Susan Walsh/AP
- The House committee investigating the Capitol riot held its fifth hearing on Thursday.
- Former DOJ officials, including ex-Acting AG Jeffrey Rosen, testified.
- One ex-DOJ official testified that Trump urged him and others to "just say the election was corrupt."
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
The Jan. 6 select committee announced it would hold a sixth hearing to start Tuesday at 1pm ET during the congressional recess and despite previous statements that it would hold its next hearings in July.
A committee advisory said it would present "recently obtained evidence" and feature witnesses, whom it did not name.
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Spanning more than two hours in the late afternoon, the House January 6 committee's fifth public hearing captured the drama that unfolded inside the Justice Department and White House as Trump looked to some of the country's most senior and important law enforcement officials to help him remain in power.
Anna Moneymaker-Pool/Getty Images
The January 6 committee aired a series of video testimonies from former Trump administration officials detailing which Republican members of Congress sought pardons from former President Donald Trump at the end of his term as he and his allies exhausted different avenues to stay in power.
Most prominently featured: Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida.
According to various officials who spoke with the committee, Gaetz began pushing for a pardon well before other Republicans who were involved in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
"Mr. Gaetz was personally pushing for a pardon, and he was doing so since early December," said Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, in testimony aired by the committee on Thursday.
Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images
Just as former Department of Justice Officials were detailing how they threatened to resign en masse if former President Donald Trump went ahead with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, Fox News cut away to air its previously scheduled talk show, "The Five."
CNN and MSNBC aired the hearings in full, which ended with Rep. Adam Kinzinger listing six GOP lawmakers whom Trump aides testified sought pardons in the administration's final weeks.
Other than the first of the five hearings so far, Fox News has carried the proceedings without commercial breaks, save for recesses during the proceedings.
Yuri Gripas-Pool/Getty Images
Top officials at the US Department of Justice threatened to resign if former President Donald Trump succeeded in making loyalist Jeff Clark the acting Attorney General, per testimony before the January 6 committee on Thursday.
Richard Donoghue, former acting deputy attorney general, said that the pledge to resign was made on a phone call in the wake of reports that Trump was considering installing Clark, who at the time was promoting unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
"They would resign en masse if the president made that change," Donoghue told the committee. "All without hesitation said they would resign."
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testified Wednesday before the January 6 House panel that at least six House members asked the White House for a pardon following the Capitol siege.
According to Hutchinson, Republican Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Mo Brooks of Alabama, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Louie Gohmert of Texas, and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania requested pardons.
The former White House aide added that GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio asked for an "update on whether the White House is going to pardon members of Congress" but did not personally ask for one.
Yuri Gripas-Pool/Getty Images
Former acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen said on Thursday that then-President Donald Trump suggested that the Justice Department send letters to state legislatures in Georgia and other states alleging that there was voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election despite knowing there was no such evidence.
Rosen told lawmakers on the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection that during Trump's final days in office, the former president and his campaign suggested several strategies for the Justice Department to overturn the presidential election results. These tactics included filing a lawsuit with the Supreme Court, making public statements, and holding a press conference.
"The Justice Department declined all of those requests that I was just referencing because we did not think they were appropriate based on the facts and the law, as we understood," Rosen said.
Screenshot / C-SPAN
The January 6 committee on Thursday displayed scans of notes taken by Richard Donoghue, then the acting deputy attorney general serving out the final days of the Trump administration.
One note, displayed as Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois led the committee's questioning, included an apparent plea from then-President Donald Trump to "just say the election was corrupt" and "leave the rest to me and the [Republican] congressmen."
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Former Attorney General William Barr said he was "not sure we would have had a transition at all" if the Justice Department had not investigated Donald Trump's claims of widespread voter fraud and found them baseless.
In a closed-door deposition, Barr suggested to the House committee investigating the January 6 attack that Trump might not have left office voluntarily if DOJ had not proactively examined the election fraud claims ahead of Joe Biden's inauguration.
Senate Television via AP
Former White House attorney Eric Herschmann told the committee that he brutally mocked a plan from a Trump loyalist to hijack control of the Justice Department in a last-ditch effort to overturn the 2020 election.
"And when he finished discussing what he planned on doing, I said, 'good, fucking, excuse me, f-ing, a-hole, congratulations you just admitted that your first step or act you would take as attorney general would be committing a felony and violating rule 6c," Herschmann told the panel, per an excerpt of his previously private deposition that was released on Thursday.
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
Sean Penn is in the House.
The actor and well known Hollywood activist made an unexpected appearance at the fifth hearing of the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.
"I'm just here to observe — just another citizen," Penn told a CNN reporter. "I think we all saw what happened on January 6 and now we're looking to see if justice comes on the other side of it."
Read Full Story
Win McNamee/Getty Images
As Rep. Liz Cheney faces a tough reelection battle in Wyoming, she's turning to Democrats in her home state to help her chances in the August 16 Republican primary.
Cheney's campaign has mailed instructions to Wyoming Democrats on how to change their party affiliation to vote for the incumbent congresswoman, The New York Times reported on Thursday. Under Wyoming law, voters must be registered as a Democrat or a Republican in order to vote in that party's primary election.
Yuri Gripas-Pool/Getty Images
We've got a major development that surfaced Thursday into what appears to be a widening federal investigation into Donald Trump's bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Federal investigators on Wednesday searched the Northern Virginia home of Jeff Clark, a former top Justice Department official who became the go-to Trump ally trying to push DOJ into backing the then-president's baseless claims about voter fraud.
ABC News first reported this, and a DOJ spokesperson has since confirmed to Insider's Ryan Barber that law enforcement activity did indeed happen in the Washington DC suburb where Clark lives. The spokesperson wouldn't comment on the nature of the activity or about any specific indiviuals.
Expect to hear Clark's name a couple times or more during Thursday's House select committee hearing as the panel examines Trump's efforts to use DOJ in his bid to stop Joe Biden from being sworn in as the country's 46th president.
Seth Herald/Getty Images
Here's something that doesn't show up on the internet very often: a 30-second trailer for a new three-part documentary taking people behind the scenes of Donald Trump's presidency and the January 6 insurrection.
But that's exactly what landed online late Wednesday via Discovery+, which shows footage of the new series titled "Unprecedented." The clip features Trump and his adult children Ivanka, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump and closes with the ex-president himself agreeing to discuss the riot at the US Capitol.
—discovery+ (@discoveryplus) June 23, 2022
House January 6 investigators have the documentary footage too, courtesy of a subpoena that Politico reported about. And Trump allies were apparently in the dark about the filming, with one texting Rolling Stone: "what the fuck is this?"
Yuri Gripas-Pool/Getty Images
The January 6 commission's fifth hearing is expected to start at 3 p.m. Thursday, with testimony expected from former Trump-administration Justice Department officials. They are:
- Jeffrey Rosen, former acting attorney general
- Richard Donoghue, former acting deputy attorney general
- Steven Engel, former assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel
Rosen served as acting attorney general in the final weeks of Trump's presidency. He previously told the committee how he came under persistent pressure from Trump to have the DOJ back Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election, as Insider's C. Ryan Barber reported.
Toward the end of his presidency, Trump considered ousting Rosen and installing Jeffrey Clark, a supporter of the bogus voter-fraud claims, in his place, but ultimately decided not to after officials threatened to resign if he went through.
Susan Walsh/AP
As the House's January 6 committee lays out in devastating detail Donald Trump's effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election, the former president is turning his anger on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
Trump has complained about McCarthy's decision to boycott the panel, with the former president telling the Punchbowl newsletter on Wednesday: "Republicans don't have a voice. They don't even have anything to say."
But Trump has no one but himself to blame for the situation, one of his Republican critics pointed out, as he was the one who opposed the formation of a bipartisan commission equally split between Republicans and Democrats to investigate the riot.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump is hate-watching the January 6 committee hearings, incensed because he believes nobody is defending him, according to The Washington Post.
Trump is at "the point of about to scream at the TV" as he tunes in to each hearing, one unnamed close advisor told the paper.
Another in his circle, also unnamed, told the paper that Trump continually complains that "there's no one to defend me" at the hearings, which have attracted huge amounts of media coverage.
Per The Post, Trump's anger centers on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who boycotted the committee at its formation, passing up the chance to put pro-Trump figures on the panel.
Mandel Ngan/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
The Justice Department expanded its investigation into the Capitol riot after issuing subpoenas to a would-be Trump elector in Georgia and a Trump campaign official who worked in Arizona and New Mexico, The Washington Post and The New York Times reported Wednesday.
Arizona, Georgia, and New Mexico are among the seven battleground states where a failed effort to overturn the election took place by appointing pro-Trump electors.
The news comes after Rep. Adam Schiff said the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection obtained evidence that former President Donald Trump was involved in the aforementioned scheme.
Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
Aides to Donald Trump had no idea a documentary maker filmed the former president on January 6, 2021, until the House committee investigating that day subpoenaed the footage, reports said.
The existence of the footage by UK documentarian Alex Holder was first reported by Politico on Tuesday.
The outlet said that Holder complied with the House committee request and handed over several months of footage of Trump up to and including January 6.
The New York Times reported that many top Trump advisors were surprised by news of the project, which was known to only a small circle of close Trump aides.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Ivanka Trump claimed to believe former President Donald Trump's false voter-fraud theories in a December 2020 interview, directly contradicting her testimony to congressional investigators earlier this year, a new report says.
In April 2022, Trump had told the House committee investigating the Capitol riot that she had "accepted" former Attorney General Bill Barr's assessment that Donald Trump's claims of election fraud were wrong.
But according to The New York Times, Ivanka Trump told the documentary filmmaker Alex Holder on December 10, 2020 — nine days after Barr made the assessment that supposedly swayed her — that she supported her father's efforts to challenge the 2020 election results.
She said Trump should "continue to fight" the 2020 election results because Americans were questioning the "sanctity of our elections."
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
A Georgia election worker testified that her grandmother faced a citizen's arrest by a group of election deniers who tried pushing their way into her house due to election lies told by former President Donald Trump and former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Wandrea "Shaye" Moss, an election worker in Fulton County, Georgia, told lawmakers during a January 6 select committee hearing that she and her mother Ruby Freeman, who worked as a short-term election worker in 2020, were among the workers counting ballots at State Farm Arena in Atlanta.
When Giuliani and Trump accused those workers of orchestrating election fraud, Moss said her family faced death threats and were pushed out of town, living in Airbnbs for two months around January 6 at the FBI's recommendation.
Moss said she endured racist harassment as well, adding that a group of people influenced by the election conspiracies showed up to her grandmother's house and tried to perform a citizen's arrest.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Paging Pat Cipollone.
The former White House counsel under then-President Donald Trump is now front and center as a top witness the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection still wants to hear from.
That's according to Rep. Liz Cheney, who publicly called Tuesday for Cipollone to testify about evidence the committee has collected showing that he "tried to do what was right" as Trump pushed to overturn the 2020 election.
Cheney also noted that the House panel is also "certain" Trump doesn't want Cipollone to testify. His previous job as Trump's top White House attorney could complicate the matter, though as Insider's Ryan Barber points out in his story, Bill Barr did participate in its investigation.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
Tuesday's House select committee featured jaw-dropping testimony from election officials who detailed the threats they faced after refusing to go along with then President Donald Trump's bid to overturn the 2020 election results.
One big dose of it came from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who explained how he received texts from all over the US and eventually his wife became a target of harassment too.
"My wife started getting the texts and hers typically came in as sexualized texts, which were disgusting," Raffensperger said during his testimony before the January 6 committee. "You have to understand that Trish and I met in high school and we have been married over 40 years now. They started going after her I think to probably put pressure on me: 'Why don't you just quit and walk away?'"
Raffensperger also testified about Trump supporters who broke into the home of his daughter-in-law, a widow with two children. And he said his phone and email were doxxed, meaning that someone had posted the number and email publicly so that people would message him.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
A Black former Georgia election worker delivered stark testimony on Tuesday about the racist and deadly threats that came when President Donald Trump publicly attacked her and her mother amid his drive to overturn the 2020 election results.
Insider's Bryan Metzger has more on the remarks from Wandrea ArShaye "Shaye" Moss, a veteran election official in Fulton County who ended up on the receiving end of myriad threats after Rudy Giuliani specifically named her and her mom when speaking to the Georgia state Senate.
"They included threats, a lot of threats wishing death upon me," Moss said. "Telling me that, you know, I'll be in jail with my mother, and saying things like, 'Be glad it's 2020 and not 1920.'"
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
"We were just kind of useful idiots, or rubes at that point."
That's a quote from former Donald Trump 2020 campaign staffer Robert Sinner describing to the House January 6 investigators his displeasure with a scheme to overturn now-President Joe Biden's 2020 victory in Georgia.
Sinner's remarks were broadcast in a video recording shown during Tuesday's select committee hearing, Insider's John Dorman reports.
Photo by Jabin Botsford-Pool/Getty Images
The House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection kept on going Tuesday despite a suspicious package being found right outside the hearing room where the panel was meeting.
Insider's Lauren Frias reported that the US Capitol Police officials did issue an all-clear about an hour after first sending out its alert. The police advised staff and visitors on the premises to stay away from the area during the incident.
A Fox News producer tweeted that the package appeared to be an unattended backpack on top of a walker outside of the House building.
Drew Angerer and Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images
GOP Sen. Ron Johnson sought to deliver a slate of "alternate" electors to then-Vice President Mike Pence ahead of the counting of votes during a Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.
That's according to a series of eye-catching text messages first displayed by the January 6 committee on Tuesday, Insider's Bryan Metzger reported.
"Johnson needs to hand something to VPOTUS please advise," Sean Riley, Johnson's chief of staff, wrote of the materials that were related to "alternate" electors from two contested Midwestern states that Democratic nominee Joe Biden had narrowly carried: Michigan and Wisconsin.
"What is it?" replied Chris Hodgson, a legislative aide to Pence.
"Alternate slate of elector for MI and WI because archivist didn't receive them," Riley replied.
"Do not give that to him," Hodgson replied.
William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC Newswire/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
Rudy Giuliani admitted to not having any evidence of election fraud after the 2020 presidential election despite repeatedly claiming he did, according to the Republican speaker of the Arizona state House.
"My recollection, he said, 'We've got lots of theories, we just don't have the evidence,'" Russell "Rusty" Bowers, the Arizona official, said in describing a conversation with then-President Donald Trump's personal attorney.
Bowers, a Trump supporter, was testifying on Tuesday before the House January 6 select committee to recount his interactions with Giuliani and the Trump legal team surrounding the events of the last presidential election.
He called the Trump team "a tragic parody" and compared them to the 1971 comedy "The Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight."
AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe
The House select committee's January 6 hearings have spotlighted the very real threat to future US elections, including the midterms coming up this November.
That's the big takeaway from a story by Insider's Grace Panetta published Tuesday that looks at how a court had to intercede after New Mexico county commission initially refused to certify results from the state's June 7 primary.
"The election denial movement pushed by Trump and his allies that spurred so many to attack the Capitol on January 6 has now fanned out to county commissions, town halls, and polling places around the country, presenting wholly novel burdens on election officials and new threats to the health of American democracy," Grace wrote.
Jim Bourg/Reuters
Former President Donald Trump sees no reason to defend the conservative attorney John Eastman, Rolling Stone reported.
The decision the outlet relayed came in light of the heavy scrutiny of Eastman in the Congressional Jan. 6 committee hearings, which detailed his role helping Trump try to overturn the 2020 election.
Eastman wrote a memo detailing a last-ditch plan for Vice President Mike Pence to block Joe Biden's certification as president on January 6, 2021, at the Congressional proceeding which was interrupted by the Capitol riot.
Citing two sources close to Trump, the outlet reported that the committee's focus on Eastman in its public hearings had bothered Trump, and that Trump has started distancing himself from the attorney.
AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File
Insider's Warren Rojas has a roster of those scheduled to appear in the committee's public hearings. See the full list below.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
The January 6 committee sent a subpoena to Alex Holder, a documentary filmmaker who interviewed Trump before and after the Capitol riot, Politico's Playbook newsletter reported Tuesday.
The existence of this footage had never been reported before, and Holder is expected to fully cooperate with the panel, Playbook reported.
Holder also spent several months interviewing members of Trump's family, including his children Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Playbook reported.
The subpoena asked Holder to provide any raw footage he might have from the Capitol riot and interviews with Trump, his family, and former Vice President Mike Pence, as well as any footage he has of discussions about voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Seth Herald/Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump on Friday bragged that he was impeached twice, while recycling his false claims about the 2020 election and attacking former Vice President Mike Pence and former Attorney General William Barr.
Delivering a speech to the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Nashville, the former president said Pence didn't have the courage to embrace his effort to overturn the election and mocked Barr for being "afraid" of getting impeached.
"What's wrong with being impeached? I got impeached twice and my poll numbers went up," Trump said.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, said she "can't wait' to talk to the House January 6 commission after it asked to interview her over her efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
"I can't wait to clear up misconceptions. I look forward to talking to them," Thomas told the right-wing news site The Daily Caller. She did not say what those misconceptions might be.
Her comments come after the House Select Committee investigating the Capitol riot announced that it had requested an interview with her. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the committee's chairman, said the panel wanted to talk to her "soon," Axios reported.
Thomas faces scrutiny over her connections to former President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
Eric Herschmann, a former Trump White House lawyer, revealed on Thursday that even on the morning of the Capitol riot, Rudy Giuliani was still debating whether then-Vice President Mike Pence had the power to overturn the votes in the 2020 election.
Herschmann's testimony was aired on Thursday during the third of six public hearings organized by the January 6 committee investigating the Capitol riot. Thursday's session centered on the pressure exerted by the Trump camp in a bid to get Pence to overturn the vote.
Herschmann said he received a call "out of the blue" from Giuliani on the morning of January 6, 2021, concerning what Pence's role would be that day.
"And, you know, he was asking me my view and analysis and then the practical implications of it," Herschmann said, who described the call as an "intellectual discussion." "And when we finished, he said, like, 'I believe that, you know, you're probably right.'"
PhoPhoto by Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images
A lawyer for former Vice President Mike Pence said that he strongly disagreed with conservative lawyer John Eastman about the Trump camp's plan to overturn the 2020 election result and warned Eastman that it might lead to violence in the streets.
Testifying on Thursday before the January 6 panel investigating the Capitol riot, Greg Jacob said he had spoken to Eastman on January 5, 2021. During their conversation, Jacob said he expressed his "vociferous disagreement" with the plan for Pence to overturn the electoral vote on behalf of former President Donald Trump and send the votes back to their respective states.
"Among other things, if the courts did not step in to resolve this, there was nobody else to resolve it," Jacob testified.
Drew Angerer/Pool Photo via AP
American democracy was on the brink like no time ever before.
That's the lede paragraph from Insider's Grace Panetta in her story that sums up the biggest takeaways from Thursday's historic and marathon third public hearing of the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol.
Grace writes that the two lead witnesses, Greg Jacob and Michael Luttig, were steeped in legal expertise and constitutional scholarship as they explained at a granular and methodical level why neither the Electoral Count Act nor the 12th Amendment permitted then-Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally reject Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden.
Then-President Donald Trump and one of his personal legal advisors, John Eastman, were pushing the vice president to do exactly that in a break with all of US history.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
Former President Donald Trump and his supporters remain a "clear and present danger to American democracy."
Those were the startling words of Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge who has long been championed by Republicans. He made them near the end of Thursday's marathon House select committee hearing into the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol.
Luttig, who advised then-Vice President Mike Pence about his ceremonial role on January 6, also went on to say Trump world is being more than blunt about its plans to manipulate the results of the next election for the White House.
"The former president and his allies are executing that blueprint for 2024 in open and plain view of the American public," Luttig testified, per Insider's Warren Rojas.
AP Photo/Susan Walsh
It's perhaps one of the biggest bombshells to come out of Thursday's House select committee hearing on the Capitol insurrection: a Trump lawyer putting in writing a request to break the law.
The no-no came from John Eastman, who sent an email at 11:44 p.m. on the night of January 6, 2021, repeated his demand that Vice President Mike Pence halt the proceedings to certify the 2020 election and send it back to the states for a period of 10 days.
"So now that the precedent has been set that the Electoral Count Act is not quite so sacrosanct as was previously claimed, I implore you to consider one more relatively minor violation and adjourn for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations, as well as to allow a full forensic audit of the massive amount of illegal activity that has occurred here," Eastman wrote to Pence lawyer Greg Jacob.
Insider's Jake Lahut writes that the Eastman email was sent after Jacob and the then-vice president's staff and family, had been sheltering in place in a secure location during the riot.
Jim Bourg/Reuters
The House panel investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol made some news on Thursday by disclosing evidence that conservative lawyer John Eastman wanted to get added to lame-duck President Donald Trump's pardon list.
Eastman was pushing to overturn the 2020 election, and as Insider's Oma Seddiq reports, his efforts prompted an email to personal Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
"I've decided I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works," Eastman wrote to Giuliani, according to Rep. Pete Aguilar, a lawmaker on the January 6 panel who read the email during Thursday's hearing.
Eastman ultimately did not receive a pardon.
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
The language got pretty profane in the White House on the morning of January 6, 2021, Insider's Bryan Metzger reports.
That's according to former aides who testified to the House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection about a call then-President Donald Trump made to Mike Pence, his vice president.
"I remember hearing the word 'wimp'. Either he called him a wimp — I don't remember if he said, 'you are a wimp, you'll be a wimp' — wimp is the word I remember," said Nicholas Luna, a former assistant to Trump.
Julie Radford, who served as Ivanka Trump's chief of staff, told the committee that Ivanka told her that the president "just had an upsetting conversation with the Vice President" in which he called Pence "the P-word."
Susan Walsh/AP
The House January 6 investigators keep on teasing how there'll soon be upcoming testimony that reveals secret coordination between Trumpworld and extremist groups.
But as Insider's Laura Italiano points out in a new story, the Oath Keepers have long boasted of such a back channel.
In fact, leader and founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes and other members of the pro-Trump militia are staking their seditious-conspiracy defense case on these yet-described communications with rally organizers.
AP Photos/Manuel Balce Ceneta and Susan Walsh
There's an interesting twist to the retired conservative federal Judge Michael Luttig testifying as a key witness in Thursday's January 6 committee hearing.
Insider's Bryan Metzger dug up video from the 2016 GOP presidential primary debates showing Luttig was once named by Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas as an ideal Supreme Court nominee.
—bryan metzger (@metzgov) June 16, 2022
Bryan writes that it was "yet another example of just how much former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results has divided the conservative legal world."
Brent Stirton/Getty Images
More public tension is emerging between the Justice Department and the House panel investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol.
Insider's Ryan Barber has the details on a new letter sent Wednesday from the top US attorney in Washington DC to the House panel. There, the DOJ official says that the House panel has complicated criminal cases with its 'failure' to turn over interview transcripts to prosecutions.
DOJ is looking for access to more than 1,000 interviews the congressional panel has conducted during its months-long examination of the Capitol attack and former President Donald Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election.
AP Photo/Susan Walsh
Some really powerful testimony to start Thursday's January 6 select committee hearing from former federal judge J. Michael Luttig.
In his opening remarks, he told the panel investigating the insurrection at the US Capitol that Vice President Mike Pence overturning the 2020 election would've pushed the country into 'the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the republic.'
"That declaration of Donald Trump as the next president would have launched America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis in America which in my view would have been the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the Republic," Luttig told lawmakers during a hearing Thursday.
Scott J. Applewhite/AP
Mike Pence's former counsel Greg Jacob is a lead witness in Thursday's third public hearing for the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.
In his written statement submitted before the hearing, Jacob called serving the vice president "the honor of a lifetime," while also warning that the rule of law is "not a plaything" for political leaders to bend per their whim.
"The law is not a plaything for presidents or judges to use to remake the world in their preferred image," he wrote. "Our Constitution and our laws form the strong edifice within which our heartfelt policy disagreements are to be debated and decided."
Insider's Grace Panetta has more on Jacob's testimony and spells out why he was a key figure in rebuffing the intense pressure campaign and efforts to compel Pence to obstruct or meddle with the count.
AP Photos/Susan Walsh and J. Scott Applewhite
Conservative activist Ginni Thomas, the wife of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, should be expecting an interview request soon from the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.
"We think it's time that we, at some point, invite her to come talk to the committee," Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chair of the panel, told Axios' Andrew Solender. He added that the invitation would come "soon."
Thomas has recently come under scrutiny for her role in seeking to overturn the 2020 election, including emailing Trump lawyer John Eastman and pressuring 29 state legislators in Arizona to overturn the state's 2020 election results.
(House Select Committee via AP
Anyone remember Eric Herschmann? The White House attorney burst into the national spotlight defending President Donald Trump during his first Senate impeachment trial way back in the early pre-pandemic days of 2020.
Now he's back, but for a very different reason.
That's the story that Oma Seddiq just delivered for Insider readers ahead of Thursday's House January 6 hearing profiling Herschmann. He's been in the news as video clips make the rounds of his testimony where he talks about warning Trump and his allies after the presidential election that there was no proof the race was rigged and stolen, and their efforts may be illegal.
In addition to his colorful language, Herschmann has drawn notice because he gave his deposition in a room with a baseball bat hanging on the wall and the word "JUSTICE" inscribed on it in bold, white letters. Observers also have noted a large painting behind him of a panda, by the artist Rob Pruitt, is similar to one that appeared in the 2015 erotic drama "50 Shades of Grey."
Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
As a rap music video creator-turned-documentary filmmaker, Nick Quested is used to being behind the cameras, not in front of them.
But among the hundreds of journalists, filmmakers, and people with cameras at the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol riot, the US House's January 6 select committee thrust Quested alone into the prime-time spotlight as one of its first public hearing witnesses.
Check out this great interview Insider's Madison Hall did with Quested, where he described an intense lead-up to his testimony last week including sitting for 7 hours of interviews with members of House select committee and their investigative counsel.
"Imagine it's like going to a seven-hour oral exam, except you're the chosen subject so you've got lots to talk about," Quested said. "And if you make a mistake, you go to jail."
He also joked Wednesday that he was chosen for the public hearing because "everyone trusts a British accent."
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
A Trump campaign lawyer wrote in emails in late 2020 that the possibility of "wild chaos" on January 6, 2021, could pressure the Supreme Court to take up a case that could overturn the presidential election, The New York Times reported Thursday.
The December 24, 2020 email exchange between the Trump attorney, Kenneth Chesebro, and conservative lawyer John Eastman, included a discussion of the possibility that the Trump campaign could get a last-minute lawsuit challenging the election results in Wisconsin before the Supreme Court.
Eastman also claimed to have inside knowledge of "a heated fight underway" between the justices over election cases.
Meg Kinnard/AP
The next hearing by the January 6 committee is due to take place on Thursday at 1 p.m. ET.
Two advisors to Mike Pence, who was former President Donald Trump's vice president, are due to testify.
The aides are Greg Jacob, Pence's former counsel, and J. Michael Luttig, a retired judge for the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit who served as an informal advisor to Pence.
Two people familiar with Luttig's testimony told CBS News that he is expected to say tht America's democracy was "almost stolen" and that conservatives should recognize the seriousness of what Trump did on January 6.
He will also say that he urged Pence to ignore Trump's pressure on the vice president to block Joe Biden's certification as president, CBS News reported.
Trump had piled pressure on Pence not to recognize Biden's victory in the days running up to January 6, 2021, and some of the rioters at the Capitol had chanted "hang Mike Pence." Pence's role in the certification process was largely ceremonial.
Screenshot / January 6 Committee
The explanation given by Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk about a tour that he led a day before the January 6 Capitol riot has changed several times.
The committee investigating the attack said Wednesday at least one person on the tour later attended Trump's January 6 rally and march toward the Capitol. Other tour members appear to have taken photos of stairwells and a security station in the Capitol complex.
There is currently no evidence that suggests any of the tour participants rioted inside the Capitol. There is also no evidence that suggests that Loudermilk knew any of the people on the tour wanted to commit violence or deface the Capitol.
The January 6 committee released footage of the tour on Wednesday, saying it included areas that tourists don't typically pay much attention to, like stairwells and hallways.
Capitol police said there was nothing "suspicious" about the tour, but Loudermilk's explanation of it has evolved.Read Full Story
AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, exchanged emails with John Eastman, a Trump lawyer who drafted a memo detailing a plan for overturning the 2020 election, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
Sources close to the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection told the Post that the correspondence, which was obtained by the committee, showed Ginni Thomas went to greater lengths than previously known to overturn the election.
A spokesman for Rep. Bennie Thompson, co-chair of the committee, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Other reports have emerged of efforts by Ginni Thomas, a right-wing activist, to overturn the election. The Post previously reported she had emailed 29 GOP lawmakers in Arizona urging them to ignore Biden's win in the state and choose pro-Trump electors.Read Full Story
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
The Capitol Police chief confirmed in a letter on Monday that GOP Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia had given 15 people a tour of the Capitol complex on the eve of the January 6 attack, adding that it was not suspicious.
Chief J. Thomas Manger also said that the group didn't enter the Capitol building in his letter to Rep. Rodney Davis of Illinois, the ranking Republican member of the House Administration committee.
"We train our officers on being alert for people conducting surveillance or reconnaissance, and we do not consider any of the activities we observed as suspicious," Manger wrote.
Citing security footage, Manger said that Loudermilk had led a group of 12 people, which later grew to 15, through the Rayburn, Cannon, and Longworth buildings, but the group never appeared at "any tunnels that would have led them to the US Capitol."
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The daughter of the Publix grocery chain's founder sponsored the January 6, 2021, speech given by Kimberly Guilfoyle, which lasted two-and-a-half minutes and cost $60,000, The Washington Post reported.
Guilfoyle, a former Fox News host who went on to work for former President Donald Trump and is now Donald Trump Jr.'s fiancée, was given $60,000 for the speech by the conservative nonprofit Turning Point Action, The Post reported, citing two sources with knowledge of the matter.
The sponsoring donor for that payment was Julie Fancelli, the daughter of Publix founder George Jenkins, The Post reported.
Guilfoyle's speech was at a Trump rally in Washington, DC, which preceded the Capitol riot.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell says that he tried to get a spot to testify before the January 6 committee and show them his "evidence" to prove former President Donald Trump's baseless claims of voter fraud, but they did not want to talk to him.
Lindell made this statement during an appearance on Steve Bannon's podcast, "War Room: Pandemic."
Bannon asked Lindell if the committee had reached out to him to go through "all the voluminous material" he has about the 2020 election.
"No, they haven't. And it's really — that's sad, too, because I've offered. I'd love to come to your committee as long as you nationally televise it, Ms. Pelosi," Lindell replied, referring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat in Georgia, told NPR that democracy in the US is at risk.
Warnock, who is running for reelection against Republican Herschel Walker, serves as Georgia's first Black senator since his election in 2021. He is also a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the church where Martin Luther King Jr. attended.
"Democracy is hard work. Democracy is not a noun, it's a verb. And over the course of time, our democracy expands. It gets a little closer towards those ideals. There are moments when it contracts, but even contractions open the possibility for new birth and new hope," Warnock said to NPR's Mary Louise Kelly.
Warnock said that the January 6 Capitol attack, in which hundreds of rioters breached the US Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 election, demonstrates the troubled state of democracy.
Chet Strange/Getty Images
Ruth Ben-Ghiat spends a lot of time thinking about authoritarianism. An historian at New York University, she is an expert on the rise of fascism in Italy and, most recently, author of the the book, "Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present," tracing the erosion of democracy from Russia to the United States of America.
She is keenly focused on what happens when those in power lose their grip on it.
"The authoritarian playbook has no chapter on failure," Ben-Ghiat wrote in a November 2020 piece for The Washington Post. "Nothing prepares the ruler to see his propaganda ignored and his charismatic hold weaken until his own people turn against him."
When, two months later, former President Donald Trump urged his supporters to head over to the US Capitol in a last-ditch effort to overturn the 2020 election, Ben-Ghiat was not altogether surprised. Indeed, she had told people to expect it, arguing: "the rage that will grow in Trump as reality sinks in may make for a rocky transition to Biden's presidency. Americans would do well to be prepared."
What stopped a failed insurrection from being a successful coup, she recently told CNN, was — at least in part — one of the lies Trump said on January 6: "I'll be there with you," he told supporters as they prepared to march on Congress.
He never showed.
In an interview with Insider, Ben-Ghiat expanded on why she thinks January 6 was an "attempted coup," why it did not succeed, and what the future holds.
Charles Dharapak/AP
Conservative lawyer John Eastman previously wrote a memo to former Vice President Mike Pence urging him to overturn the 2020 election results.
White House lawyer Eric Herschmann told Eastman to "get a great f-ing criminal defense lawyer" the day after the Capitol attack.
"You're going to need it," Herschmann recounted to the January 6 House committee.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump released a 12-page statement after the committee's second hearing on Monday.
He spent nearly nine pages of the statement pushing bogus claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him.
He also bashed the panel and claimed it was trying to stop him from running again in 2024. He has repeatedly teased a 2024 run for president.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
Rudy Giuliani responded to claims that he was drunk on election night 2020 in a tweet on Monday night, insisting he "was drinking diet coke all night."
The claim about the former New York City mayor's behavior at the White House election night party resurfaced during Monday's January 6 committee hearings.
In a taped deposition, former advisor to then-President Donald Trump Jason Miller said: "I think the mayor was definitely intoxicated, but I do not know his level of intoxication when he spoke with the president, for example."
After, Giuliani's media office tweeted about his drinking Diet Coke, attributing the claim to an unnamed "fellow guest."
Andrew Harnik/AP
Rep. Bennie Thompson, chair of the January 6 committee, said it was not the group's job to refer Trump or anyone else to the Justice Department for charges.
"No, that's not our job," Thompson said on Monday, according to CNN. "Our job is to look at the facts and circumstances around January 6, what caused it and make recommendations after that."
But some committee members disagreed with that approach, showing rare public cracks within the committee.
"The January 6th Select Committee has not issued a conclusion regarding potential criminal referrals. We will announce a decision on that at an appropriate time," tweeted Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican serving as the committee's vice chair.
And Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat, told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Monday that he had not seen Thompson's comment but was not aware a decision on referrals had been made yet.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
Trump-allied lawyer Rudy Giuliani continued to make bizarre false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election during his testimony to the January 6 panel, claiming he had evidence of a "big truck" of fraudulently-cast Biden votes.
Giuliani's testimony to the House panel investigating the Capitol riot was aired on Monday, during the second of the committee's six public hearings on January 6. The former New York mayor doubled down on outlandish and unproven election fraud claims.
"They saw a big truck bringing in 100,000 ballots in garbage cans, in wastepaper baskets, in cardboard boxes, and in shopping baskets," Giuliani claimed without substantiation.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Former Attorney General William Barr said that former President Donald Trump was more fixated on "crazy" allegations of voter fraud than knowing the "actual facts" on the matter.
Barr's testimony to the House panel investigating the January 6 Capitol riot was aired on Monday as part of the second of the committee's six public hearings on their investigation.
In a videotaped deposition, Barr recounted a meeting with Trump on December 14, 2020. Barr said Trump "went off on a monologue" during the meeting about what he claimed to be "definitive evidence" of election fraud being carried out via the Dominion voting machines.
According to Barr, Trump then "held up the report" and claimed it showed "absolute proof that the Dominion machines were rigged." Barr added that Trump then declared that the report meant that he would have a second term.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Alex Cannon, a former Trump campaign lawyer, testified in front of the House Committee on January 6 and said that Trump aide Peter Navarro accused him of being a "deep state" operative because he expressed doubt over Dominion voting machine conspiracy theories.
Cannon's testimony was broadcast on Monday as part of the second of six public hearings on the committee's investigation.
During his deposition, Cannon said that he had a conversation with Navarro in mid-November, after the 2020 presidential election, about voter fraud allegations.
Cannon said he spoke to Navarro specifically regarding the conspiracy theory that Dominion voting machines were used to flip votes from Trump to Biden. This conspiracy has continually been pushed by Trump-allied lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, as well as MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Dominion named all three in a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit.
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images; Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Former Trump campaign chief Bill Stepien says the Trump team was split into two camps after the election – "Team Normal" and "Team Giuliani."
The House Select Committee to Investigate January 6 played a clip of Stepien's testimony on Monday during the second of the committee's six public hearings. During his deposition, Stepien was asked if he had pulled back from the Trump camp to preserve his professional reputation.
"You didn't want to be associated with some of what you were hearing from the Giuliani team and others that — that sort of stepped in in the wake of your departure?" an unidentified questioner asked Stepien.
"I didn't mind being categorized. There were two groups of them. We called them kind of my team and Rudy's team. I — I didn't mind being characterized as being part of Team Normal, as — as reporters, you know, kind of started to do around that point in time," Stepien said.
AP Photo/Susan Walsh
Former Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt said he was surprised by the internal firestorm that erupted at his former workplace after Fox became the first major news network to call Arizona for President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
Stirewalt, who was fired from Fox in January 2021, testified before the January 6 committee investigating the Capitol riot on Monday, telling lawmakers that former President Donald Trump's chance at victory was virtually zero after most networks called the election for Biden on November 7, 2020.
Trump was reportedly enraged that Fox News's decision desk called the swing state of Arizona for Biden before most other outlets did the same, but Stirewalt said he was confident in his team's work. Biden ultimately won the state by about 11,000 votes.
But what Stirewalt wasn't expecting was the wave of backlash at Fox News that followed the accurate projection.
Stirewalt spoke to NPR's David Folkenflik following his Monday testimony, telling the outlet that people close to Trump were hammering Fox executives and anchors to take back their Arizona call.
The ordeal left Stirewalt disillusioned about the state of network news in the US, he told the outlet.
Senate Television via Getty Images
Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann confronted a conservative lawyer who pushed Trump's election lies, the day after the Capitol riot, according to a taped deposition the January 6 committee released on Monday.
"I said to him, 'Are you out of your effing mind,'" Herschmann told the committee about his conversation with Eastman. "'I only want to hear two words coming out of your mouth for now on: orderly transition.'"
Eastman was closely involved in then-President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including a push to get Vice President Mike Pence to either delay or unilaterally overturn a state's results on January 6.
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Former Attorney General Bill Barr laid out his frank assessment of former President Donald Trump's election loss in Pennsylvania during Monday's House Select Committee hearing — and it wasn't voter fraud.
"I think once you actually look at the votes, there's a [sic] obvious explanation," Barr said of Trump's election fraud conspiracy theories. "For example, in Pennsylvania, Trump ran weaker than the Republican ticket generally. He ran weaker than two of the state candidates. He ran weaker than the congressional delegation running for federal Congress."
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said he quit his high-profile job because he felt what unfolded after the 2020 presidential election night was not "honest or professional."
He described a Trump campaign that was becoming increasingly divided because Trump chose to use baseless allegations to claim he hadn't lost the 2020 election.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Bill Barr said that dealing with baseless claims of voter fraud from Donald Trump's team was like "playing Whac-a-Mole," in testimony played Monday by the House select committee.
Barr described dealing with an "avalanche" of false voter fraud claims from Trump and allies like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who became the campaign's primary peddlers of election fraud claims.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
Trump rejected his campaign advisors' guidance on election night in 2020 and instead relied on counsel from his former personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who was apparently drunk, Rep. Liz Cheney said Monday.
Campaign aides were advising Trump that the race was too close to call in key battlegrounds, but Trump took Giuliani's advice and just claimed he'd won in an early morning speech.
Joshua Roberts/Getty Images
Former New York Rudy Giuliani pushed then-President Donald Trump to prematurely declare victory on election night 2020, a group of former top Trump aides testified.
Bill Stepien, Trump's final 2020 campaign manager, testified to the House January 6 committee that he urged Trump to strike a measured tone and not to declare victory while votes were being counted.
"Ballots were still being counted, ballots were still going to be counted for days, and it was far too early to be making any proclamation like that," Stepien testified in a previous deposition that was partially aired on Monday.
But Trump rejected the calls of caution and in the early morning after the election did exactly what some of his aides told him not to do.
"Frankly, we did win this election," Trump declared at the White House.
AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey
As the January 6 select committee honed in on Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Monday's hearing started off with pre-taped depositions of former White House officials on their incensed reaction to Fox News calling Arizona for then-candidate Joe Biden.
Fox News had just introduced a new methodology to its decision desk, which its director, Arnon Mishkin, explained to Insider ahead of Election Day. The network called Arizona before other major TV outlets, and ultimately proved correct in its decision.
Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News political editor, described the network's decision desk as "the best in the business" in his testimony.
The network's new strategy included surveying upwards of 100,000 Americans ahead of Election Day to see where people were voting by mail or in person, and using that large dataset to make sense of the returns on election night. That allowed Fox to have an assessment of how many remaining votes would be by mail and how those who intended to vote by mail indicated they would vote.
"We already knew Trump's chances were small and getting smaller based on what we'd seen," Stirewalt said.
CNN
The second public hearing by the committee is due to start around 10:30 a.m. ET on Monday.
Witnesses include the former Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt and the GOP election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg.
Stirewalt's team correctly called Arizona for Joe Biden in the 2020 election before other networks did so, and subsequently became the target of Trump supporters.
He was fired as a Fox News political editor on January 19, 2021, and now works for NewsNation. It is not clear what the committee plans to ask Stirewalt.
The committee said in a Monday morning update that Bill Stepien, Trump's former campaign manager, was no longer able to appear due to a family emergency. It said Stepien's lawyer would make a statement on the record instead.
YouTube/CNN
January 6 committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin dodged questions from CNN for evidence that Republican lawmakers asked then-President Donald Trump for pardons after the Capitol riot.
He said the details would emerge later.
When asked by CNN's Dana Bash if he had evidence, Raskin responded: "It is multiple members of Congress, as the vice-chair said at our opening hearing, and all in due course the details will surface," Raskin said, referring to Cheney.
When asked again if he had evidence, he said: "Everything we're doing is documented by evidence ... Everything that we are doing is based on facts and this is a bipartisan investigation which is determined to ferret out all of the facts of what happened."
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said that much of the Republican Party is looking for an "off-ramp" from former President Donald Trump's bogus theory that the 2020 election was stolen.
Speaking to Fox News host Bret Baier, Hutchinson said Sunday that Trump is "politically and morally responsible" for much of the January 6 riot at the Capitol.
He suggested that many Republicans are looking for alternative leadership as Trump continues to falsely insist on the claim that inspired the riot — that there was widespread election fraud.
"For him to continue to push that theory, I agree is the wrong direction for the Republican Party," said Hutchinson. "I think there's many Republicans that are looking for an off-ramp, new opportunities … to find leadership in the future."
He did not specify whether he meant ordinary GOP voters, or elected officials, mainly of whom have vocally endorsed Trump's claims.
Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The members of the House panel investigating the Capitol riot on Sunday said that the panel has uncovered enough evidence for the Department of Justice to mull a criminal indictment against former President Donald Trump over his efforts to invalidate President Joe Biden's electoral win, according to The Associated Press.
Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, who sits on the panel and also leads the House Intelligence Committee, said that he wanted to see the department examine Trump's efforts in seeking to halt the certification of Biden's victory.
"I would like to see the Justice Department investigate any credible allegation of criminal activity on the part of Donald Trump," he said on ABC News on Sunday. "There are certain actions, parts of these different lines of effort to overturn the election that I don't see evidence the Justice Department is investigating."
Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
The upcoming January 6 committee hearing will focus on a deep dive that former President Donald Trump knew he lost the election but still tried to overturn it and his "dereliction of duty," a committee member said.
Democratic Rep. Elaine Lurie told NBC's "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd that the upcoming hearing will show how Trump tried to pressure local, state and federal officials to overturn the election, after baselessly claiming it was rigged against him.
"We've pieced together a very comprehensive tick-tock timeline of what he did," The Virginia lawmaker said.
Lurie told Todd that it's more accurate to say that the committee now has a timeline of what Trump was not doing before and during the insurrection than what he was doing.
"There is a gap there that we have tried through these witnesses, we've interviewed a thousand witnesses and a lot of people who work directly in the White House for the president, in his immediate vicinity throughout the day," she said.
"So we've pieced together a very comprehensive tick-tock timeline of what he did."
Read Full Story
MANDEL NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
A lawyer for former Vice President Mike Pence told him the day before the Capitol Riot that following former President Donald Trump's request to certify the election for him would eventually fail in court, according to a memo obtained by Politico.
Congress was in the process of certifying the 2020 presidential election on January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters who falsely believed the election had been rigged stormed the US Capitol.
Trump had previously asked Pence to certify the election in his favor, but attorney Greg Jacob told Pence in a memo that doing so would break multiple provisions of the Electoral Count Act.
According to Politico, in the memo, Jacob said the move could fail in the courts or put America in a political crisis where Pence would find himself "in an isolated standoff against both houses of Congress … with no neutral arbiter available to break the impasse."
The attorney will testify publicly in front of the House committee investigating the Capitol riots this week, however, his letter has been known to the committee for months, Politico reported.
Jim Watson/Getty Images
Rudy Giuliani, former advisor and personal lawyer to Donald Trump, claimed in an episode of his podcast that the former president had "nothing to do with" the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The episode, released Saturday, was a response to the House select committee's televised hearings related to the investigation into the events of Jan. 6, 2021. On Thursday, the committee released findings that indicated the events of the day were an attempted coup intended to keep former president Trump in power.
Luis M. Alvarez/AP
Fox News host Laura Ingraham claimed the January 6 Committee hearing on Thursday "bombed," despite reeling in nearly 20 million viewers.
Fox was the only major news outlet not to carry the hearing live on Thursday evening, which was the House Select Committee on January 6's first major public hearing about the Capitol attack, the efforts to overturn the election, and what then-President Donald Trump knew before and during the attack.
Committee members revealed that Trump and his allies staged "an attempted coup" and funded a misinformation campaign that "provoked the violence on January 6." They also said that Ivanka Trump "accepted" the attorney general's opinion that there was no election fraud, and that several Republican congressmen asked for pardons following January 6.
Ingraham's claim that the hearings "bombed" came as she responded to criticism from The View's Joy Behar.
"Fox News did not carry the January 6 Committee's live hearings last night. Shocker isn't it? But they still had plenty to say about it," Behar said. "The usual suspects, Tucker [Carlson] and Ingraham, dusted off their greatest hits, calling it a witch hunt, saying it's political revenge from Pelosi, and downplayed what happened on the 6th."
Behar added: "There were no commercial breaks last night on either show. So what does that tell you? That Rupert Murdoch is so desperate to keep his viewers away from the hearing, along with those two, that he is willing to lose millions of dollars."
Ingraham swiped back at Behar in a tweet, claiming to have had "two commercial breaks Thursday night." According to PolitiFact, Carlson's and Hannity's shows had no commercial breaks, whereas Ingraham "went to commercial a few times."
Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
Enrique Tarrio and four other members of the Proud Boys were charged this week with seditious conspiracy in what one constitutional expert calls a "textbook case" of sedition, but the charges themselves face an uphill battle in court.
Seditious conspiracy, sometimes referred to as "sedition," is law that first originated in 1789 to prosecute speech critical of the government.
Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The public hearings for the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection resume on Monday, June 13, at 10 a.m. ET.
Catch up on our takeaways of the biggest moments from the first hearing on Thursday, June 9, 2022, and check out the full schedule.
Drew Angerer/Getty Image
In a Friday tweet storm, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked several of her fellow representatives if they'd asked the White House for a pardon following the January 6 attack.
Her remarks came the day after the January 6 House select committee aired its first public hearing — in which GOP co-chair Rep. Liz Cheney alleged that several members of Congress asked for pardons after the insurrection.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
More than 19 million people watched the first public hearing of the congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, The New York Times reported Friday, citing preliminary figures from ratings company Nielsen.
The actual number is higher, The Times noted, as the preliminary tally does not include all networks and streaming services that aired the hearing.
The Thursday hearing aired from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. on broadcast channels and cable news networks — but not on Fox News, which elected to stick its usual programming.
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump on Friday lashed out at William Barr, calling him a "weak and frightened" attorney general and a "coward" after the House January 6 committee aired his testimony debunking Trump's false claims of widespread election fraud.
During Thursday's public hearing, the committee played recorded testimony from Barr in a closed-door interview saying that he didn't agree that the election was "stolen" and that he told Trump the idea was "bullshit."
Trump attacked Barr, his former attorney general, on his social-media platform, Truth Social, saying he "was always being 'played' and threatened by the Democrats and was scared stiff of being Impeached."
Read Full Story
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump said his daughter Ivanka Trump doesn't understand elections after she testified that there was no fraud in the 2020 election.
The committee aired her testimony on Thursday, where she said that she "accepted" former Attorney General Bill Barr finding no evidence that the vote was stolen.
"Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results," Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday. "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!)."
Chet Strange/Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump responded to the first public hearing by criticizing the House committee and repeating his fake voter fraud claims.
"So the Unselect Committee of political HACKS 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," he shared on Truth Social early Friday morning.
He added: "Our Country is in such trouble!"
Fox News
Fox News' prime-time shows refused to carry Thursday's hearing, with host Tucker Carlson bragging about the network's decision.
"The whole thing is insulting. In fact, it's deranged," Carlson said. "And we're not playing along."
"This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live. They are lying, and we are not going to help them do it," he said, apparently referring to those investigating the riot.
Host Sean Hannity on his own show called the hearing a "multi-hour Democratic fundraiser," without offering any evidence, and a "made-for-TV smear campaign against President Trump featuring sliced and diced video that fits their pre-determined political narrative."
And host Laura Ingraham painted the hearing as boring, saying: "In the end, this was nearly two hours of an unsuccessful, laborious attempt to connect the dots back to Trump, to Trump to a coup that never happened."
AP Photo/ Andrew Harnik)
Rep. Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the House January 6 committee, said at Thursday's hearing that several Republican members of Congress asked for a pardon from then-President Donald Trump after the Capitol riot.
She called out Rep. Scott Perry in particular, saying: "Representative Perry contacted the White House in the weeks after January 6 to seek a presidential pardon."
"Multiple other Republican congressmen also sought presidential pardons for their roles in attempting to overturn the 2020 election," she added.
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said watching the first televised hearing on the Capitol riot took her back to the traumatic experience of being there on the day.
Ocasio-Cortez posted a video of the hearing, where scenes of violence and sights of Trump supporters flooding the Capitol were being played.
"Good Lord. The way it all comes rushing back into the body. It's like it's that day all over again," she wrote.
Eva Marie Uzcategui Trinkl//Getty
A high-ranking member of the Proud Boys told the January 6 panel that membership in the organization "tripled" after former President Donald Trump told them to "stand back and stand by."
Trump made the comments during a debate in September 2020. The former president was asked to disavow white supremacist groups and urge them to "stand down." But instead of doing so, Trump said: "Proud Boys, stand back and stand by."
A clip of an interview with Proud Boys member Jeremy Bertino aired during the televised January 6 hearings on Thursday night. He said Trump's comments were a watershed moment for the group.
Bertino was asked if the number of Proud Boys members increased specifically after Trump's comments.
"Exponentially," Bertino said. "I'd say, tripled, probably. With the potential for a lot more eventually."
Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The January 6 panel released a never-before-seen video from inside House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's office during the January 6 Capitol riot.
In the video, the dozens of frantic staffers are seen pouring into the hallways of Rep. McCarthy's office.
The staffers appeared to be fleeing McCarthy's office as a radio transmission signaled that people would be moving through the tunnels of the Capitol building.
The House committee played the video during the first of six televised January 6 hearings. It pinpoints 2:28 p.m. — as violent clashes between rioters and police officers take place outside the Capitol, McCarthy staffers can be seen running through the hallway of his chambers.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards said it looked to her like an "absolute war zone" on January 6, 2021, when supporters of former President Trump attacked the US Capitol, forcing officers to engage in "hours of hand-to-hand combat" beyond the scope of any law enforcement training.
Edwards, who was injured in the attack, told members of the House select committee on Thursday, "I can just remember my breath catching in my throat" while looking at the "carnage" and "chaos" of the riot scene.
"I couldn't believe my eyes," she told the committee. "There were officers on the ground. You know, they were bleeding, they were throwing up…I mean I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people's blood. You know, I was catching people as they fell."
Eva Marie Uzcategui Trinkl//Getty
At the first of six public hearings planned for this month, the House committee displayed video of an interview with a Proud Boy who attributed Trump's comment to exponential membership growth in the far-right group.
In another interview, former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio cracked a wry smile and said he regretted not selling t-shirts brandished with the words "Stand back and stand by."
"One of the vendors on my page actually beat me to it, but I wish I would've made a 'stand back stand by' t-shirt," Tarrio said in his interview with the House committee.
Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
—Bloomberg (@business) June 10, 2022
Former Trump White House Senior Advisor Jared Kushner testified in front of the January 6 House Committee that he thought White House Counsel Pat Cipollone's threat to resign was nothing more than "whining."
"I know that him and the team were always saying, 'We're gonna resign, we're not gonna be here' if this happens, that happens," Kushner, who is also the former president's son-in-law, said during an on-camera deposition Thursday. "I kind of took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you."
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming on Thursday evening issued members of her party a stark warning over their continued support of former President Donald Trump.
"I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: there will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain," Cheney, vice chair of the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, said during the panel's first hearing.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
"The White House staff knew that President Trump was willing to entertain and use conspiracy theories to achieve his ends," Rep. Cheney said during opening remarks at the first public hearing investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
"They knew that the president needed to be cut off from all of those who had encouraged him. They knew that President Donald Trump was too dangerous to be left alone," she added.
Michael Reynolds/AP
Following the 2020 presidential election, then-Attorney General William Barr told Donald Trump that his claims of widespread election fraud were "bullshit" and entirely unsupported by evidence, it was revealed during the first January 6 committee public hearing.
Video of Barr recounting his remarks to Trump in a closed-door interview with the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was played on June 9, 2022, during the public hearing.
Barr said he spoke with Trump on at least three occasions between November and December 2020, and he described Trump's claims of election malfeasance as "crazy stuff" and said the falsehoods were influencing the public, doing a "great, great disservice to the country." Barr credited the timing of his December 2020 resignation, in part, to Trump's baseless election claims.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Video testimony of part of Ivanka Trump's testimony to the January 6 committee was shown during the first public hearing of the investigation into the riots at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
During the clip, Ivanka Trump was asked about then-Attorney General Bill Barr's statement that former President Donald Trump's claims that there was fraud in the 2020 election were incorrect.
"It affected my perspective," Ivanka Trump told the committee in recorded testimony, aired for the first time on Thursday. "I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he was saying."Read Full Story
Win McNamee/Getty Images
Rep. Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, said that during these public hearings they would reveal more information about a "seven-part plan" to overturn the 2020 presidential election, led by former President Donald Trump.
—CSPAN (@cspan) June 10, 2022
Win McNamee/Getty Images
As a riot unfolded at the US Capitol, former President Donald Trump told aides that his own vice president might deserve to die, Rep. Liz Cheney said Thursday.
Cheney, a Wyoming Republican who co-chairs the House panel investigating the January 6 insurrection, made the claim in her opening remarks.
"Aware of the rioters chants to 'hang Mike Pence,'" Cheney said, "the president responded with this sentiment: 'Maybe our supporters have the right idea.' Mike Pence 'deserves it.'"
As The New York Times reported last month, two former White House staffers testified before the January 6 committee that Mark Meadows, Trump's ex-chief of staff, told them that he heard the former president make the comment.
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Rep. Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the House panel investigating the January 6 attack, will say tonight that the American people deserve answers about the insurrection.
"We can't sweep what happened under the rug," Thompson says in early excerpts of his opening statement. "The American people deserve answers. So I come before you this evening not as a Democrat, but as an American who swore an oath to defend the Constitution."
The House Select Committee on January 6 will have its first major public hearing tonight, kicking off a series of public hearings about the attack, efforts to overturn the election, and what then-President Donald Trump was aware of in the lead up to it.
Thompson will add that American democracy "remains in danger."
"... Our work must do much more than just look backwards," Thompson will say. "Because our democracy remains in danger. The conspiracy to thwart the will of the people is not over. There are those in this country who thirst for power but have no love or respect for what makes America great: devotion to the Constitution, allegiance to the rule of law, our shared journey to build a more perfect Union."
Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, is facing a defining career moment after nearly three decades in Congress. Thompson told Insider's Camila DeChalus that the committee is his "signature work in the United States House of Representatives."
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Rep. Bennie Thompson is the chairman of the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection. He has been in Congress for 29 years but views this investigation as his "signature work."
"There's a lot of other pieces of legislation that basically alter the trajectory of so many people in my district, in this country, as well as other pieces of legislation, but nothing compares to the importance of this committee and why I value its work as my signature work in the United States House of Representatives," he told Insider's Camila DeChalus in a May interview.
In the first public hearing of the January 6 committee, Thompson will take center stage.
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas offered up three things he'd rather do Thursday night than sit through any part of the January 6 committee's highly anticipated prime-time hearing.
"I've got to mow my lawn. Or comb my hair. Or maybe just watch the paint dry on the walls," Cruz said of what he considered better ways to invest one's time than validating the existence of "a political campaign ad for the Democrats."
Cruz bashed the ongoing House investigation as political theater meant to distract a recession-wary populace from all the ways he said President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have failed them.
"From the opening gavel to the close of the hearing, one hundred percent of their endeavor is a political Hail Mary pass," Cruz told Insider in the tunnels beneath the Senate chamber. "The American people are deeply unhappy with the disaster of the left-wing policy agenda we've seen for the last two years."
Brent Stirton/Getty Images
A Justice Department lawyer revealed Thursday that transcripts of the 1,000 interviews conducted as part of the House January 6 committee's investigation into the Capitol attack will be made public in September. It would be an unprecedented release of documents that could shed new light on the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
The revelation came during a pretrial hearing for former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio and four other members of the far-right group who were charged with seditious conspiracy in connection with their alleged role in planning and participating in the Capitol siege.
"The committee will release the transcripts in early September and a report of the committee's findings will be released around the same time," Assistant US Attorney Jason McCullough told a judge.
Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via AP, Pool
The House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection is holding a much-anticipated public hearing Thursday night.
The nine-member panel, chaired by Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, has spent months interviewing witnesses and examining phone and email records to try to get to the bottom of former President Donald Trump and his allies' efforts to overturn the 2020 election and prevent President Joe Biden from taking office.
The committee, which includes Republican Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, is expected to hold a half-dozen public hearings in June.
Here's what you need to know ahead of the broadcast at 8 p.m. ET:
- How to watch the hearings
- The key witnesses who are likely to testify
- What to expect
- Sources say the evidence will put Trump "at the center" of the events
- Meet the lawmakers and staff leading the investigation
- At least 862 people have now been arrested for their actions on January 6
- More than 300 people have already pleaded guilty
- An oral history of the insurrection from 34 people who were there
- How the US Capitol riot led to Trump's second impeachment
- Liz Cheney's break from GOP leadership on the investigation
Via PakApNews