More January 6 testimoiny nuggets

Then-President Donald Trump wanted to trademark the phrase “Rigged Election!” days after Election Day in 2020, according to emails provided by Jared Kushner to the House select committee.

[...]

“Hey Jared! POTUS wants to trademark/own rights to below, I don’t know who to see – or ask…I don’t know who to take to,” the email from Scavino reads, according to a transcript of Kushner’s testimony to the committee, which was released by the panel on Friday.

Two phrases were bolded in the email: “Save America PAC!” and “Rigged Election!”

  CNN

WTF??? Did he think he could collect money from people writing "Rigged Election!"? What a freak.

Kushner forwarded the request and discussed it on an email chain that included Eric Trump, the president’s son; Alex Cannon, a Trump campaign lawyer; Sean Dollman, the chief financial officer of Trump’s 2020 campaign; and Justin Clark, a Trump campaign lawyer.

“Guys - can we do ASAP please?” Kushner wrote.

Obviously Kushner is just as insane as Trump here.

Robert Sinners, who worked on the Trump campaign’s Election Day operations in Georgia in 2020 and helped organize the slate of alternate GOP electors there, told congressional investigators that his “intent was never to be aligned with team crazy.”

[...]

CNN previously reported that Sinners emailed the fake electors asking for “complete secrecy and discretion” on December 13, 2020, a day before the GOP electors convened at the Georgia capitol. Sinners told the panel that efforts to ensure Georgia’s GOP electors met in secrecy had more to do with skirting Covid-19 restrictions and avoiding protesters than keeping the elector plan under wraps.

Yeah, that's believable.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol met in person Thursday with conservative activist Ginni Thomas, and during her interview, she told the panel that she did not discuss any of the legal challenges to the 2020 presidential election with her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

  CBS

But did she discuss her own - or others' - activities attempting to overturn the election?

Ginni Thomas also denied her husband knew of her texts with former President Trump's White House chief of staff.

[...]

She also told the committee that her husband is "uninterested in politics," and said in her statement, "I generally do not discuss with him my day-to-day work in politics, the topics I am working on, who I am calling, emailing, texting or meeting."

"Generally".

In one of the texts, sent during a press conference pushing election fraud claims that featured Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Thomas wrote: “Tears are flowing in what Rudy is doing right now.”

In another text, sent on Nov. 24, 2020, Meadows told Thomas that Trump’s post-election legal battles were part of “a fight of good versus evil.” Thomas replied: “Thank you. Needed that, this plus a conversation with my best friend just now. I will try to keep holding on.”

[...]

Thomas confirmed that when she mentioned her “best friend,” she was referring to her husband. But when asked what she and Justice Thomas had talked about, Ginni Thomas said she did not know.

[...]

[Thomas] was asked about some of the text messages she had sent to Meadows after the 2020 election. Thomas said at the start of her testimony that she regretted “the tone and content” of the messages, and expressed frustration at the fact they were made public.

  HuffPo

Oh yeah, that's believable. And I ask you: Do those texts seem a little intimate to you? I don't mean in any sexual context, but like she and Mark Meadows are sharing an awful lot, that they were in constant and close contact during the coup attempt? Would that be a normal situation between a Supreme Court justice's wife and the President's chief of staff? I don't think so.

"I will try to keep holding on."  They're working together, obviously.  And they're NOT relaying information to their partners (Chief Justice and President)?  That's just not believable.  

“My husband often administers spousal support to the wife that’s upset,” she said.

Do all these nutjobs speak of themselves in the third person?

“So I assume that’s what it was. I don’t have a specific memory of it.”

Bullshit. And Clarence Thomas should have been deposed, too.

Thomas said it was “embarrassing” to be confronted with her old digital communications.

“It was an emotional time,” she told the committee at several points.

"Embarrassing".

Thomas deposition transcript 

The national chairman of the Proud Boys took a Dec. 12 tour of the White House, and alarm bells went off inside the Secret Service and among other security officials.

Trump deputy chief of staff Tony Ornato told the Jan. 6 committee last month that Robert Engel — the head of Trump’s Secret Service detail — flagged the visit for him as security officials wondered how they let him slip through the cracks.

“Why didn’t we pick up on his role/membership in the Proud Boys?” one official asked Engel, in an email Engel shared with Ornato.

  Politico

Who gave him the tour?

Ornato also forwarded an article to Engel about the prospect of violence on Jan. 6

But Ornato said he didn’t recall seeing any of this chatter, despite being a point of contact for the security agencies involved, and he said he didn’t recall whether he read the article he sent.

I'm sorry, what?

Ornato also said he didn’t recall the content of a 12-minute call he had on Jan. 6 with Engel, who had been receiving updates about the security situation at the Ellipse, where Trump had begun delivering his speech.

It’s just kind of hard to believe that you don’t recall anything about a conversation when that was going on around the Ellipse and the White House that morning,” an unidentified committee investigator said.

No shit.

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

Looking forward to critiques

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

UPDATE:

January 6 Committee reconvened

As the House returns to Washington this week, the panel is promising to air its new findings in at least one public hearing this month, with another perhaps to follow in October — a schedule that would put Trump and his GOP supporters on the defensive heading into November’s midterm elections.

[...]

[A] central focus of the investigation throughout August was the wide-ranging effort by a long list of Trump supporters — some of them on Capitol Hill — to install slates of fake electors in certain battleground states where Trump has claimed, falsely, that he prevailed over President Biden. Gingrich, the committee has found, was a part of that effort.

[...]

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), said Gingrich’s campaign to keep Trump in the White House did not stop even after Congress voted to certify Biden’s victory in the aftermath of the failed insurrection.

[...]

Snippets of Gingrich’s emails obtained by the panel reveal he had suggested line edits for a post-election TV ad in Georgia, where Trump was defeated, promoting conspiracy theories around voter fraud. The message, Gingrich advised, should include reference to a “call to action.”

“The goal is to arouse the country’s anger,” Gingrich wrote to Kushner and Miller, adding that viewers “will then bring pressure on legislators and governors.”

  The Hill

Gingrich has yet to pay for past political sins. I hope they get him.

While Trump’s former chief of staff had delivered thousands of text messages to investigators last year, he has refused to speak with the panel, even under subpoena. The House held Meadows in contempt of Congress last year, but the Justice Department declined to bring charges. The standoff remains under litigation.

Why did the DOJ choose not to bring charges? Curious. Is Meadows maybe cooperating to bring down Trump?

Some members of the select committee are also interested in speaking with Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who had sought to overturn the 2020 election and solicited the help of several well-placed figures, including Meadows and John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who had drafted the dubious legal reasoning on which the “stop the steal” effort relied.

[...]

Still another figure of interest is Tony Ornato, a former Secret Service agent who doubled as Trump’s deputy chief of staff. Ornato has already spoken with investigators, but they want him back to clarify discrepancies in testimony surrounding Trump’s alleged clash with his security detail on the day of the Capitol attack.

We're all interested. I assume these people will want some serious compensatory actions of some kind before agreeing to "interviews" with the Committee since they know from the previous hearings they'll be seen by the world. I also assume it will take some court rulings to get them there, further delaying justice.  (And I assume these folks are hoping they can delay until the GOP can steal the 2024 election and get them all out of the hot water they're in.)

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

UPDATE:  I do hope that date holds.  Because it will be perfect timing after this:

Well, lookie here

Ooooh.  Let me guess:  they gave him the "opportunity to resign"

According to Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who serves on the [January 6] panel, committee members have stressed their desire to speak with Ornato and he has retained private counsel. It’s not clear whether Ornato will end up testifying related to the claims from Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

Sources told CNN that Ornato had been eligible for retirement since earlier this summer, and he had been discussing leaving the Secret Service since before Hutchinson’s testimony.

  CNN

Whatever.

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

UPDATE:

[...] just two days before his planned interview with January 6 investigators.

[...]

Ornato had finally agreed to an interview with Department of Homeland Security investigators on August 31 after multiple attempts to arrange one. According to a memo sent by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General to the head of the Secret Service, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and DHS general counsel, the inspector general had been attempting to interview Ornato since June 29 and spent all of July and much of August following up.

[...]

Ornato has indicated that he still intends to attend the interview, according to an email obtained by The Intercept, but since Ornato will be a private citizen, investigators won’t have testimonial subpoena authority to compel his cooperation.

  Intercept

Speaking of the Secret Service

THE SECRET SERVICE erased text messages from January 5 and January 6, 2021, according to a letter given to the January 6 committee and reviewed by The Intercept. The letter was originally sent by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General to the House and Senate homeland security committees. Though the Secret Service maintains that the text messages were lost as a result of a “device-replacement program,” the letter says the erasure took place shortly after oversight officials requested the agency’s electronic communications.

[...]

“I’m not getting in the car,” Pence reportedly told the Secret Service detail on January 6. “If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off.” Had Pence entered the vice presidential limo, he would have been taken to a secure location where he would have been unable to certify the presidential election results, plunging the U.S. into uncharted waters.

  The Intercept

Did Pence realize his detail was comprised of Trump supporters?

[K]ey evidence in the form of the Secret Service’s electronic communications may never see the light of day. The Department of Homeland Security — the Secret Service’s parent agency — is subject to oversight from the DHS Office of Inspector General, which had requested records of electronic communications from the Secret Service between January 5 and January 6, 2021, before being informed that they had been erased.

[...]

A top Secret Service official allegedly involved in the attempt to spirit away Pence on January 6 remains in a leadership position at the agency [as the assistant director of the Secret Service’s Office of Training]. Tony Ornato, a Secret Service agent whom Trump made the unprecedented decision to appoint as his deputy White House chief of staff, reportedly informed Pence’s national security adviser, Keith Kellogg, on January 6 that agents would relocate the vice president to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. “You can’t do that, Tony,” Kellogg reportedly told Ornato. “Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it.” (Ornato has denied the account.)

And he also denied the account Cassidy Hutchinson gave of him telling her about the incident with Trump in the car. He should be put under oath to answer questions.

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

Shakeup at the Secret Service

In a January interview with the committee, according to a person who described the exchanges, [Agent Tony] Ornato recounted various recollections of Jan. 6. that led panel members to question his version of events.

Murray’s decision to allow Ornato to serve as a political adviser to the president “crossed a major line” for the Secret Service since agents are “sworn to be above politics,” Carol Leonnig, a Washington Post reporter and author of “Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service,” wrote on Twitter. The book also describes Murray and Ornato as good friends.

Ornato’s political appointment was “approved by current director James Murray at Trump’s urging, a decision that infuriated current and former agents,” Leonnig wrote in her tweet.

[...]

When asked at the daily White House press briefing whether Murray’s departure was related to the revelations from the Jan. 6 committee’s hearings, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre denied any connection.

“This has been in talks for several months,” she said, noting that conversations around the director’s retirement had been ongoing since April.

  Politico

Uh-huh.

Well, well, well

Update on Tony Ornato

Trump and Secret Service agent Tony Ornato are saying Cassidy Hutchinson lied in her recent testimony before the January 6 Committee.

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

UPDATE :  Shakeup at the Secret Servivce

The plot thickens

Investigative journalist and author Carol Leonnig [...] spoke to MSNBC's Rachel Maddow following testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson in the Tuesday Jan. 6 Committee hearing.

[...]

"There was a very large contingent of Donald Trump's detail who were personally cheering for [Joe] Biden to fail," she said.

  Newsweek

That isn't surprising.

"Some of them even took to their personal media accounts to cheer on the insurrection and the individuals rioting up to the Capitol, as patriots. That is problematic.

"I am not saying that Tony Ornato or Bobby Engel did that but they are viewed as being aligned with Donald Trump, which cuts against them.

[...]

"The second part I would stress is both of these individuals, Bobby Engel and Tony Ornato were very close to President Trump.

"Some people accused them of, at times, being yes-men and enablers of the President, particularly Tony Ornato.

"People who wanted to do what [Trump] wanted and see him pleased.

"That was frustrating to agents that were more focussed on security or being independent or good planning.

"So both of these individuals lose a little bit of credibility because of how closely they have been seen as aligned to Donald Trump

UPDATE 7/8:  Shakeup at the Secret Servivce

Not good

Senior Secret Service agents are reportedly prepared to testify that Donald Trump did not lunge for the wheel of his vehicle or physically attack the chief of his security detail after his speech near the White House on January 6 – as a former aide said he did in sworn testimony on Tuesday.

[...]

CNN and other outlets reported the pushback on the alleged Secret Service incident from Tony Ornato, who was also a deputy chief of staff in the Trump White House, and Robert Engel, who was Trump’s security chief.

[...]

Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post, author of two books on the Trump administration and a history of the Secret Service, Zero Fail, said: “Sources tell me agents dispute that Donald Trump assaulted any agent or tried to grab the steering wheel on Jan 6. They agree Trump was furious about not being able to go to Capitol with his supporters. They offer to testify under oath.”

[...]

[According to Cassidy Hutchinson's Tuesday testimony,] Trump allegedly told Engel: “I’m the fucking president. Take me up to the Capitol now.”

When he was turned down, Hutchinson said, Trump tried to seize the steering wheel. Engel grabbed his arm and said: “Sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel. We’re going back to the West Wing. We’re not going to the Capitol.”

Hutchinson said “Trump then used his free hand to lunge towards Bobby Engel and when Mr Ornato recounted the story to me he motioned towards his clavicles”. Questioned by Liz Cheney, the committee deputy chair, Hutchinson said Engel did not dispute the account when Ornato relayed it.

  The Guardian

The Committee should have known before taking Hutchinson's testimony public whether these people would back her up.

Former White House chief of staff MICK MULVANEY: “This is explosive stuff. … I know her. I don’t think she is lying.”

  Politico

I don't think she is, either. It seems much more likely that the Secret Service agents want to avoid any backlash in their employment for tattling on the president.

UPDATE:  Further evidence for the more likely scenario.

Hutchinson’s attorneys, Jody Hunt and William Jordan of Alston Bird, issued a statement on Hutchinson’s behalf Wednesday defending her testimony.

“Ms. Hutchinson stands by all of the testimony she provided yesterday, under oath, to the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol,” they said.

[...]

The Jan. 6 committee didn’t reach out to the Secret Service in the days before it aired explosive testimony about an alleged physical altercation between Donald Trump and his security detail on the day of the riot, according to an agency spokesperson.

[...]

“[W]e were not asked to reappear before the Committee in response to yesterday’s new information and we plan on formally responding on the record,” he wrote in an email. “We have and will continue to make any member of the Secret Service available.”

[...]

Earlier this year, the committee already asked the head of Trump’s detail on Jan. 6 — who was with Trump riding from the “Stop the Steal” rally to the White House that day — about that car trip. That agent, Robert Engel, gave testimony at the time that appears to be consistent with Hutchinson’s story but is not known to include the stunning details Hutchinson described.

  Politico

Let's get them into the hearings, under oath.

But here's a more troublesome bit:

With respect to the handwritten note’s authorship, a spokesperson for Trump White House attorney Eric Herschmann has disputed part of Hutchinson’s Tuesday testimony. She told the select panel that she wrote the note about a statement for Trump to give on Jan. 6 calling for rioters to leave the Capitol, at the direction of then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows after he met with Herschmann. (The statement in question was never issued.)

“The handwritten note that Cassidy Hutchinson testified was written by her was in fact written by Eric Herschmann on January 6, 2021,” said a spokesperson for Herschmann. “All sources with direct knowledge and law enforcement have and will confirm that it was written by Mr. Herschmann.”

[...]

“While we understand that she and Mr. Herschmann may have differing recollections of who wrote the note, what’s ultimately important is that both White House officials believed that the President should have immediately instructed his supporters to leave the Capitol building,” [a Jan. 6] spokesperson said.

Maybe they both wrote similar notes, but shouldn't that be easy enough to determine? I mean, it was hand written. There was some mention of a word that was crossed out, and perhaps Herschmann asked for the note and edited it.  The note was projected on the big screen behind the panel, and when asked, Hutchinson told the Committee at the hearing that it was her handwriting.  I don't think it's likely she would lie about that.

UPDATE:

The January 6 Committee posted a video of Trump leaving the ellipse in his limo.  It is being said that it shows him moving his hands toward the driver.  I can't make it out, only can see rapid movement inside the vehicle, but I feel sure the Committee has determined it backs up Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony.

UPDATE 7/1:

UPDATE 7/8:  Shakeup at the Secret Servivce

UPDATE 7/21:

January 6th hearing #6

I don't know why it was important to call a special hearing today to get Cassidy Hutchinson's live testimony on the record (perhaps there's something on the DOJ's schedule they're aiding*), but the thing that I'm going to remember about it - and I'm willing to bet I won't be the only one - is that Donald Trump had tantrums where he threw plates of food against the wall, and he tried to choke someone who told him he couldn't go to the Capitol with the insurrectionists.

Other notable points:

Renato is a former prosecuting attorney.  (As is @Popehat.)

Joyce Vance was also a federal prosecutor:

Aaron Rupar's coverage of the hearing with video clips begins here:

Full hearing here.

Unsurprising GOP reaction, dismissive - and plain wrong:

And the totally expected response of Donald Trump:

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

Previous hearing

UPDATE:

Read the thread here.

*UPDATE:  A more likely reason may be that Hutchinson was getting extreme pressure and/or threats:

This ought to make the July hearings viewer numbers rocket.

Next hearing (July 12)

UPDATE 6/29:  Not good.  It's being reported that the Secret Service agents involved in Hutchinson's story about Trump's actions in the limo are willing to testify in contradiction to her account.

UPDATE 7/8:  Shakeup at the Secret Servivce