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January 6 Hearings Live

www.cnn.com

January 6 committee moves to hold former DOJ official in contempt but also gives him one last chance to cooperate

The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol approved on Wednesday night the report to hold former Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark in contempt of Congress for defying his subpoena by refusing to answer questions during a recent deposition and...
www.cnn.com www.cnn.com

Fuck this shit.

I'm pretty sure there are dozens if not hundreds of bathrooms in the congress building and the congressionsional office building. Choose a few and replace the locks so they lock from the outside. Put a cot, a blanket, and a pillow (preferably a a shitty MyPillow pillow), and lock these folks up immediately on contempt charges.
 
lpetrich said:
Eastman takes the Fifth with Jan. 6 committee - POLITICO
"The attorney, who helped former President Donald Trump contest the 2020 election, asserted his right against self-incrimination in a Dec. 1 letter to the Capitol riot panel."
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He can still be ordered to appear and raise his right hand, no?
Shouldn't they do that, on television, so the public can hear "might tend to incriminate me" over and over?
 
www.politico.com

'Absolute liars': Ex-D.C. Guard official says generals lied to Congress about Jan. 6

In a 36-page memo to the Capitol riot committee, Col. Earl Matthews also slams the Pentagon's inspector general for what he calls an error-ridden report.
www.politico.com www.politico.com

A former D.C. National Guard official is accusing two senior Army leaders of lying to Congress and participating in a secret attempt to rewrite the history of the military's response to the Capitol riot.

In a 36-page memo, Col. Earl Matthews, who held high-level National Security Council and Pentagon roles during the Trump administration, slams the Pentagon's inspector general for what he calls an error-riddled report that protects a top Army official who argued against sending the National Guard to the Capitol on Jan. 6, delaying the insurrection response for hours.

Matthews' memo, sent to the Jan. 6 select committee this month and obtained by POLITICO, includes detailed recollections of the insurrection response as it calls two Army generals — Gen. Charles Flynn, who served as deputy chief of staff for operations on Jan. 6, and Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt, the director of Army staff — “absolute and unmitigated liars” for their characterization of the events of that day. Matthews has never publicly discussed the chaos of the Capitol siege.
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Matthews' memo levels major accusations: that Flynn and Piatt lied to Congress about their response to pleas for the D.C. Guard to quickly be deployed on Jan. 6; that the Pentagon inspector general’s November report on Army leadership’s response to the attack was “replete with factual inaccuracies”; and that the Army has created its own closely held revisionist document about the Capitol riot that’s “worthy of the best Stalinist or North Korea propagandist.”

The memo follows Walker’s own public call for the inspector general to retract its detailed report on the events of Jan. 6, as first reported by The Washington Post. Walker told the Post he objected to specific allegations by the Pentagon watchdog that Matthews’ memo also criticizes, calling the inspector general’s report “inaccurate” and “sloppy work.”
Reached for comment on Matthews’ memo, Walker, the former head of the D.C. Guard, said the report speaks for itself and that he had nothing further to add. A Jan. 6 committee spokesperson declined to comment.
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Trump allies work to place supporters in key election posts across the country, spurring fears about future vote challenges - The Washington Post
In Michigan, local GOP leaders have sought to reshape election canvassing boards by appointing members who expressed sympathy for former president Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 vote was rigged.

In two Pennsylvania communities, candidates who embraced election fraud allegations won races this month to become local voting judges and inspectors.
And in Colorado, 2020 doubters are urging their followers on conservative social media platforms to apply for jobs in election offices.
A year after local and state election officials came under immense pressure from Trump to subvert the results of the 2020 White House race, he and his supporters are pushing an ambitious plan to place Trump loyalists in key positions across the administration of U.S. elections.

The effort goes far beyond the former president’s public broadsides against well-known Republican state officials who certified President Biden’s victory, such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey. Citing the need to make elections more secure, Trump allies are also seeking to replace officials across the nation, including volunteer poll watchers, paid precinct judges, elected county clerks and state attorneys general, according to state and local officials, as well as rally speeches, social media posts and campaign appearances by those seeking the positions.
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www.theatlantic.com

January 6 Was Practice

Donald Trump’s next coup has already begun—and today’s GOP is much better positioned to subvert future elections.
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com

Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.

“The democratic emergency is already here,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine, told me in late October. Hasen prides himself on a judicious temperament. Only a year ago he was cautioning me against hyperbole. Now he speaks matter-of-factly about the death of our body politic. “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024,” he said, “but urgent action is not happening.”

For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.
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So depressing, this is happening all out in the open and doesn't seem like shit is being done about it. A little is being done for voting access, but the bigger threat is from local officials overturning an election result.
 
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Democrats seem to think that if they pass their "build back better" plan and give everyone lots of free goodies then the people will vote for them in the next election. but instead, they should be passing a plan to stop voter suppression and voter nullification efforts or it won't matter if people *want* to vote for them. they'll lose anyway.
 
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ZiprHead said:
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They are absolutely told that, but not from any official mouthpiece. Rather this is the resounding cry of the population at large.

The views of trumpanzees are not entirely cultish so much as a convenient vehicle for a variety of bad faith formats.

"Trump won" is a Dog-Whistle for "I am willing to disregard all principle for the sake of ending oversight on selfishness."

It is a loyalty oath to evil.
 
Watch A Reporter Call Out Marjorie Taylor Greene For Supporting Domestic Terrorists More Than The Capitol Police
noting
Acyn on Twitter: "Reporter: I don’t remember you holding a press conference for the unusually cruel treatment of Capitol Police officers (vid link)" / Twitter

MTG responded
You may not remember a particular press conference about police officers, but I have made many public statements and cried out against all violence against police officers for the BL- yes, yes for the police officers, specifically for the Capitol Police here.

Congressman Gohmert sponsored a bill that I co-sponsored with him wanting to give, you know, medals of honor to award them for how they were treated during the January 6 riot, but also extend it to police officers all across the country. I am not going to separate them. I am very supportive of our police, and I have consistently denounced the violence here, so do not go down that route.
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In effect, "All Lives Matter".
 
(We have several threads on this topic. Perhaps I should move this post to a more appropriate thread.)

I remain convinced that The Atlantic provides better insights than all other American media put together.This recent article by George Packer, titled "To head off the next insurrection, we'll need to practice envisioning the worst." is a must-read.

It's hard to guess exactly what form America's breakdown will take. Will the South Carolina State Guard attack Fort Sumter? (Or wherever the new federal arsenal is, Fort Sumter now being a museum?) Will the rednecks of Eastern Oregon send gun-toting families West to hijack goods trafficked on the communistic Interstate Five? Most scenarios seem laughable!

But the article lays out the three most plausible scenarios.
George Packer said:
Here's one way I imagine it could happen: ... The Republican Party's long campaign of undermining faith in elections leaves voters on both sides deeply skeptical of any outcome they don't like. When the next president is finally chosen by the Supreme Court or Congress, half the country explodes in rage. Protests soon turn violent, and the crowds are met with lethal force by the state, while instigators firebomb government buildings. Neighborhoods organize self-defense groups, and law-enforcement officers take sides or go home. Predominantly red or blue counties turn on political minorities.... The new president takes power in a state of siege.

... some Americans actually long for an armed showdown.... Michael Anton, a former Trump White House adviser, recently wrote:
Michael Anton said:
If the Lone Star way of life is to survive, Texans must fight for it. Then we shall see whether California's long experiment with postmodern deracination and anti-masculinity can stand up to Texas's more robust embrace of the old virtues....
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Imagining the worst is a civic duty; cheering it on is political arson.
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A likelier scenario is even sadder in some ways. America becomes like China or Russia, as citizens accept loss of democracy in return for continued prosperity.
Another, likelier scenario is widespread cynicism. Following the election crisis, protests burn out. Americans lapse into acquiescence, believing that all leaders lie, all voting is rigged, all media are bought, corruption is normal, and any appeal to higher values such as freedom and equality is either fraudulent or naive. The loss of democracy turns out not to matter all that much. The hollowed core of civic life brings a kind of relief. Citizens indulge themselves in self-care and the metaverse, where politics turns into a private game and algorithms drive Americans into ever more extreme views that have little relation to reality or relevance to those in power. There's enough wealth to keep the population content. America's transformation into Russia is complete.
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Obviously, Republicans are to blame:
We know what's driving us toward this cataclysm: not simply Trump, but the Republican Party. By the usual standards, Trump's postpresidency has been as pathetic as the forced exile of any minor dictator -- Idi Amin poolside in Jeddah. Much of Trump's nongolfing time is devoted to fending off criminal charges against his business. Banned from Twitter and Facebook, he started a blog that was so anemic, he had to shut it down. His sore-loser rallies are desultory. And yet, in the year since the insurrection, the party has aligned itself so completely with his sense of grievance and lust for revenge that there's no room for dissent. The insurrection and the lie that instigated it are not tools that Republicans can put away when it suits them.
.... Ashli Babbitt, the invader killed by a Capitol Police officer, has become a martyr . Those few [Republicans] who have the temerity to tell the truth are being pushed out of the party.
Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers around the country have ... set in motion an irreversible process of electoral sabotage.
Not even Senator Mitt Romney will take a single step that could save democracy....
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But so are Democrats:
Democrats suffer from a different failure of imagination. They regularly sound the alarm about the threat to democracy, but it is one of many alarms, along with those over the pandemic, child care, health care, criminal justice, guns, climate change. All of these deserve urgent attention, but they can't be equally urgent. Biden has spent far less of his political capital on saving democracy than on passing an infrastructure bill. According to a Grinnell College poll in October , only 35 percent of Democrats believe that American democracy faces a "major threat." The figure is twice as large for Republicans -- whose belief in a major threat is the threat....
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But Packer retains some hope!
There is a third scenario ...
Citizens will have to do boring things -- run for obscure local election offices and volunteer as poll watchers -- with the same unflagging energy as the enemies of democracy. Decent Republicans will have to work and vote for Democrats, and Democrats will have to work and vote for anti-Trump Republicans or independents in races where no Democrat has a chance to win. Congressional Democrats and the Biden administration will have to make the Freedom to Vote Act their top priority, altering or ending the filibuster to give this democratic fire wall a chance to become law.
The overriding concern of democratic citizens must be the survival and strength of the alliance. They will have to resist going to the mat over issues that threaten to tear it apart. The point is not to abandon politics, but to pursue it wisely. Avoid language and postures that needlessly antagonize people with whom you disagree; distinguish between their legitimate and illegitimate views; take stock of their experiences. This, too, requires imagination.
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Shadowy Man said:
Democrats seem to think that if they pass their "build back better" plan and give everyone lots of free goodies then the people will vote for them in the next election. but instead, they should be passing a plan to stop voter suppression and voter nullification efforts or it won't matter if people *want* to vote for them. they'll lose anyway.
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Pretty much what happened with the GOP and their tax cut.
 
Brian Schatz on Twitter: "Can someone explain to me why this isn’t the only thing in the news? I deeply respect the fourth estate, but, holy shit they had a plan to just end democracy, and is the press gonna just be like “are democrats using the wrong words again?”" / Twitter
noting
Susan Glasser on Twitter: "‘Declare national security emergency’
Chilling, absolutely chilling to see this in writing." / Twitter
noting
Hugo Lowell on Twitter: "Latest: Trump White House chief Mark Meadows turned over to Jan. 6 committee an email that referred to a PowerPoint calling for Trump to declare a NatSec emergency and have VP Pence delay Biden’s certification (pix link)" / Twitter
and
Hugo Lowell on Twitter: "The PowerPoint titled “Election fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” and dated Jan. 5 came up in an email Meadows gave to Jan. 6 committee about a briefing that was to be provided “on the hill”" / Twitter

What was in that presentation:
Options for 6 JAN
  • VP Pence seats Republican Electors over the objections of Democrats in states where fraud occurred
  • VP Pence rejects the electors from States where fraud occurred causing the election to be decided by remaining electoral votes
  • VP Pence delays the decision in order to allow for a vetting and subsequent counting of the all the legal paper ballots
Recommendations
  • Brief Senators and Congressmen on foreign interference
  • Declare National Security Emergency
  • Foreign influence and control of electronic voting systems
  • Declare electronic voting in all states invalid
  • LEGAL & Genuine Paper ballot counts or Constitutional remedy delegated to Congress
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^You are right. This ought to be a big news item. Let's not sugarcoat it. A "National Security Emergency" is a dictatorship.

Here also is a youtube video on the presentation.
 
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