Jan. 6 committee wrestling with criminal referral for Trump

Posted on April 11, 2022 by Brandi Buchman

The Jan. 6 committee has amassed so much evidence in the nearly 500 days since Donald Trump incited an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that congressional investigators are weighing a criminal referral to the Department of Justice for the twice-impeached ex-president.

Whether they ultimately issue that referral is a question that hangs heavy in the air over the probe and members are internally split on the path ahead, according to a report by The New York Times from Sunday.

Nonetheless, after some 800 interviews and extensive cooperation from those orbiting the Trump White House and campaign in the runup to Jan. 6, the committee’s bipartisan leadership has said the evidence strongly indicates Trump illegally obstructed Congress—again—and committed fraud against the American people as he and those who sought to keep him in power worked to pull off a scheme that hinged on his lies about the outcome of the 2020 election.

During an interview on CNN following the Times report, committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney, a Republican ousted from GOP leadership for her participation in the probe, brushed off the notion that division was stewing among members.

The sources in the Times said some lawmakers on the committee are at odds over whether it is actually necessary to throw their weight behind a criminal referral for the ex-president to the Department of Justice.

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That referral is mostly symbolic as the committee has acknowledged countless times over the last year in court and to the press that it simply does not have the authority to prosecute Trump.

A criminal referral could also potentially trigger a lengthy series of delay tactics from Trump or his allies in Congress that would draw time and resources away from key areas of the probe.

From the Times:

The members and aides who were reluctant to support a referral contended that making one would create the appearance that Mr. Garland was investigating Mr. Trump at the behest of a Democratic Congress and that if the committee could avoid that perception it should, the people said.

This assessment on optics reflects, at least in part, the scars left in Washington from the deeply contentious and circus-like atmosphere created in the wake of Trump’s first impeachment for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Prosecution in this case, as a matter of constitutional fact, must be left to the proper—and separate—channels at the Department of Justice.

To that end, over the sprawl of its inquiry the select committee has issued subpoenas aplenty and filed lawsuits to claw back or expose various records from integral Trump White House and campaign officials. In this process, it has left a trail of morsels for the Department of Justice to consider as that department conducts its own separate and massive review of Jan. 6.

Take the case of John Eastman, the Trump attorney who wrote a memo proposing how to overturn the election through an unconstitutional pressure strategy involving former Vice President Mike Pence.

When a federal judge in California finally reviewed the emails Eastman sought to keep away from the committee during his tenure at Chapman University, the judge found information that led him to believe Trump and Eastman “more likely than not” engaged in a federal crime.

The ruling was a boon for transparency overall, to be sure, but it also provided the Department of Justice with something deeply important, at least in the eyes of some members of the Jan. 6 committee: A federal judge’s ruling, they reportedly said, would simply mean more in the eyes of Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Once the committee completes its investigation, it will issue a report on its complete findings and recommendations. That report alone may have so much information and relevant evidence in it that the Department of Justice could use it as its guide to bring criminal charges.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who previously served on both impeachment inquiries for Trump and for former President Bill Clinton, now sits on the Jan. 6 probe. She is of the opinion that a criminal referral isn’t the end all be all to accountability or justice.

When asked whether the select committee would issue a criminal referral for Trump, Lofgren told the Times, “Maybe we will, maybe we won’t.”

“It doesn’t have a legal impact,” Lofgren said.

Other panel members like Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia have been insistent, however, that it is about the principle of the matter, political ramifications of the criminal referral be damned.

“This committee, our purpose is legislative and oversight, but if in the course of our investigation we find that criminal activity has occurred, I think it’s our responsibility to refer that to the Department of Justice,” Luria recently told MSNBC.

This weekend, Cheney told CNN “there’s not really a dispute on the committee” over the referral and emphasized that members are working in a “really collaborative way.”

The committee, reportedly, has not yet met formally to discuss issuing a referral to the Department of Justice for Trump, however, and there may not be a meeting in the mix any time soon.

Public hearings are expected this summer, potentially in May and June, and according to committee member and Rep. Pete Aguilar, the probe is not interested in “presupposing” what will be in its final report.

As of April 6, the Department of Justice has made nearly 800 arrests in its investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Jan. 6 committee wrestling with criminal referral for Trump

Posted on April 11, 2022 (Updated April 12, 2022) by Brandi Buchman

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That referral is mostly symbolic as the committee has acknowledged countless times over the last year in court and to the press that it simply does not have the authority to prosecute Trump.

A criminal referral could also potentially trigger a lengthy series of delay tactics from Trump or his allies in Congress that would draw time and resources away from key areas of the probe.

From the Times:

The members and aides who were reluctant to support a referral contended that making one would create the appearance that Mr. Garland was investigating Mr. Trump at the behest of a Democratic Congress and that if the committee could avoid that perception it should, the people said.

Prosecution in this case, as a matter of constitutional fact, must be left to the proper—and separate—channels at the Department of Justice.

Take the case of John Eastman, the Trump attorney who wrote a memo proposing how to overturn the election through an unconstitutional pressure strategy involving former Vice President Mike Pence.

When asked whether the select committee would issue a criminal referral for Trump, Lofgren told the Times, “Maybe we will, maybe we won’t.”

“It doesn’t have a legal impact,” Lofgren said.

Other panel members like Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia have been insistent, however, that it is about the principle of the matter, political ramifications of the criminal referral be damned.

This weekend, Cheney told CNN “there’s not really a dispute on the committee” over the referral and emphasized that members are working in a “really collaborative way.”

The committee, reportedly, has not yet met formally to discuss issuing a referral to the Department of Justice for Trump, however, and there may not be a meeting in the mix any time soon.

As of April 6, the Department of Justice has made nearly 800 arrests in its investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Let’s talk about the Trump White House call logs from Jan. 6

Posted on April 1, 2022 by Brandi Buchman

Let’s talk about these call logs.

At the top of this week, The Washington Post and CBS News reported that upon review of official phone logs from the Trump White House given to the Jan. 6 committee, a gap of over seven hours was discovered in then-President Donald Trump’s official daily diary and switchboard record from that day.

In contrast, on Thursday, CNN reported that “an official review” of those logs—based on anonymous sources familiar with the matter, including a former Obama White House staffer—determined the records were “complete.”

The earlier reported gaps, the source told CNN, were likely due to Trump’s “typical” practice of having staff place calls for him on White House landline phones or using White House-provided cell phones or personal phones. Neither would be traced through the White House switchboard, meaning they would not appear on the log provided to the committee.

So, what to make of all this? Are the Jan. 6 call logs complete or incomplete? What information is missing? Was there a cover-up?

In this heap of anonymously sourced reporting and analysis tied to the call logs, at least one fact can be safely established today, Friday, the 450th day since the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election: There is a huge amount of information about Trump’s exact conduct during the bloodshed and chaos of Jan. 6 that remains unknown and is in dire need of additional context.

The records published by The Washington Post and CBS cover 11 pages. Six of those pages are the “Presidential Call Log” while five comprise the “Daily Diary of President Donald J. Trump.”

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White House Call Log Jan 6 2021 Obtained by WaPo and CBS by Daily Kos on Scribd

The diary will record a president’s movements on a given day. The call log shows call records incoming and outgoing from the White House switchboard or from aides. It will also list the length of a call and a small notation, perhaps, but scant else.

Under law, both the logs and the diary must be preserved.

The Trump administration was notoriously bad at maintaining records, and Trump’s penchant for using his cell phone or a staffer’s phone to make or take calls, regardless of how sensitive the subject matter was, is well documented.

Recreating the timeline of Jan. 6 has been made more difficult by this, and the gaps in these particular logs raise major questions when compared against the record of Trump’s communication with high-ranking officials or allies before and during the attack.

For example, the logs omit a critical phone call that took place between Trump and then-Vice President Mike Pence that morning. There are also missing records of calls that happened between Trump and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy as well as other Republican lawmakers like Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah.

Those calls happened, and they have been corroborated through court records, committee testimony, or public statements made by those directly involved. To wit, Pence’s National Security Adviser Keith Kellogg testified to the committee that he heard Trump speak to Pence on the phone from the Oval Office on the morning of Jan. 6.

Kellogg said he heard Trump pressure the vice president to go along with the scheme to stop the peaceful transfer of power. Ivanka Trump was also present for that call.

Kellogg’s testimony was corroborated by other witnesses who appeared before the committee and heard the call as well. But there’s no record of that call on the switchboard, a fact that now raises questions over what device Trump used in that moment and why.

Handwritten notes attached to Trump’s private schedule for Jan. 6 show him having a call with “VPOTUS” at 11:20 AM. The presidential diary for the day meanwhile notes Trump called an “unidentified person” at 11:17 AM on Jan. 6, but the diary fails to mention the 11:20 AM call from his private schedule. And as noted by CNN, neither call was reflected in the White House call log.

McCarthy admitted openly he spoke to Trump on Jan. 6 when he was interviewed by Fox News last April, and he admitted the same to fellow Republican Rep. Jamie Herrera-Beutler months before when Trump was facing impeachment for incitement of insurrection.

McCarthy said he spoke to Trump in the middle of the afternoon on Jan. 6 as the violence was playing out at the Capitol. The California Republican recalled being under siege and frantically calling Trump for help. He begged the president to “forcefully” call off his supporters.

But just like the Pence call, there’s no record of the McCarthy call on the official log either.

Trump called Lee during the attack at 2:26 PM, something Lee admitted during Trump’s second impeachment inquiry. Lee said Trump intended to reach Tuberville but dialed the wrong number, so Lee passed his phone off to Tuberville.

When the Alabama senator picked up, he told the president Pence had been removed from Senate chambers just as rioters had stormed the complex.

That call record is missing from the logs, too.

It may seem a small detail now, but as The Guardian has reported, “two sources familiar with the matter” said Lee was called by Trump from a number listed as (202) 395-0000.

That is a “placeholder number that shows when a call is incoming from a number of White House department phones,” the sources said.

Since the Lee call is missing from the log, the specter of tampering is now raised.

An entry not omitted from the logs spurs even more questions: Trump’s 10-minute phone call with Rep. Jim Jordan.

Jordan has been a fierce ally to the ex-president, defending him at every turn and patently refusing to cooperate with the probe. Jordan has also been completely unable or unwilling to keep his story straight about his contact with Trump on the day of the assault.

Last July, when pressed by Fox News host Bret Baier about how many times he spoke to Trump on Jan. 6, Jordan said his chats with Trump happened so often, he couldn’t “remember all the days I talked to the president.”

Within 24 hours Jordan changed his story, this time telling a different reporter he couldn’t recall if he and Trump spoke in the morning or not.

When Jordan appeared for a meeting before the House Rules Committee in October, he told Chairman Jim McGovern he couldn’t recall how many times he spoke to Trump on Jan. 6, but Jordan sputtered: “I talked to the president after the attack.”

According to the traceable call log made public this week, Trump and Jordan spoke for exactly 10 minutes on Jan. 6 starting at 9:24 AM.

If they spoke after the attack, like Jordan said last October, then this particular log does not show it.

Assessment of these logs as “complete” may very well be technically accurate if that assessment does not account for the ways Trump bypassed the traceable system or abused procedure.

The Select Intelligence Committee for the U.S. Senate noted in its 2020 report on Russian interference in the 2016 election that Trump often relied on his bodyguard, Keith Schiller, when he wanted to call Republican operative Roger Stone. Trump, the report stated, would use Schiller’s phone to chat with Stone because he did not want his advisers to know they were speaking.

Sources told the Post and CBS Trump may have used a disposable or “burner” phone on Jan. 6 to evade scrutiny. Trump has denied knowing what a burner phone is, let alone using one.

Yet his former National Security Adviser John Bolton told reporters Trump knows exactly what the devices are, and that would track with reporting by Rolling Stone from November that Team Trump was no stranger to the hard-to-trace devices.

Sources told the magazine that March for Trump and Women for America First organizers used burner phones at length for “crucial planning conversations” about the rally at the Ellipse. The officials, including Kylie and Amy Kremer, allegedly communicated with Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, but also with the president’s son and daughter-in-law, Eric and Lara Trump, on the phones.

In its contempt of Congress report for Meadows, the Jan. 6 committee established there was prevalent use of personal devices and encrypted apps by Meadows in service of the president.

So far the committee has interviewed and taken depositions from 800 people, including many of those figures who appeared in the Jan. 6 call logs, like Steve Bannon, John Eastman, and Rudy Giuliani.

The logs show Trump spoke to Bannon at 8:37 AM on Jan. 6 and then with Giuliani, his attorney, not long after at 8:45 AM. Within 10 minutes, Trump called Meadows and then tried to call Pence.

Pence was unavailable, so Trump left a message with the vice president’s office.

Bannon reportedly asked Trump if Pence was going to attend a breakfast meeting because the men wanted to get Pence on board with their plan to delay or stop the certification.

Trump also spoke to Fox News host Sean Hannity and right-wing commentator William Bennett. He called then-Sen. David Perdue of Georgia as well, and he also spoke to Kurt Olsen early that morning. Olsen was a champion of Trump’s bogus election fraud conspiracy theories.

Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell got a call from Trump too, as did Sen. Josh Hawley. McConnell told the Post he declined Trump’s call on Jan. 6, and Hawley has said he missed the call altogether and that he never spoke to Trump on Jan. 6.

Stephen Miller haunts the public call logs too; he and Trump spoke for almost half an hour on Jan. 6 from 9:52 AM to 10:18 AM.

After the seven-hour gap of time where no official calls are recorded on Jan. 6, the next bit of action didn’t occur until 6:54 PM when Trump rang up Dan Scavino, his trusted aide and communications director. Scavino has refused to cooperate with the Jan. 6 probe and, along with trade adviser Peter Navarro, was found in contempt of Congress by the Jan. 6 committee.

A full vote by the House to find them in contempt will be held on April 4.

Ex-prosecutor: Trump is guilty of fraud beyond a reasonable doubt

Posted on March 24, 2022 by Brandi Buchman

In the now public resignation letter to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg from veteran prosecutor Mark Pomerantz, the cards, as they say, are on the table for all to see.

Pomerantz, a special assistant district attorney in New York, was leading an exhaustive fraud investigation into former President Donald Trump’s finances, ultimately reviewing whether Trump or Trump Organization defrauded bank lenders and tax assessors when disclosing the value of various holdings to secure high-value loans.

What Pomerantz now openly says he found was proof of Trump’s “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” and enough evidence to prosecute, which has piled up in Trump’s bogus financial statements and false claims that have compounded year after year.

Pomerantz’s choice to step down, along with fellow prosecutor Carey Dunne, emerged from a deep well of gradually building frustration with Bragg, who had only recently replaced New York District Attorney Cy Vance.

When The New York Times first reported the resignations, sources effectively told the paper the attorneys left because Bragg had amassed too many doubts that the case could survive a grand jury.

Pomerantz would not comment to the press in February about his decision to leave. The publication of his letter on Wednesday reverses that course and presents the stakes urgently to the public.

“The investigation has been suspended indefinitely,” Pomerantz wrote. “Of course, that is your decision to make. I do not question your authority to make it and I accept that you have made it sincerely. However, a decision made in good faith may nevertheless be wrong.”

He described the failure by Bragg to prosecute—quite baldly—as “misguided and completely contrary to the public interest.”

“Because of the complexity of the facts, the refusal of Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization to cooperate with our investigation, and their affirmative steps to frustrate our ability to follow the facts, this investigation has already consumed a great deal of time. As to Mr. Trump, the great bulk of the evidence relates to his management of the Trump Organization before he became President of the United States. These facts are already dated, and our ability to establish what happened may erode with the further passage of time,” Pomerantz wrote.

When Dunne stepped down, he told fellow attorneys working the case he had to “disassociate” himself from Bragg’s decision because he felt the district attorney was “on the wrong side of history.”

According to a spokesperson for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, the fraud investigation into Trump and Trump organization continues.

“A team of experienced prosecutors is working every day to follow the facts and the law. There is nothing we can or should say at this juncture about an ongoing investigation,” spokeswoman Danielle Filson told CBS.

But time is of the essence: The grand jury hearing evidence assembled under Pomerantz and Dunne’s scrutiny is set to expire in April.

Well before they left, they emphasized this deadline repeatedly to Bragg. At a meeting in January, Pomerantz and Dunne told the newly sworn in official that it could take months to present the case. Bragg was reportedly well aware of the stakes—he had met with Pomerantz and Dunne weeks before in December. At that meeting, he reportedly sought an update on the case and appeared eager to pick up where his predecessor left off.

Once formally in office, Bragg started off receptive to pursuing the path toward an indictment, but that enthusiasm fizzled after New York Attorney General Letitia James announced the state’s civil investigation into Trump and the Trump Organization had turned up new evidence of fraud. That included, according to James, evidence that Trump grossly inflated property valuations to banks as well as the IRS for no fewer than a half dozen entities.

The Times reported this January:

“Ms. James highlighted details of how she said the company inflated the valuations: $150,000 initiation fees into Mr. Trump’s golf club in Westchester that it never collected; mansions that had not yet been built on one of his private estates; and 20,000 square feet in his Trump Tower triplex that did not exist.”

On the criminal side, Pomerantz and Dunne were struggling to secure a witness for their grand jury that appeased Bragg. He was opposed to proposals calling Trump’s onetime fixer, Michael Cohen, before the grand jury. Bragg cited concerns over Cohen’s trustworthiness. The special prosecutors asked Bragg’s office to consider suspending the grand jury before it expired.

The clock, however, kept running down, and Pomerantz grew more frustrated with delays. He proposed different strategies to coax Bragg, but those too fell on deaf ears. Pomerantz and Dunne allegedly conceded to Bragg just before their resignations that it would be a hard road to tread toward indictment, but it was a “righteous case that ought to be brought.”

“To the extent you have raised issues as to the legal and factual sufficiency of our case and the likelihood that a prosecution would succeed, I and others have advised you that we have evidence sufficient to establish Mr. Trump’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and we believe that the prosecution would prevail if charges were brought and the matter were tried to an impartial jury,” Pomerantz wrote to Bragg on Feb. 23.

He continued:

“No case is perfect. Whatever the risks of bringing the case may be, I am convinced that a failure to prosecute will pose much greater risks in terms of public confidence in the fair administration of justice. As I have suggested to you, respect for the rule of law, and the need to reinforce the bedrock proposition that “no man is above the law,” require that this prosecution be brought even if a conviction is not certain.”

Daniel Goldman, who served as lead counsel to Trump’s first impeachment inquiry, reacted to Pomerantz’s letter publicly on Twitter on Thursday. Goldman ran for the New York attorney general spot.

Knowing someone committed a crime and proving that crime in court are distinctly different events, Goldman said.

“The easy thing for Bragg to do would be to charge Trump. It certainly would be the politically expedient thing to do,” Goldman said.

Goldman wrote that Bragg, to his credit, has served as a former federal and state prosecutor who led probes into Trump when Bragg worked at the attorney general’s office. The newly elected official should be “applauded,” Goldman added.

Suggestions that Bragg’s decision was reached corruptly were deemed “preposterous,” he said.

There is a BIG difference between *knowing* somebody committed crimes and *proving* those crimes in court. The problem with this case has always been the evidence of Trump’s knowledge — it is not enough to say “of course he knew.” And Michael Cohen is a tarnished witness. 2/
— Daniel Goldman (@danielsgoldman) March 24, 2022

An attorney for Trump, Ronald Fischetti, told The Guardian that Pomerantz’s departure was just the latest proof that prosecutors didn’t have the goods to indict Trump. Fischetti said Bragg should be “commended” for following the rule of law instead of the rules of politics.

For Pomerantz, according to his February resignation letter, it was never about politics.

“I fear that your decision means that Mr. Trump will not be held fully accountable for his crimes. I have worked too hard as a lawyer, and for too long, now to become a passive participant in what I believe to be a grave failure of justice,” he wrote.

Likely no subpoenas from Jan. 6 probe for sitting lawmakers

Posted on March 16, 2022 by Brandi Buchman

Anonymous sources cited in a report published by ABC Wednesday have cast new doubt that the Jan. 6 committee will pursue enforcement of subpoenas it has issued to a handful of sitting Republican lawmakers with alleged ties to the Capitol attack.

Reports of a similar nature have circulated for months as investigators have continued taking deposition and records from over 500 witnesses, including high- and low-level aides and Trump White House staff, election officials, and many others.

According to ABC, GOP House Leader Kevin McCarthy and Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania have had “no follow-up discussions” about their cooperation since receiving their respective subpoenas.

The decision to drop the pursuit of the Republican legislators' records and testimony has “not been formalized” and ABC said their “sources caution that the committee's plans could change,” but “the emerging consensus is to proceed without taking this step.”

A representative for the Jan. 6 committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment to Daily Kos on Wednesday.

Forcing compliance with sitting lawmakers is tricky for the panel both politically and legally. Committee Chair Bennie Thompson has said since late last year that if those lawmakers targeted do not come forward, he was uncertain what tools the probe might have in its chest to force their testimony.

Committee members have been outwardly devoted to pursuing the investigation regardless of the political toll it exacts—Liz Cheney was ousted from her leadership role in the GOP after joining the committee. But the fact remains that political retribution could be swift if Republicans take back the House and Senate in the coming elections.

Rep. Jim Jordan, for example, is among Trump’s most fierce lapdogs in Congress and has been spurned by the Jan. 6 committee already when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi rejected his nomination to the panel by McCarthy.

Jordan has made it clear since Trump’s first impeachment when he defended the former president unflaggingly that he would relish a chance to drag Biden White House officials through public hearings should the GOP retake Congress.

Jordan is a member of the powerful House Judiciary Committee and is also a member of a Jan. 6 shadow committee. That committee has no subpoena power, but it has been running a parallel investigation to the official probe for months, largely relying on U.S. Capitol Police testimony to support its contention that security and intelligence failures were solely to blame for the rioting.

Investigators allege Jordan spoke to Trump on Jan. 6. They have based this on Trump White House call logs received from the National Archives in February.

Jordan has flip-flopped on his account of the day, regularly buckling under scrutiny in interviews. But with or without his testimony, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has already given the probe text messages illuminating how Jordan was campaigning for then-Vice President Mike Pence to stop the certification.

Constitutionally, Pence did not have that authority.

As for Perry, the committee asked him to voluntarily comply in December. Thompson alleges that Perry was the engine behind a scheme to install a Trump-friendly lawyer Jeffrey Clark at the Department of Justice as the nation’s attorney general.

Scott Perry Letter by Daily Kos

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Politico reported on March 2 that committee investigators “have repeatedly asked witnesses to describe contacts with Perry.”

The panel has already conducted over 550 interviews. Frustrating it may be for watchers of the probe, the lack of participation by certain lawmakers does not preclude the reams of evidence and other materials the committee has already amassed.

Before eventually turning his back on the committee following extensive cooperation, Meadows turned over heaps of text messages and other correspondence, only some of which has been made public.

Meadows has since been held in contempt of Congress. It is up to the Justice Department to decide whether it will bring a criminal indictment for his obstruction.

The Meadows messages alone painted a frantic picture of the White House and Washington both before and after the attack.

—@Liz_Cheney reads texts sent by Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Brian Kilmeade, and Donald Trump Jr. to Mark Meadows during the insurrection, imploring him to get Trump to do something. pic.twitter.com/mgzFeHiHsy
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) December 14, 2021

The committee itself does not have the ability to indict anyone. It has taken pains to reiterate this as Republicans like Meadows, Jordan, and several others already subpoenaed actively claim the probe acts beyond the scope of its authority.

They argue the select committee moves as a law enforcement arm, not a legislative arm.

But the committee has underlined, time and again, it does not need to indict.

It needs only to amass information and investigate all of the different avenues in which the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election was undertaken.

If it finds criminality or evidence of criminality, it will be up to the Department of Justice to act next.

‘Bound to respect’: A reflection on hate and reconciliation after passage of anti-lynching bill

Posted on March 15, 2022 by Brandi Buchman

The sacrifice Mamie Till Mobley made when she decided to show the world exactly what hate and racism did to her son Emmett Till was motivated by such profound love for her child that its power altered the course of history.

Most recently, the flame of that legacy has been kept burning by the passage of a federal law named after her son, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, that, once and for all—and after 200 attempts—makes lynching a hate crime in the United States.

In an interview with Daily Kos, Congressman Al Green of Texas, a Democrat now 74 years old, choked back tears as he weighed the impact of Emmett’s life and what has happened in the decades since his death.

Much has changed, and much, as the nation witnessed with the murder of Ahamud Arbery, has not.

Green is an American. He is also Black. He was a child like Till when Till was killed in 1955. Green has sat on segregated busses and in segregated movie theaters. He drank from “coloreds only” water fountains. He has known what it is to hurriedly step off a sidewalk to clear the way for white people traveling the same concrete as himself lest he invite trouble, or something much worse, into his life.

So, when the Senate unanimously codified lynching as a crime motivated by hatred, this was no small or rhetorical distinction. Its meaning is not abstract.

As his tears fell, Green cast his eyes all the way back to 1857, a little under 100 years before Till would be mutilated and thrown into Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River by two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam.

That year the Supreme Court decided Dred Scott v. Sandford and Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that Africans or Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

“The whole notion of due process did not apply to Black people, according to Taney,” Green said.

The Dred Scott case, he remarked, ultimately set the foundation for a deeply flawed belief to take root from the very top of the nation’s power structure on down among those who were racist or ignorant or both.

The door that Taney opened with his ruling has a through line that can be traced all the way to the Mississippi courtroom where defense attorney Sidney Carlton told an all-white, all male jury that if they did not free Milam and Bryant, their “Anglo-Saxon ancestors” would “turn over in their grave” in shame at the lack of their courage to acquit.

The jury did acquit and the men lit up cigars in the courtroom and kissed their wives to celebrate after the verdict came down.

Bryant admitted to the murder in 1956, recalling with bravado what he told Till after he abducted him.

“I just made up my mind. 'Chicago boy,' I said, 'I'm tired of 'em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I'm going to make an example of you -- just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand,” Bryant said.

He called Till ‘Chicago boy’ because the teenager had come to Mississippi from Illinois to visit his cousins. Emmett’s mother had reservations about her son traveling to the South.

Last December, the Justice Department announced it was renewing an investigation into Till’s murder. Witnesses said Till, just 14, whistled at a white woman, Carolyn Donham Bryant, at a store where she worked in Money, Mississippi.

A historian, Timothy Tyson, claimed in 2017 that Donham Bryant told him she lied about Till whistling at her. Relatives denied she recanted her remarks, according to the Associated Press, and Donham Bryant told the FBI she never went back on her original story. The DOJ asked Tyson for recordings or transcripts of the admission but he was never able to produce them.

“These two white men went into [Till’s great uncle’s] home and abducted him [at gunpoint]. Somehow, they thought that society expected this of them after this lady had been somehow abused without having been touched, without having any assault perpetrated upon her. So they took him out and brutalized him in ways we can’t imagine,” Green said.

When authorities pulled Till’s naked body from the river, his eye was dislodged from its socket. He was beaten about his hips and back. He had been shot above the right ear. Around his neck with barbed wire, his body had been weighted with a large fan blade.

Witnesses passing by where Bryant and Milam spent hours torturing Till before his death later said they heard Till crying: “Mama, save me. Please don't do it again.”

Mamie Till Mobley only recognized the body belonged to her young son because of a ring he wore that somehow, Milam and Bryant had left on Till before throwing him into the river.

As Green relived these abuses and specifically, how Till’s mother made the choice to expose the horrors of her son’s mutilated body at his funeral without censorship, Green’s voice cracked as he uttered each word thoughtfully.

“Even in the segregated South, there are some things that seem to have an impact beyond what’s anticipated. People saw his body. They saw the mutilation and when they saw it, they knew that there was something inherently wrong with what happened,” Green said. “It was a part of the spark that ignited the civil rights movement.”

Indeed, in the late 1980s the Rev. Jesse Jackson told Vanity Fair that Rosa Parks told him she was motivated by Emmett Till when she refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus. Till had been murdered just 100 days before.

Bryant and Milam acted with the permission Taney gave them a century ago, Green argued.

“Their actions were indicative of people who felt they were not bound to respect [Emmett Till’s] life,” he said before reflecting back on Emmett’s mother.

“She changed the course of history because she insisted that her son be shown to the world as he was,” Green said.

The legislation written in Till’s name and first introduced by Rep. Bobby Rush of Illinois evokes Mamie in a similar way. It calls out the criminality of hate for what it is and does not seek to dull or hide this abject failure in the nation’s history.

Fast-forwarding to 2019, the Department of Justice reported over 3,900 hate crimes or crimes motivated by race or ethnicity. In 2020 that number shot up to over 5,200 hate crimes.

Green believes the U.S. is now experiencing the outflows of what he calls the “Trump Effect.”

“One of the great mistakes of contemporary times was our failure to indict, or more appropriately, impeach President Trump for the hate that he engendered and caused to rear its ugly head in ways that it hasn’t for some time,” Green said as he let out a heavy sigh.

Green, who has been in office for eight terms, was the first lawmaker in Congress to call for accountability of Trump’s conduct. Long before Trump was impeached for abuse of power, obstruction of Congress, and later, incitement of insurrection, Green was the canary in the coal mine and called for Trump to be impeached no less than three times.

He demanded Trump be impeached for obstruction of justice when Trump fired FBI director James Comey. Then, Green demanded Trump be impeached after the 45th president lashed out at Reps. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley on Twitter with a series of racist messages.

Trump had already exhibited a "long history of abusing his office for the unconstitutional purpose of promoting racism and bigotry,” Green said at the time.

“He gave people reason to believe that Black people, people of color, women, they had no rights bound to respect,” Green told Daily Kos before reflecting on the white nationalist rally that turned deadly in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

Trump gave racists “reason to believe they could march through the streets with tiki torches and say ‘Jews will not replace us’ as their mantra,” Green lamented.

Trump’s conduct accelerated bad behavior and hateful acts came out more into the open because there was a nod of approval from on high.

Green reflected on men like George Floyd, a Black man who was killed in Minnesota by a police officer when that officer, Derek Chauvin, kept his knee on Floyd’s neck despite Floyd’s protests and pleas of being unable to breathe.

“That police officers could put a knee on the neck of a person and watch the life evaporate … I sincerely believe in my soul that they did it because they wanted to teach those who were watching a lesson and let them know that they had no rights that they were bound to respect,” Green said.

Till, Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery—who Green called a “modern day Emmett Till”—were all accosted by white men who believed they were above the law and above the Black human beings before them.

If they didn’t say it with their words, they did not need to. Their actions spoke for them and juries, this time, have agreed.

“We do have rights,” Green said, crying. “We do have rights that they are bound to respect. Dr. Martin Luther King was right. The moral arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice.”

The passage of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act does not solve racism. It does not solve violent, racially motivated crimes. But it is a change for the better, for the good. And it is a change made for a world that Green acknowledged he may not be around to see.

He reflected on the words of Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle, who Martin Luther King once employed in a speech of his own.

“’No lie can live forever,’” Green said before then reciting poet William Cullen Bryant. “Truth crashed to earth shall rise again.”

The anti-lynching bill will officially be enshrined into law with President Joe Biden’s signature.

Green hopes one day the U.S. will find a way to reconcile its past more completely.

He has called for the formation of a cabinet-level Department of Reconciliation that would ensure efforts to “achieve racial harmony are never abandoned.” He has also called for a Slavery Remembrance Day, akin to Holocaust Remembrance day, and he has called for the Russell Senate office building to be renamed given Richard B. Russell’s self-proclaimed position as a white supremacist.

Green delivered his letter to President Biden in late February and has not yet heard back.

“I won’t give up,” he told Daily Kos. “As long as I’ve got pen and paper, I won’t give up.”

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“My hope is that one day, maybe not in my lifetime, we’ll have a Department of Reconciliation because we have not reconciled, we have not dealt with the hate, in a very transparent and candid way and it is needed,” he said. “Things don't always happen as quickly, in my opinion, as they should. But I hope that at some point, in somebody’s lifetime, we will reconcile. We won't have perfect harmony but we will know that women, people of color and persons who know their gender better than persons who encounter them, will have rights that all people are bound to respect.”

And there are signs of hope.

On Monday, officials in Indiana announced that they were formally updating the death record for George Tompkins, a young Black man found hanging from a tree in Indiana a century ago with his hands bound behind his back.

Police ruled it a suicide. No one was arrested.

After much pushing from activists, authorities changed the death record from suicide to lynching and homicide.

Trump White House call record omissions raise eyebrows

Posted on February 10, 2022 by Brandi Buchman

As a congressional watchdog calls for a new probe into allegations that former President Donald Trump regularly destroyed presidential records, the Jan. 6 committee has simultaneously discovered on Thursday that a series of critical gaps exist in White House call logs secured from the National Archives.

First reported by The New York Times, the gaps in the official White House telephone logs from Jan. 6, 2021, are not a complete surprise—Trump was well known to use his private cell phone or his staff’s cell phones when conducting affairs or speaking to aides, legislators, and others.

The Jan. 6 committee has not yet suggested that the omissions in the call logs are the result of any tampering on behalf of the former president. A committee spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment to confirm whether the logs it has received are all of the logs requested are just a portion of those records.

White House call logs itemize who has telephoned the White House or who called out and will also include, generally, the date, time, and length of a call.

The Jan. 6 committee has received a plethora of documents and testimony already confirming that Trump spoke to several key officials throughout Jan. 6, including one call made to then-Vice President Mike Pence and legislators like Sen. Mike Lee of Utah.

The call to Lee was meant for Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama. Lee passed his mobile phone to Tuberville and the Alabama lawmaker spoke to Trump for just under 10 minutes. Their discussion unfolded as the president’s supporters were storming the Capitol.

That entire exchange, however, did not occur on an official White House telephone, making the committee’s findings on Thursday all the more concerning.

CNN reported that sources who have reviewed a presidential diary from Jan. 6—also obtained by the Archives and shared with the committee—noted that it has “scant information and no record of phone calls for several hours” after Trump returned to the Oval Office up until he recorded a national address in the Rose Garden.

In addition to calls to Pence and Senator Lee, Trump also had a tense phone call with House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy on Jan. 6.

During Trump’s second impeachment, McCarthy told a fellow Republican lawmaker that when he finally reached Trump by phone during the assault, Trump was insistent that “antifa” had breached the complex.

McCarthy told Trump it was his supporters and Trump hung up in a huff.

Since then, McCarthy has aligned himself completely with the former president, refusing to cooperate with a voluntary request from Jan. 6 investigators issued weeks ago. The probe is now weighing whether to officially subpoena the House leader.

Doing so would be a historic move and an outcome the California Republican has arguably long courted. McCarthy was opposed to the formation of a Jan. 6 commission from the outset unless it promised to review other, unrelated external security threats posed to lawmakers and focused on intelligence failures of the U.S. Capitol Police.

He later refused to negotiate with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi over the committee’s membership. After his proposal to seat two staunch Trump allies on the committee, including Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio—who was, even then, considered to be a potential material witness to the overall probe—McCarthy took his ball and went home.

With negotiations killed, the House went forward and the committee was formed. The House Republican has since regularly opposed the committee’s work and has taken up keen alliances with the uber-conservative, pro-Trump, anti-Jan. 6 investigation House Freedom Caucus.

Though the gaps in the White House call logs obtained so far may correlate to Trump’s prolific use of unofficial cell phones, sources who reviewed the logs did say Thursday that at least one entry positively confirms Trump attempted to call Pence on the morning of Jan. 6 before the siege.

The official record does not reportedly show Pence answering, and the source said, according to CNN, that there is also no record showing Pence returned Trump’s call.

Interestingly, Keith Kellogg, Pence’s national security adviser at the time, informed the committee during recent closed-door testimony that Pence and Trump spoke on the phone on Jan. 6 and further, that the president’s daughter and adviser, Ivanka Trump, witnessed the call.

This was the call in which Trump pressured Pence to stop or delay the certification. If the White House call records obtained Thursday show that a call was made to Pence but Pence did not pick up, then Kellogg’s testimony would seem to suggest that the pressure call to the vice president happened on another phone, and not an official White House telephone.

Like the select committee, the Archives did not immediately return request for comment Thursday about whether all of the White House call logs have been remitted to the panel in full or if others are still on the way.

The Jan. 6 committee has issued sweeping orders to telecommunications companies, including Verizon and T-Mobile, for the phone records of other Trump White House officials, family members, and orbiters. More than 100 people have been part of those requests; the companies have largely cooperated thus far, according to court records.

Select committee chairman Bennie Thompson has aired his concerns about Trump’s prolific unofficial cell phone use in the past.

Norm Eisen, a legal analyst for CNN, said Thursday that the gap of records in the White House call logs and related diaries “raises a set of very serious concerns, including questions of whether there was an intentional effort to circumvent the usual system and, if so, who directed it and for what purpose.”

Trump’s ex-press secretary produces text messages for Jan. 6 investigators

Posted on February 1, 2022 by Brandi Buchman

Once former President Donald Trump’s formal mouthpiece for 2020 election misinformation, former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany has since cooperated with the Jan. 6 probe, turning over text messages to investigators more than two months after her initial subpoena.

Some of those text messages have been public for weeks. Back on Jan. 20, when the committee first issued a request the voluntary compliance of Ivanka Trump (the former president’s daughter and onetime adviser has avoided a formal subpoena for now), McEnany’s messages with Fox News host Sean Hannity were uncovered.

Hannity and McEnany discussed, at least in part, a strategy to handle an unhinged Trump after the insurrection. The commentator told the White House press secretary in one exchange there could be “no more stolen election talk” after the deadly attack.

Hannity then followed that point up with another: “Yes, impeachment and 25th amendment are real and many people will quit,” Hannity wrote.

“Love that. Thank you. That is the playbook. I will help reinforce,” McEnany replied.

On Tuesday, ABC News reported that sources familiar with the Jan. 6 probe confirmed those text messages were merely part of McEnany’s larger production of records for investigators.

The committee has been on a hot streak of late, securing one win for transparency after another. The Supreme Court recently shot down Trump’s bid to hide over 700 pages of presidential records related to the attack and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

And in federal court, John Eastman, a key Trump world figure and author of legal memos laying out a strategy for former Vice President Mike Pence to keep Trump in power, has been striking out with his attempt to keep records away from scrutiny.

A judge recently ordered Eastman to produce emails from his time at Chapman University to Jan. 6 investigators. Prosecutors claim he is attempting to slow-walk that production, but as of Monday, a judge ordered Eastman to narrow his review of some 19,000 relevant emails to just those records sent between Jan. 4, 2021 through Jan. 7, 2021. That doesn’t take all other records off the table, but it will help expedite the investigation.

As for McEnany, who sat for deposition earlier this month, it is also now likely that the panel has received pages from a binder she kept as press secretary.

In its presidential records requests, the committee noted to the National Archives and Records Administration last fall that there were several pages from McEnany’s binder related to the Trump campaign’s allegations of voter fraud.

The committee informed McEnany in its original subpoena that it was also interested in public statements and remarks she made spreading misinformation about the 2020 election results.

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Kayleigh McEnany Subpoena N... by Daily Kos

McEnany was also with Trump when he traveled to the Ellipse on Jan. 6 and delivered his speech inciting the attack. There have been reports that she also “popped in and out” to join Trump as he idly watched the assault from his perch in the White House.

Jan. 6 Committee requests critical meeting with Ivanka Trump

Posted on January 20, 2022 by Brandi Buchman

Ivanka Trump, who once addressed the mob storming the U.S. Capitol as “American patriots” on Twitter before swiftly deleting the post—has been requested to voluntarily cooperate with the Jan. 6 Committee’s investigation.

In a letter to the former president’s daughter and onetime advisor, committee chairman Bennie Thompson said the panel confirmed from Keith Kellogg, former Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser, that Ivanka was present when Trump called Pence on Jan. 6 and pressured him to throw the election so he could remain in power.

Ivanka heard just one side of that phone call, the committee acknowledged, but between that and the testimony and records already provided to the committee, Ivanka appears to have been so up close and personal with her father on Jan. 6, that she could have unparalleled information about his exact mindset that day.

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Letter Requesting Voluntary... by Daily Kos

Kellogg, according to the committee, told investigators that when Trump was getting ready to end the call with Pence on Jan. 6, Ivanka turned to Kellogg and remarked: “Mike Pence is a good man.”

In addition, the committee also requested that the former president’s daughter offer details she may have about other discussions she witnessed, particularly those involving Trump’s plans to obstruct or impede the physical counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6.

“White House counsel may have concluded that the actions President Trump directed Vice President Pence to take would violate the Constitution or otherwise be illegal. Did you discuss those issues with any member of the White House Counsel’s office?” the committee asked Thursday.

The committee also noted that just before the Capitol attack, a “member of the House Freedom Caucus with knowledge of President’s planning for that day” sent a message to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows saying if Trump allowed the counting of votes—in other words, a critical part of the transition of power from one administration to the next—then “we’re driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic.”

Ivanka was also allegedly called on multiple times during the melee to wrangle her father. The committee noted media reports about Senator Lindsey Graham who called her at least once during the riot and pleaded with her to have Trump issue a statement.

Kellogg said he urged Trump to act with haste but Trump’s obstinance was so severe that, according to another interview conducted by the committee, staffers recognized it might only be Ivanka who could persuade him to act.

In a brief transcript that accompanied the request to Ivanka, that deposition was laid out:

Q: Did you think that she [Ivanka Trump] could help get him [President Trump] to a place where he would make a statement to try and stop this?

A: Yes.

…

Q: So you thought that Ivanka could get her father to do something about it?

A: To take a course of action.

…

Q: He didn’t say yes to Mark Meadows or Kayleigh McEnany or Keith Kellogg but he might say yes to his daughter?

A: Exactly right.

Evidence already obtained by the committee has shown many Trump administration officials and other hangers-on were in frantic contact with the White House as the riot exploded, calling on Trump to act. Those individuals reportedly include Donald Trump Jr., Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham, Brian Kilmeade, and Sean Hannity, as well as “multiple members of Congress and the press, Governor Chris Christie and many others.”

In a text exchange from someone “outside of the White House,” an individual asked a White House staff member: “Is someone getting to POTUS? He has to tell protesters to dissipate. Someone is going to get killed.”

The response was chilling.

“I’ve been trying for the last 30 minutes. Literally stormed in outer oval to get him to put out the first one. It’s completely insane.”

The committee said Thursday this dynamic was of particular interest.

“Why didn’t White House staff simply ask the President to walk to the briefing room and appear on live television to ask the crowd to leave the Capitol?” the letter noted. “General Kellogg testified he “very strongly recommended they do not” ask the president to appear immediately from the press room because press conferences tend to get out of control and you want to control the message. Apparently, certain White House staff believed that a live unscripted press appearance by the president in the middle of the Capitol Hill violence could have made the situation worse.”

By the time Trump finally released a video message that was filmed in the Rose Garden asking the mob to disperse—while also telling them he “loved” them and they were “very special”—Ivanka had already been pleading with her father for two hours.

The committee has been informed that multiple unused clips from Trump’s speech exist in the National Archives and were part of the presidential records transfer that Trump attempted to block.

Beyond the phone call with Pence, the committee also asked Ivanka to disclose any information she might have about the delayed response for backup to beleaguered U.S. Capitol and Metropolitan Police Department officers.

Then acting Defense Department secretary Chris Miller testified under oath that former President Trump never contacted him at any time on Jan. 6 and never, again, at any time, issued him any orders to deploy the National Guard.

“The committee has identified no evidence that President Trump issued any order, or took any other action, to deploy the guard that day. Nor does it appear that President Trump made any calls to the Department of Justice or any other law enforcement agency to request deployment of their personnel to the Capitol,” Thompson wrote.

Ivanka could also have insights into how Trump behaved after the insurrection.

Texts from Sean Hannity to Mark Meadows and former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, for example, showed how Trump was being urged to drop the election fraud talking point.

On Jan. 7, Hannity messaged McEnany and provided her with a strategy to deal with Trump:

“1. No more stolen election talk

2. Yes, impeachment and 25th amendment are real and many people will quit...”

McEnany responded: “Love that. That is the playbook. I will help reinforce...”

She also agreed with him when the right wing pundit told her it was “key” that Trump stop entertaining “crazy people.”

“Yes 100%,” McEnany replied.

Any correspondence or other records that Ivanka might have produced in her capacity as a former advisor to the president is required, under the Presidential Records Act, to be preserved and remitted to the National Archives.

In a particularly pointed portion of the request to Ivanka Trump, the committee attached a 2017 memorandum from former White House counsel Don McGahn where the former White House counsel had once outlined the legal requirements for records preservation for White House staff.

McGahn was a key figure in the Mueller investigation of interference in the 2016 election and was instructed by Trump not to comply with a subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee.

The committee has proposed a meeting with Ivanka Trump for Feb. 3 or Feb. 4.

The former president’s daughter and adviser released a statement through a spokesperson Thursday saying “as the committee already knows, Ivanka did not speak at the January 6 ally.”

The spokesperson continued: “As she publicly stated that day at 3:15 PM, ‘any security beach or disrespect to our law enforcement is unacceptable. The violence must stop immediately. Please be peaceful.”

Notably, her spokesperson did not include the “American Patriots” salutation Ivanka put at the very top of that same statement from just after 3 p.m. on Jan. 6.

Ivanka Trump sent this tweet just after 3pm during the January 6th attack, and left it up for about half an hour before deleting it. In real time that's when Officer Fanone was dragged out into the crowd and tazed and Officer Hodges was crushed in the doorway https://t.co/h6liZjlCHf
— Aaron Fritschner (@Fritschner) January 20, 2022

Ex-press secretary says Trump held secret meetings in White House residence

Posted on January 20, 2022 by Brandi Buchman

According to a report from The Guardian published Thursday, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham has revealed to investigators on the Jan. 6 Committee that Trump held “secret meetings” at the White House residence in the run-up to the Capitol attack.

The committee has not formally subpoenaed Grisham, indicating that her cooperation was voluntary. She had front row seats at the Trump White House while serving as a White House communications director, press secretary for former First Lady Melania Trump, and later, Melania Trump’s chief of staff. Grisham resigned, effective immediately, on Jan. 6 in the wake of the violent Capitol assault. Her resignation was joined by White House press aide Sarah Matthews.

The alleged “secret meetings” were “known only by a small number of aides” and sources told The Guardian that the gatherings were coordinated by Trump’s right hand in the White House, former chief of staff Mark Meadows.

Meadows initially cooperated with the Jan. 6 probe, providing some records and testimony—but he abruptly backtracked and shut down the talks. The committee, in turn, voted to hold Meadows in contempt and the full House of Representatives followed. He was referred for criminal prosecution to the Justice Department in December. So far, the DOJ has been mum about whether it will pursue an indictment as it did for Steve Bannon. Bannon, who has entered a not guilty plea, is now awaiting trial.

While Meadows would reportedly schedule the clandestine meetings, Grisham told investigators it was Timothy Harleth, Trump’s chief White House usher, who would wave the parties in. It is not clear yet who attended the meetings.

President Joe Biden fired Harleth from the usher role one day after his inauguration. It is common for ushers to remain in their positions regardless of the administration in power but Harleth was ousted in short order as the incumbent cleaned house of Trump-era officials. Harleth previously worked as the director of rooms at Trump International Hotel.

Grisham, according to Thursday’s scoop from The Guardian, also provided the names of other aides in the White House usher office that may be of use to the committee in their probe.

Grisham also said that “an aide to former White House adviser Peter Navarro tried at least once to quietly usher” lawyer Sidney Powell into the White House residence. Powell was a major proponent of Trump’s incessant lies about the outcome of the 2020 election, and led the charge in claims that Dominion Voting Systems voting machines were corrupt. For her conspiratorial claims, Powell is staring down a massive defamation suit from Dominion. She was also subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 Committee this week.

Trump’s exact conduct and thinking before and during the Capitol attack when he was out of public view are at the beating heart of the Jan. 6 Committee’s probe. It has been widely reported that the former president sat idly by in the White House as the attack exploded, watching the riot from television. It was also reported one week after the assault that Trump had told aides for several days before the Jan. 6 rally that he wanted to accompany demonstrators but that he only decided not to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” after Secret Service agents insisted his safety could not be guaranteed if he did so.

But whether he actually intended to march with his supporters that morning or purely made the remarks to raise the mob’s hackles is at debate.

“Grisham told the select committee that Trump’s intentions—and whether the Secret Service had been told Trump had decided not to mark to the Capitol—should be reflected in the presidential line-by-line, the document that outlines the president’s movements, the sources said.”

A representative for the committee did not respond to request for comment Thursday.

The committee has so far interviewed more than 400 sources and with its recent victory against Trump at the Supreme Court, the National Archives and Records Administration has already begun the transfer of presidential records Trump wanted to keep secret.

The records to be transferred include critical items like call and visitor logs, diaries, internal correspondence, calendars, speech drafts, photos as they relate to Jan. 6, correspondence among White House officials, and much more.

“The Supreme Court’s action tonight is a victory for the rule of law and American democracy. The Select Committee has already begun to receive records that the former President had hoped to keep hidden and we look forward to additional productions regarding this important information. Our work goes forward to uncover all the facts about the violence of Jan. 6 and its causes,” Jan. 6 Committee chairman Bennie Thompson said Wednesday night. “We will not be deterred in our effort to get answers for the American people, make legislative recommendations to strengthen our democracy, and help ensure nothing like that day ever happens again.”