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The 01-06-21 Select Committee Thread


Satchel

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31 minutes ago, Serak The Preparer said:

Yes - and he certainly has a proven track record of listening to such sage advice and not putting himself in further precarious situations.

While true, I think the prospect of a felony indictment changes the calculus to some degree.

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1 hour ago, TwiceHorn said:

The simple fact is Donald Trump has never been indicted.  It's a whole different deal than civil suits or the inherently political impeachment.

I suspect his lawyers, if they're any good, would advise him not to run as he would be virtually certain to incriminate himself on the campaign trail, or at least create a shitstorm of collateral issues that they don't want to deal with.

And hell be elected and immune from prosecution before anyone can do shit about it. Which seems like a great reason to run. 

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1 hour ago, TwiceHorn said:

I suspect his lawyers, if they're any good, would advise him not to run as he would be virtually certain to incriminate himself on the campaign trail, or at least create a shitstorm of collateral issues that they don't want to deal with.

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6 hours ago, SydneyCarton said:

And hell be elected and immune from prosecution before anyone can do shit about it. Which seems like a great reason to run. 

Actually, I don't think a President is immune from anything that commences before he's in office, civil or criminal.

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8 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Actually, I don't think a President is immune from anything that commences before he's in office, civil or criminal.

bruh. The trump presidency provided empirical evidence to prove that a president will be immune from anything and everything, so long as they have a strong base of 30% support in congress and a media apparatus to shit into.

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5 minutes ago, Captainant said:

bruh. The trump presidency provided empirical evidence to prove that a president will be immune from anything and everything, so long as they have a strong base of 30% support in congress and a media apparatus to shit into.

None of that was surprising to anyone who knew anything about anything.  Trump was never going to be indicted as a sitting president.  The impeachments were DOA before they were even begun.

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52 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Maybe the first time in the history of evar that Trump follows his counsel's advice:  When you're gonna lie, at least say "to the best of my knowledge" before the lie.

Counsel doesn't advise him to couch his answers like that, 'cause he'd fuck it up.  Instead he'd say something like, 

"I have knowledges.  The best knowledges to me.  To the tremendous best knowledges known only to me, I have not an answer.  Be knowledge, be best."  And then he'd fumble with the usual water pitcher in the middle of the deposition table. 

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"At the hearing on Friday, we look forward to questioning Greene under oath about her involvement in the events of Jan. 6, and to demonstrating how her facilitation of the insurrection disqualifies her from public office under the United States Constitution. "

I wonder if they will ask her about the bombing... she has a very specific arm swing motion that matches the person dropping off the pipe bombs. 

 

 

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I guess this is the best place to put this. Given that his advisors and allies, along with his own threats, it's fucking frightening how close Trump almost got to breaking our democracy. We all knew it at the time, but this article is a pretty good reminder. And, clearly, we're not out of the woods yet. With the character of the current Republican Party being what is it, we may never be again in our lifetimes.

 

Fearing a Trump Repeat, Jan. 6 Panel Considers Changes to Insurrection Act
The 1807 law allows a president to deploy American troops inside the country to put down a rebellion. Lawmakers fear it could be abused by a future president trying to stoke one.

WASHINGTON — In the days before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, some of President Donald J. Trump’s most extreme allies and members of right-wing militia groups urged him to use his power as commander in chief to unleash the military to help keep him in office.

Now, as the House committee investigating last year’s riot uncovers new evidence about the lengths to which Mr. Trump was willing to go to cling to power, some lawmakers on the panel have quietly begun discussions about rewriting the Insurrection Act, the 1807 law that gives presidents wide authority to deploy the military within the United States to respond to a rebellion.

The discussions are preliminary, and debate over the act has been fraught in the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s presidency. Proponents envision a doomsday scenario in which a rogue future president might try to use the military to stoke — rather than put down — an insurrection, or to abuse protesters. But skeptics worry about depriving a president of the power to quickly deploy armed troops in the event of an uprising, as presidents did during the Civil War and the civil rights era.

While Mr. Trump never invoked the law, he threatened to do so in 2020 to have the military crack down on crowds protesting the police killing of George Floyd. Stephen Miller, one of his top advisers, also proposed putting it into effect to turn back migrants at the southwestern border, an idea that was rejected by the defense secretary at the time, Mark T. Esper.

And as Mr. Trump grasped for ways to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, some hard-right advisers encouraged him to declare martial law and deploy U.S. troops to seize voting machines. In the run-up to the Jan. 6 attack, members of right-wing militia groups also encouraged Mr. Trump to invoke the law, believing that he was on the brink of giving them approval to descend on Washington with weapons to fight on his behalf.

“There are many of us who are of the view that the Insurrection Act, which the former president threatened to invoke multiple times throughout 2020, bears a review,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and a member of the Jan. 6 committee.

Spoiler

While no evidence has emerged that Mr. Trump planned to invoke the act to stay in office, people close to him were pushing for him to do so. Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, attended a meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18, 2020, in which participants discussed seizing voting machines, declaring a national emergency and invoking certain national security emergency powers. That meeting came after Mr. Flynn gave an interview to the right-wing television network Newsmax in which he talked about a purported precedent for deploying troops and declaring martial law to “rerun” the election.

The idea was also floated by Roger J. Stone Jr., the political operative and longtime confidant of Mr. Trump, who told the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in an interview that Mr. Trump should consider invoking the Insurrection Act.

In the weeks before the riot, the notion was prevalent among militia members and other hard-right supporters of Mr. Trump. It has surfaced repeatedly in evidence that federal prosectors and the House committee have obtained during their investigations into the Capitol attack.

In December 2020, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia group, wrote an open letter to Mr. Trump in which he called on the president to “use the Insurrection Act to ‘stop the steal,’” begin seizing voting data and order a new election.

“Clearly, an unlawful combination and conspiracy in multiple states (indeed, in every state) has acted to deprive the people of the fundamental right to vote for their representatives in a clear, fair election,” Mr. Rhodes wrote, adding, “You, and you alone, are fully authorized by the Insurrection Act to determine that such a situation exists and to use the U.S. military and militia to rectify that situation.”

In text messages and social media posts ahead of the Capitol riot, other Oath Keepers members also discussed the possibility of Mr. Trump invoking the Insurrection Act. Two of them, Jessica Watkins and Kelly Meggs, the head of the militia’s Florida chapter, have been charged in connection with the attack.

And Mr. Rhodes sent armed men to a hotel in Virginia on Jan. 6 to await Mr. Trump’s order, which the militia leader said would nullify Washington gun restrictions and allow the group to take up arms and fight for the president.

The House committee, which has interviewed more than 850 witnesses, is charged with writing an authoritative report about the events that led to the violence of Jan. 6 and coming up with legislative recommendations to try to protect American democracy from a repeat. Though their recommendations are likely to garner widespread attention, they are not guaranteed to become law.

One such recommendation is almost certainly to be an overhaul of the Electoral Count Act, which Mr. Trump and his allies tried to use to overturn the 2020 election. In recent weeks, the panel has begun discussing whether to call for revisions to the Insurrection Act, which empowers the president to deploy troops to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy.”

The changes under discussion could add a higher and more detailed threshold for a president to meet before he could deploy troops domestically, including requiring consultation with Congress.

“Essentially, the former president threatened by tweet to send in the armed services to take over civilian governments, because he saw things that he didn’t like on TV,” Ms. Lofgren said, referring to Mr. Trump’s threats to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to racial justice protests. “That’s not really the history of the use of the act, and maybe more definition of terms might be in order.”

The last time lawmakers turned their attention to a potential overhaul of the Insurrection Act was after Mr. Trump threatened in 2020 to invoke it to crush protests that spread across the country after a white police officer killed Mr. Floyd, an unarmed Black man, in Minnesota.

“If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them,” Mr. Trump said then. White House aides drafted a proclamation to invoke the Insurrection Act in case the president followed through with the threat.

A group of Senate Democrats led by Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut proposed legislation that would have required that the president consult with Congress before deploying troops and clarified that the Insurrection Act could not be invoked to curtail civil rights. The bill went nowhere in the Senate, which was then controlled by Republicans.

The Democratic-controlled House added similar limitations to the annual defense policy bill last year, but the limitations were stripped out of the legislation before it became law.

Republicans have insisted that Congress should not change the Insurrection Act, arguing that consulting with lawmakers would slow down a president when swift action could be needed.

“A president would not be able to act quickly and decisively in the event of riots that are not being controlled at the state or municipal level,” Representative Doug Lamborn, Republican of Colorado, said during a floor debate in 2020, adding, “This would hinder and delay needed action to preserve domestic peace.”

Mr. Esper, who opposed the deployment of troops on American streets and was fired as defense secretary by Mr. Trump, also told a congressional committee in 2020 that he did not support altering the law.

“My view is there’s nothing that’s happened that strikes me as compelling to change it at this point in time,” Mr. Esper said, adding that the law had “endured well” over time.

The law dates to the early 19th century, when President Thomas Jefferson signed it amid concerns that Aaron Burr, his former vice president, was plotting to raise an army.

President Andrew Jackson used the act in 1831 to crush Nat Turner’s rebellion of enslaved people. President Abraham Lincoln invoked it during the Civil War. President John F. Kennedy used the law to send troops to enforce the desegregation of Alabama public schools, and President Lyndon B. Johnson invoked it to protect civil rights marchers in Selma, Ala.

President George H.W. Bush was the last commander in chief to put it into effect, during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

 

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"At the hearing on Friday, we look forward to questioning Greene under oath about her involvement in the events of Jan. 6, and to demonstrating how her facilitation of the insurrection disqualifies her from public office under the United States Constitution. "
I wonder if they will ask her about the bombing... she has a very specific arm swing motion that matches the person dropping off the pipe bombs. 
 
 

Man, if that is really MTG…. she’s gonna stroll to re-election (and maybe the VP slot in 24).
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6 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

I never did understand that song.  I don't think I'm supposed to.

I know it's a reference to some art flick, but beyond that . . .

I don't think debaser is even a word.  But the GQP bowing and scraping before Trump are all debasers.

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35 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

Aside from seeing it with our own eyeballs?

Yep.  Need more than that.  Had a conversation with my mom about it last week.  "But the police let all those people in, I don't know what they were doing wrong."  People on the right are choosing not to see the stuff that would show them that anything nefarious happened.  

We also talked about the crazies arming themselves because the dems are getting ready to outlaw all guns.  Her response, "Well not yet."  So it doesn't matter what the Dems actually say about the 2nd amendment.  

Reality is no longer a factor to those on the right.  They are going to believe what they believe and they are going to ignore any evidence that tells them maybe they shouldn't believe it.

I told her that being duped into believing something is fine and is no stain on her, as long as she quits believing it when presented with information that she was duped.  After that, it's 100% on her if she keeps believing nonsense.  I expect her to keep believing nonsense.

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3 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

Can you imagine how many public hearings the GOP would have held about this now if the roles were reversed?

They would have referred to the democrats as "the terrorist democrat party" for the last 15 months. 

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Raskin is promising must see TV, come June. I think the committee will deliver. I can’t wait to learn more about the allegation of Pence’s key card being canceled, the alleged secret collusion between Pence’s and Trump’s SS teams that intended to make Pence unavailable for the vote certification, and the degree to which Grassley was involved. 
 

Should be fun.

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