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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — June 24, 2022

By June 24, 2022No Comments

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Must Read Stories

January 6 Committee Outlines Trump’s Scheme To Coerce And Dismantle The Justice Department 

  • New York Times: Jan. 6 Panel Outlines Trump’s Bid to Coerce Justice Dept. Officials: The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol painted a vivid picture on Thursday of how former President Donald J. Trump directed a wide-ranging bid to strong-arm the Justice Department into overturning the 2020 election, the most brazen attempt by a sitting president since Watergate to manipulate the nation’s law enforcement apparatus to keep himself in power. In a stunning display of evidence, including testimony from top officials who resisted the former president’s efforts, the committee laid out how Mr. Trump tried repeatedly to use the Justice Department to interfere in the election. In near-daily conversations, he badgered its leaders to act on unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, including wild internet hoaxes, accusing them of failing to do their jobs. He explored naming a conspiracy theorist who was circulating outlandish stories of voting irregularities to serve as a special counsel to look into possible election misdeeds. “Why don’t you guys just seize machines?” Mr. Trump demanded to know at one point, later calling a top official at the Homeland Security Department when informed that voting machines fell under that agency’s purview, not the Justice Department’s. When top Justice Department officials repeatedly told him that they had investigated and debunked his allegations of widespread election fraud, Mr. Trump said they need not find evidence. “Just say the election is corrupt and leave the rest to me,” he told them.
  • Washington Post: Echoes Of Watergate: Trump’s Appointees Reveal His Push To Topple Justice Dept: Richard Donoghue, President Donald Trump’s acting deputy attorney general, picked up the phone at home in December 2020 to hear the president of the United States insist once again that the election he had just lost was filled with fraud. He reached to his wife’s nightstand, picked up pad and pen, and took precise notes, scribbling in loose cursive as Trump spoke: “Just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.” On Thursday, those same handwritten notes flashed on an oversize video panel in a hearing room amid a riveting afternoon of testimony before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Donoghue and two other former top Justice Department officials also told the committee in extraordinary detail about how he — along with the acting attorney general and Trump’s own White House counsel and others — confronted the president in an explosive Oval Office meeting on Jan. 3, 2021. The meeting centered on a plan by a mid-level Justice official, Jeffrey Clark, to become attorney general. New details released at the hearing revealed just how close the Justice Department came to collapsing and throwing the country into an unprecedented constitutional crisis. Among those details: a possible link between Clark, another Justice official and John Eastman, a conservative attorney running a parallel effort on Trump’s behalf to push states to overturn the election. And, White House phone logs that at one point listed Clark as the acting attorney general, showing how close he came to getting the position.

New Details Emerge On The Role Of House Republicans In The Scheme To Overturn The Election 

  • Politico: Multiple House Republicans Sought Pardons After Capitol Riot, Hearing Reveals: A handful of House Republicans who strategized with Donald Trump about overturning the 2020 election hotly denied seeking pardons after the Jan. 6 select committee released testimony Thursday stating they’d pursued clemency from the former president after the Capitol attack. Several top Trump aides during the post-Jan. 6 period, including special assistant Cassidy Hutchinson and aide Johnny McEntee, described outreach to White House officials from multiple members of Congress seeking clemency: Reps. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). Additionally, according to the former Trump aides’ testimony, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) sent an email on Jan. 11, 2021, asking for “all purpose” pardons for every lawmaker who objected to electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) never asked for a pardon but did request an update on the status of requests by other members, Hutchinson said. The flurry of pardon requests followed what the select committee showed was weeks of efforts by Trump’s top congressional Republican defenders to spread misinformation about the results of the 2020 election. Those GOP lawmakers also helped apply pressure on the Justice Department to legitimize those false fraud claims. 
  • Washington Post: Rep. Scott Perry Played Key Role In Promoting False Claims Of Fraud: Of all the fantastical false claims of fraud and vote manipulation in the 2020 presidential election, “Italygate” was one of the most extreme. And Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) was at the heart of bringing it to Donald Trump’s attention. This particular allegation of fraud centered around what one former Justice Department official described Thursday as an “absurd” claim: that an Italian defense contractor had conspired with senior CIA officials to use military satellites to flip votes from Trump to Joe Biden. As The Washington Post has reported, the theory was pushed by a Virginia horse-country socialite who once gave an extended television interview from a 22-bedroom mansion that she repeatedly described as her own, even though it was not. But as the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol demonstrated Thursday, Italygate also made its way to the highest levels of the U.S. government. The committee showed Dec. 31, 2020, text messages between Perry and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that included a YouTube video about it, with Perry asking: “Why can’t we just work with the Italian government?” Meadows discussed the claim “frequently,” according to Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who led the questioning during the committee hearing on Thursday, which focused on Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to help overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Perry also pressed acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen to investigate. “I told him this whole thing about Italy had been debunked,” Rosen said during Thursday’s hearing. Another former Justice official who testified Thursday, Richard Donoghue, said the theory was “pure insanity” and “patently absurd.” That wasn’t Perry’s only involvement in encouraging Trump to get the vote overturned. The committee obtained records from the National Archives showing that Perry was among the Republican members of Congress who met with the president in the Oval Office on Dec. 21, 2020. That day, Meadows tweeted that the meeting’s purpose was “preparing to fight back against mounting evidence of voter fraud. Stay tuned.” The committee also displayed White House logs showing that Perry returned to the White House the next day — and “this time, he brought a Justice Department official named Jeffrey Clark.”

Federal Authorities Search Home Of Former Trump DOJ Official Jeff Clark 

  • New York Times: Federal Authorities Search Home of Trump Justice Dept. Official: Federal investigators carried out an early-morning search on Wednesday at the home of Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, in connection with the department’s sprawling criminal inquiry into efforts to overturn the 2020 election, people familiar with the matter and an associate of Mr. Clark said. It remained unclear exactly what the investigators may have been looking for. But Mr. Clark was central to President Donald J. Trump’s unsuccessful effort in late 2020 to strong-arm the nation’s top prosecutors into supporting his claims of election fraud, and the search suggested that the criminal investigation could be moving closer to Mr. Trump.
  • Daily Beast: Jeffrey Clark Whines to Tucker: ‘I Don’t Recognize the Country Anymore’: Hours after the House Jan. 6 committee detailed damning evidence of former President Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to run with his false election claims, former DOJ official and eager Trump stooge Jeffrey Clark found refuge on the friendly airwaves of Tucker Carlson Tonight. That Clark’s home was raided Wednesday by more than a dozen DOJ officials served as additional fodder for a pity fest. “They dragged him into the street in his pajamas. What did Jeff Clark do wrong? Was he selling fentanyl? Was he human trafficking on the Mexican border?” Carlson asked, using one of the same arguments he deployed to try to defend Peter Navarro, the ex-Trump adviser who also worked to overturn the 2020 election, when he was taken into custody earlier this month. “Jeff Clark did not commit any crime. What he did wrong was calling for an investigation into voter fraud,” Carlson insisted, glossing over Clark’s involvement in Trump’s desperate acts to hold onto power.

Ron Johnson Changes His Tune  On Fake Electors Plot 

  • Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Ron Johnson Now Says He Helped Coordinate Effort To Pass False Elector Slates To Pence, But His New Explanation Drew A Quick Rebuke: ​​After initially claiming to be “basically unaware” of an effort by his staff to get fake presidential elector documents to Vice President Mike Pence, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson said Thursday he coordinated with a Wisconsin attorney to pass along such information and alleged a Pennsylvania congressman brought slates of fake electors to his office — a claim that was immediately disputed. Evidence presented this week by the U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol showed Johnson’s chief of staff tried to deliver the two states’ lists of fake presidential electors for former President Donald Trump to Pence on the morning of the U.S. Capitol insurrection but was rebuffed by Pence’s aide.   Johnson initially told reporters this week he did not know where the documents came from and that his staff sought to forward it to Pence. But he said in a Thursday interview on WIBA-AM that he had since discovered the documents came from Pennsylvania U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, and acknowledged he coordinated with Dane County attorney Jim Troupis and his chief of staff by text message that morning to get to Pence a document Troupis described as regarding “Wisconsin electors.” Kelly’s office immediately pushed back on Johnson’s claim, saying: “Senator Johnson’s statements about Representative Kelly are patently false.” “Mr. Kelly has not spoken to Sen. Johnson for the better part of a decade, and he has no knowledge of the claims Mr. Johnson is making related to the 2020 election.”
  • Wisconsin State Journal: Donald Trump Attorney Coordinated With Ron Johnson To Pass False Elector Document To Mike Pence: A former Dane County judge who legally represented former President Donald Trump coordinated with U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson to pass documents falsely stating Trump won Wisconsin to then-Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6, 2021, newly revealed text messages show. […] The Wisconsin document, signed by 10 Republicans who convened in the state Capitol on Dec. 14, 2020, was filled out on the same day the Democratic slate of Wisconsin electors met in the same building to deliver the state’s 10 electoral votes to President-elect Joe Biden. The meeting of Republicans occurred after the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Biden had won the election. “We need to get a document on the Wisconsin electors to you for the VP immediately,” former Dane County Circuit Court Judge Jim Troupis told Johnson at 11:36 a.m. Jan. 6, 2021, according to texts provided to conservative media outlet Just the News. “Is there a staff person I can talk to immediately. Thanks Jim T.” The conservative outlet also reported that [Rep. Mike] Kelly was in communication with Troupis, who then connected with Johnson. Troupis did not return a phone call or message about why he texted Johnson about the documents. Six minutes later, screenshots of the text messages show, Johnson connected his chief of staff, Sean Riley, with Troupis in a text chain. Riley was newly serving in Johnson’s office and was previously a Trump White House adviser. An hour after Johnson referred Troupis to Riley, Riley sought the assistance of a Pence aide in passing the document, and another falsely asserting Trump won Michigan, to the vice president but was rebuffed.

In The States 

GEORGIA: Brian Kemp To Testify In Fulton County Grand Jury Investigation 

  • Atlanta Journal Constitution: Gov. Kemp To Testify In Fulton County’s Trump Probe: Gov. Brian Kemp will deliver testimony next month to Fulton County prosecutors investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 elections, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned. But unlike the parade of witnesses who have appeared at the Fulton courthouse to answer questions in front of a special grand jury, the Republican will instead deliver a “sworn recorded statement,” according to a letter from the Fulton County District Attorney’s office dated Wednesday and obtained by the AJC on Thursday. In the letter to Kemp’s attorney, Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor hired by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to help with the investigation, said the DA’s office agreed to the terms “in a spirit of cooperation with the Governor and his schedule.” Kemp’s sworn examination will take place on July 25. The 23-member special grand jury also subpoenaed a bevy of evidence from Kemp’s office, which Wade said must be made available at least 72 hours before the governor’s scheduled testimony.

WISCONSIN: Election “Audit” Attorney Says He Deleted Records 

  • Associated Press: Wisconsin Election Investigator Says He Deleted Records: The former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice hired to investigate President Joe Biden’s victory in the battleground state testified Thursday that he routinely deleted records, and deactivated a personal email account, even after receiving open records requests. Michael Gableman testified in a court hearing about whether the person who hired him, Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, should face penalties after earlier being found in contempt for how he handled the records requests from American Oversight. Dane County Circuit Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn decided against penalizing Vos for contempt, but said she would determine later whether to penalize Vos for how he handled open records requests. She set a hearing for July 28. Bailey-Rihn said that Gableman gave testimony that conflicted at times, but it was clear that he had destroyed records “that were contrary to what fits into the scheme of things.” Vos hired Gableman a year ago under pressure from Donald Trump to investigate the former president’s loss to Biden by just under 21,000 votes in Wisconsin. The investigation has cost taxpayers about $900,000 so far. Biden’s victory has survived two recounts, multiple lawsuits, a nonpartisan audit and a review by a conservative law firm.

What Experts and Pundits Are Saying

Neal Katyal, former US solicitor general, on federal investigators searching the home of Trump DOJ attorney Jeffrey Clark: “The hugest news available to us today, much bigger than the hearing to me…you don’t dawn raid someone’s home unless they’re a target or very close to a target of a criminal investigation, so they really do think Jeffrey Clark has committed various federal crimes. This was signed off on by a judge. This wasn’t just the Justice Department on their own running into his house, and in order to do that they have to have some theory of what the crime is.” MSNBC’s The Beat with Ari Melber  

Preet Bharara, former United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, on FBI’s Jeffrey Clark search: “This is a significant event” Tweet 

Eric Holder, former US attorney general: “Trump – ‘Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen’. This is the smoking gun. Coupled with other testimony demonstrates both Trump’s substantive involvement and corrupt intent, requisite state of mind.” Tweet 

Ryan Goodman, former Defense Department Special Counsel, on Jeffrey Rosen’s testimony about Clark (Photo): “This is otherwise known as President Trump’s taking an affirmative step —an “overt action”— in furtherance of scheme (to use language of criminal conspiracy). Rosen testified Clark said Trump offered him job of acting A.G. and accepted it (to send corrupt letter)[.] New evidence👇” Tweet 

Harry Litman, former U.S. Attorney and Deputy Assistant Attorney General.: “If you haven’t been in the DOJ, might be hard to imagine how outrageous it is that Clark went to the White House on 12/22/20, with Scott Perry, without notifying the AG and DAG.  It is an instant firing offense.  It is completely beyond the pale.” Tweet 

Praveen Fernandes, Constitutional Accountability Center vice president: “Q: ‘…One of the more striking things was towards the end of the hearing, and I don’t know whether you heard this part, but with a listing of you know some of these members of Congress who asked for preemptive pardons.’ A: ‘…I think that at least is some acknowledgement that these individuals recognized that what they did was against the law. I mean you don’t ask for a pardon for something you think is unimpeachable.’” KPFA Radio

Norm Eisen, Brookings Institute senior fellow: “Wow. Congressmen helping Trump on & before 1/6 & then demanding pardons. Makes me think of 18 USC 201: A public official who corruptly seeks anything of value in return for an official act or colluding in fraud shall be imprisoned for up to 15 years & disqualified from office” Tweet 

David Axelrod, Obama administration senior advisor: “This was a devastating hearing.  The account of Trump’s frantic, attempted coup at the Justice Department as a prelude to a larger coup was stunning. The plotting of members of Congress to facilitate it–and then to seek premptive pardons-was telling and vile.” Tweet 

Walter Shaub, Project On Government Oversight senior ethics fellow: “The lesson fascists will take from this hearing is that they’ll need more obedient DOJ officials next time.” Tweet 

Richard L. Hasen, incoming professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles: “Mr. Trump was the 45th president, not the first American king, but if we don’t deter conduct like this, the next head of state may come closer to claiming the kind of absolute power that is antithetical to everything the United States stands for.” New York Times Op-Ed 

Julian Zelizer, American historian at Princeton University: “These SCOTUS decisions will do more than anything else to solidify Republican loyalty to Trump. It is difficult to overstate how central the creation of a 6-3 voting bloc was to conservatives. It is the judicial equivalent of supply side tax cuts.” Tweet

Ben Rhodes, former deputy national security advisor for strategic communications: “Hard to overstate how little respect Trump and his circle had for the United States of America, its laws and traditions. MAGA weaponizes phony patriotism and xenophobia while trying to destroy everything that actually is supposed to make America great” Tweets 

Charlie Sykes, founder and editor-at-large of The Bulwark (Video): “This was not just some rage tweeting from Donald Trump… This was a conspiracy to overturn the election at every level of government. That is not an exaggeration. We’re seeing how extensive the attempt was” Tweet of MSNBC’s Deadline White House with Nicolle Wallace 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections 

CNN: Newly Elected GOP Congresswoman Spread Capitol Riot Conspiracies And QAnon Hashtags In Now-Deleted Tweets

Politico: Trump-fueled primary endangers Republican who wants to probe Jan. 6 panel

Washington Post: Liz Cheney aims to recruit crossover Democrats in her primary

January 6 And The 2020 Election

CNN: New documentary footage reveals Pence reacting on the night House pushed for him to invoke 25th Amendment

NBC: ‘Say the election was corrupt’: Jan. 6 panel details Trump’s DOJ pressure campaign

Politico: New Jan. 6 witness: Trump had mystery call with Putin

Washington Post (Analysis): Jan. 6 committee connects two strands of Trump’s effort to retain power

Washington Post: Trump called Jan. 6 participants ‘smart,’ filmmaker says

Washington Post: U.S. broadens Jan. 6 seditious conspiracy indictment of Oath Keepers

Republican Response to the January 6 Committee Hearings 

NBC: Trump fumes as Republicans ignore Jan. 6 panel

Opinion 

New York Times (Richard Hasen): No One Is Above the Law, and That Starts With Donald Trump

New York Times (Michelle Goldberg): The Jan. 6 Hearings Have Been So Much Better Than I Expected

Politico (Ankush Khardori): John Eastman’s Criminal Exposure Is Real

Washington Post (Eugene Robinson): It will be bad if Merrick Garland prosecutes Trump — and worse if he doesn’t

Washington Post (Erik Wemple): Judge: Fox Corp. can’t wiggle out of Dominion’s ‘big lie’ lawsuit

Washington Post (Greg Sargent): What Trump’s anger at Kevin McCarthy really says about Jan. 6

In The States 

Arizona Republic: Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward subpoenaed by DOJ in fake elector scheme

HuffPost: GOP Pennsylvania Gov. Nominee Used Campaign Funds For Jan. 6 Committee Lawyer