A group of 40 House Democrats, led by Rep. David Cicilline (R.I.), introduced legislation on Thursday to bar former President Trump from holding future federal office under the 14th Amendment.
Section 3 of the amendment states that no one who previously took an oath to support the Constitution and engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” shall "hold any office, civil or military, under the United States."
Cicilline said in a release announcing the legislation that Trump “very clearly” engaged in an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, with the intention of overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election.
“You don’t get to lead a government you tried to destroy,” he said.
The release states that the bill includes testimony and evidence demonstrating how Trump engaged in the insurrection.
The bill also specifically describes how Trump helped encourage the violence on Jan. 6, tried to intimidate state and federal officials when they did not support his false claims of the election being stolen and refused to denounce the mob that stormed the Capitol for hours during the riot.
“The 14th Amendment makes clear that based on his past behavior, Donald Trump is disqualified from ever holding federal office again and, under Section 5, Congress has the power to pass legislation to implement this prohibition,” Cicilline said.
Cicilline, who served as an impeachment manager during Trump’s first impeachment, sent a letter to his Democratic colleagues last month to solicit co-sponsors for a bill to bar Trump from office.
Trump was impeached on a charge of “incitement of insurrection” in the aftermath of Jan. 6, but he was acquitted by the Senate. This was the second time Trump was impeached, with the first coming in December 2019.
Last month, Trump became the first major candidate to announce a run for the presidency in 2024.
The 14th Amendment was ratified in the aftermath of the Civil War, when ex-Confederates and seceded states rejoined the Union.
Here’s a job for the national political press corps, if they can take time out from declaring doom for the Democrats in the midterms: Put elected Republicans and every GOP candidate on the ballot everywhere on the record about how their vilification of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi resulted in an assassination attempt against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and landed her husband in the hospital with serious injuries.
We’re hearing plenty of platitudes and “thoughts and prayers” from Republicans, from leadership on down. Let’s start with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, who, as of this writing, hadn’t released any kind of statement about the attack, but had a press person say, “Leader McCarthy reached out to the Speaker to check in on Paul and said he’s praying for a full recovery and is thankful they caught the assailant.”
Maybe he’s in hiding because of that time he said in public that he’d like to hit Nancy Pelosi with an oversized speaker’s gavel the Tennessee delegation gave him: “I want you to watch Nancy Pelosi hand me that gavel. It will be hard not to hit her with it.”
The Tennessee delegation just presented @GOPLeader with an oversized gavel. “I want you to watch Nancy Pelosi hand me that gavel… It’ll be hard not to hit her with it,” he joked. pic.twitter.com/L2Rj1U0oAX
That would be a great thing for reporters to ask McCarthy about, should he decide to come out of hiding.
Maybe they could get the odious Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), GOP House conference chair, to elaborate on her tweet about “wishing for a full recovery” for Paul Pelosi. Because Stefanik has made a cottage industry out of telling the public, Pelosi is a monster. Like when she tweeted a hideously altered image of Pelosi, making her look like a monster during Trump’s first impeachment.
Or when she pushed a bunch of Facebook ads targeting Pelosi, Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden and “Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION.”
Then there is GOP leadership’s embrace of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the insurrectionist who essentially called for Pelosi’s execution while she was running for Congress in 2018 and 2019. “She’s a traitor to our country, she’s guilty of treason,” Greene said in a video posted on Facebook in 2019. “She took an oath to protect American citizens and uphold our laws. And she gives aid and comfort to our enemies who illegally invade our land. That’s what treason is. And by our law representatives and senators can be kicked out and no longer serve in our government. And it’s, uh, it’s a crime punishable by death is what treason is. Nancy Pelosi is guilty of treason.”
She’s not just still a member in good standing, she had a front-row seat when McCarthy released the House GOP’s midterm election agenda.
Then you’ve got Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) bemoaning the attack, saying, “violence is never the answer for any grievance and every American should always be safe in their own home.” Because, of course, the issue here is crime, which is, of course, the Democrats’ fault, but anyway, thoughts and prayers.
Graham is up there with Stefanik in making attacks on Pelosi a hobby. He accused her of “taking a wrecking ball to the Constitution” over Trump’s first impeachment. He all but accused Pelosi of being responsible for the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Which, of course, takes us to Graham’s BFF, lord and master, golfing buddy Donald Trump. The guy who attacked Pelosi at the National Prayer Breakfast after his first impeachment. “As everyone knows, my family, our great country, and your president have been put through a terrible ordeal by some very dishonest and corrupt people….” he said, with Pelosi sitting feet away. “So many people have been hurt. And we can’t let that go on.”
Trump’s attacks on Pelosi were relentless throughout his entire siege of the White House, calling her “unhinged” in tweets, calling her “Crazy Nancy” and accusing her of “breaking all rules” in his impeachment. And, of course, blaming her for the Jan 6. attack (you didn’t think Graham came up with that all on his own, right?).
“There would have been no January 6, as we know it, if Nancy Pelosi heeded my recommendation to bring 10,000 Soldiers, or the National Guard, into the Capitol,” Trump said in a statement earlier this year. “End the Unselect Committee January 6th Witch Hunt right now. Pelosi and the Dems are responsible!”
That’s what Republicans continue to endorse. That’s what led to an assassination attempt against Pelosi. These people aren’t going to take ownership of what they’ve created. But the very least the traditional press corps could do is hold them to account for it.
How should we be reading the 2022 polls, in light of shifting margins and past misses? In this episode of The Downballot, Public Policy Polling's Tom Jensen joins us to explain how his firm weights polls to reflect the likely electorate; why Democratic leads in most surveys this year should be treated as smaller than they appear because undecided voters lean heavily anti-Biden; and the surprisingly potent impact abortion has had on moving the needle with voters despite our deep polarization.
Kevin McCarthy, would-be House speaker, lied to two of the police officers who helped save his skin on Jan. 6. He lied to the mother of an officer who died after the attack, telling them last year that the person who commanded Trump’s violent followers to march to the U.S. Capitol had no idea at all what they were doing. He also took credit for Trump’s eventual public statement asking rioters to “go home.” One of the attendees, then-D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone, recorded the meeting and has shared that recording with CNN.
McCarthy met with Fanone, U.S. Capitol Officer Harry Dunn, and Gladys Sicknick, the mother of late Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, in June 2021. Fanone recorded the meeting because as he told CNN, “was because I didn’t expect Kevin McCarthy to, No. 1, tell the truth; No. 2, recount the conversation accurately; and No. 3, I wanted to show people how indifferent lawmakers are, not just Republican lawmakers, but all lawmakers, to the actual American people that they are representing.” D.C. has single-party consent for recordings—what Fanone did is completely legal.
The three had been pressing McCarthy to meet with him after House Republicans had begun to try to downplay what had happened that day and McCarthy himself had started to bow to Trump’s pressure and back off his pledge to allow Republican participation on the Jan. 6 committee. Fanone writes in a new book just being launched, “The only reason McCarthy had agreed to meet with us was because he’d been getting heat for refusing to see me.”
“I’m just telling you from my phone call, I don’t know that he did know that,” McCarthy told the three, speaking about his call to Trump and Trump’s knowledge of the attack. Sicknick’s mother pushed back in the meeting, according to the audio. “He already knew what was going on,” she said of Trump. “People were fighting for hours and hours and hours. This doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Fanone also challenged McCarthy about his continued defense of Trump: “While you were on the phone with him, I was getting the shit kicked out of me!” He wrote in his book, “I asked McCarthy why he would take credit for Trump’s pathetic, half-hearted late-afternoon video address to his followers. I said, ‘Trump says to his people, ‘This is what happens when you steal an election. Go home. I love you.’ What the f–k is that? That came from the president of the United States.”
Subsequent revelations in public testimony to the Jan. 6 committee proved just how brazenly McCarthy lied to the officers and Mrs. Sicknick.
Jan 6 committee interviews reveal that Rep. Kevin McCarthy told Donald Trump to call off the rioters but Trump turned him down, saying: ‘Well Kevin, I guess they’re just more upset about the election theft than you are’ pic.twitter.com/NBolF2CCYL
In those hearings, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified about her own telephone conversations with McCarthy that day, conversations which McCarthy now says he doesn’t remember having. “You told me this whole week you aren’t coming up here,” Hutchinson said that McCarthy told her. “Why would you lie to me?” She responded that as far as she knew, there weren’t plans for Trump to go to the Capitol. McCarthy answered, “Well, he just said it on stage, Cassidy. Figure it out. Don’t come up here.”
Months before McCarthy met with the officers, in the immediate aftermath of the attack, McCarthy had no problem blaming Trump for the riot. In audio obtained by The New York Times, McCarthy told fellow Republicans that he wanted Trump to resign as they discussed impeachment. “I’ve had it with this guy,” he told a group of his leadership team. “What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that and nobody should defend it,” he told the group. That’s what he was saying before he made a call to Trump, when he told the group that he was going to tell Trump to resign.
That didn’t go as planned, according to more recording the Times obtained. Following that call, McCarthy told Republicans on a conference call: “Let me be very clear to all of you, and I have been very clear to the president: He bears responsibilities for his words and actions. [...] No if, ands or buts.”
“I asked him personally today: Does he hold responsibility for what happened?” McCarthy said. “Does he feel bad about what happened? He told me he does have some responsibility for what happened and he’d need to acknowledge that.”
Five months later, McCarthy told the officers who protected him that day and the mother of an officer who died as a result of that attack that Trump had nothing to do with any of it. Kevin McCarthy is a liar. And a bad one. You’d think he’d have learned his lesson about watching what he says in private meetings, given his track record in that whole pre-2016 election scandal: “There's … there's two people, I think, Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump… [S]wear to God.”
The Jan. 6 committee on Thursday asked Newt Gingrich to come forward voluntarily and answer questions about evidence investigators obtained highlighting the role he played promoting former President Donald Trump’s scheme to overturn the 2020 election both before and after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
According to the committee, the emails that piqued their interest were between Gingrich and Trump’s advisers, including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, communications strategist Jason Miller, and others, like Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone, all of whom have cooperated at length with the congressional investigation.
Gingrich, a Georgia Republican and former House speaker, had cozied up to the White House as Trump’s impeachment-marred and scandal-ridden term came to an end. In the process, the committee contends, Gingrich ended up providing Trump’s team with significant input on television advertisements that propagated conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud.
Further, House Select Committee Chair Bennie Thompson noted, mere days after the election in November 2020, Gingrich peppered Meadows and Cipollone with questions about who was in charge of coordinating an elector bid that would put fake pro-Trump “electors” in states demonstrably won by now-President Joe Biden. That fake elector bid was at the very core of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election.
A month later, Gingrich proposed that ads should encourage the public to pressure state officials to investigate conspiracy theories. Those included the now long-debunked claim of Trump ballots being smuggled in suitcases out of voting centers in Georgia by nefarious election workers.
Gingrich wrote Kushner, Miller, and consultant Larry Weitzner in a Dec. 8, 2020 email that “the goal is to arouse the country’s anger through new verifiable information.”
“If we inform the American people in a way they find convincing and it arouses their anger, they will then bring pressure on legislators and governors,” Gingirch wrote.
But that “new verifiable information” was bunk.
Gingrich also did this just after Gabriel Sterling, the Georgia deputy secretary of state, issued an impassioned public plea begging that the disinformation and character attacks on election workers and election officials cease.
“Someone’s going to get hurt. Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed,” Sterling said.
Literal hours after the insurrection, investigators on the committee say Gingrich opted to keep pushing Trump’s agenda.
Thompson described Gingrich as “relentless.”
In an email sent at 10:42 PM on Jan. 6—former Vice President Mike Pence had only reopened the Senate around 8 PM—Gingrich asked about the fake electors for Trump in an email to Meadows:
“[A]re there letters from state legislators about decertifiying electors?” Gingrich wrote.
The committee asked Gingrich to appear for a transcribed interview beginning the week of Sept. 19.
As the summer winds down, the Jan. 6 committee’s public-facing activities are expected to ramp up. As committee member and Rep. Jamie Raskin recently told Daily Kos, the Jan. 6 probe would continue to gather and assess new evidence it received over the course of its public hearings and work to tie up loose ends before issuing an interim report.
Meanwhile, on Friday, according to The New York Times, Cipollone and his deputy White House counsel Pat Philbin are expected to testify before a federal grand jury investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
Jan. 6, 2021, was madness. Without a proper account of that day, the stain of its violence and betrayal, already indelibly etched into the national history, could continue to spread, shading and infiltrating every institution low and high until finally, this ‘great experiment’ collapses in on itself in a heap of dingy authoritarianism.
For the last several weeks, the Select Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol presented its findings on the insurrection incited by former President Donald Trump now more than a year ago.
He is the only American president ever impeached for this betrayal, making him uniquely offensive since his actions obliterated the core of what the Constitution demands of presidents above all else when they take the oath: its faithful preservation and defense.
So much of what happened on the way to Jan. 6 unfolded in public.
Trump said long before Election Day if he lost, it was because the election was rigged. Many of his personal attorneys and members of his administration spent weeks promoting or defending wild conspiracy theories of voter fraud at press conferences, on podcasts, on the radio, or on television. This continued unabated even after the nation’s Attorney General and heads of the nation’s intelligence networks confirmed to Trump in public—and in private, as the committee showed at length this summer—that his fraud claims lacked credibility entirely.
It was an all-out assault of disinformation and propaganda aimed at convincing the American public he was not defeated after a single term in the White House where his tenure and popularity were regularly marred by the cruelty of his policies and the consequences of his own actions, like impeachment for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Trump’s speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6 was a tirade but it was also an open invitation to his most devoted followers to help him retain power by force despite losing the 2020 election popularly and by way of the Electoral College. And when the debris, blood, sweat, urine, and feces were finally cleared away from the Capitol after the mob stormed it, Trump’s second impeachment followed.
The case was, as Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told Daily Kos during an interview this week, “made almost completely with facts from the public record, and the statements and actions Trump made.”
“It was overwhelming,” Raskin said. “Although the incitement was plain to see and the violence was bloody and fresh on people’s minds, what we did not have was the detailed account of the president’s step-by-step effort to orchestrate a political coup against the election and essentially set aside Joe Biden’s seven-million-vote victory.”
Kevin Seefried of Delaware, pictured here, was found guilty of obstruction of Congress among several other charges in June. He used the Confederate flag to jab at U.S. Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman. Goodman was the officer responsible for luring rioters away from lawmakers by mere seconds and inches. Seefried is sentenced in September.
Now, that “detailed account” has been presented to millions of Americans.
An average of 13 million broadcast viewers watched per hearing day, according to Nielsen, hearing evidence at each juncture about how Trump: 1) worked to overturn the election results by promoting a lie; 2) attempted to install his allies at the Justice Department when legal avenues to assert his victory were defeated; 3) advanced a fake elector strategy to pressure the vice president to stop Congress from certifying the count; 4) invited a crowd he understood to be armed to march to the Capitol with him during the Joint Session of Congress; and 5) abandoned his sworn duty to protect the United States by sitting idly for nearly three hours while ignoring pleas for help as a mob erected a gallows, issued calls to hang the vice president and Speaker of the House, stormed the halls of Congress and attacked hundreds of outnumbered police officers with a barrage of lethal weapons.
During its two primetime sessions alone, a cumulative 30 million (or more) broadcast viewers heard this evidence—and then some.
Raskin told Daily Kos in April he hoped the hearings would become a way of arming the American public with the tools of “intellectual self-defense against the authoritarian and fascistic policies that have been unleashed in this country.”
”These hearings have been so devastating for Trump and his followers because they have shown everyone exactly every effort he undertook to overturn the election and the Constitutional order. And almost all of it was based on evidence brought forth by Republican witnesses,” Raskin said by phone this week.
That is true, despite what disinformation may be flowing out from right-wing platforms.
The testimony during the hearings overwhelmingly featured Republican lawyers, judges, political commentators, election attorneys, Trump-appointed U.S. Attorneys, a Republican city commissioner, and a Trump campaign manager, to name but a few.
”I think [the hearings] have moved the whole spectrum of public opinion closer to the facts of what actually happened. These people who were already convinced of Donald Trump’s culpability now have a lot more evidence to corroborate their initial convictions,” Raskin reflected.
“Those who were on the fence have been moved to reject the ‘Big Lie’ and to doubt the continuing efforts to undermine the reality of Biden’s victory. Those who were in Trump’s camp as true believers have begun to melt away at the margins even though many of them are still holding firm. It does not look like a promising scenario for those who continue to want Donald Trump to be the central figure of American politics,” he said.
A Morning Consult/Politico poll released this week found that the hearings may not have shaken loose many of Trump’s most fundamental supporters, but the share of unaffiliated or independent voters in the U.S. that believe the former president is responsible for the insurrection has increased significantly. And almost more importantly, those independents who held “favorable views” of Trump have continued to dip, too. Many independents are indicating they will vote for a Democrat in November.
If the Justice Department will not make it so that Trump is unable to hold office, at the least, this should be a small comfort: the hearings have manifested an even greater number of Americans who believe there is good reason to vote against a person, or persons, who would incite a deadly insurrection.
Raskin would like to see the Justice Department take action publicly and more definitively before the midterms. He also knows that the timing of that announcement could draw ire, and that screeches of political impropiety are likely to come.
“But the Constitution itself regards this matter with the utmost gravity,” Raskin said. “Section III of the 14th Amendment said that people who have sworn an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution and betray it by engaging in an insurrection shall never hold federal or state office again. That is a constitutional principle.”
He continued: “It’s obviously a legitimate thing for us to be talking about. But the Department of Justice and prosecutors at other levels have to make their decisions without regard to anyone’s political plans. If people had immunity from prosecution just because they were running for office, then anybody who was suspected of a crime, any crime at all, could simply announce for political office, and then they would have legal immunity. That can’t be right,” he said.”
The committee’s debut session was a year ago this month. Police who defended the Capitol testified for the first time publicly and put a personal face on the raw, frenzied violence that most Americans only witnessed from afar.
As the months have marched on, the committee has unearthed hundreds of thousands of pages of records from the White House and elsewhere and has interviewed over 1,000 people who were directly or indirectly involved with Jan. 6. Those interviews continue. Raskin said this week the number of former Trump aides who have come forward recently are producing a “waterfall of truth.”
Attempts to stop the committee from airing its evidence have been unceasing, yet mostly unsuccessful. Those caught in the committee’s scrutiny have been unable to cast the panel as illegitimate when fighting subpoenas in court.
The committee’s work has been overwhelmingly bolstered through judicial opinions, providing an outcome that offers benefits twice over. When Judge David Carter ruled that Trump and John Eastman, the attorney who developed a six-point strategy to overturn the election, had likely engaged in a criminal conspiracy—and further that they “engaged in a coup in search of legal theory”—it set a strong precedent for Congress and upped the ante for investigations at the Justice Department.
In fact, this week, Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Windom revealed in court that the Department obtained a new search warrant to access records on John Eastman’s phone. This process has been unfolding for the last month. The home of Jeffrey Clark was also searched. Clark is the former DOJ attorney who Trump tried to install as attorney general after existing senior officials at the department refused his scheme to declare the election as false. And Clark’s underling, Ken Klukowski, is now cooperating with the DOJ’s probe into Jan. 6 in full, according to Klukowski’s lawyer, Ed Greim.
Cassidy Hutchinson, who provided some of the most shocking public testimony this summer is cooperating with the department. During the hearings, she testified under oath that Trump knew the mob was armed—“I don’t fucking care that they have weapons, they’re not here to hurt me,’” she recalled him saying—and she disclosed that her boss, Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, sought pardons in the aftermath of the insurrection. She also disclosed information about a small battery of Republican lawmakers who sought pardons in the wake of Jan. 6.
She also divulged how the president wished to go to the Capitol on Jan. 6 after his speech, offering insight into his mindset that day. When this request was rejected, his outrage was so severe, Hutchinson said, that the former president lunged at the arm and neck of a Secret Service agent driving him.
Other witnesses have refused to cooperate under subpoena, courting contempt of Congress charges and indictments like Trump ally and strategist Steve Bannon and former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro. Bannon was found guilty on two counts and faces sentencing in October. Others, like Meadows or onetime adviser Dan Scavino, have cooperated to varying degrees and managed to evade prosecution. Other Trump-world officials have invoked their Fifth Amendment rights after being subpoenaed. Committee vice chair Liz Cheney said last month, more than 30 witnesses called before the committee invoked their right against self-incrimination.
The most high profile of those figures are Eastman; Clark; longtime GOP operative Roger Stone; conspiracy theory hack and right-wing podcaster Alex Jones; and Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser.
In December 2020, Flynn publicly advocated for Trump to invoke martial law to rerun the 2020 election. He was also part of discussions with Trump and his attorneys where there was talk of the military seizing voting machines. He did not ultimately cooperate with the select committee, but in airing a five-minute clip of Flynn’s deposition, the committee allowed his silence to speak volumes.
When Cheney asked Flynn if he felt the violence on Jan. 6 was legally justified, he pleaded the Fifth. When she asked if he believed it was morally justified, he pleaded the Fifth. When she asked him if he believed in the peaceful transition of power in the United States, the retired three-star Army general pleaded the Fifth.
A Capitol Police officer walks past a worker cleaning damage a day after a pro-Trump mob broke into the US Capitol.
With each day that has passed since the committee’s first-ever hearing last July, the truth continues to pour out.
”The defense of the constitutional order and the rule of law should be something that unifies Americans across the political spectrum,” Raskin said. “Trump convinced millions of people that if your team does it, if they break the law or upend the Constitutional order, you embrace it or defend it regardless of how unlawful or criminal it is.”
“But that’s just an appalling descent for intellectual and ethical standards in American life,” Raskin said.
“When the people [who believed the Big Lie] called for ‘Justice for Trump’ they said ‘let the people decide.’ The people voted for Biden. But Trump tried to overthrow the election, so he was impeached for doing that. And we took it to trial, and at trial, they told us then, ‘don’t deal with this through impeachment, you could prosecute him if there was a crime.’ “
“Now the Department of Justice is investigating whether there is a crime, and these same people are saying, ‘you can’t prosecute him, it’s too political!’ No matter what is done, they essentially assert that Donald Trump is beyond the reach of the law and that is a profoundly anti-democratic attitude,” he said.
One of the last battles to be waged between Trump and the truth about January 6 will very likely play out on the field of executive privilege disputes and crime-fraud exceptions where the Department of Justice, not the select committee, will lead the charge of a criminal investigation into the former president and his associates.
The Justice Department is moving at its own pace and operating mostly in stealth, but the dam seems to be breaking as more reporting now suggests the DOJ has its Jan. 6 prosecutors focused on two principal tracks: Trump’s possible orchestration of a seditious conspiracy and obstruction of a congressional proceeding and fraud.
The fraud track would stem from the fake-elector scheme and is believed to encompass the pressure campaign Trump and his allies put on officials at the DOJ to say the election was rigged and votes were fraudulently cast.
The committee’s investigation, meanwhile, is still humming as members maneuver their way through new challenges—like what to do about a batch of deleted Secret Service text messages from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6 as well as deleted texts from the same period at the Department of Homeland Security.
That department’s inspector general, Joseph Cuffari, the Washington Post was first to report on Friday, “scrapped” an effort to recover agency phones. In February, after learning that messages had been erased during a “planned” device reset, Cuffari reportedly decided to stop further review and collection of phones. He only this month notified the House and Senate Homeland Security committees of the “erased” texts. He was asked by the head of that committee, and various others 10 days after the insurrection to ensure all records and devices were preserved.
Committee chairman Bennie Thompson, as well as Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who sits on a committee that oversees offices of the inspectors general, have called on Cuffari to recuse himself from the investigation. The director of the Secret Service, James Murray, announced late Friday he would waylay his planned July 31 retirement to “ensure our agency's continued cooperation, responsiveness, and full support with respect to ongoing congressional and other inquiries.”
This is an unsettling series of developments, Raskin admits.
“This profound mystery of the Secret Service texts and what information is being masked by their disappearance is something we are all pursuing. We are invested in finding out the truth there,” he said.
The next hearing is expected in September and the committee plans to produce an interim report around the same time. A final report will follow, but meanwhile, over the next month, he said, “everyone has loose ends that they want to follow up on.”
During the course of its probe, every member of the committee has specialized in a different facet of the investigation.
Raskin’s focus was Trump’s mobilization of the mob as well as domestic violent extremist groups like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers. and Three Percenters.
“There are still significant things that we are finding out that I want to pursue there,” Raskin said. “The same goes for the shakedown of the Justice Department, the attempt to coerce state election officials, and so forth. I would say each member has his or her continuing research agenda and then we have some things we consider major to the whole of the investigation we are pursuing.”
It has been a long year already and it is not quite yet over. As for the man at the center of the probe, former President Trump, he has yet to stop his incessant spread of disinformation about the 2020 election and is poised to take another run for the White House.
But Raskin is optimistic.
“I’m most optimistic about the fact that the vast majority of the American people do not believe in coups, insurrections, and political violence to usurp the will of the people. There is still a profound allegiance to constitutional democracy in the country,” he said.
He is not cynical, but “sobered” around other facts.
What “sobers him,” he said, is that Republican Party, even now “remains under the spell and stranglehold of Donald Trump.”
He continued: “They are using every anti-democratic device in the book to thwart majority rule; from voter suppression statutes to gerrymandering of our districts to the weaponization of the filibuster to the manipulation of the Electoral College.”
“We are in a race between the clear majority’s will and preference for democratic institutions and progress and the efforts to drag us back into some kind of anti-democratic past,” Raskin remarked.
So, then, are the people now armed with the tools of “intellectual defense” they need to resist this and other aspiring tyrants to come?
“I don't think people will fall for any more ‘Big Lies’ or disinformation for the most part,” he said.
The lawmaker reflected: “People who have been disabused of all these notions aren’t going back. But there is an important question being tested here: whether the new propaganda systems that have grown up in the internet age can actually operate like an intellectual straight-jacket? Will millions of people really be locked into a system of lies? That’s a question that is closely connected to the future of our democracy. Democracy needs a ground to stand on, and that foundation has got to be the truth.”
Cases containing electoral votes are opened during a joint session of Congress after the session resumed following protests at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, early on January 7, 2021.
In the wake of the insurrection, there was a reported flurry of conversation among members of former President Donald Trump’s Cabinet about whether he should be removed from office by way of the 25th Amendment. Now the Jan. 6 committee is conducting interviews with some of those officials as investigators pursue more information about what unfolded around Trump after the attack.
According to reporting first from ABC, the committee has now interviewed former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and plans to interview former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo before the week is out.
Mick Mulvaney, who parlayed his job as Trump’s acting chief of staff to become the special envoy for Ireland, is also reportedly meeting with the panel on Thursday.
Exactly six days after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, the House of Representatives passed a resolution 223-205 urging then-Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office.
At the time, Pence said he did not believe this course of action was “in the best interest of our nation or consistent with the Constitution,” and he dubbed the resolution a “political game.” He also issued his refusal to invoke the 25th Amendment before the House had even completed its vote.
That “game” Pence worried about, however, was reportedly one that some members of Trump’s inner circle had already considered playing.
In ABC reporter Jonathan Karl’s book, Betrayal, he described a conversation between then-Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and then-Secretary of State Pompeo. Pompeo, Karl reported, sought out “legal analysis” on how the 25th Amendment could be applied and how fast it might work.
Washington, D.C., was heavily reeling from the Capitol assault. Yet during an appearance on MSNBC last November, Karl said the 25th Amendment talks were quickly nipped in the bud once officials learned the process could be a lengthy one and potentially complicated by the fact that members of Trump’s Cabinet had resigned after Jan. 6, including Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
It was reported Thursday that both DeVos and Chao are figures of interest to Jan. 6 investigators, too, and that they may also be asked to cooperate.
DeVos stepped down 24 hours after the attack and told USA Today this June that she was part of conversations where the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment with other members of Trump’s Cabinet was discussed.
In a portion of his testimony to the Jan. 6 committee, former White House attorney Pat Cipollone told investigators that former Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia wanted members of the Cabinet to meet 24 hours after the insurrection. Scalia said he asked for the meeting because he felt “trying to work within the administration to steady the ship” would be better than watching more resignations roll in.
Pompeo has historically denied that he was part of any conversation after Jan. 6 where invoking the 25th Amendment came up.
DeVos’ recent interview undercuts that claim.
“I spoke with the vice president and just let him know I was there to do whatever he wanted and needed me to do or help with, and he made it very clear that he was not going to go in that direction or that path,” DeVos said of Pence on June 9. “I spoke with colleagues. I wanted to get a better understanding of the law itself and see if it was applicable in this case. There were more than a few people who had those conversations internally.”
DeVos said when she realized invoking the 25th Amendment against Trump was not a viable path forward, she tendered her resignation. She has not outwardly blamed Trump for Jan. 6, but she told USA Today she “didn’t see the president step in and do what he could have done to turn it back or slow it down or really address the situation.”
Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testified to the Jan. 6 committee that discussions of removing Trump with the 25th Amendment were flowing after the mob laid siege to the Capitol. Trump had spent three hours watching the mob attack without strongly condemning the violence or taking concerted action to stop it. When he finally delivered a speech in the Rose Garden that afternoon, and only after multiple people had died and much blood had been shed, he proclaimed “we love you” to his supporters before asking them to go home.
The next day, officials at the White House pushed to have Trump deliver a speech. Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the committee under oath that the plan for the Jan. 7 speech mostly went into effect because people inside the White House were terrified of two things: the mounting criticism that Trump didn’t do enough and that the 25th Amendment would be invoked.
“The secondary reason to that [speech] was that, ‘think about what might happen in the final 15 days of your presidency if we don’t do this, there’s already talks about invoking the 25th Amendment, you need this as cover,’” Hutchinson said.
According to CNN, the committee is also seeking testimony from John Ratcliffe, a former Republican congressman from Texas who vehemently defended Trump during Trump’s first impeachment inquiry for obstruction of Congress and abuse of power as well as during special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference of the 2016 election.
Chad Wolf, once the acting secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, and his former deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, are in reported talks to meet with investigators, as well.
Both Wolf and Cuccinneli were asked to cooperate with the probe voluntarily last October.
Wolf was once much adored by Trump. He began to lead the Department of Homeland Security after then-Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen resigned in April 2019. Despite Nielsen’s overt willingness to enforce any number of Trump’s cruel immigration policies during her tenure, she wasn’t enough of a toady for the 45th president, and he slammed her in the press as an ineffectual before she resigned. When she finally stepped down, Kevin McAleenan, then the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, filled her slot. McAleenan resigned in November 2019.
Those transitions were riddled with problems, however.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) would later reveal, after its own independent assessment of DHS, that both Nielsen and McAleenan altered or amended internal policies on lines of succession at the department. DHS pushed back on the report when it went public but Wolf ultimately stayed in place with Trump’s full support. Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee as well as the Jan. 6 committee, said the succession rules were altered in haste so Trump’s “ideologues” could bypass typical Senate confirmation procedure.
Thompson had good reason to feel this way. In a February 2019 interview with CBS’ Face the Nation, Trump acknowledged that he enjoyed lording over acting officials versus those who had to go through more rigorous congressional approval.
Mulvaney, who meets with the committee Thursday, should cooperate without much trouble, if history is any indicator. Though he was a fierce defender of Trump’s during his tenure with the administration, after Jan. 6, Mulvaney became a more vocal critic.
“You don't get to where you got to yesterday with something that's normal. That's not normal for any citizen, let alone a president of the United States,” Mulvaney said on Jan. 7 when facing questions about whether Trump should be removed through the 25th Amendment.
Since then, Mulvaney has thrown his support behind those Trump officials who have come forward to testify, including Hutchinson.
The Jan. 6 committee is expected to continue its probe in the weeks ahead, and chairman Thompson has said that additional hearings will be held in September.
Fresh off a subpoena requesting his cooperation, former Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone is slated to testify before the Jan. 6 committee for a private, transcribed, and videotaped interview.
A committee aide did not immediately respond to a Daily Kos request for comment.The New York Times was the first to report the development Wednesday, citing a person briefed on the matter.
Cipollone’s full compliance could be illuminating for the investigation into former President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. According to sworn testimony already delivered by former members of the Department of Justice under Trump, as well as Trump White House officials, Cipollone was often a firsthand witness to make-or-break moments in Trump’s attempted coup.
Cipollone was privy to multiple conversations about the bunk elector scheme championed by Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, witnesses have said, and Cipollone was also present when Trump raised the question of seizing voting machines.
The former president’s counsel attended a meeting recently detailed at length—and under oath—by the nation’s former acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, and Rosen’s deputy, Richard Donoghue.
Rosen and Donoghue testified that it was Cipollone who stood tall against Trump in the Oval Office during a meeting where Trump nearly fired Rosen and replaced him with yes-man Jeffrey Clark, a mid-level environmental lawyer at the Department of Justice who strongly supported Trump’s baseless election fraud claims.
Like Cipollone, Clark was subpoenaed by the committee. But Clark refused to answer any questions and instead pleaded the Fifth Amendment repeatedly during a private meeting with committee counsel.
When Rosen and Donoghue testified, they described how the draft letter written by Clark rattled off a long series of bogus claims about election fraud in Georgia and urged that “alternate” electors be seated.
Rosen’s predecessor, Attorney General Bill Barr, had already declared publicly and in private meetings with Trump, that there was no evidence of fraud widespread enough that it would alter the outcome of the election. But Clark, Rosen and Donoghue said, pushed ahead anyway.
When Cipollone saw the draft letter, Donoghue told the committee he remembered the counsel’s reaction vividly.
If the DOJ cosigned it, Cipollone allegedly said, it would be a “murder-suicide pact.”
The draft letter never went out because Donoghue, Rosen, and others at the Department of Justice threatened to resign en masse if Trump insisted on replacing Rosen with Clark.
According to sworn testimony already provided by former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, Cipollone was also part of key conversations with Mark Meadows, then Trump’s chief of staff.
Hutchinson said Cipollone pleaded with Meadows to act as the mob grew larger, gallows were erected on the Capitol lawn and chants of ‘Hang Mike Pence’ reverberated on Capitol grounds.
Hutchinson recalled Cipollone telling Meadows how desperate the situation had become on Jan. 6 and urged Meadows to understand that the mob was quite literally calling to kill then-Vice President Mike Pence.
“You heard him, Pat,” Hutchinson recalled Meadows saying. “He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”
According to Hutchinson's recounting of the day, Cipollone was flabbergasted.
“This is f-ing crazy. We need to be doing something more,” Cipollone allegedly said.
Cipollone has been a stalwart ally to Trump, representing the 45th president for both of his impeachments and in various other legal matters. When Trump was impeached for obstruction of Congress and abuse of power in 2019, Cipollone offered a vehement and sharp defense of Trump, taking up the “witch hunt” mantle at length and slamming the inquiry as meritless and part of a campaign by Democrats and those on the left to punish Trump for political differences.
When Trump was impeached the first time, Cipollone notably called for cameras to be barred from proceedings, arguing it would create a circus-like atmosphere. The cameras would stay.
Trump was ultimately quite pleased with Cipollone’s performance during the first impeachment, calling him a “Great White House counsel.”
This latest decision to comply with the Jan. 6 committee’s subpoena will put Trump’s relationship with Cipollone to the test and the extent of Cipollone’s cooperation will naturally hinge on what he actually discloses.
When Trump attorney John Eastman tried to fend off the committee’s subpoena for his records, Eastman cited attorney-client privilege but was unable to overcome the crime-fraud exception to this assertion. The crime-fraud exception essentially says that confidentiality is not blanketed and if a client sought advice from an attorney that would help that client pull off or commission a crime, then work product or correspondence can be disclosed.
A Washington Post profile of Cipollone from Jan. 2020 notes the counsel’s propensity to keep himself out of the national spotlight.
His profile was so low in Washington, D.C., in fact, that when Cipollone first took to the Senate floor during Trump’s impeachment, it was his first time ever appearing on C-SPAN.
Memorably, even while presiding over the inquiry, Chief Justice John Roberts introduced Cipollone and mispronounced his last name.
TODAY: Cipollone's first time on C-SPAN. Sekulow's 44th time on C-SPAN (first in 1990 ... 1991 below) pic.twitter.com/XbWVBCJ5ek
Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s personal attorneys, told Yahoo! News in January 2020 that Cipollone was a “serious tactician” and described him as an “aggressive advocate” for the 45th president though “measured.”
In that same 2020 article, an unnamed Trump White House official said Trump saw Cipollone as “beyond loyal.”
Cipollone will appear before the committee for his private session this Friday.
The committee’s next public hearing is July 12 at 10 AM ET and there will be at least one more hearing to follow. The committee is expected to focus on the extremist elements involved in the insurrection as well as unpack exactly what was going on during the 187 minutes of silence from the White House as the Capitol was under attack.
Pat Cipollone had what one former member of the Justice Department described last week to the Jan. 6 committee as “an impossible job” serving the 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
But Cipollone was “consistent” and “did that job well,” Richard Donoghue, once the second-in-command to former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, testified.
Cipollone “always sided with the department” and did so even as Trump pushed to overturn the results of the 2020 election by attempting to install crony Jeffrey Clark into the attorney general role.
This was a necessary step in a greater plan to have Clark send a letter to swing states falsely informing them their election results were fraudulent and directing them to appoint Trump’s fake electors.
Cipollone, however, appeared to know a bad deal when he saw it three days before the insurrection during a meeting at the White House with Rosen, Donoghue, Office of Legal Counsel head Richard Engel, Clark, and Trump.
Cipollone rejected Clark’s letter and the plan underpinning it as a “murder-suicide pact,” Donoghue told the committee publicly last week.
When the mob finally ensued on Jan. 6, according to testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, the one-time aide to Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, it was Cipollone who pleaded with a despondent Meadows as a gallows was being erected on the Capitol lawn.
“They are literally calling for the vice president to be f-ing hung,” Hutchinson recalled Cipollone telling the president’s chief of staff.
Meadows replied, saying of then-Vice President Mike Pence, “You heard him, Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”
Cipollone, Hutchinson said under oath, was, in this terrifying moment, at a loss.
“This is f-ing crazy, we need to be doing something more,” Hutchinson recalled Cipollone saying.
Now, the Jan. 6 committee wants Cipollone to do something more, and it has issued a subpoena for his deposition by July 6.
Cipollone’s testimony would be significant for the investigation into the Capitol attack and Trump’s bid to overturn the election results. It would perhaps be some of the most significant testimony to emerge because it would likely expose the former president’s overt role in the insurrection even more directly.
He sat previously for the committee in April, but he was not under oath and the meeting was not transcribed. He appeared with Patrick Philbin, another Trump White House attorney who once joined him to defend Trump against impeachment.
The subpoena now forces Cipollone to decide what he will say under oath and what he will leave under possible attorney-client privilege or executive privilege with the former president.
Cipollone, according to Hutchinson, was one of the few voices of reason surrounding Trump on Jan. 6, even explicitly warning him and others in the president’s orbit that if he went to the Capitol after his speech at the Ellipse, “we’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable.”
He was at meetings where the question of seizing voting machines was raised, and he was there when not just Donoghue, Engel, and Rosen’s resignations were threatened if Trump insisted on installing Clark, but when Bill Barr, Rosen’s predecessor, offered to quit because he would not declare there was election fraud where none existed.
Cipollone threatened to resign in the runup to Jan. 6 often, according to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser.
Kushner testified before the probe in recorded deposition and told committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney he chalked up Cipollone’s threats to resign as mere “whining.”
Cheney has publicly called on Cipollone to testify before the committee multiple times and has framed the request in a way that would possibly curry public trust around him.
“Our evidence shows that Mr. Cipollone and his office tried to do what was right,” Cheney remarked during a recent hearing.
But according to the letter notifying him of the subpoena, Cipollone has declined to cooperate since April. And this subpoena is among the last-resort options barring something more extreme down the road, like holding him in contempt.
If he were to sit now, it would be under closely negotiated terms with counsel present.
In a statement Wednesday, Thompson and Cheney noted, however: ”Any concerns Mr. Cipollone has about the institutional prerogatives of the office he previously held are clearly outweighed by the need for his testimony."
On Tuesday, the nation heard incredibly compelling testimony about the pressure placed on state and local officials by Donald Trump in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. As Brandi Buchman reported, the testimony showed how Trump personally leaned on these officials, how his bullying opened both them and their families to threats, and how Trump was at the center of a scheme to subvert democracy using a slate of fake electors in multiple states.
Tuesday’s testimony was only the latest in a series of hearings in which the public has seen new information about events on Jan. 6. In those hearings, the House select committee has been working backwards. They started by showing the violence of the assault on the Capitol. Then they showed how Trump recruited white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys to his cause. Then how Trump and his legal team concocted a fictional narrative about voting fraud. Tuesday was the first day dedicated to Trump’s efforts to make that plan reality.
If it seems familiar, it’s because what the select committee is doing is what the prosecution does at every murder trial: Show the jury a body on the ground, identify the weapon, then prove who was wielding the knife. They’re giving the nation the body of the crime, the tools enlisted to make it happen, and both motive and means of execution.
And now Republicans are sorry. Not sorry that Jan. 6 happened—sorry that they didn’t corrupt the select committee when they had the chance.
Over at Punchbowl News, there’s a feeling from Republicans that, horror of horrors, the committee is doing a good job. That is, they’ve put together convincing evidence and the presentations to the public have been convincing. Republicans “won’t admit it openly” but in private, they’re fretting over how the committee has created a “blistering portrayal of former President Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat following the 2020 elections” and the steps Trump took to overturn the results. And, as happens on almost every occasion, Republicans are looking for the most important thing in any crisis situation: someone to blame.
It can’t be Trump, because as Lindsey Graham made clear, they’re all terrified of Trump. They love that little frisson of terror they get at the mere mention of his name.
So the finger of blame seems to be pointing at the guy who had the chance to turn this committee into an absolutely ineffective, watered down, good-people-on-both-sides farce, but passed up that opportunity: House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
Just over one year ago, Republicans in the Senate filibustered a billto create an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate Jan. 6. As Laura Clawson reported at the time, Democrats made “huge concessions” concerning the makeup of the committee and limits of the investigation in an effort to address concerns expressed by Republicans. It was enough to get 35 House Republicans on board, but in the Senate only six Republicans were willing to go along, and a smirking Mitch McConnell led the filibuster to halt an investigation into crimes that were then only four months in the past.
A month later, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi handed McCarthy the outline for the current select committee, giving him the opportunity to appoint Republican members. McCarthy might have chosen to take it seriously, but he didn’t. Instead he promptly picked Reps. Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, both of whom McCarthy knew would be sought as witnesses for direct involvement in the Jan. 6 conspiracy.
When Pelosi rejected this attempt to knee-cap the committee, McCarthy had a list of literally hundreds of Republicans to choose from. He might have saddled the committee with any of a number of cynical old hands or hard-charging MAGA freshmen, either of which could have served to turn every session in the committee into the kind of “where is Hunter Biden’s notebook?” madness seen during Trump’s impeachment hearings.
Every public hearing, if there even were public hearings, could have been subject to lengthy diatribes about Benghazi and demands that they subpoena the grandkids of Hugo Chavez. Republicans could have done what Republicans do in defense of Trump: Throw up smokescreens, erupt in faux outrage, and use up committee time making regular statements about how the whole investigation was “a witch hunt.”
Only McCarthy didn’t do that. Refused his first choice of sleeveless wrestling shower guy, McCarthy decided that he wouldn’t name anyone at all, leaving Pelosi the opportunity to select Liz McCarthy and Adam Kinzinger from the very short list of Republicans who were not willing to crown a game show host as America’s king.
Now, as that committee wades into Trump with one punch to the gut after another, Republicans are coming to the consensus that it was McCarthy who screwed this up. That consensus includes Trump.
Trump: “I think in retrospect [McCarthy should’ve put Republicans on] to just have a voice. The Republicans don’t have a voice. They don’t even have anything to say. … “I think it would’ve been far better to have Republicans [on the panel]. [Jim Banks and Jim Jordan] were great. They were great and would’ve been great to have them. But when Pelosi wrongfully didn’t allow them, we should’ve picked other people. We have a lot of good people in the Republican Party.”
This is a trial at which Trump has refused to testify and done everything he possibly can to keep all the others involved in the conspiracy from raising their right hand. And the truth is that every Republican in Washington, D.C., and Mar-a-Lago thought McCarthy had done the right thing at the time, because “illegitimate witch hunt” was a well-established theme they could sell to Trump’s base.
Except Trump’s base isn’t watching the committee hearings. Everyone else is. And Trump is discovering that when you’re on trial for attempting to murder democracy, refusing to put on a defense isn’t a great strategy.
Expect the “blame Kevin” chorus to only grow louder. After all, “scapegoat” is McCarthy’s dedicated role.
The Jan. 6 committee is reportedly preparing to call Supreme Court spouse Ginni Thomas to talk about just how deeply involved she was in the effort to help Donald Trump have a coup. Thomas told the Daily Caller, “I look forward to talking to them,” and that she wants to “clear up misconceptions.” Okay then.
The committee now says she’s going to get that opportunity. That’s one step closer to Congress taking seriously the threat that Thomas and her spouse, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pose to the republic.
A report in The New York Times Thursday combined with The Washington Poststory put Ginni Thomas in the thick of John Eastman’s coup-plotting. There are emails between the two. There’s Eastman telling a pro-Trump lawyer and Trump campaign officials that he was aware of a “heated fight” within the Supreme Court: “For those willing to do their duty, we should help them by giving them a Wisconsin cert petition to add into the mix.”
Now, that could be Eastman lying about the situation in order to keep the team fighting for Trump or from some other reason—that’s law professor Steve Vladek’s interpretation. Or it could have been Ginni working Eastman up with tales from the inside to keep him happy.
Regardless, it is the spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice in the thick of a coup attempt. We don’t know where Clarence Thomas is in all this. We do know that he was the lone justice who wanted to keep the White House records around Jan. 6 away from the committee. Maybe now we have new information as to why he wanted that.
What we also know now, thanks to Thursday’s Jan. 6 committee hearing, is that Eastman (who was a Thomas clerk back in the day) knew that what he was promoting was illegal and told Trump so on Jan. 4, two days before the insurrection.
Eastman knew what he was pushing—with help from Ginni Thomas—was illegal. Following that to its logical conclusion, with the revelations of the last 24 hours, how does the committee not subpoena Ginni Thomas?
Furthermore, how do President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer not demand that Clarence Thomas resign? How do the House and Senate Judiciary Committees not turn their attention to Clarence Thomas and investigating just what Clarence and Ginni Thomas were cooking up together?
Here’s what retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig, a true conservative hero who was on George W. Bush’s short list for the Supreme Court, said: ”Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy. [...] I don’t speak those words lightly.”
Those allies and supporters include Supreme Court Clarence Thomas. The danger is coming from the highest court in the land and Congress has to deal with that. It’s time to begin the investigations leading to an impeachment of Clarence Thomas. No, this Senate would not convict with 50 Republicans, but after the work of the Jan. 6 committee and all of these revelations, they need to be forced to vote to protect him. They need to be making the case against Clarence Thomas, and then they need to start real work of reforming and expanding the Supreme Court.
