It will get even worse if Republicans control Congress next year, and use their own hearing power to offer Trump's lies an even bigger gloss of mainstream respectability. Every day Trump is allowed to control the narrative, his power only grows stronger.
One indication of where all this is heading:
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