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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — July 11, 2022

By July 11, 2022July 28th, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

January 6 Committee Will Hold Two Hearings This Week Focused On White House Ties To Violent Militia Groups 

  • NBC: ‘Closing Argument’: Jan. 6 Panel Makes Final Hearings Push: Six down. At least two more to go. The Jan. 6 committee is hitting the home stretch of the public hearings phase of its historic, yearlong investigation into the attack on the Capitol — and American democracy. After a half-dozen hearings, committee members are looking to build on the momentum with a pair of back-to-back panel meetings this week. They will mark a final push for a special House panel that set out not only to establish an official record for the history books but also to demonstrate Donald Trump’s role in the plot to overturn the 2020 election, and to warn the public about ongoing threats to the election system.  […] Tuesday’s meeting will focus on what some panel members called the “marshaling of the mob,” including evidence of coordination between Trump, his top aides and associates, and white nationalist or militia groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers who members say led the assault on the Capitol that day. The committee will examine how Trump’s “pressure merges with the physical violence” that his supporters carried out at the Capitol, said Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., who will lead part of Tuesday’s hearing. The final planned hearing is expected on Thursday and will zero in on Trump’s actions — or inactions — as his vice president, Mike Pence, House and Senate lawmakers and hundreds of police officers came under attack. There were “187 minutes where people were pleading with him to take action, and he failed to do so,” Dean said. Thursday’s hearing is likely to be set for prime time, just like the first hearing, seeking a bigger televised audience.
  • Politico: Meet The Key Players In The Next Jan. 6 Hearings: Phil Waldron. Bobby Engel. Sarah Matthews. They’re all key figures in the Jan. 6 select committee’s sprawling investigation, but there’s a fair chance you’ve never heard of them. House investigators have named dozens and dozens of witnesses as they probe the tumultuous final weeks of former President Donald Trump’s administration. While some of those have become household names, there are many more offering consequential pieces of evidence behind the scenes, which the panel has gradually released at each public hearing. This week, the select panel’s two hearings are expected to focus on the convergence between Trump’s allies and fringe groups who incited Capitol violence, as well as the former president’s 187 minutes of inaction as the mob breached the building. That means more recorded and live testimony to come.

Pat Cippollone Provided “Valuable” Testimony To January 6 Committee in Marathon Friday Interview 

  • CBS: Raskin Says Cipollone Gave “Valuable” Testimony To Jan. 6 Committee: Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of the House select committee probing the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, said Sunday that former White House counsel Pat Cipollone provided the panel with “valuable” testimony during a closed-door interview last week. “We’re going to get to use a lot of Mr. Cipollone’s testimony to corroborate other things we’ve learned along the way,” Raskin told “Face the Nation” of the panel’s upcoming hearings. “He was the White House counsel at the time, he was aware of every major move I think that Donald Trump was making to try to overthrow the 2020 election and essentially seize the presidency. I considered his testimony valuable.”
  • New York Times: Jan. 6 Panel Questions Cipollone on Pardons and Trump’s Election Claims:  Pat A. Cipollone, who served as White House counsel for President Donald J. Trump, was asked detailed questions on Friday about pardons, false election fraud claims and the former president’s pressure campaign against Vice President Mike Pence, according to three people familiar with his testimony before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The panel did not press him to either corroborate or contradict some specific details of explosive testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who captivated the country late last month with her account of an out-of-control president willing to embrace violence and stop at nothing to stay in power, the people said. During a roughly eight-hour interview conducted behind closed doors in the O’Neill House Office Building, the panel covered some of the same ground it did during an informal interview with Mr. Cipollone in April. In the session on Friday, which took place only after Mr. Cipollone was served with a subpoena, investigators focused mainly on Mr. Cipollone’s views on the events of Jan. 6 and generally did not ask about his views of other witnesses’ accounts.

Steve Bannon Makes Last Minute Offer To Testify Before His Criminal Contempt Trial As  DOJ Reveals Documents Showing Trump Never Invoked Executive Privilege To Prevent Him From Testifying 

  • Politico: Bannon Makes Last-Minute Offer To Testify To Jan. 6 Committee Ahead Of Criminal Contempt Trial: Longtime Donald Trump ally Steve Bannon has made a last-minute offer to testify to the Jan. 6 select committee, just days before his criminal trial for defying the panel’s subpoena is set to begin. The offer, in a letter from Bannon’s attorney Robert Costello, cited an accompanying letter from Trump himself purporting to “waive” executive privilege over Bannon’s testimony — a privilege that the committee and Justice Department say was never properly invoked and might not be applicable to a former president. It’s unclear whether the panel considers the offer a serious one. Bannon has for months refused to testify to the committee by claiming absolute “immunity” from congressional subpoenas because of his role in the Trump White House, which ended in 2017. That immunity, he argued, stemmed from longstanding internal Justice Department opinions that prohibit Congress from compelling the testimony of current or former high-level officials. Offering to testify suggests he may be abandoning the immunity claim. Costello said in the email that Bannon still considered the subpoena invalid but was deferring to Trump’s wish that Bannon testify.
  • ABC: DOJ Reveals Investigators Interviewed Trump’s Attorney In Connection With Bannon Contempt Case: The Justice Department revealed in an early Monday morning court filing that federal investigators interviewed former President Donald Trump’s attorney Justin Clark two weeks ago in connection with Steve Bannon’s criminal contempt case. Prosecutors say that Clark confirmed in the interview that at no point did Trump ever invoke executive privilege over Bannon’s testimony — and directly contradicted other claims made by Bannon’s defense team in their case. They further suggest Bannon’s recent efforts in conjunction with Trump to offer to finally testify before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack are no more than a stunt to try and make him more a sympathetic figure to the jury he’s set to face next week.

Trump And His Attorney Float A New Scheme For Him To Be “Reinstated” As President By A GOP-Controlled Congress 

  • HuffPost: Trump Calls On Wis. GOP To Nullify Elector Votes, Make Him Victor After Ballot Box Ruling: Donald Trump is now calling on the Republican speaker of the Assembly in the Wisconsin Legislature to snatch back the state’s 2020 electoral votes to declare him the winner of the presidential race he lost in the wake of a court ruling on ballot drop boxes. He pushed the astonishing plan a day after he baselessly declared himself the winner in the state when the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Friday restricted the number of absentee ballot boxes in future elections. He again insisted in his message on his Truth Social platform Saturday that he is the “actual winner (by a lot!)” in the battleground state. Trump claimed “Brave American Patriots already have a Resolution on the [Wisconsin Assembly] Floor” to throw out Joe Biden’s victory.
  • Newsweek: Trump Lawyer Says He Will Be Reinstated as President if GOP Win Midterms: Christina Bobb, an attorney who has supported Donald Trump’s legal challenge to overturn the 2020 election, has suggested a scenario in which the former president could be reinstated after the midterm elections in November. Bobb told the conservative news outlet the Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) what she thought could happen in states in which there was “evidence that Joe Biden cheated” in the election Trump and his allies have continuously claimed was fraudulent. “They could withdraw their electors, or they could actually decide to award Trump electors, although I would anticipate they will probably just withdraw the electors,” she said. “If that happens from three different states, three different resolutions go into Congress,” she said it would then be up to Congress to decide “whether they want to accept the resolutions, whether they want to act on them or not.”

Far Right Christian Nationalists Seen As “Emboldened” On Their Quest For Political Power 

  • New York Times: The Far-Right Christian Quest for Power: ‘We Are Seeing Them Emboldened’: Three weeks before he won the Republican nomination for Pennsylvania governor, Doug Mastriano stood beside a three-foot-tall painted eagle statue and declared the power of God. “Any free people in the house here? Did Jesus set you free?” he asked, revving up the dozens before him on a Saturday afternoon at a Gettysburg roadside hotel. Mr. Mastriano, a state senator, retired Army colonel and prominent figure in former President Donald J. Trump’s futile efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, was addressing a far-right conference that mixed Christian beliefs with conspiracy theories, called Patriots Arise. Instead of focusing on issues like taxes, gas prices or abortion policy, he wove a story about what he saw as the true Christian identity of the nation, and how it was time, together, for Christians to reclaim political power. The separation of church and state was a “myth,” he said. “In November we are going to take our state back, my God will make it so.” Mr. Mastriano’s ascension in Pennsylvania is perhaps the most prominent example of right-wing candidates for public office who explicitly aim to promote Christian power in America. The religious right has long supported conservative causes, but this current wave seeks more: a nation that actively prioritizes their particular set of Christian beliefs and far-right views and that more openly embraces Christianity as a bedrock identity.
  • Politico: ‘Operation Higher Court’: Inside The Religious Right’s Efforts To Wine And Dine Supreme Court Justices: The former leader of a religious right organization said he recruited and coached wealthy volunteers including a prominent Dayton, Ohio, evangelical couple to wine, dine and entertain conservative Supreme Court justices while pushing conservative positions on abortion, homosexuality, gun restrictions and other issues. Rob Schenck, an evangelical minister who headed the Faith and Action group headquartered near the Supreme Court from 1995 to 2018, said he arranged over the years for about 20 couples to fly to Washington to visit with and entertain Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and the late Antonin Scalia.

In The States 

WISCONSIN: GOP-Controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court Bans Ballot Drop Boxes  

  • Washington Post: Ballot Drop Boxes Not Allowed In Wisconsin, State Supreme Court Rules: A divided Wisconsin Supreme Court barred the use of most ballot drop boxes on Friday and ruled voters could not give their completed absentee ballots to others to return to election clerks on their behalf, a practice that some conservatives disparage as “ballot harvesting.” Voting rights proponents said the decision would make it harder for voters — particularly those with disabilities — to return their absentee ballots. Many Republicans countered that the ruling provides needed protections against voter fraud and could help prevent someone from casting a ballot in the name of someone else. For years, ballot drop boxes were used without controversy across Wisconsin. Election clerks greatly expanded their use in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic as absentee voting hit unprecedented levels. By the time of the presidential election, more than 500 ballot drop boxes were in place across Wisconsin, many of them at libraries and fire stations and some of them under video surveillance. Some Republicans balked at their use, pointing to a state law that says an absentee ballot must “be mailed by the elector, or delivered in person, to the municipal clerk issuing the ballot or ballots.” The state’s high court on Friday ruled that means voters themselves must return absentee ballots and cannot use drop boxes.

What Experts Are Saying

Barbara McQuade, former United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, re: Steve Bannon and Select Committee on January 6: “Witnesses don’t get to determine the time of their testimony. He violated the law the day he failed to show up on the date on the subpoena.” Tweet 

Peter Odom, former assistant district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia: “Subpoenas issued to members of Trump’s team earlier this week in Georgia hint at how prosecutors are building a case that the former president and his lieutenants were engaged in a criminal conspiracy. Subpoenas say that several of the witnesses were ‘involved in the multi-state, coordinated efforts to influence the results of the November 2020 election.’ That particular language raises red flags for Peter Odom, a former assistant district attorney in that office who prosecuted election criminal cases. ‘Conspiracy is an agreement by two or more persons to commit a crime. It’s very clear they’re having the grand jury looking at conspiracy by Donald Trump and his close associates to illegally influence the election,’ Odom told The Daily Beast.” The Daily Beast 

Laurence H. Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor of constitutional Law emeritus at Harvard University, Dennis Aftergut, former federal prosecutor, and Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution: “By calling [Georgia Secretary of State Brad] Raffensperger, [Senator Lindsey] Graham looks to have been engaging in political activity well outside any proper legislative function and, therefore, beyond the privilege’s protection. Graham’s appearance before the grand jury is important not only to understanding the full extent of what happened in the alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. It also matters to a core tenet of our constitutional democracy. No one, including a senator or a president, is above the law.” The Washington Post 

Noah Bookbinder, president of CREW: “That 61% of Republicans now call January 6 a ‘legitimate protest’ even as we learn more about how it was violent, premeditated, and premised on known lies is beyond disturbing. That a major party has abandoned its commitment to truth and democracy creates incredible danger.” Tweet 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections 

The Hill: Can election denialism be a winning issue in November?

New York Times: Liz Cheney’s Latest Fans: Democratic Donors

New York Times: The Fight Over Truth Also Has a Red State-Blue State Divide

January 6 And The 2020 Election

The Atlantic: What Happened To Michael Flynn?

CNN: Oath Keeper members brought explosives to DC area around January 6 and had a ‘death list,’ prosecutors say

CNN: Trump considering waiving executive privilege claim for Bannon but prosecutors say he was never shielded

Daily Beast: How the Jan. 6 Panel Is Supercharging the Georgia Trump Investigation

Los Angeles Times: How John Eastman’s role in Jan. 6 still haunts the California university where he taught

NBC: Ex-Oath Keepers spokesperson to appear as witness at Tuesday’s Jan. 6 hearing

NBC: Jan. 6 panel: Ex-White House lawyer spoke of ‘Trump’s supreme dereliction of duty’

New York Times: Cassidy Hutchinson: Why the Jan. 6 Committee Rushed Her Testimony

Politico: Trump attorney Justin Clark interviewed with FBI last month, prosecutors say

Reuters: Steve Bannon’s lawyer asks to leave Jan. 6-related case, says he may be witness

Other Trump Investigations 

Washington Post: U.S. appeals court upholds release of Trump financial records to House

Washington Post: By firing his enemies, Trump made their taxes more interesting to the IRS

Opinion

New York Times (Aquilino Gonnell): I Was Betrayed by President Trump

Washington Post (Laurence Tribe, Dennis Aftergut, and Norm Eisen): Is a senator exempt from giving testimony in an election fraud probe?

Political Violence

Time: Armed Demonstrators and Far-Right Groups Are Escalating Tensions at Abortion Protests

Votebeat: Schools are ideal polling places — but anxiety over security is high

In The States 

Atlanta Journal Constitution: AJC subpoenaed by Fulton prosecutors for audio of leaked call

Reuters: Man arrested over alleged threat to Colorado’s top election official

Wisconsin Watch: ‘A hammer in search of a nail’: Wisconsin AG candidate prosecutes eligible voters for address snafus