GOP Slapped Down Again For Jan. 6 National Guard Lie

Mary Papenfuss

Fri, June 10, 2022, 

Fact checker called out Republican leaders Friday over newly resurrected claims that President Donald Trump was not responsible for a no-show by the National Guard during the Jan. 6 insurrection last year.

Trump has repeatedly blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for blocking some 10,000 members of the Guard that day. But Pelosi has no control or jurisdiction over the National Guard in the District of Columbia. Trump does.

A number of media outlets, from USA Today to The Washington Post and CNN have debunked Trump’s claims that he called out the Guard and Pelosi blocked them protecting the Capitol.

Trump even boasted in a videotaped statement a day after the 2021 insurrection that he “immediately deployed the National Guard and federal law enforcement to secure the building.

GOP leaders again on Thursday blamed Pelosi for blocking the Guard. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) for some reason on Thursday instead blamed Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who was Senate minority leader during the insurrection.

As the violence raged for three hours throughout the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump watched the riot on television at the White House. He did not contact anyone to protect the building or the lawmakers trapped inside.

“Not only did President Trump refuse to tell the mob to leave the Capitol, he placed no call to any element of the United States government to instruct that the Capitol be defended,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) revealed Thursday night during the first hearing of the Jan. 6 House select committee,

“He did not call his Secretary of Defense on Jan. 6. He did not talk to his Attorney General. He did not talk to the Department of Homeland Security,” Cheney added. “President Trump gave no order to deploy the National Guard that day. And he made no effort to work with the Department of Justice to coordinate and deploy law enforcement assets.”

Her statements were backed up by videotaped testimony aired at the hearing from Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley. He said it was then-Vice President Mike Pence, who was under siege himself at the time, to demand that the National Guard be called out.

Pence told Pentagon leaders to “get the Guard down here, put down this situation,” Milley testified. The general said he later received a call from then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who told him to “kill the narrative that the vice president is making all the decisions.”

Republicans have likely landed on the National Guard issue again because a complete lack of action by Trump for hours to protect the Capitol and lawmakers would appear to strengthen the case the Jan. 6 panel is building against him, claiming he was out to seize control of the election and remain in power,

Thousands of National Guard troops were eventually deployed to Capitol Hill to secure the area.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

Capitol attack pardon revelations could spell doom for Trump and allies




Hugo Lowell in Washington DC
Sun, June 12, 2022, 

The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack revealed at its inaugural hearing that Donald Trump’s top Republican allies in Congress sought pardons after the January 6 insurrection, a major disclosure that bolstered the claim that the event amounted to a coup and is likely to cause serious scrutiny for those implicated.

The news that multiple House Republicans asked the Trump White House for pardons – an apparent consciousness of guilt – was one of three revelations portending potentially perilous legal and political moments to come for Trump and his allies.

Related: January 6 hearing: Trump was at heart of plot that led to ‘attempted coup’

At the hearing, the panel’s vice-chair Liz Cheney named only one Republican member of Congress, congressman Scott Perry, the current chair of the ultra conservative House freedom caucus, who sought a presidential pardon for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

The select committee did not elaborate on which other House Republicans were asking for pardons or more significantly, for which crimes they were seeking pardons, but it appeared to show at the minimum that they knew they had been involved in likely illegal conduct.

The extraordinary claim also raised the prospect that the Republican members of Congress seeking clemency believed Trump’s election fraud claims were baseless: for why would they need pardons if they really were only raising legitimate questions about the election.

“It’s hard to find a more explicit statement of consciousness of guilt than looking for a pardon for actions you’ve just taken, assisting in a plan to overthrow the results of a presidential election,” Jamie Raskin, a member of the select committee, told reporters.

Willful blindness

The disclosure about the pardons came during the opening hour of the hearing where the panel made the case that Trump could not credibly believe he had won the 2020 election after some of his most senior advisors told him repeatedly that he had lost to Joe Biden.

Trump, according to videos of closed-door depositions played by the select committee, was told by his data experts he lost the election, told by former attorney general Bill Barr that his election fraud claims were “bullshit”, a conclusion Ivanka Trump said she accepted.

The admissions by some of Trump’s top aides are important since they could put federal prosecutors one step closer to being able to charge Trump with obstructing an official proceeding or defrauding the United States on the basis of election fraud claims he knew were false.

It’s hard to find a more explicit statement of consciousness of guilt than looking for a pardon for actions you’ve just taken
Jamie Raskin

At the heart of the case the panel appears to be trying to make is the legal doctrine of “willful blindness”, as former US attorney Joyce Vance wrote for MSNBC, which says a defendant cannot say they weren’t aware of something if they were credibly notified of the truth.

The potential case against Trump might take the form that he could not use, as his defense against charges he violated the law to stop Biden’s certification on January 6, that he believed there was election fraud, when he had been credibly notified it was “bullshit”.

Trump-Flynn-Powell meeting

Also in the first hour of the hearing, the select committee cast in a new light the contentious 18 December 2020 meeting Trump had at the White House with his former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and former Trump lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell.

The Guardian has reported extensively on that meeting, where Powell urged Trump to sign an executive order to seize voting machines and suspend normal law, based on Trump’s executive order 13848, and to appoint her special counsel to investigate election fraud.

Cheney confirmed the reporting by this newspaper and others, that the group discussed “dramatic steps” such as seizing voting machines, but also alluded to a potential discussion about somehow obstructing Biden’s election win certification.

The basis for that characterization, based on how Cheney described the late night meeting in the Oval Office that later continued in the White House residence, appears to be how Trump, just hours later, tweeted that there would be a “wild protest” on January 6.

It was not clear whether Cheney was laying the groundwork for the select committee to tie Trump into a conspiracy of some sort, claiming this represented two people entering an agreement and taking overt steps to accomplishing it – the legal standard for conspiracy.

But the “wild protest” phrase would shortly after be seized upon by some of the most prominent far-right political operatives.

Hours after Trump’s tweet, according to archived versions of its website, Stop the Steal changed its banner to advertise a “wild protest” before Ali Alexander, who led the movement, even applied for a permit to stage a rally on the east side of the Capitol on January 6.