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January 6 Committee subpoenas Trump official who attended key meeting the day before MAGA riots: report
January 28, 2022
On Friday, CNN analyst Gloria Borger reported that the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has subpoenaed Judd Deere, the formed deputy White House press secretary under former President Donald Trump who issued a statement after the attack.
"What does the committee think it can learn from him?" asked anchor Jake Tapper.
"They think they can learn a lot," said Borger. "He is someone the committee is interested in because he has firsthand knowledge of Donald Trump's behavior before and during the January 6th attack on the Capitol, because he was there in the White House. And the letter we've obtained to Deere said there is reason to believe he was involved in formulating the White House response to the attack as it occurred. But specifically, the committee is very, very interested in a January 5th staff meeting in the Oval Office with the president which Deere reportedly attended."
"Now, the letter uses an account from the book 'Peril' in which Trump listened to the crowds outside and said, 'There is a lot of anger out there right now,'" said Borger. "And the letter also refers to documents the committee has obtained itself, portraying the president as repeatedly asking, what are your ideas for getting the RINOs — Republicans in name only — to do the right thing tomorrow. How do we convince Congress? So Deere is just the latest in a wide net of people in the Trump orbit to be subpoenaed as the committee tries to get inside Donald Trump's state of mind."
Watch below:
Gloria Borger reports on January 6 Committee subpoena to Judd Deere www.youtube.com
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Jan. 6 committee says Mark Meadows' 'hokey pokey' has slowed down plan for primetime hearings
January 28, 2022
The Jan. 6 committee's plans to hold primetime hearings has been slowed down significantly by stonewalling efforts from former President Donald Trump's inner circle, Rep. Jamie Raskin, one of the committee's members, told Salon this week.
In particular, Mark Meadows' game of "hokey pokey" has vexed the panel, which has subsequently been forced to push back its planned public testimony to April or May.
"Well, you know, I'd hoped it would happen in March," Raskin said on the video interview series "Salon Talks," adding that he hopes the hearings will now be held "later in the spring, April or May more likely."
Meadows initially cooperated with the committee's requests but then quickly changed his mind, turning over thousands of documents before refusing to sit for a deposition. These included a number of bombshell texts and emails, as well as a 38-page powerpoint titled "Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN" that was reportedly shopped around Capitol Hill in the days before the attempted insurrection.
The plot included plans to declare a national emergency in order to delay the certification of the 2020 election and the outlines of a wild conspiracy that the country of Venezuela had taken over voting machines in a large number of important states, among other debunked and unverifiable allegations.
Raskin lamented "the obstruction and roadblocks thrown up by the entourage right around Donald Trump — Mark Meadows, who's kind of doing the hokey pokey, one foot in, one foot out — Steve Bannon, Roger Stone."
"It's only when you get right to that kind of bullseye core right around Donald Trump and his inner most confidants that people think they're somehow above the law and can just give the finger to the U.S. Congress."
Still, despite the confounding efforts of Trump's inner circle, the Maryland Democrat believes "these could be the most important hearings in American history."
"I mean, certainly up there with the Watergate hearings," he added.
The comparison is especially apt given Raskin's hopes that the committee will format the hearings as an every-day-for-however-long-it-takes phenomenon, similar to the those conducted in the wake of Watergate.
"I hope we will see them every single day so we can tell a complete story to the American people about how this took place," he said. "It's obviously enormously complex, but people are following it closely."
The committee has been ramping up over the past few weeks to take its findings public, hoping to put the finishing touches on its findings by inching its way toward Trump's inner circle in recent days. The panel has conducted hundreds of interviews — upwards of 300, according to some news reports — and collected tens of thousands of documents, all while traveling extensively to battleground states where TrumpWorld's efforts to subvert the election were focused.
"The full picture is coming to light, despite President Trump's ongoing efforts to hide the picture," Rep. Liz Cheney, the committee's vice chairwoman and one of its two Republican members, told the Associated Press earlier this month.
"I don't think there's any area of this broader history in which we aren't learning new things," she added.
But there's one important factor weighing on the panel's timeline: Republicans will likely disband the effort should they re-take the House this fall.
The panel apparently hopes to have a completed report by this summer — but as with all predictions, that timeline is subject to change. And, given TrumpWorld's successful effort to push back the committee's timeline, it also appears that strategy is not likely to change anytime soon.
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Fake Trump electors have ‘absolute criminal liability’ and will cooperate to save themselves: MSNBC analyst
January 28, 2022
Fourteen fake Trump electors who were subpoenaed Friday as part of the House's Jan .6 probe are facing "absolute criminal liability," according to one former federal prosecutor.
Daniel Goldman, who served as lead counsel for the House during former president Donald Trump's first impeachment trial, said a House Select Committee's decision to subpoena the fake electors is "unquestionably another significant step in their investigation."
"This was part of a broader conspiracy orchestrated by Rudy Giuliani that involved individuals with the Trump campaign and with the Republican state parties in these battleground states, and it's just getting worse and worse the more we learn about it," Goldman told MSBNC.
Host Nicole Wallace responded by suggesting that Trump — and not Giuliani — bears ultimate responsible for the fake elector scheme.
"Donald Trump is the through line," Wallace said. "The whole thing seems top-down driven. There's no way that seven random states that Trump lost bigly, if you will, came up with 'Let's fake it!'"
READ MORE: Fake Trump elector subpoenaed by Jan. 6 committee is an NRA board member
Goldman agreed.
"When I say Rudy Giuliani was orchestrating it, I don't know who came up with the idea, but we know Giuliani was .... at the hub of it," he said. "Whose idea it was, we still don't know. But you're right, there's no question that regardless of whether it was his idea or not — and we can be sure that it was not — Donald Trump adopted this and ran with this and pressed it publicly, privately, on recordings, in every way shape or form. So to the extent that there is a conspiracy to overturn the election, through the use of these fake electors ... to the extent that there was such an illegal conspiracy to defraud the Untied States, the evidence indicates thus far that Donald Trump was involved in that conspiracy."
Asked whether the fake electors themselves could also face criminal liability, Goldman responded, "Absolutely."
"They were a part of this, particularly the ones who knew that the document they signed was going to be fraudulently certified and sent to Congress," Goldman said. "They knew that was a forgery. They knew that was bogus. ... And so there is absolutely criminal liability, and what I think you will see is, all of these electors running as fast they can to meet with the Department of Justice to cooperate to get themselves out of trouble, and go up the food chain about people who were directing them, and as we know by now, that's how investigations work."
Watch below.
MSNBC 01 28 2022 16 03 57 www.youtube.com
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