While the decision to subpoena Donald Trump to appear before the January 6 Committee will attract more headlines, the immediate legal threat to the disgraced former president stems from his theft of classified documents and his attempts to obstruct efforts to return them.
Overnight, the committee investigating the January 6 insurrection voted unanimously to subpoena Trump. “He must be accountable,” Bennie G Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the committee, said.
The committee also released an array of material further implicating Trump in the incitement of the insurrection. New material from the Secret Service emerged that contradicted previous testimony both from Secret Service officials and former Trump staff that the violent nature of the protests on January 6 took them by surprise. Instead, it’s now clear the Secret Service was aware that attendees planned to bring weapons, and was directly warned of the violent — and perhaps even lethal — intentions of Trump supporters.
The committee also produced new corroboration of previous evidence that Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was told by Trump in response to McCarthy’s request that the president call off the insurrectionists: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” McCarthy has never confirmed the conversation, but multiple sources have now said McCarthy told them of the exchange.
The committee released testimony that showed Trump was aware he’d lost the election: former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who provided some of the most damning evidence against Trump, revealed that Trump, after the US Supreme Court refused to hear attempts to overturn the election, told his chief of staff Mark Meadows, “I don’t want people to know we lost.”
The committee also revealed a plan by right-wing supporters of Trump to declare victory before the results were known on the night of the election, including by claiming a fictional “election day deadline” — to such an extent that aides to then vice president Pence tried to work out ways to avoid Pence being forced to offer an opinion.
But while the subpoena is big news, the committee is running out of time before the mid-term elections on November 8, which despite Democratic resurgence are still tipped to deliver control of the House to Republicans. McCarthy has already indicated he will kill the committee off if he becomes majority leader. One view is that the subpoena, which Trump will refuse to comply with, is a pro forma effort by the committee to say it offered Trump a chance to testify before issuing its final report.
The committee also released footage taken during the insurrection as House and Senate leaders on both sides frantically call a variety of officials, governors and military commanders in the search for assistance in securing the Capitol.
Trump’s far more immediate concern is prosecution over his theft of classified documents and his efforts to prevent their return after repeated demands that he surrender them. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that one of Trump’s aides at his Mar-a-Lago estate has dramatically altered their evidence after being interviewed by the FBI, and admitted Trump ordered boxes of classified documents to be moved to his residence following a subpoena for them. Security camera footage confirms boxes of documents being moved at the time.
That could be seen as a further attempt to prevent the return of the documents, which Trump had no authority to remove from the White House after his presidency ended.
Trump’s legal efforts to derail possible prosecution over stealing classified documents also took a hit when the Supreme Court flatly rejected an effort by Trump to overturn a court order preventing the documents seized from his property being vetted by a judicial officer. The decision means the Department of Justice can continue to compile its case against Trump unimpeded by interference by Trump-appointed judges in lower courts.
If Trump is prosecuted on the most open-and-shut case of his criminality, his theft of documents, it will make for a rich irony. Trump, along with many Republicans, made much of fictitious claims of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state mishandling classified documents. And Trump as president signed into law a bill dramatically increasing the penalty for mishandling documents to five years’ imprisonment.
Wouldn’t it be delicious to see Trump jailed for 5 years under his own law fiddling..!!
But, but, but………….
……..he’d already pardoned himself in advance by thinking about it!
That argument is easiy refuted by the requirement that he be able to think.
That would preclude him from running again in 2024. Lock him up!
A great idea, but it would depend on what charge/s that The Trump had been arraigned on and on which he had been found guilty, if under that below, 18 U.S. Code § 2385
He would not be able to do so as he world be ” ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.”
However if any other of the others he could possibly run from a prison cell
Code § 2383 – Rebellion or insurrection- Fine or up to 10 years or both
Code § 2384 – Seditious conspiracy-Fine or up to 20 years or both.
For Eugene Debs ran as a Socialist candidate in POTUS elections five times, those of 1900,1904,1908,1912 and finally that of 1920 from his prison cell.
Debs was convicted and sentenced to 10 years under the very punitive Sedition laws brought in to counter opposition to the USA entering WWI,
18 U.S. Code CHAPTER 115— TREASON, SEDITION, AND SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITIES
18 U.S. Code § 2385 – Advocating overthrow of Government
Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or
Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or
Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.
grâce à LC, Wikipedia, et al.
The way the GOP is fighting transparency and accountability : how can any country look to the US now and say that US has any moral authority?
And it appears possibly around 50% of the population go along with their lack of morality.Frightening.
See above less than one third!
A greater mystery is why anyone with half a brain or a skerrick of decency ever harboured such a notion.
The problem is that the US gave control of the public schools to the county business community in the 1980’s. Most public schooled Americans can’t place the US on a map of the world.
Hard to reason or see past the desire to financially survive from one week to the next.
They have created the perfect serf class!
Or a functioning democracy either.
Long live Charles the third and his heirs and successors.
Keep in mind that virtually all law enforcement people tend to be conservative, spook outfits like the FBI and CIA, even more so. So there is an inbuilt reluctance to bother conservative politicians about small matters like breaking the law. Look out our own record of convictions of conservative lawbreakers. More liberal or left wing people have to watch out but conservatives can get away with things. Woke people dont seek to have the power of life and death over others. Control freaks and other psychos do.
The mention of spook outfits brings to mind this, when I was working in an Academic Library in Canberra.
In the year following the 11 September 2001 incident, which is also the date of the CIA run coup that put Pinochet in power in Chile, from which far more people died than in New York and Washington .
A patron came in who was nominally from the Attourny General’s Department, but as we all knew from the badge he was in fact from the Spooks aka ASIO ,
He was there borrowing a number of books on infrastructure and how to safeguard it and other matters.
In a discussion about such, he said that he had been one of a group sent to the USA, by the Howard Government, to look at the security manifestations concerning infrastructure, the storage/transport of hazardous materials including tank farms of all sorts, pipelines and how and where hazardous waste, including nuclear material, might be stored.
All the while accompanied by senior personnel from US Homeland Security. There were two ASIO teams, with one working on the West Coast and going inland from there, another on the East Coast then working its way inland.
Due to the fact that the US was finally implementing serious air travel security, it was taking too long to fly the US hub and spoke passenger air system, so they did most of the travel by car.
He was in the East Coast team and remarked that once you were out of the major cities and off the highways on to lesser roads, the two lane blacktops, much of the USA looked close to a third world country.
Houses with tar paper roofs, clapboard siding from log trim, outdoor dunnies, yards littered with brokendown cars and other debris etc.etc.
Finally, this from a Spook as they are generally not known to be selected for their non right wing views, he said that it was amazing that there had not been another revolution in the USA given the state of much of the country!
I’ve often thought it was a compliment to be called woke :). It’s preferable to be asleep and be run around someone else’s wheel??
If the Secret Service knew in advance of the insurrection and of weapons being carried, what on earth where they doing to avoid the situation? Were they keeping it secret in some sort of mistaken translation of their job description? This cost lives and potentially could have led to a civil war.
They may have been thinking that Trump’s protests about the election outcome would be successful and that somehow he would again be declared President – and they would appear to have been backing him all along.
See above!
It’s very good question Frank. However perhaps the answer lies in the failure at the time of western anti-terror agencies to monitor right wing terrorism ( and maybe some tacitly endorsed it?). One of the worst things about the Trump legacy is that it makes it difficult for the West to object to the narcissistic megalomania of Xi Jinping. US democratic institutions have barely been able to halt the progress of their own megalomaniac.
In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security reported that white supremacy is the US’s biggest threat for domestic terror, it was met with harsh criticism. Conservatives blasted the department for defining terror threats too broadly, instead of focusing on potential Islamic terrorists.
The then-House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) was one of those who berated the DHS saying that they were nott focusing on the real threats the US faces.
This was a report by Daryl Johnson, a Department of Homeland Security analyst, wrote a report warning that home-grown extremists are organizing and targeting military veterans for recruitment. Johnson was correct.
The internal report, which was not meant for publication, was drawn up by the department of homeland security, set up after the 9/11 attacks to co-ordinate internal security.
“Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” and it named white supremacists, radical anti-abortionists, and a few “disgruntled veterans” as most susceptible to recruitment by extremist groups, or to harbouring resentment that may lead to domestic terrorism. DHS stressed that, during recessions, these threats go up, and law enforcement should be on the lookout for such extremism:
A leaked copy says: “The economic downturn and the election of the first African-American president present unique drivers for rightwing radicalisation and recruitment.”
It adds that the threat posed by “lone wolves” and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years.
The report also generated criticism from Republicans and military veterans’ groups, who resented the implication that returning troops presented a danger. The American Legion called it “unfair”, “incomplete” and “politically motivated”.
Marked “for official use only”, the nine-page report was drawn up by the extremism and radicalisation branch of homeland security. A leaked copy initially appeared on conservative websites and was then picked up by the US media.
The assessment contends: “Rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalise returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat. These skills … have the potential to boost the capabilities of extremists, including ‘lone wolves or small terrorist cells’, to carry out violence.
The willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist groups during the 1990s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war is being replicated today.”
The early 1990s saw a rise in militias and cults that were anti-government and anti-Bill Clinton, against a background of economic recession. Some looked to survivalism; others were motivated by racism or religion.
There was a series of incidents and shoot-outs with federal agents, including the Waco siege in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
Trump had managed to bring the Secret Service on side when he appointed Tony Ornato, then assistant director. of the Secret Service, to be the Trump White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations!
It is one think to have information and another to get the instigator of the crime to call in adequate police.
There was no way Trump was going to defend the Capitol.
Trump won’t turn up.
Trumps biggest worry is espionage and that case against Trump isn’t too far away.
Than you can add in another four or five cases against Trump that are pending.
Trump must not sleep at night, the walls are closing in on him.
He’ll think about running but I don’t think his ego will let him. But I don’t think he’ll get a bed in Putin’s Palace if he did, and where else could he run to – Belorussia perhaps. Can anyone see a metaphoric “Gun-fight at the Mar-a-Lago Cemetery“?
And I wonder if we will ever discover what the private 2-hour conversation with Putin in Iceland was about? Ukraine?