Still digging

Kushner testified

Hard to believe he doesn't have criminal liability in something.   Two billion dollars from Saudi Arabia as soon as he left the White House seems a bit fishy.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The myth of liberal bias

From journalism to tech giants, the bias is actually toward "conservatism".  The January 6th Committee uncovered much of the social media bias, but didn't focus on it in their report.

The Jan. 6 committee spent months gathering stunning new details on how social media companies failed to address the online extremism and calls for violence that preceded the Capitol riot.

The evidence they collected was written up in a 122-page memo that was circulated among the committee, according to a draft viewed by The Washington Post.

[...]

Congressional investigators found evidence that tech platforms — especially Twitter — failed to heed their own employees’ warnings about violent rhetoric on their platforms and bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives, particularly then-president Trump, out of fear of reprisals. The draft report details how most platforms did not take “dramatic” steps to rein in extremist content until after the attack on the Capitol, despite clear red flags across the internet.

[...]

“These platforms enabled the mobilization of extremists on smaller sites and whipped up conservative grievance on larger, more mainstream ones.”

  WaPo

So Elon lost more money than anyone in the world on a false assumption.

Some of what investigators uncovered in their interviews with employees of the platforms contradicts Republican claims that tech companies displayed a liberal bias in their moderation decisions — an allegation that has gained new attention recently as Musk has promoted a series of leaked internal communications known as the “Twitter Files.” The transcripts indicate the reverse, with former Twitter employees describing how the company gave Trump special treatment.

[...]

Confronting that evidence would have forced the committee to examine how conservative commentators helped amplify the Trump messaging that ultimately contributed to the Capitol attack [...] — a course that some committee members considered both politically risky and inviting opposition from some of the world’s most powerful tech companies.

[...]

“Recent events demonstrate that nothing about America’s stormy political climate or the role of social media within it has fundamentally changed since January 6th,” the staffers’ draft memo warned.

Social media moderation also has become a flash point in the states. Both Texas and Florida passed laws in the wake of Trump’s suspension to restrict what content social media platforms can remove from their sites, while California has imposed legislation requiring companies to disclose their content moderation policies.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 01/19/2023:

Add witness tampering to the charges

[January 6 witness testimony transcripts] reveal how much pressure [WH aide Cassidy] Hutchinson was placed under to remain “loyal” and “in the family” ahead of testimony that established to many that the hearings were a telling and horrific examination of the events on or around January 6.

Her lawyer had told her, “we just want to focus on protecting the president” and she was told, she informed the panel in testimony in September – two months after her public appearance – that she would be “taken care of” if only she followed their desired script.

“I was scared,” she told investigators. “I almost felt like at points Donald Trump was looking over my shoulder.”

[...]


In her testimony, she said she’d accepted the help of former Trump White House ethics counsel Stefan Passantino who, Hutchinson claims, encouraged her to fail to recall some events during the interviews. That claim, made under oath, could provide federal investigators with evidence of witness tampering.

“The less you remember, the better,” Hutchinson recalled Passantino telling her. “Don’t read anything to try to jog your memory. Don’t try to put together timelines … Especially if you put together timelines, we have to give those over to the committee.”

[...]

“We’re gonna get you a really good job in Trump world,” Passantino told her, Cassidy testified. “We’re gonna get you taken care of. We want to keep you in the family”.

[...]

Hutchinson also testified that an array of Trump officials, including her former boss and then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, had promised that loyalty would be beneficial to her.

[...]

After the second session, Hutchinson said her testimony was shared with others in the Trump orbit. It was, she said, “the first clear indicator for me of he doesn’t care about what I want, he doesn’t care about what I think is best for me, he’s doing what he thinks is best for Trump and the people in Trump’s orbit”.

[...]

According to transcripts, Hutchinson has felt uneasy about Passantino’s advice to downplay what she knew and that she had struggled between repeating testimony she had offered in February and March, replete with “I cannot recall” statements.

Without telling Passantino, Hutchinson contacted former White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin to ask to act as a backchannel to the committee so they could call her back in a third time and know what questions to ask her. “If I’m going to pass the mirror test for the rest of my life, I need to try to fix some of this,” she testified in September, referring to wanting to be able to look at her own reflection without feeing shame.

But, she said, she “knew in some fashion it would get back to him if I said anything he would find disloyal,” she testified. “And the prospect of that genuinely scared me. You know, I’d seen this world ruin people’s lives or try to ruin people’s careers.”

[...]

Hutchinson changed attorneys to Jody Hunt, a longtime confidant of Jeff Sessions, the former Republican senator from Alabama who had served as Trump’s first attorney general.
  Guardian

Jan 6 witness testimony transcripts

Today, the Select Committee made public 34 transcripts of witness testimony that was gathered over the course of the Select Committee’s investigation into the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.

  J6 Committee

Links to each are given in the article. 

And George Conway has pulled out several instances where witnesses were taking the 5th and being assholes about it. Apparently I was wrong in believing the answer to a question actually had to incriminate you in some way before you could deny to answer on grounds of the fifth amendment.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Mark Meadows texts acquired and being released

I'm waiting to see who - if anyone - gets hauled before a court to answer for his or her part in the insurrection.

Not that it affects DOJ decisions...

The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection is considering criminal referrals for at least four individuals in addition to former President Donald Trump [...] former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, right wing lawyer John Eastman, former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark and Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

[...]

The committee has not officially decided whom to refer to the Justice Department for prosecution and for what offenses, sources said.

[...]

While the criminal referrals would largely be symbolic in nature – as the DOJ has already undertaken a sprawling investigation into the US Capitol attack and efforts to overturn the 2020 election – committee members have stressed that the move serves as a way to document their views for the record.

  CNN

And making the Democratic base happy, as well as reminding Robert Mueller what he could have done.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Jan 6 Committee wrap-up

The House panel investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is planning to release its final report and hold a "formal presentation," which could include a hearing, the week of Dec. 19. Specifically, members are eyeing the date of Dec. 21, according to sources familiar with the panel's proceedings.

[...]

The report is expected to include information that hasn't been made public during the previous hearings, and the committee also plans to share hundreds of transcripts of the over 1,000 witnesses it interviewed.

  NPR

UPDATE:

Jan 6 Committee dropping subpoenas

Well, that kinda sucks.  I hope they at least can refer to DOJ people who refused to comply with subpoenas.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Wrapping up the January 6 Committee work

[Committee Chair Bennie Thompson indicated] the committee had now turned to finalizing its report, legislative recommendations and more explosive final decisions — including whether to make criminal referrals for witness tampering, perjury or contempt of Congress.

[...]

Thompson told POLITICO the select committee will meet Friday to discuss recommendations from a subcommittee, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin, about those referrals and about how to handle the five Republican lawmakers — including GOP leader Kevin McCarthy — who declined to comply with the panel’s subpoenas.

  Politico

I should hope they'd be charged with contempt.

Congress has limited power to make criminal referrals to the Justice Department, except for witnesses it holds in contempt for refusing to comply with testimony or document demands. However, referrals for perjury or witness tampering could also carry some force with prosecutors — if lawmakers can make a compelling case that a witness was criminally defiant.

[...]

Thompson declined to say whether he believed any particular witness committed perjury: “Stay tuned.”

[...]

Any criminal referrals, Thompson said, would be made to the attorney general, who could then decide whether to steer it to Special Counsel Jack Smith — who took over the Justice Department’s Donald Trump-focused Jan. 6 investigation earlier this month — or other prosecutors within the Justice Department.

[...]

At a press conference Wednesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland reiterated the Justice Department’s interest in obtaining the select committee’s evidence and transcripts.

“We are asking for access to all of the transcripts, and that’s really all I can say right now,” Garland said in a response to a reporter’s question.

Thompson also said he expects the committee’s final report and transcripts will be a massive evidence dump that occurs during the holiday season, rather than a slow rollout. The timing of the report, he said, will depend on how long the Government Publishing Office says it will take to produce a physical copy of the report, though much of the material will be exclusively digital.

I'm looking forward to folks going through all the material and reporting tidbits that weren't covered in the hearings.

UPDATE:

Jan 6 Committee still working

UPDATE 11/30:

Discord in the ranks

[L]ess than six weeks before the conclusion of the [January 6th] committee’s work, [Rep. Liz] Cheney’s influence over the committee’s final report has rankled many current and former committee staff. They are angered and disillusioned by Cheney’s push to focus the report primarily on former president Donald Trump, and have bristled at the committee morphing into what they have come to view as the vehicle for the outgoing Wyoming lawmaker’s political future

[...]

Some of the disaffected staff have left in recent months, in part out of frustration that their work is not expected to get significant attention in the report

[...]

Fifteen former and current staffers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, expressed concerns that important findings unrelated to Trump will not become available to the American public.

  WaPo

So they should avail themselves of Washington's favorite passtime and leak.

Several committee staff members were floored earlier this month when they were told that a draft report would focus almost entirely on Trump and the work of the committee’s Gold Team, excluding reams of other investigative work.

Potentially left on the cutting room floor, or relegated to an appendix, were many revelations from the Blue Team — the group that dug into the law enforcement and intelligence community’s failure to assess the looming threat and prepare for the well-forecast attack on the Capitol. The proposed report would also cut back on much of the work of the Green Team, which looked at financing for the Jan. 6 attack, and the Purple Team, which examined militia groups and extremism.

[...]

A senior committee staffer told staff in a virtual conference meeting two weeks ago that none of the work done by people serving on teams other than the Gold Team that didn’t focus on Trump would be included in the final report.

“Everybody freaked out,” the staffer said.

[...]

“We all came from prestigious jobs, dropping what we were doing because we were told this would be an important fact-finding investigation that would inform the public,” said one former committee staffer. “But when [the committee] became a Cheney 2024 campaign, many of us became discouraged.”

I guess I didn't realize that's what it bacame.

However, [one] staffer said, while committee members disliked those chapters [from the other teams], they were open to including some of that material in a more concise or streamlined form.

“It’s not a class project — everyone doesn’t get a participation prize,” said a senior Democratic aide. “The Green Team has chapters and chapters of good work, but the problem is they’ve learned a lot of great stuff about objectionable but completely legal things.”

[...]

“Donald Trump is the first president in American history to attempt to overturn an election and prevent the peaceful transfer of power,” [Cheney spokesman Jeremy ] Adler said. “So, damn right Liz is ‘prioritizing’ understanding what he did and how he did it and ensuring it never happens again.”

Also, the Committee has a Chair - Benny Thompson. Surely he has the power to direct the report as he sees fit.

People familiar with the committee’s work said Cheney has taken a far more hands-on role than Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), who is chairing the committee.

[...]

People familiar with the committee’s work said Cheney has taken a far more hands-on role than Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), who is chairing the committee.

[...]

Two people familiar with the process argued that without Cheney’s guidance, the committee would not be on track to submit a cohesive final report by the end of the year.

[...]

Tim Mulvey, the select committee’s spokesman, said in a separate statement that the panel’s “historic, bipartisan fact-finding effort speaks for itself, and that won’t be changed by a handful of disgruntled staff who are uninformed about many parts of the committee’s ongoing work.”

“They’ve forgotten their duties as public servants and their cowardice is helping Donald Trump and others responsible for the violence of January 6th,” Mulvey’s statement continued. “All nine committee members continue to review materials and make contributions to the draft report, which will address every key aspect of the committee’s investigation. Decisions about the contents of the report ultimately rest with the committee’s bipartisan membership, not the staff.”

[...]

[L]awmakers on the committee are now reassessing what to include in the final draft and also eyeing different ways to publicly share more of the investigators’ work outside of the report. That could include sharing findings on the committee’s website or releasing internal transcripts.

[...]

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a member of the panel, said over the weekend during an interview with “Face the Nation” that the public would have access to “all the evidence, for good or ill” within the next month.

[...]

“No member of the Committee has worked harder than Liz Cheney. Our bipartisan efforts have led to what some have called the most effective set of congressional hearings in modern history. The Committee intends to release the evidence we have acquired so no element of our work will go unreported.”

[...]

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and his staff are already preparing to conduct an examination of any evidence omitted from the final report that is more flattering or at least exculpatory about Trump’s actions leading up to the Jan. 6 assault, according to one Republican operative.

Of course they are.

That's what it seems like to me, too.  Especially when some of the disgruntled staff were complaining they left good jobs to do this work.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Meanwhile at the J6 Committee...

J6 Committee response to Pence bullshit

“Our investigation has publicly presented the testimony of more than 50 Republican witnesses, including senior members of the Trump White House, the Trump Campaign, and the Trump Justice Department,”  [...] . “This testimony, subject to criminal penalties for lying to Congress, was not ‘partisan.’ It was truthful.”

[...]

Soon after the Jan. 6 panel’s push back on Wednesday, Pence appeared on CNN for a town hall with Jake Tapper, where the anchor asked the former vice president about Thompson and Cheney’s statement.

“Well, it’s not the first sharp elbow I’ve gotten on Capitol Hill,” the former vice president responded as he stood by his comments earlier in the day.

Pence again argued the committee had “no right to his testimony,” citing separation of powers concerns as he expressed worry over a vice president testifying before Congress.

“The principle itself was offensive to me,” Pence told Tapper. “I thought the missed opportunity with Jan. 6th was we could have proceeded in a way that was above politics.”

  The Hill

Refusing to be held accountable to the public you're supposed to serve as Vice President is offensive to the public.

Asshat.

WTF!

“Congress has no right to my testimony.” Seriously?! The entire country has a right to his testimony. He was the fucking Vice President.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE: The Committee responds.

Thomas and Alito - twin court cranks

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Hopefully the Committee gets her records in time for their report so we know why she was so bent on keeping them from it.

UPDATE:

(Today)

Good deal.

Of course he is

He knows the committee dissolves at the end of the year.  He's filing suit in south Florida and will appeal a denial, so essentially, he's not going to be testifying.

I don't think the committee really wanted to mess with him testifying anyway.  What good could come from having him take the 5th or lie on every question?  What they did by the subpoena was to block him from claiming he never had a chance to give his side of things.

Will they get Meadows or not?

The jury is still out.

A federal judge has thrown out Mark Meadows’ year-old lawsuit over subpoenas from the House’s Jan. 6 select committee, concluding that the former White House chief of staff was constitutionally barred from bringing it in the first place.

[...]

U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols said that the Constitution’s “speech or debate” clause — which prohibits lawsuits against lawmakers for anything associated with their legislative work — applied in the case of the committee’s subpoenas to Meadows issued in the fall of 2021.

“The record makes clear that the challenged subpoenas are protected legislative acts,” Nichols wrote in the decision.

Meadows is likely to appeal the ruling, effectively putting his testimony out of reach for the Jan. 6 select committee, which is slated to dissolve at the end of the year.

[...]

It’s a significant victory for the select committee, but in some ways it’s a hollow one. The panel repeatedly told Nichols it had chosen not to assert its “speech or debate” immunity and wanted the judge — a Donald Trump appointee — to issue a more sweeping ruling on Trump’s efforts to assert executive privilege over Meadows’ testimony.

[...]

The panel has been seeking Meadows’ testimony since September 202.

  Politico

The Secret Service on January 6

Jan 6 Committee still hauling 'em in