Trump coup

[Admin]

Top Secret Service agents who tried to undermine former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony to the Jan. 6 committee have hired private lawyers and are refusing to cooperate with the investigation, members of the panel said over the weekend. Hutchinson, who worked as a top aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, testified last month that she was told by deputy chief of staff Tony Ornato that former President Donald Trump was so irate that his security detail would not take him to the Capitol with his supporters on Jan. 6 that he lunged at Secret Service agent Bobby Engel, the head of his detail.

Hutchinson said Ornato, who made the unusual leap from working at the Secret Service to working for Trump before returning as a senior Secret Service official, described the incident with Engel present and he did not dispute it. After her testimony, journalists citing anonymous sources reported that Engel and the driver of Trump's vehicle were "prepared to testify under oath" to dispute Hutchinson's account and that Ornato denied telling Hutchinson that Trump "grabbed the steering wheel or an agent."

Secret Service agents who vowed to derail Hutchinson testimony lawyer up, refuse to testify: panel - Alternet.org

• They were prepared to testify under oath until they weren't.
  
• And of course there is this:
  

Last week, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, under which the Secret Service operates, sent a letter to Congress informing them that text messages sent by agents on and before January 6 had been erased. A spokesperson for the Secret Service claimed that this was part of a long-planned “system migration,” but the erasures have now spurred a criminal investigation after investigators could find only a single relevant text message from two dozen agents subject to a congressional subpoena. Further concerns were raised after the Washington Post reported that the DHS inspector general had known about the erased messages since February but had not said anything.

Afterward, when Pence fled, he refused the requests of agents to get into a car because he didn’t trust them not to drive away and evacuate him from the Capitol. Pence, who thought it was important for the country to proceed with finishing the task Congress started that day, didn’t want to prevent the election’s certification if he couldn’t return to the Capitol that night, as the Washington Post’s Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker reported in their book I Alone Can Fix It. Pence told Tim Giebels, the head of his detail, “I’m not getting in the car, Tim. I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving the car. If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car.”

The Secret Service’s deleted text message scandal, and the criminal investigation into it, explained - Vox

[Admin]

When Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden on election night 2020, infuriating Donald Trump and fueling Republican election subversion attempts which continue to this day, Rupert Murdoch told Jared Kushner “the numbers are ironclad – it’s not even close”. Details of the Fox News owner’s conversation with Trump’s son-in-law and chief adviser about the call which most observers say confirmed Trump’s defeat are contained in Kushner’s memoir, Breaking History, which is due out next month.

Murdoch told Kushner on election night that Arizona result was ‘not even close’ | Jared Kushner | The Guardian

[Admin]

“Once is happenstance,” Ian Fleming’s Auric Goldfinger tells the spy James Bond in the eponymous novel. “Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.” The villain’s bon mot comes to mind with regard to another gold-obsessed malefactor these days. Last month, the public learned that the Secret Service had deleted, or negligently allowed the deletion of, texts surrounding the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Last week, The Washington Post reported that texts for top officials then in the Department of Homeland Security, including Acting Secretary Chad Wolf and his deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, are also missing. And yesterday, CNN reported that, according to court filings, the Pentagon wiped the phones of top defense officials, including messages from that day. (An official told The Washington Post the deletions were standard process.))

Well, the Cover-Up Sure Isn’t Making January 6 Look Any Better

[Admin]

In early 2021, with the turmoil of a bitterly contested presidential contest still fresh, several election clerks in Michigan received strange phone calls. The person on the other end was a Republican state representative who told them their election equipment was needed for an investigation, according to documents from the Michigan attorney general’s office. They obliged. Soon, the machines were being picked apart in hotels and Airbnb rentals in Oakland County, outside Detroit, by conservative activists hunting for what they believed was proof of fraud, the documents said. Weeks later, after the equipment was returned in handoffs in highway car-pool lots and shopping malls, the clerks found that it had been tampered with, and in some cases, damaged.

The revelations of possible meddling with voting machines have set off a political tsunami in Michigan, one of the most critical battleground states in the country. The documents detail deception of election officials and a breach of voting equipment that stand out as extraordinary even among the volumes of public reporting on brazen attempts by former President Donald J. Trump’s supporters to scrutinize and undermine the 2020 results. But one of the most politically striking elements of the case is the identity of one of the people implicated in the scheme by the office of the attorney general: Matthew DePerno, who is now the presumptive Republican nominee for that very post.

Michigan Officials Push to Investigate Matthew DePerno in 2020 Election Scheme

[Admin]

Evidence presented to the grand jury is secret but any case against Trump is likely to be built around a tape recording of his call to Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to demand he “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. When Raffensperger rebuffed the demand, Trump made vague threats of charging him with a crime for failing to investigate allegations that Democrats had rigged the vote. “You know what they did and you’re not reporting it. You know, that’s a criminal offence. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you,” he told Raffensperger. The then president spoke to other senior Georgia Republicans, including the governor, Brian Kemp, and attorney general, Chris Carr, to urge them to contest the state’s vote count. They too resisted the pressure. Raffensperger and Carr have already testified to the grand jury. Kemp is resisting a subpoena.

Trump also tried to get federal officials at the justice department to intervene. His lawyers filed a series of lawsuits making extraordinary claims of foreign interference and other conspiracy theories. All of them were dismissed. When all of that failed, Giuliani and others pushed a false claim that the law allowed the Georgia legislature to replace its members of the electoral college with a slate that would vote for the defeated president. Legislators refused to play along and the Trump campaign instead sent 16 “fake electors” using false election certificates – another failed attempt to overturn the election replicated in six other states lost by Trump. Willis has told some of those involved in the fake electors plot that they are the target of criminal investigation by the grand jury, including the Georgia Republican party chair, David Shafer, and a state senator, Brandon Beach. Carlson said the combination of Trump’s actions potentially amount to a substantial body of evidence of wide wrongdoing.

Of all the legal threats Trump is facing, is this the one that could take him down? | Donald Trump | The Guardian

• Evidence of interference in Georgia's election results mounts
  

[Admin]

Navarro played a central role in Trump’s attempts to overturn his election defeat, outlining a plan called the “Green Bay Sweep” which was meant to block certification of Biden’s win. In November, Navarro will stand trial. He is charged with contempt of Congress, for refusing to comply with the January 6 investigation. He faces up to two years in jail. The judge in the case refused a request to hold the trial next April, so Navarro could market his new book..

Trump backed failed campaign coup against Kushner, Navarro book says | Books | The Guardian

[Admin]

Fox News’ Sean Hannity may have uncritically elevated baseless conspiracy theories about widespread fraud committed by voting machine suppliers in the 2020 election — even though he didn’t think they were true. That’s the latest revelation out of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corporation, which is slated to go to trial in April in a Delaware court.

Dominion sells election technology, including voting machines, that was employed in over two dozen states in 2020. And it argues that, following former President Donald Trump’s election loss, Fox broadcasted a series of unfounded and defamatory allegations about the company that it knew to be untrue. In the process, Dominion says Fox “destroyed the enterprise value of a business that was worth potentially more than $1 billion.” According to Dominion’s March 2021 complaint, Fox advanced the lies that Dominion had “committed election fraud by rigging the 2020 Presidential Election,” including by using its software and algorithms to alter vote counts; that Dominion is owned by a company founded in Venezuela that has tried to rig elections in favor of the dictator Hugo Chávez; and that Dominion paid officials to adopt its machines in 2020.

“Fox, one of the most powerful media companies in the United States, gave life to a manufactured storyline about election fraud that cast a then-little-known voting machine company called Dominion as the villain,” the complaint states. One way the company claims Fox did this is by giving conspiracy theorists unfiltered platforms. Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor, who is also being sued by Dominion for defamation, appeared on Hannity’s primetime show on November 30, 2020 — a week after she was unceremoniously booted from former President Donald Trump’s legal team challenging the results of the 2020 election. She had also been a guest on Hannity’s radio show earlier that day.

“There was a whole plot going on and a lot of people involved in this,” Powell said on the evening show. She baselessly accused voting machine companies, including Dominion, of using their machines to “trash large batches of votes that should have been awarded to President Trump” and to “inject and add massive quantities of votes for Mr. Biden.”Hannity, a longtime Trump ally, didn’t push back against those claims, even as concerns grew among Republicans that Powell’s rhetoric had grown too extreme. He stopped short of making those same accusations himself, but didn’t dismiss them either. He asked whether the machines had been investigated for the kind of tampering she was alleging (Powell said it would happen soon) and asked why Democrats weren’t looking into any of these “whistleblower” claims before ending the segment.

Two years later, he was asked about Powell’s theory in a seven-hour deposition that was reportedly shared during a court hearing earlier this week as part of the Dominion lawsuit: “I did not believe it for one second,” he said under oath. Powell also walked back her theorizing in 2021, with her lawyers stating “no reasonable person would conclude that the statements [Powell made] were truly statements of fact.”

Sean Hannity’s damning deposition in the Fox News defamation lawsuit, explained

[Admin]

Even as Donald Trump prepares to dial up his campaign to take back the White House, the former US president’s political and personal fate may already have been decided by the secret workings of a grand jury in Georgia. The 23-member panel, convened to consider whether Trump and others committed crimes in trying to overturn his defeat in Georgia when it appeared the state might decide the outcome of the entire 2020 presidential election, was dissolved on Monday after submitting its conclusions and asking that they be made public.

If the grand jury’s report recommends prosecution, a county district attorney in Atlanta, Fani Willis, will face the most consequential decision of her career – whether, for the first time in American history, to charge a former president with a criminal offence. That could result in Trump sitting behind bars in Georgia when he expects to be out on the campaign trail. Provided he is not already serving time as the result of a federal investigation into his attempts to pressure election officials in several other states to rig the vote and his part in the 6 January 2021 storming of the Capitol.

Trump’s political fate may have been decided – by a Georgia grand jury | Donald Trump | The Guardian

[Admin]

Donald Trump repeatedly lied in public and in private about what he claimed – with made up numbers – was extensive election fraud, and went as far as to spend more than $600,000 to commission a study that would prove his allegations true. The expensive and extensive report did the exact opposite, exponentially deflating his lies. He never released the report, and to his day has continued to lie about election fraud. The Washington Post obtained a copy of the report, publishing some of its findings and comparing them to lies Trump told.

Trump spent $600,000 on a failed study to prove his election fraud claims were true. He never released it - Alternet.org

[Admin]

An internal Trump campaign memo from December 2020, made public Tuesday by The New York Times, reveals new details about how the campaign initiated its plan to subvert the Electoral College process and install fake GOP electors in multiple states after losing the 2020 presidential election.

In the December 6, 2020, memo, pro-Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro laid out the plan to put forth slates of Republican electors in seven key swing states that then-President Donald Trump lost. The memo then outlines how then-Vice President Mike Pence, while presiding over the Electoral College certification on January 6, 2021, should declare “that it is his constitutional power and duty, alone, as President of the Senate, to both open and count the votes” from the GOP electors.

Chesebro conceded in the memo that this idea was a “controversial” long shot that would “likely” be rejected by the Supreme Court – but nonetheless promoted the strategy. He wrote that despite the legal dubiousness, “letting matters play out this way would guarantee that public attention would be riveted on the evidence of electoral abuses by the Democrats and would also buy the Trump campaign more time to win litigation that would deprive Biden of electoral votes and/or add to Trump’s column.”

NYT: Architect of Trump fake electors plot thought SCOTUS would ‘likely’ reject plan, but pushed ahead anyway