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Trumps Ask N.Y.’s Highest Court to Stop July 15 Deposition

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Erik Larson
Thu, June 9, 2022, 10:03 AM
 
 

(Bloomberg) -- Former President Donald Trump and two of his children are asking New York’s highest court to stop depositions set to start July 15 in the state’s three-year-old probe of the family real-estate business.

Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump agreed on Wednesday to appear for the depositions next month unless the state Court of Appeals in Albany stepped in. They filed a notice of appeal later in the day, hours after their lawyer told a lower court judge at a hearing that she believed rulings against the Trumps were “based on who my client is.”

 

The seven-judge Court of Appeals may choose not to intervene or hear the Trumps’ arguments. A trial judge and an intermediate appeals court have both already rejected the Trumps’ claim that the probe by New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, is politically motivated. James has been examining whether the Trump Organization manipulated asset values to get loans or avoid taxes.

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The Jan. 6 Committee Can’t Convict Trump—but It Could Help Bankrupt Him

 
 
Jose Pagliery
Wed, June 8, 2022, 9:07 PM
 
 
Reuters
 
Reuters

The Jan. 6 Committee begins its highly anticipated national reckoning Thursday night by calling attention to the brutality Capitol Police officers faced 18 months ago and diving into details about one of the gangs leading the violence on that dark day.

While it’s doubtful the hearings will meet the sky-high expectations of those who believed the committee would expose open-and-shut wrongdoing from some of the nation’s top officials, the prime-time hearings will deliver one thing: evidence for many of the lawsuits seeking to make former President Donald Trump and other election denialists actually pay for the violence.

“What the committee can't do is hold people accountable. But that’s where criminal prosecutions and civil litigation comes in,” said Edward G. Caspar, an attorney representing injured and traumatized Capitol Police officers who are suing Trump after the violence insurrection.

 

The Real Tragedy of Jan. 6 Is That It’s Still Not Over

That inability to hold Trump accountable with this special panel may sound surprising, given the certainty that committee leaders—Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY)—have used in discussing how Trump advanced “a corrupt scheme to obstruct the counting of electoral college ballots and a conspiracy to impede the transfer of power.”

But that doesn’t mean there won’t be any consequences from the House’s Jan. 6th Committee work. After all, the committee has undertaken what investigator (and former Republican Rep. from Virginia) Denver Riggleman has called “the biggest data effort in the history of congressional investigations."

Still, one of the big challenges for the panel’s investigation—with its contentious lawsuits, secret interviews, and promises to expose the truth—is that it ultimately has no power to punish those who are responsible for last year’s attack on the Capitol.

So far, legal scholars and progressive activists have focused their exasperated calls for action on the Department of Justice. But the real action could come from lawsuits like the one Conrad Smith and seven fellow Capitol Police officers filed in August against Trump, his campaign, Stop the Steal election denial movement organizers like Ali Alexander and Roger Stone, and enforcer gangs like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia.

“The committee is playing a critical role here for America,” Caspar said. “If you think of the three means of seeking accountability for those responsible for the attack—congressional hearings, criminal prosecution, civil litigation—they’re like a three-legged stool. The committee can shine a very bright light on the evidence and present it to the public. That’s something the others can't do.”

The committee has plenty of that.

According to the panel, it has interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses and collected at least 140,000 documents, obtained through subpoenas and delivered under oath. Attorneys working on cases against Trump are already considering how to get that evidence—in some cases, videos or interview transcripts—into a form that’s admissible in court for their cases. Luckily for those attorneys, the witnesses who spoke to the committee were already under oath when they testified.

McCarthy and Scalise Say They Won’t Be Watching First Jan. 6 Hearing

D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine—whose office in December sued the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, as well as individual members of each militant group—has indicated to The Daily Beast that he will be closely watching the hearings to see what evidence comes out that would be helpful to its case.

In fact, the committee’s first hearing, which starts at 8 p.m. EDT on Thursday, is expected to touch on the role of the Proud Boys during the coordinated attack on the Capitol. The committee will hear from two witnesses: Nick Quested, a documentarian who was embedded with the Proud Boys around Jan. 6, and Caroline Edwards, a Capitol Police officer who suffered a traumatic brain injury that day.

The witnesses and the frenzy surrounding the first public hearing should make for somewhat compelling television—at least as compelling as congressional hearings can be. Even the choice of venue for the event has an element of TV drama; the committee is hosting the hearing in the rarely used Cannon Caucus room, ostensibly so it can accommodate more press but also to add an air of officialness to the proceedings, with the room’s Corinthian columns and ornate chandeliers.

But the evidence revealed by the committee will likely be far more pedestrian. No bombshells are expected Thursday night. And yet, prosecutors and attorneys representing clients in civil cases may not need bombshells. Instead, they just need enough legal fodder to drag certain people in the twice-impeached former president’s orbit—like Donald Trump Jr. and Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL)—back into the judicial hot seat.

In March, for example, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta dismissed Brooks as a defendant in the insurrection lawsuit that was brought by his congressional colleague, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA).

One of the attorneys on Swalwell’s legal team, Phil Andonian, thinks new evidence might persuade the judge that there’s a strong enough case that the Republican congressman bore some responsibility for the damage at the Capitol.

Jan. 6 Committee Subpoena 5 GOP Congressmen Who Refused to Cooperate

It was already known that Brooks, a Trump loyalist who peddled all kinds of disproven voter fraud claims, wore a bulletproof vest on the morning of Jan. 6 when he told riled up protesters near the White House that their ancestors had “sacrificed their blood… and sometimes their lives.”

Brooks then asked the protesters, “Are you willing to do the same? Are you willing to do the same to fight for America?”

The Jan. 6 committee has obtained thousands of text messages from Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and others, including messages to Brooks that could further implicate the Republican congressman.

“This is going to be a good road map to discovery whenever we get to that. I'm certainly interested in a lot of the bit players we’ve identified,” Andonian told The Daily Beast. “It seems almost certain that we're going to get information [that] Mo Brooks, Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani were more involved than we were able to allege based on the public information we had at the time we filed the lawsuit.”

“We all know there was coordination and there were people within the campaign that were part of the rally and were talking,” Andonian continued. “That's only going to get stronger as this information makes its way out.”

Andonian expects that might require his team to refile the lawsuit, as opposed to merely amending it. But the end result would still be what they sought: accountability.

Until then, even those who strongly support the committee are aware of potential pitfalls.

Norm Eisen, an attorney and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who recently authored a report on the committee’s role in saving the nation’s Republic, said this week that the committee has already done the incredibly difficult work of laying the groundwork to show that Trump and his associates knowingly committed crimes by trying to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in the nation’s history. But he acknowledged that hearings might still fall flat with some Americans.

Trump Attorney John Eastman Ordered to Hand Over Batch of Emails and Documents to the Jan. 6 Committee

“If it's not bipartisan, that's a risk. But they have brought one of the most conservative members of the GOP caucus, Liz Cheney, as vice chair, a co-equal in managing this. Bipartisanship is a risk but they've hedged that,” he said. “The second risk is not having anything new to say.”

Doug Jones, the former senator and federal prosecutor from Alabama, said the committee has to be particularly cautious in its messaging right out the gate so as to not taint its findings with the perception that it’s driven purely by politics.

“Where the committee needs to be very careful is, if they forget the fact that they're factfinders,” Jones said. “They should not give the American public the perception that this is an attack on Donald Trump. They are finding facts. The facts are going to speak for themselves. They’re going to connect the dots.”

Those facts are still coming in.

Late Tuesday night, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter in California ordered John Eastman to turn over potentially damning documents to the committee. Eastman is the disgraced attorney who closely advised Trump on the ploy to remain in power by pressuring then-Vice President Mike Pence to not certify the electoral college results, and his emails—which the judge determined likely show evidence of an actual crime—were ordered to be delivered to the committee by 5 p.m. Wednesday.

Those emails, if made public by the committee, will only serve to fuel lawsuits against Trump’s inner circle. And even in the off chance that they’re not, attorneys suing Trump for monetary damages will still fight to get them—and expose them.

“Our cases will go forward, and we will be able to hold these people accountable in a way that's public and transparent and will inform the American public,” Caspar said.

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The Republicans have lost their silly minds....sad times in America.

Half of U.S. Republicans believe the left led Jan. 6 violence: Reuters/Ipsos poll

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FILE PHOTO: The U.S. Capitol Building is stormed by a pro-Trump mob on January 6, 2021
 
Jason Lange
Thu, June 9, 2022, 1:17 PM
 
 

By Jason Lange

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than half of U.S. Republicans believe the false claim that left-wing protesters led the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot to try to make then-President Donald Trump look bad, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.

The two-day poll, completed on Wednesday, underscored the deep partisan lens through which many Americans view the assault ahead of high-profile televised hearings in Congress beginning on Thursday.

At the hearing, Democratic-led investigators will spotlight testimony by the Republican former president's top aides and family members in an effort to persuade Americans that the riot was an orchestrated attack on democracy.

The Reuters/Ipsos survey found that many Americans who identify as Republicans hold views at odds with the facts uncovered by the bipartisan congressional investigation and a criminal probe.

Related video: McCarthy says 'everybody in the country' responsible for Jan. 6

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Although 55% of the Republicans polled said they believed the riot was led by violent left-wing protesters, nearly all of the 840 people arrested following the attack have been Trump supporters, according to U.S. prosecutors, and FBI Director Christopher Wray has said there was no evidence leftist extremists disguised themselves as Trump supporters during the attack.

The poll found 58% of Republicans said they believed most of the protesters were peaceful and law-abiding, even though four people died on the day of the attack, at least 140 police were assaulted, and one Capitol Police officer who fought against the rioters died the next day.

About two-thirds of Republicans believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, a persistent view even though state and federal judges dismissed more than 50 lawsuits brought by Trump and his allies challenging the election while reviews and audits found no evidence of widespread fraud.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll found that overwhelming majorities of respondents from both parties thought it was unacceptable for their party's members to use violence to achieve political goals. One in 10 people in each party considered violence to be an appropriate political tool.

The poll was conducted online, in English, throughout the United States. It gathered responses from 1,004 adults between June 7-8. The poll has a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about 4 percentage points.

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Miley Cyrus To Perform Halftime Show At Jan. 6 Committee Hearings
June 9th, 2022 - BabylonBee.com

article-11470-1.jpg

 

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The nation is abuzz with anticipation of the televised January 6 Committee hearing making its prime time debut at 8 p.m. ET. To top off the excitement of the House select committee's investigation, producers of the star-studded extravaganza have announced that Miley Cyrus will be the featured performer during the hearing's halftime show.

Other performers during the bedazzling spectacle will include Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Demi Lovato, and the ghost of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

"If you thought the Depp-Heard trial was exciting, wait until you get a load of this baby," said James Goldston, a former ABC News executive hired by the Democrat-led committee to really "wow" the American people with a multimedia presentation aimed at objectively and judiciously seeking the truth of what really happened that fateful day.

Republican lawmakers have pounced on the House select committee, accusing them of putting on a politicized, narrative-driven stunt rather than seeking truth. In response, GOP lawmakers have sworn to make their own January 6 Committee with cool, Republican members, lots of American flags, and a concert on Mt. Rushmore featuring Toby Keith and Morgan Wallen.

The January 6 Committee said the opening ceremony of the hearing will include previously-unseen video footage of the Capitol riots, followed by a ritual burning of Trump in effigy.

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Trump Slams Ivanka and Denies Saying Pence ‘Deserves’ to Hang in Truth Social Meltdown

Dan Ladden-Hall
Fri, June 10, 2022, 9:31 AM
 
 

After video showed Ivanka Trump going before the Jan. 6 House committee to say she didn’t believe her dad’s wild theory that the 2020 election was stolen, former President Donald Trump returned the favor by attacking her credibility as a witness.

In a flurry of missives sent via his Truth Social channel early Friday, Trump also denied having agreed with rioters’ chants to hang Mike Pence and—just for good measure—reaffirmed his baseless claim that the election was stolen.

Ivanka told the congressional panel that she had changed her mind about whether or not the election was rigged after William Barr, Trump’s attorney general for most of 2020, told her that it wasn’t. “I respect Attorney General Barr,” Ivanka said on the video, “So I accepted what he was saying.”

The comment seems to have touched a nerve with her father, who rushed to tell his followers that they should pay no mind to what his daughter had said. “Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results,” the former president wrote. “She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!).”

It wasn’t just Ivanka’s testimony that left Trump all hot and bothered.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) revealed that former Trump aides said the president had reacted to mob chants to hang his vice president with shocking approval, including with the ice-cold phrase: “Mike Pence deserves it.” Again, Trump contradicted the testimony with all-caps fury. “I NEVER said, or even thought of saying, ‘Hang Mike Pence,’” he wrote. “This is either a made up story by somebody looking to become a star, or FAKE NEWS!”

“The so-called ‘Rush on the Capitol’ was not caused by me,” Trump continued, “It was caused by a Rigged and Stolen Election!” Returning to another familiar refrain, the former commander-in-chief also appeared to sum up his feelings toward the bipartisan House select committee generally as: “A one sided, totally partisan, POLITICAL WITH HUNT!” He earlier used the platform to claim that the panel “refuses to play any of the many positive witnesses and statements, refuses to talk of the Election Fraud and Irregularities that took place on a massive scale,” before adding: “Our Country is in such trouble!”

At the hearing Thursday, Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) directly blamed Trump for the attack on the Capitol after the 2020 election.

“He spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the Constitution to march down to the Capitol and subvert American democracy,” Thompson said. Rep. Cheney further pointed to Trump’s repeated claims that the election was stolen as the reason the attack took place. “Those who invaded our Capitol and battled law enforcement for hours were motivated by what President Trump had told them: that the election was stolen, and that he was the rightful president,” Cheney said in her opening statement. “President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack.”

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Donald Trump, Democrats are obsessed with 2020 — GOP should look to the future

By 
Post Editorial Board
June 10, 2022 1:02pm 
 

The Jan. 6 Commission is a Democratic campaign ad, a thinly veiled partisan exercise — aired in primetime, with the cooperation of a liberal press — to bolster a failed Joe Biden presidency.

But rather than ignore it or look to the future, Donald Trump, the King Lear of Mar-a-Lago, decided to tweet — er, Truth — yet another statement confirming that he refuses to accept reality. “January 6th was not simply a protest,” he wrote, “it represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again.”

It wasn’t, of course. It was a national shame. One that neither Democrats nor Trump can stop obsessing over. It’s time for Republicans to move on.

This isn’t 2016, when the country was sleepwalking toward a Hillary Clinton coronation, and Trump was the only one pugnacious enough to say it doesn’t have to be this way.

He refused to accept that the southern border should be lawless and that China should be allowed to steal jobs. He knew, unapologetically, that the economy flourished under low taxes and little government interference. He pulled off one of the most jaw-dropping upsets in American political history, and — though the liberal media will never admit it — oversaw a term of mostly peace and prosperity.

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Yahoo News

Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien to testify before Jan. 6 hearing on election falsehoods

Caitlin Dickson
Caitlin Dickson
·Reporter
Sun, June 12, 2022, 6:31 PM
 
 

The Jan. 6 committee’s series of public hearings will resume Monday morning with a number of in-person witnesses who are expected to shed new light on former President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the election. One of the witnesses will be Bill Stepien, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager.

Committee members are likely to press Stepien, a behind-the-scenes veteran of Republican campaigns, on what Trump’s inner circle knew about the results of the election they lost, even as their candidate actively contested the outcome.

From left, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, Eric Trump, son of President Donald Trump, and campaign manager for Donald Trump's 2020 presidential campaign Bill Stepien, listen as President Donald Trump speaks to a crowd of supporters during a campaign stop at Mariotti Building Product, Thursday, Aug. 20, 2020, in Old Forge, Pa. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
 
Then-Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, son Eric Trump, and press secretary Kayleigh McEnany listen as then-President Trump speaks to a crowd in Old Forge, Pa. (AP/Evan Vucci)

Committee aides told reporters Sunday that the public will hear — from both in-person witnesses and taped depositions of others who’ve spoken to the committee — about Trump’s decision to declare victory on election night, even though he “was told again and again he didn't have the numbers needed to win.”

The committee staffers also said that the committee “will reveal information about how the former president’s political apparatus used these lies about fraud to drive fundraising,” and bring in millions of dollars between the election and Jan. 6, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in a violent attack aiming to stop the certification of then-President-elect Joe Biden’s win. (The aides spoke on background, meaning that their names would not be used.)

Stepien is set to testify alongside Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News political editor who was fired by the cable network in January 2021, amid backlash from Trump supporters over the journalist’s decision to accurately call Arizona for Biden as the final votes were tallied.

FILE - Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., vice chair of the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection, joined at left by Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., testifies before the House Rules Committee seeking contempt of Congress charges against former Trump advisers Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino in response to their refusal to comply with subpoenas, at the Capitol in Washington, Monday, April 4, 2022. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
 
Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., vice chair of the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection, joined at left by Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. (AP/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

Monday’s hearing will mark the second in a new series of panels that the select committee plans to hold this month. During its initial primetime hearing on Thursday evening, the Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., outlined how they plan to use the hearings to reveal what they’ve learned over the past 11 months about the Jan. 6 attack.

Committee aides told reporters that Monday’s hearing would be focused on “The Big Lie,” or “the decision by the former president to ignore the will of the voters, to declare victory in an election that he’d lost, to spread claims of fraud,” and to continue to do so after his attempts to litigate those claims in court were unsuccessful.

Stepien and Stirewalt will make up the first of two panels of witnesses for the day. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed published after his firing, Stirewalt wrote that the refusal of many Trump supporters to believe the legitimate results of the election was a "tragic consequence of the informational malnourishment so badly afflicting the nation."

The second panel will feature conservative election attorney Benjamin Ginsburg, former Philadelphia city commissioner Al Schmidt, and BJay Pak, who served as U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Georgia for the Trump administration.

After the election, Trump falsely claimed that widespread voter fraud delivered Biden’s victory in swing states like Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia. In a recorded phone call, Trump even pressured Georgia state election officials to “find” enough votes to flip the state from Biden to himself; Pak is likely to testify about this period of time.

In addition to Thompson and Cheney, committee aides said that Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., “will play a key role” in Monday’s hearing, which they predicted will likely last a little more than two hours.

On Thursday, Cheney promised that the upcoming hearings would show evidence of Trump’s involvement in what she described as a “sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.”

In the Thursday primetime hearing last week, committee members also offered a preview of how they plan to use both live and pre-taped witness testimony to connect the dots between Trump’s efforts to subvert the outcome of the election and the violence that took place at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In addition to Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards and documentarian Nick Quested, who appeared in person on Thursday night to describe their interactions with members of the extremist group the Proud Boys who were among the first to breach the Capitol on Jan. 6, the committee also showed clips of some of the more than 1,000 witness interviews it has conducted over the last 11 months.

Among the most notable witnesses featured in the clips shown Thursday include: Trump’s daughter and former White House adviser, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner; Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller and William Barr; Stewart Rhodes, founder and leader of the far-right paramilitary group the Oath Keepers, who has been charged with seditious conspiracy in connection with the attack on the Capitol, as well as a number of other accused and convicted rioters.

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